MR J. K. MOLONEY, A TRIBUTE ‘ST ALBANS VILLAGE’ LOSES PICTURESQUE PERSONALITY

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32778, 1 December 1971, Page 16

MR J. K. MOLONEY, A TRIBUTE ‘ST ALBANS VILLAGE’ LOSES PICTURESQUE PERSONALITY

(Specially written for "The Press" by

W.R.L.

Cunninghame Graham, in writing of Conrad, said that death annihilates perspective, blots out all sense of time and leaves the memory of those that we have lost blurred in outline. It may not always be that way where personality is strong, impressions distinct, and incidents oft-recounted. These elements and circumstances all attach to John Keith Moloney.

He worked and played and fought and lived—and died — a character, a personality; a man of such enthusiasms, emotions, and infectious exuberances that he highlighted his life against early oblivion.

Everyone who met him responded to his laughter and vitality; it was impossible to feel dull in his company. When in his much bepictured and littered study he embellished reminiscence and narrative with expansive anecdotes, he would set the table completely aroar. A rugged soldier I met him first in 1914 as an undergraduate at Canterbury College, that “alma mater” which so fostered scholarship and sport—including his beloved “Old Maroons”—that it earned from him a lifetime affection. Then came the First World War and his enlistment with many university friends in The Earl of Liverpool’s Own, “The Dinks,” for which he held undying military affection.

He served in Egypt and France and was selected for O.T.C. training at New College. He revelled in this emergency association with wartime Oxford, rich in scholarship and tradition and then exhibiting unusual military, sporting and social aspects. He had a facility for acquiring friendships and would recall his conversations with William Spooner —that learned but singular warden of his college—literarily notorious for those accidental transpositions which became a vogue in humour. He talked with Rudyard Kipling and danced with Violet Loraine and Irene Vanbrugh. He was a brave and rugged soldier. With pleased modesty he would delight in later years to hear, on a St Crispin evening, a veteran recounting the fight of “Moloney’s Platoon” in a punishing night action in

1917 against a large German patrol which blundered upon it near Ploegsteert Wood. In jocular exhilaration he took credit for destruction of half the Germans on the Western Front.

What a different Tartarin Alphonse Daudet could have created here!

Jester in court

Invalided home after Passchendaele, he soon returned to university life and then plunged into the profession of the law and criminal advocacy. How colourfully and dramatically he would plead a cause. At one moment his magisterial friend, Mr E. C. Lewey, would share the ripple of laughter; at another, almost with a tear upon his cheek, he could scarce await the grant of a liberal indulgence in penalty. Courtrooms were infected by his ebullient presence. There was a jester in court when Moloney was up. It was almost the same in the Supreme Court. On the wall of his study, in Mansfield Avenue, was an autographed portrait of his resident judge with special significance. It was signed “To my friend Mr J. K. Moloney with my best wishes—E. H. Northcroft. April 1951.” Even the august Court of Appeal heard him with appreciation, enjoyment, and indulgence. He remained the only counsel who, in living memory, was bold enough to cite a case from the “Readers Digest” as a persuasive precedent. But his widest and most endearing range of activity was sport—participant, administrative, and historical, Always an ardent patriot—proud of the Empire and the heritage which its scholars, seamen and soldiers—and subjects generally had established, he cherished the national games—cricket and football. Even this liveliest of temperaments was calmed by the restfulness of cricket. The pauses and breaks permitted him to reminisce or philosophise and he gave it a lifetime of adoration. Indeed was he not a scorer for the greatest innings in the cricket history of New Zealand the partnership which Arthur Sims helpfully shared with that illustrious prince of batsmen, Victor Trumper, making his 293 at; Lancaster Park? - T * Gusto in sport

But Rugby interested him still more. It was his second great love. With what gusto in earlier days he would urge the flying ball and, in later days, at smoke concerts, or over a social beer

in his garden, recount, sometimes with nice assessment and historical exactitude—but often with customary hyperbole the skills and performances of All Black teams, Charlie Saxton’s Kiwis, the Springboks, the Wallabies and the Lions and all those Canterbury sides which have embellished the annals he has helped with such industry to record. He was an apostle of the attack, quick to commend originality or roundly to condemn bad handling or loss of initiative. With one or two exceptions he probably knew more of the players and the history of our national games than anyone in the country. His visits to the Public Library (he was an omnivorous reader) were as much for the purpose of checking Rugby records as for collecting autobiographies and reminiscences to enrich his widely acquired knowledge of world affairs. When times were tough in the depression he gave assistance to the Metropolitan Relief Fund; when age and fitness debarred him from the Army he gave regular service to the Union Jack Club. In these later years, when his time was given to compiling sporting reminiscences unpublished as yet—and when painful ailments and failing sight so afflicted him, he exemplified Sir James Barrie’s maxim: “It is not life that matters; it is the courage you bring to it.”

His greatest love He had an understanding and intelligent family . including a soldier son now ’ in Vietnam—but it is fair to say that his continuing ' capacity to exhibit fortitude ’ against adversity traced mostly from the unremitting, dedicated devotion of his wife, to whom in the extremity of his brief final pain he uttered words short in expression but bursting with gratitude “Goodbye, Love!” She was indeed his greatest love. I saw him two or three weeks ago sauntering slowly along the pavement in St Albans village where everyone knew him so well. There was a Dayan patch over his sightless eye and this time, not his Cossack hat, nor yet an Army balaclava atop ah ill-shaved chin, but a hat of almost Texan proportion set aslant above a bright, reinvigorated face and borne with an “air farouch.” , A light has gone out to the village, but all who knew him will console themselves by recollecting the maxim of Confucius: “It is better to light one small candle than curse the darkness.” He lit his candle!