FORMER TEST CAPTAIN

Evening Star, Issue 22686, 28 June 1937, Page 5

FORMER TEST CAPTAIN

AITKEN SERIOUSLY ILL [Special to the ‘ Star.’] WELLINGTON, June 26. As New Zealand prepares to meet another Springbok invasion the man who captained the All Black side which met South Africa in the first and second tests in 1921 lies seriously ill at Hanmer. This is G. G. Aitken. New Zealand Rhodes Scholar of 1920, Wellington and New Zealand centre three-quarter, and a member of the famous “ Hying four ” of Scotland, when G. P. S. MacPherson, lan Smith, A. C. AVallace, and G. G. Aitken furnished the Scottish threequarter line. Aitken was selected as Rhodes Scholar in 1922, the vacancy which he was awarded being one which had become available because the 1920 nominee had given up his scholarship. Ho left New Zealand for Oxford in that year after captaining the Victoria Univerdly College first fifteen, playing in the Wellington representative team, captaining New Zealand University against Sydney University in 1920 and 1921, and leading the All Blacks against the Springboks at Dunedin and at Auckland in the only test which the South Africans have won in this country. Ho did not play in the third’test at Wellington. He was also 440yds hurdles champion of the New Zealand University in 1919, and second that year in the New Zealand championship. At Oxford, where he gained his blue and formed one of the all-Oxford four which, as has been said, furnished the Scottish three-quarter line, Aitken took a B.A. degree, and came back to New Zealand in .1925 to be told that he could have much the same job at Wellington College that he had possessed when he left for England. Ho determined to return to England in 192 G. There he married, but during a walking tour in Germany his wife became ill and died, and last year he returned to this country with his small son John. But he was in indifferent health, and the man who was capped twice for New Zealand and eight times for Scotland was forced to enter Hanmer because of a lung affection. There, it appears, he will be likely to remain for some time to come.