Reporters Diary

Press, 16 January 1978, Page 2

Reporters Diary

Long shot "CAME through New York did you? Then you probably met my brother — he lives in Brooklyn.” That kind of optimistic inquiry is familiar to most travellers. Cyril Webber, national director of the water polo coaching in Britain has been sent a somewhat similar inquiry from his home town of Barnstaple in North Devon. He is here for a few months to do some coaching, and an 80-year-old has sent him a very old family photograph with the request that he look up some of them while he is here. “Sorry to trouble you. Cyril.” wrote Mrs W. H. Barrow, “I have enclosed a photograph of the family taken some years ago, but I expect you will find some of the family still about. I know some are in Wellington and some in Christchurch. Thanks a lot.” She gives no names, and in any other country

it would ■ be a forlorn hope. But in this extended village of New Zealand, where anyone can find an acquaintance in common with anyone else if they talk long enough, the right Barrows will probably trundle forward.

Passing parade MEDICAL men who have rooms in the Harley building in Cambridge Terrace have always regarded their address as having something of the same dignity and standing as Harley Street in London. That was why they were so miffed when a massage parlour started up at the end of one of their highly polished corridors. The massage parlour has gone, and the newest tenant is from a kindred profession, the law, which should go a good way towards restoring the high moral tone of the building. However, word has it that even this improvement does not meet with uni-

versal approval among the Harley doctors and dentists. The new man is a leading criminal lawyer, and his professional neighbours are already looking askance at some of his clients who call for consultations. Reed boat THE NORWEGIAN explorer, Thor Heyerdahl, has sailed from Muscat in his reed boat Tigris on the most dangerous stage of his voyage to prove that the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia could have reached India and Africa. “We want to go as far as we can. . . until the boat sinks or disintegrates,” Professor Heyerdahl, aged 63, said before leaving with his 10-man multinational crew after a week’s stay. The anthropologist who left south Iraq on November 23, believes the Sumerians could have reached both the Indus basin and the Red Sea, and is leaving it to chance which way the winds and currents carry his boat. “We are just hoping for a wind which will take us away from the land into the main ocean,” he said. His boat, made of wild reeds gathered from marshes in Iraq, is built to a 5000-year-old design, the oldest known to scholars. Mirror image

NO-ONE can deny that there have been mistakes in the “Diary” from time to time, but it has never done what Mr George Lucock found in a copy of the Melbourne “Truth” while he was visiting Australia. Half of one page was printed in reverse, which must have been confusing to followers of horse-racing, because it was the entire day’s programme for Warwick Farm racecourse. The Melbourne paper was able to make this "through the looking glass” mistake because of the photographic process used for printing the page. Passion

OBERAMMERGAU. West Germany’s famous pass-ion-play village, remains locked in conflict after an opinion poll showed residents equally divded over old and new texts of the centuries-old production. Some 48 per cent voted

for the 1750 version, which has been criticised as anti-semitic, and 48 per cent for a revised text. A few villagers thought the controversial play should be scrapped altogether. The new version, which blames the devil and not the Jewish people for the death of Christ, aroused fierce argument when tried out last summer and made bitter enemies of former friends. The opinion poll commissioned to decide the matter has only confirmed the stalemate and now the issue is expected to be fought out at local elections in March. The play, performed every 10 years, is next to be staged in 1980.

Italians sought MRS P. M. PENROSE, of Bromley, has been sending Christmas cards to India for several years in response to a request for them in “The Press” by Father E. Petrin, of the Catholic Mission, P.S. Binnaguri, District Jalpalgur, in West Bengal. They have corresponded over the years, and now Father Petrin has asked her if she can help find a relative of his, Giuseppe Petrin, brother of Cristoforo Petrin, who came to New Zealand about 45 years ago. Indeed, he would like to hear from any Italians who hail from Veneto Provincia of Vicenza, or Novale and Valdagno.

Cook's cottage CAPTAIN Cook’s cottage in Melbourne is to get its first facelift since the 1956 Olympic Games. For the last, two years a joint National Trust and Melbourne City Council committee has been preparing plans to upgrade the 18th century cottage. The plans are for an impressive recreation of an eighteenthcentury English garden and a stronger attempt to make the cottage more authentic. There will also be added electronic security and audio-visual equipment detailing facts about Captain Cook and his family. The Melbourne City Council has agreed to spend $65,000 on cottage improvements during the next two years. Ecstatic

A MIDDLE-AGED woman who has raised two sons

and reckons she knows a lot about cleanliness was camping with her husband recently at the Taupo motor camp. In the evening she had occasion to use the camp amenities, and returned to the tent quite overcome with admiration for the cleanliness of the place. “It is the cleanest motor-camp I have ever been in,” she told her husband. "The lavatory walls have water running down them.”

Portrait burned “I AM NOT upset, 1 have no rancour,” said the portrait painter Graham Sutherland, now aged 74, after Lady SpencerChurchill’s executors announced this week that the controversial Sutherland portrait of Sir Winston Churchill had been burned within 18 months of its unveiling. But the artist described the action as "an act of vandalism unequalled in the history of art.” The portrait was commissioned by both British Houses of Parliament and presented to Sir Winston on his eightieth birthday in 1954 by his former political colleague and opponent, Clement Attlee. Neither Churchill nor his wife hid their dislike of the portrait, which showed a bulldog-looking Sir Win* ston, dressed in pinstripes and bow tie, glaring pugnaciously out from the canvas. "It makes me look half-witted, which I ain’t,” Sir Winston said at the time. He disliked his dress too. He wanted to wear for the sittings the robes of a knight of the Garter. Sutherland replied: "It was a straight-forward portrait of Sir Winston and I painted what I saw. He asked me if I was painting him as a cherub or a bulldog. He showed me for the most part, the Churchillian bulldog. “He was like a rock and that is how I painted him.” Lady Churchill, who died last month, told her executors she had promised her husband — who died in 1965 — that the portrait would never see the light of day. The original intention was for it to hang in Parliament Buildings after Sir Winston’s death. —Garry Arthur.