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Press, 1 April 1989, Page 22

Few people living in Canterbury today are familiar with the name of Robert Speight. Yet to this pioneer scientist, who died in Christchurch 40 years ago this year, we owe as much as to any other single person for our understanding of the geology and landscapes of the province.

Canterbury also owes a debt to Robert Speight for his nurturing of one of its most important institutions, the Canterbury Museum, through difficult years of public indifference and neglect. One Canterbury sporting body which counts Speight among its founding fathers is the Canterbury Mountaineering Club,

founded in tbe 1920 s by students of Canterbury College, where Speight was Professor of Geology.

The C.M.C. has now helped to rescue Speight from undeserved obscurity by commissioning a series of articles which will be published in the Club’s annual “Canterbury Mountaineer” as the Speight-Carrington

Memorial Articles. (Carrington, regarded as the founder of the C.M.C., was a young student who drowned in the Waimakariri Gorge in 1926.)

The articles have been endowed by a longstanding C.M.C. member, Christopher Fenwick. The first appeared in the 1988 “Canterbury Mountaineer.”

By

JOHN WILSON