ABOUT GENTLEMEN

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 226, 20 June 1936, Page 8

ABOUT GENTLEMEN

Exchanges at Wellington City Council Meeting

Brushes between Cr. R. A. Wright, M.P., and Cr. P. M. Butler occurred at the special meeting yesterday of the Wellington City Council, called to consider the effect of the 40-hour week. Cr. Wright spoke just after Cr. Butler, by whom he was more than once interrupted. To this he raised objection.

“You have had your say, so now let me have mine,” he said to Cr. Butler. Cr. Butler: You do the same yourself, in another place. Cr. Wright: I did not interrupt you and vou should not interrupt me. That is all.

The Mayor, Mr. T. C. A. Hislop, asked councillors to speak to the chair and not to one another, and to discuss the question before the meeting. Cr. Wright said that he was being interrupted continually, though he had kept silent when other speakers had the floor, including Cr. Butler. If Cr. Butler was a gentleman he would give the same treatment to other speakers a s was given him. ‘‘l have been at this game long enough to know this old trick of trying to put a man off his line of argument by constantly interjecting,” he said. “I have had experience of it and I am too old in the head to fall for little tricks like that” Later in the meeting Cr. Butler, speaking to an amendment, referred to the remarks of Cr. Wright, saying he had once explained to Cr. Wright an error in a public statement and Cr. Wright “had not been gentleman enough” to make the correction public. Cr. Butler was going on to refer to a record in public life for “twisting, skulking and running away,” when he was interrupted by the Mayor, who asked that the debate should be confined to the point before the meeting. Cr. Wright spoke again later in the meeting, and said that all he wished to say iu reply to some personal remarks that had been made was that his record in public life well bore comparison with that of Cr. Butler. ‘