HIGH COMMISSIONER.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20322, 2 February 1928, Page 7

HIGH COMMISSIONER.

THE NOTTINGHAMSHIRE SOCIETY. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, December 24. Sir James Parr, the High Commissioner, was a guest rt the Christmas dinner of • the London Nottinghamshire Society. In responding to the .oast of the County of Nottingham, he recalled his recent visit to Bingham, the birthplace of his father. It was a misfortune, said Sir James, not to have been born in Nottinghamshire, but his father, who went out to New Zealand when a lad, had had the good fortune to be born in tf best possible shire in England. “ My father was a stout Nottinghamshire man,” he said, “ and he /as the type of man who believed that one Englishman waj worth any half a dozen foreigners, and that one Notts man was worth at least three of any other county. In that spirit I was raised, ~nd when I came to London I felt that it was my duty to become a member of the London Notts. Society. “ A month ago I was able to go and see the old spots my father knew, and was able to tell the principal business men of the city that New Zealand took about 70 per cent, of her imports from England, and most of them from the Midlands. THE OLD CHURCH AT BINGHAM. “ In the old Norman church at Bingham I saw the spot where my father sang as a chorister 80 years ago. The news that the son of old Reuben Parr was in the village got about, and when I came out of the church I was met by a number of the old inhabitants who remembered my father. -A charming woman, of middle age. flung her arms around my neck. She then brought along her mother, who must have been about a hundred, and she told me about my father when he was a boy. “ I was introduced to the vicar, and he took me to the graveyard and showed me the graves of my forebeaia who had worshipped in the village church a hundred years ago.” „ Sir James said he had a great regard for Nottinghamshire 'and everything that appertained to it. The friendrhip, he hoped, would grow and ripen.