GENERAL’S STORY.

Manawatu Standard, Volume L, Issue 75, 24 February 1930, Page 7

GENERAL’S STORY.

NEARLY MARRIED A PRINCESS

How he nearly married a Maori princess is told by ex-Major-General J. l£ B. Seely, the former Secretary for War, in “Adventure,” published in England. . He relates that this girl of 17 in the King Country, New Zealand, started to teach him Maori in 1890. “But for Tom Connolly, a friend who accompanied me, we should have married,” he says. “I suppose I would become what is termed a Pakeha Maori. Tom said that I would break my mother’s heart. So we left next morning.” General Seely describes Sir Maurice Hankey, the Australian-born Secretary of the Naval Conference, and secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, as the man who won the war. He says that in 1912 Admiral Sir John Fisher said: “There is a man with a bulging forehead crammed with brains created by God for the discomfiture of the Kaiser. It is vital that he be secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence. He has Napoleonic ideas and Cromwellian thoroughness.” The appointment was m Gmieral Seely tells of his release of Mr Ramsay MacDonald from arrest in Belgian in 1914. Returning in a motor they came under rifle and machine-gun fire. They jumped out and ran to the French support trenches, where a soldier suggested that they should be shot as spies, till General Seely explained the position to an officer. The French captured the German trenches while they were there, and Mr MacDonald showed the utmost coolness under fire.

Mr MacDonald went to th© front in 1914 as an ambulance officer, was arrested, and was deported. On the instruction of General Seely, who was Secretary for War at the time, he was later allowed to return to Belgium, and was received by the officers who had ordered his deportation.