PROFESSOR SHELLEY

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 120, 17 November 1936, Page 12

PROFESSOR SHELLEY

SOCIETY'S FAREWELL

BROADCASTING & HUMANITY

Members of the Society for Imperial Culture met in Christchurch on Saturday evening to say farewell to Professor J. Shelley, president of the society since its inception, who is leaving to take up the position of Director of Broadcasting. Tributes were paid to the original thought and adventurous spirit of Professor Shelley and also to his whole-hearted enthusiasm in many causes for the cultural welfare of the community. Dr. J. Hight, patron of the society, presided.

Dr. Hight congratulated Professor Shelley on his elevation to a position of tremendous possibilities. As members of a society for the study and development of culture they rejoiced that he went to control an instrument of such great power for national culture.

When the society had been formed it had been the obvious thing to persuade Professor Shelley to be its president, and he had retained that position to the present time. When he came to New Zealand 16 years ago he had already a reputation for independent thought and for courageous action. He had the distincttion of being the only man to give up a university chair in England to occupy one in New Zealand, his action in doing so being characteristic of his independent spirit.

Professor Shelley had played many parts in the community. In planning and guiding the work of the society he had shown abundant proof of his various abilities and of his characteristic quality of abundant sell-sacrifice. He had taken the whole community as his school and made its vital interests his own concern. There was nobody whose vision had not been clarified and sharpened by contact with him. In particular he had done essential service by emphasising the cultural side of life and the need for and true character of progress.

There had always been a provocative quality in what Professor Shelley had said. He had aroused people from lethargy, often by casting a bomb or projecting some original thought among them. He carried with him the best wishes of the members of the society, who believed that he was going to a position where his work for education would have a wider scope.

Mrs. E. Rosa Sawtell, as one who was associated with Professor Shelley in the inception of the society, then presented to him on behalf of the members a landscape painting by Mr. Sydney L. Thompson. FUNDAMENTAL HUMANITY. After other members had spoken, Professor Shelley said that the society could not give him anything he would treasure more than a picture by his friend Sydney Thompson.

Probably the greatest single cultural influence in his life, he said, was his contact with ordinary men as a private in the Army. In the line the man on one side of him had been a bookie's tout and the one on the other a man of independent means. In those circumstances both wei-e met as solid human beings, stripped of the trappings of circumstance.

To understand the nature of culture it was necessary to get down to the fundamental human being. His own guide in life was summed up in the phrase, "Be simple." The new position he' was going to lie knew was in some ways a thankless job, full of criticism and difficulty. All he was going to do was to be simple.

"If a person says, 'I like so and so, 1 I shall ask myself what it is in him that makes him like that thing. I shall ask myself what I can give him that he will recognise as better, not what I from a superior height recognise as better, because I deny the existence of that superior height."

Professor Shelley added that he regarded radio as being in one aspect the voice of the people, and to it under certain circumstances the old tag about the voice of the people being the voice^ of God most truly applied.