SIR VINCENT MEREDITH’S “LONG BRIEF”

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31042, 23 April 1966, Page 4

SIR VINCENT MEREDITH’S “LONG BRIEF”

A Long Brief. Experience* of A Crown Solicitor. By Sir Vincent Meredith. Collin*. 213 pp.

A notable career in the worlds of New Zealand law and Rugby football is set out in Sir Vincent Meredith’s autobiography, published posthumously. The achievement of reaching a profession was due to a personal diligence that later characterised the successful lawyer. Coming from a family that was financially unable to support his higher education—though the lad won scholarships Sir Vincent Meredith’s life's work commenced at 16 when he joined the Customs Department. Studying law in his spare time, and with no access to legal offices, he eventually qualified and began practising in Wellington, later joining the Crown Law Office, working under the then Solicitor-General, "the great John Salmond.” After three years he moved to Auckland where in 1921 he became Crown Solicitor for the district, a post he held for 31 years until he retired in 1952. As Crown Solicitor in Auckland, Sir Vincent Meredith appeared in the Courts in many cases that attracted Dominion-wide notice, and he participated in one inquiry of international interest. Recalling an almost forgotten piece of New Zealand history. Sir Vincent Meredith gives the story of the Commission set up by the League of Nations to inquire into allegations of maladministration of the New Zealand mandate over Western Samoa. New Zealanders of older generations will recall the "Mau” agitation, and as they read Sir Vincent Meredith’s account of proceedings before the Commission will be sensitive to echoes of this episode in more recent, and similarly thinly-based, agitations allegedly on behalf of native peoples in other parts of the world. Sir Vincent Meredith appeared in many notable cases while holding his “long brief.” He gives extensive accounts of several. One was the application for removing from the Medical Register Dr. Dundas McKenzie, who claimed, by means of two electrical machines, first to diagnose disease or the prospects of its onset with one machine, and to cure it with the other. Dr. McKenzie’s claim to diagnose disease through his apparatus by attaching to it a spot of blood from a patient was tested clandestinely by the law in several ways. Most ludicrous of them was to take a spot of blood from the tail of a donkey working on one of Auckland’s beaches. The

blood, ostensibly from a man who wished to have a diagnosis, produced a conclusion that the donor was suffering from syphilis, congenital and acquired. Pathologists who examined other samples of the donkey’s blood restored an unblemished reputation to a playmate of thousands of Auckland’s children. Dr. Dundas McKenzie's name was duly removed from the Medical Register. The trial of the poisoner Munn is -set out extensively with several long extracts from Sir Vincent Meredith’s cross - examination. Dealing with his best-known criminal case. Sir Vincent Meredith gives in full

his opening address at the trial of William Bayly, charged with the murder of his neighbours, Mr and Mrs Lakey. The address is a masterly exposition of the connecting links in an involved and complicated case; it, shows how first-rate detective work after the discovery of Mrs Lakey’s body and the disappearance of her husband established that the apparent murderer—the husband—had himself been killed and his body dismembered and burnt in a petrol drum. Another ghoulish case to which Sir Vincent Meredith devotes a chapter is that of the two Australians. Talbot

and McKay, who conspired to defraud an insurance company. first setting fire to a cottage at Piba beach; McKay appeared to have burnt to death in the fire, but the work of scientists and detectives established that the human remains found in the cottage were of a body that had been removed from a grave in Waikumete cemetery.

Sit Vincent Meredith condenses to a single chapter the account of a long career in Rugby football in which he was player, national selector, administrator, and manager of two All Black touring teams. The changes he saw in the game were naturally many and fundamental; his remedy for the ills of contemporary Rugby is direct and simple—a return to the 2-3-2 scrum. He condemns forthrightly “the attitude of the members of the New Zealand Rugby Union towards players with any tinge of Maori blood.” He regards the South African attitude that, no New Zealander with Maori blood can play in South Africa or stay at hotels as an insult to New Zealanders that should not be tolerated. He deplores the acceptance of a tour to New Zealand of a South African team. “Quite a number of New Zealanders think that so far as South Africa is concerned. and football, we arc finished with them—or is it a question of the big gates?” Close contact with Maoris from boyhood onwards gave Sir Vincent Meredith a deep respect for them, and he ends his book with a chapter of tribute to his fellow New Zealanders of Maori origin. A Maori, Sir James Carroll, was the finest speaker he ever heard, combining a wonderful command of beautiful English with a gift of natural eloquence and imagery. Typical was the occasion when Sir James Carroll attended the funeral of an old political opponent. Sir William Herries. When speaking at the graveside he said: “Standing at the grave of my old friend, I find my mind like a hive where the bees come homing with a thousand honeyed thoughts.” This thought might well have recurred to Sir Vincent Meredith's many friends when, last year, a life of worthy service ended.