POOR CONDITIONS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26692, 11 February 1948, Page 6

POOR CONDITIONS

VOYAGE FROM ENGLAND ECONOMICS LECTURER ARRIVES There was no excuse for the disgraceful conditions on board the Rangitata during her last voyage from England to Wellington. Although a high standard of luxury was not expected when travelling under troopship conditions, it was obvious that the company had not made a success of the trip. In these words Dr Harro Bernardelli, who arrived in Dunedin yesterday to take up his position as senior lecturer in economics at Otago University expressed his dissatisfaction. “ Sanitary facilities were foul and filthy. Obviously civilians could not be put on fatigue parties as was the case with troops under military discipline, and so necessary work was not done. There was no control of noise, which at times made the vessel a bedlam. Included among the 850 passengers was a large number of immigrants and a considerable party of children. Impetigo broke out among the latter, early in the voyage, but it was not officially diagnosed until weeks later, when many more cases had been reported,’’ continued Dr Bernardelli.

The loud-speaker system should have been a boon, but often news bulletins were inaudible because of static, and the nervous irritation caused by music blaring out against the noise of a Pacific storm did not

make for contented passengers. In spite of all these troubles however, the passengers were in a good humour, probably because food was plentiful and well prepared.

Wide Academic Experience

Dr Bernardelli was born at Magdeburg, Germany, and studied at the Cologne, Goettingen, Berlin, and Frankfurt Universities. He planned to leave Germany because of the political situation there, and left in 1934 for England, where for a year he was honorary visiting research fellow at Liverpool University. From his original studies in science and mathematics his interests turned to economics and social service, by way of statistics. He was appointed senior lecturer in economics at the Rangoon University College in 1935, and became a naturalised British subject three years later. During the Allied retreat in 1942 from Burma to India, Dr Bernardelli was sent to the nothern Shan States on the Chinese border to supervise the State banks, which had both an official and a black market rate of exchange When Mandalay fell to the Japanese the northern banks approved some colossal transactions, which had to be carefully scrutinised., War-time Propaganda Work

For the next three years he was attached to the Ministry of Information in Delhi, working on German counterpropaganda directed at the small colonies of highly-skilled Germans scattered throughout the Near East, who were cut off from newspapers by the war. At the end of hostilities he went to England, and, after lecturing at the London School of Economics in 1946, he took up a position with the Department of Economics and Social Studies at the Nottingham University College in September of that year.