NEWS OF THE DAY

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 43, 21 February 1938, Page 6

NEWS OF THE DAY

At the conclusion of Friday’s business, Mr. Justice Fair adjourned the quarterly sessions of the Supreme Court at Napier until February 28, and he left during the week-end for Gisborne, where a session opens to-morrow. The criminal and divorce lists have been disposed of at Napier and the Court, when it resumes, w ill deal with civil and miscellaneous matters. ‘‘The public does not realise that athletics is tie only sport in which New Zealand consistently produces men of international ranking,” said Mr. J. J. Brownlee, who presided at a meeting of the Canterbury Centre of the New Zealand Amateu r Athletic Association. A s-urvey of tho post-war years showed that no other code in the Dominion had maintained a position of equality with all other parts of the British Empire, he added. The first of the new training aeroplanes being presented to the Middle Districts Aero Club by the Government arrived in Palmerston North on Friday, having been flown from Auckland, where it wan assembled, by FlyingOfficer F. L. Truman, pilot-instructor to the club. It is a Tiger Moth machine, and isi built and equipped for military training purposes. Its Gipsy Moth engine develops 130 horse-power, and it has a speed of 110 miles an hour. “The greatest New Zealander in England to-day isi Lord Bledisloe, ” said Mr. Rex King, of Christchurch, who was well known in the Dominion as a Canterbury Rugby forward before he went to England to play for Warrington League Club. Mr. King, on his return a few days ago, said that Lord Bledisloe interested himself actively in all that concerned the welfare of New Zealand, and whenever misstatements and false allegations about the Dominion appeared in the English newspapers he was one o f the first to come fQrward and “give the; lie” to harmful untruths. To receive a cheque for a legacy which was le:ft to him in his aunt’s will 49 years ago was a pleasant surprise for an Invercargill resident recently. When his aunt died in Aberdeen in 1888 he was left an amount of money that was to come to him when he was 21. Many o:: the papers of the estate went Astray, with the result that as t.ie years passed the money was forgotten until recent!}* the man received a letter from a firm of English lawyers, who advised that while going through a 40-year-old box of papers of a deceased lawyer they had come across the papers which had been lost. It took the lawyer’s letter nine months to reach its destination, but after a delay of nearly half a century the man has reoeived a cheque for three times the original amount. Inquiries made at church offices reveal that there aro more clergymen of a ripe old age in the Presbyterian Church than in any other church in New Zealand. The oldest is Rev. W. Haln, who will be 94 years old on March 22, and who still occupies the pulpit on the course o" his visits to various localities. The next oldest is Rev. J. H. MacKenzie, of Wellington, aged 88, who retired 18 months ago from the position of clerk to the General Assembly. There are seven other ministers over SO years of age. Rev. Alexander Greig died in Dunedin last week in his hundredth year. The oldest clergy]nan in New Zealand is believed to be Rev. Robert Young, aged 94. He waii vicar of Masterton for many years. Archbishop Julius is 90. The oldest Methodist minister is Rev. Thomas Fee, of Christchurch, who is in his eighty-seventh year. Rev. Roscoe Wilson, vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Kew, Melbourne, has just returned from an absorbingly interesting tour of Europe, in the course of which he studied crowds and individuals in France, Italy and Germany, and got the “inside running” to many things in Egypt and other countries. He has come back, the Melbourne Argus says, impressed with many lessons. One of them is that the world needs a new Charles Dickons so to write as to revive the nation’s sense of humour and enable us all to laugh at ourselves—and not at the other fellow. He is convinced that the strain and excessive seriousness of millions in the totalitarian countries, and even in some of the democracies, need the relief that laughter and an appreciation of the comic and absurd of life and behaviour gives to-really healthy minds.