Reporter's Diary

Press, 30 January 1981, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

Return to sender LYTTELTON, Canterbury’s picturesque and historic port, has always had a bad deal from overseas writers as far as spelling goes. The curator of the Lyttelton Museum, Mr Baden Norris, was convinced that “foreigners” were the worst culprits — until he received a letter from the Auckland Museum of Transport and Technology. It was addressed to: Litterton Historical Museum, P.O. Box 91, Lyttleton.

“That takes the cake. After two attempts they still had it wrong — and from a local institution, too,” said Mr Norris. One ventures to hope that the people at MOT AT know more about transport and technology than they do about spelling. For the record, Lyttelton was renamed in honour of Lord George William Lyttelton (1817-76), the ■ fourth Baron Lyttelton, who became chairman of the Canterbury Association in 1849. He eventually got to visit the Canterbury settlement in New Zealand in

1867. During the whaling days of the 1830 s, the harbour and township had been called Port Cooper, after one of the partners in. the Sydney trading firm of Cooper and Levy who also had a smaller bay in the harbour .itself named after him. Port Cooper might be easier to spell, but it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as Lyttelton.

Volatile god A STYLISED representation of Buaumoko, the Maori god of earthquakes and volcanoes, has been adopted by the International Society for Earthquake Engineering. Ruaumoko was considered “especially appropriate” as a symbol” for the society, said Dr R. Hatherton, a geophysicist ' and one of the organisers of this week’s conference at Napier on large earthquakes. The Hawke’s Bay Art Gallery and Museum has put on a small display featuring the Maori god to coincide with the conference and the anniversary of New Zealand’s worst disaster, the Napier earth-

quake of 1931. Maori mythology has it that Ruaumoko was the last of the family of 70 Maori gods. The society’s version says that he was still at' the breast of the Earthmother when she was turned over on her face by hep other sons to improve the weather conditions, and that Ruaumoko was thus buried. He is said to hold no brief at all for mankind, and now and then sends an earthquake or volcanic disturbance to destroy them. Dummy run SHOPPERS IN New Brighton watched curiously this week as a male staff member of McKenzies chain store spent a busy hour in the window of the shop, shipping away at a wig on one of the female display dummies. The tid-ying-up snip here and there seemed to meet with the approval of all concerned, and the staff member is pow looking for live models to try out his new-found skill. Omen? WE HOPE the o.st of The Court Theatre’s proauction Of “The Bed Before Yesterday”' doesn’t believe in theatrical bad omens.

The author of the play, Ben Travers, died in London late last month, aged 94. Remarkably, “The Bed Before Yesterday," his latest big success, was written only five yea.s ago when he was 89. A Londoner, Travers worked in his father’s grocery shop until he got bored in 1911 and decided to become a dramatist. He mingled with the famous at Bodley Ifead, but his first work was a novel. He then went into drama, and in a career spanning 60 years wrote 20 plays, 30 film scripts, and five novels. “The Times” described Travers as the twentieth century’s chief practitioner of farce, one of the happiest and most difficult dramatic art forms. “The Bed Before Yesterday,” a warm play about a woman who has outlived two husbands and wants a third, opens at Th* Court on Saturday, February 7. Revised version “HAVE YOU a book on conversion tables?” a Sussex reader of the London “Daily Telegraph” asked the young woman assistant in his local bookshop. “I’m afraid no,” came the reply. “The only thing we stock in that line is the Bible."