Full of Zest at 70 London’s New Lord Mayor

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 508, 10 November 1928, Page 26

Full of Zest at 70 London’s New Lord Mayor

HOT a day over fifty!” one would say, meeting Sir Kynaston Studd, London’s new Lord Mayor, for the first time, and forgetting his (incredible) 70 years. The fitness and alertness of the old athlete and cricketing days, when he twice played for his Eton XI. and four times for Cambridge University, which he captained in 1884, still remain with him. His cricketing friends of those heydays who remember with pride the capable Studd trio —J. E. K., C. T., and G.B. —might bang their champion heartily on the hack to-day and awake no hollow echoes indicative of a “prime” that is long past. The athlete is there intact under the alderman’s robes, and in the keen eye of common-sense sanity in a face whose features spell discipline and resolution. The even, trim moustache is the man no less than tbe alert-bearing and resonant, precise speech; you feel that there is no room for “ragged ends” in the make-up, physical or mental, of the man who has been the chief driving force behind the Regent Street Polytechnic for a quarter of a century. * * * That this centre of earnest and aspiring youth is still the principal obsession of Sir Kynaston’s life was evident when I chatted with him recently in one of those staid, panelled rooms at the Old Bailey, writes T.A. in the “Daily Chronicle.” He would not discuss the impending realisation of a lifetime’s dream—for that is undoubtedly what the Lord Mayorship means to him. Once one is civic head of the City of London, he implied, one does not talk of oneself; the City, and the noble tradi-

tions of the City, count for infinitely more than mere personality; the man willingly subjugates himself to the office he has been chosen to fill. But he did talk about “the Poly,” and all it means to the social and educational life of London. “Do you know,” he said, pressing his fingertips together, as he invariably does when coming to grips with a problem, “all the big social upheavals during

and since the war have had no place in the life of the Polytechnic. “The Polytechnic was not touched by them, for political and religious discussion, by common consent, have no part in our life there. When those young men and young women crossed the Regent Street threshold they left all that behind them, and concentrated on the things they could share in common instead of those which divided them and held them apart. That was a fine thing. It left them free to discover excellences in each other —excellences in intellectual and handicraft pursuits, in the arts and in sport. If only more of that spirit might

infuse adult life, I interpolated; if only men and women, too, might have their social “Polytechnics” where thenaffinities rather than their differences might be paramount. . . . “That is difficult,’\agreed Sir Kynaston. “Clubs, I suppose, are the nearest approach—they certainly help. All forms of sport and other leisure pursuits help as well. They represent a community of interest. When you are a keen enthusiast in cricket or football, for instance, it does not matter much that you are a Tory or a Socialist. You have found common ground on which you can meet.” * * * It was evident that he saw, in the newer and saner inclination for employer and employee to co-operate in the common good, just another manifestation of the true Polytechnic spirit which emphasised likeness rather than difference. That was why he hailed it as a good thing, and apparent in Sir Kynaston’s Lord Mayor’s year would see that spirit more than ever evident in the civic, and national life. If London’s Lord Mayor embodies two qualities more than others in his life they are pride in personal fitness and pride in the capacity to help one’s fellows. It was the combination of these which earned him the title of cricketer-evangelist. In the healthy, athletic life he saw the ability to get the utmost out of one’s powers- in the early religious life at college’and the work at the Polytechnic—which he began, under the late Quintin Hogg, the founder, over forty years ago—the ability to dedicate those powers to the good of others. Depend upon it, those qualities will be equally apparent in Sir Kynaston’s Lord Mayorship.