NEW ZEALAND AND WESTMINSTER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18754, 6 January 1923, Page 13

NEW ZEALAND AND WESTMINSTER

HARWICH GAIN FOR THE LIBERALS. ,'Feom Oce Own Correspondent.) LONDON, November 24. Mr A. E. Hillary, tho successful Liberal candidate for the Harwich Division of Essex, polled 10.566 votes against 9792 polled by Captain O, St. J. Strutt, the Unionist candidate, thus gaining for his party a Liberal seat. . As a small boy Mr Hillary was in New Zealand. With his parents and their familv lie sailed from Plymouth at tho end of 1579, and arrived at Lyttelton at the end of the following February. At that time there was an epidemic in a mild form of scarlet fever and . measles on board ship, and the passengers went into quarantine for one month at Ripa Island. Tho new M.P. spent Ids twelfth birthday on the voyage out, and lie still remembers the enjoyable time he had on tho quarantine island, where the time was chiefly passed in fishing. Air Hillary's father was a rather prominent Wesleyan Methodist local preacher, and it is possible that some of the old standards in the Wesleyan Methodist Church will remember the family at the time they were in New Zealand, although their stay there did not exceed a year. In 1880 trade was in a very depressed state, and satisfactory employment was difficult to find, therefore ■ Mr Hillary’s father took a small store somewhere off Colombo road. At the youthful age of 12, the new M.P. passed through the Seventh Standard at the elementary school and there being no schools to which his parents could afford to send him that could further advance his education, he became junior clerk or a sort of handy boy in ’he service of the New Zealand boot manufacturing company, where he remained as long ns Ills parents were in New Zealand. In a letter to mo written this week, Mr Hilary sa3's: “I have always looked forward with pleasure to the time when I could take a triii and visit some of the places that I know in those' days, and my memories of N"w Zealand are very pleasant ones. I was, of course, too young to fully appreciate the depressing effect of the complete failure of the enterprise from my parents’ standpoint, but we all of us remember with pleasure the kindness we met with from the folks we mot there.” Subsequently Mr Hillary, whoso home is at Soufhcliffo, Clacton-on-Sea, on tho Essex coast, became managing director of Messrs Carsons, Limited, chocolate manufacturers, Glasgow.