A GOLDEN WEDDING.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19412, 21 August 1926, Page 7 (Supplement)

A GOLDEN WEDDING.

THE REV. SiLAS HOCKING. There were marjy callers recently afc the sunny Highgate home of tho Rev. Silas K. Hocking, tho popular novelist, end Mrs. Hocking, to offer congratulations on their golden -wedding. Mr. Hocking will tell you ho is 76; it is hard to accept this, writes a Daily Chronicle representative. He is still a keen golfer end a bowler. All the previous Saturday afternoon was spent on the bowling green, and he has the tanned face and the brisk movements of a man much younger. " It lias been 50 years of very happy married life," Mr. Hocking said, and told the story of his busy life since 1870, when, as a youth of 20, lie left his native Cornish village. He went to I'ontypool as a minister, then to Spalding, then to Liverpool—" where I met my wife " —on to Burnley and Manchester, and finally to Southport, where he stayed 13 years. Then he resigned from the ministry and came to London—just on 30 years ago. Mr. Hocking's novels number more than 70; exactly how many even Mr. Hocking cannot tell. But many of his oldest, written 40 years ago, are still selling, and he is still writing. He takes no pessimistic view of his fellow-Britons, and will say no unkind word against the young people of 1926. N - The interviewer discussed fiction and the theatre. Here Mr. Hocking is perturbed. Too many modern plavs, he thinks, skirt on the edge of impropriety, and with storv-writing the tendency is not healthy. " The sex problem is too much in prominence," he said. "To me. a number of modern novels are excessively morbid. Some of them are well done. So far as style goes, a few ore almost literature. Bat- they are unhealthy. I think'the novel should have a story to tell—the better the story, the better the book, if style is not deipised."