People and Their Doings.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20276, 10 April 1934, Page 8

People and Their Doings .

Mr K. C. James has Played Against All Cricket Teams Visiting New Zealand in the Last Ten Years : What Shaw Thinks of Queen Victoria Statues.

JT WOULD BE interesting to hear Mr Bernard Shaw’s judgment on the statues of Queen Victoria in Christchurch and Wellington—both rather terrible things from an artistic point of view. It is strange to think of Mr Shaw rising in vigorous defence of the great Queen, but some years ago he asked “ what crime Queen Victoria committed that she should be so horribly guyed through the length and breadth of her Dominions?” “ It was part of her personal quality,” Mr Shaw continued, “ that she was a tiny woman; and our national passion for telling lies on every public subject has led to her being represented as an overgrown monster. The sculptors seem to have assumed that she inspired everything that was ugliest in the feminine fiction of her reign. Take Mrs Caudle, Mrs Gamp, Mrs Prig, Mrs Proudie, and make a composite statue of them; and you will have a typical memorial of Queen Victoria. ... It is pure plastic calumny. Queen Victoria was a little woman with great decision of manner and a beautiful speaking voice which she used in public extremely well. She carried herself very well. All young people now believe that she was a huge heap of a woman ... I blush for British sculpture, and long for a trip in a bombing aeroplane to remove Victoria’s lying reproaches from the face of her land.” 9 9 9 LATE MR F, W. CHRISTIAN, of Palmerston North, was a really brilliant man who deserved a more liberal reward for his research work among the islands of the Pacific than the small posts he held in his last years, writes J.C. He was a clever Oxford graduate who early in his working life was attracted by the magic of the Pacific and came out to New Zealand as the result of correspondence with that great enthusiast in Maori-Poly-nesian subjects, Mr Edward Tregear, and made the wide Pacific his field of labour and pleasure. He explored the ocean from Samoa to the Carolines and Rarotonga to the Marquesas, cruising from island to

island, studying the languages and the customs of the native peoples. He and Dr J. Macmillan Brown were the great scientific rovers of the Pacific. The veteran doctor survives to write, let us hope, many another book of oceanic travel and ethnological notetaking and theorising. si? <l|? M R CHRISTIAN’S twenty years and more of ranging and roving, in the “ Locksley Hall ” manner, satisfied an intense zest for roaming the world, for exploration and linguistic research. He was perfectly happy when he found himself on an island where there was a mine of race lore awaiting a digger, an island, often, where he was the first scientific-minded inquirer. He knocked about Polynesia and Micronesia in all manner of small craft, he risked wreck in many precarious places. One of his long voyages was from Tahiti to the Marquesas in a French nativemanned schooner. An account of his cruise there was sent by him to the “ New Zealand Graphic,” Auckland; it comes to mind as a peculiarly sympathetic account of a visit to a dying people in a wildly beautiful land. W New Zealand when he was only a colt, K. C. James, who has just accepted a business engagement in England, has played against all teams visiting New Zealand in the last ten years, and he has risen to the captaincy of the Wellington team, with the control of coacbmg. When the New Zealand team made its first tour of England “The Cricketer” said: “ Of their wicket-keeper, K. C. James, it has been said by some of those most qualified to know that at the present moment he is probably second to W. 'A. Oldfield, the Australian, as the best in the world. Having seen him on several occasions, the writer has very little hesitation in putting

him in the same class as Strudwick, Lilley, Halliwell, Sherwell, Blackham, Jarvis, M’Gregor and many others, who have all been so good.” As a batsman, James has held, at times, three Plunket Shield partnership records, and he has always been an invaluable man to his side. He will not play in England except on Saturday afternoons, as his business will come first. He will leave Wellington on Friday by the Rangitane for London. © 3? £JIXTY YEARS AGO (from the “ Star ” of April 10, 1874) Lyttelton.—There was some excitement in Lyttelton yesterday morning, owing to a report that a man had been stabbed during the night. It appears that the police, on going the rounds, found a man with a large wound in his neck. The man, on being questioned, declined to give any information. On inquiry, however, it turned out that the man, named Williams, being under the influence of liquor, drove his head through a large square of glass in Mr Jacobsen’s shop in London Street, and in extricating himself, caused the wound in his neck. An Auckland telegraphic message says.— H.M.S. Clio, from New Caledonia, reports trade there brisk. Flour is scarce at £24 !0s and timber overstocked. The mines are progressing favourably. A hurricane occurred at Norfolk Island, damaging the plantations, fences and buildings. The church was blown down and over thirty pine trees, some thirty to thirty-five feet in circumference, torn up by the roots and hurled like sticks before the storm. There was a tremendous sea. The road from the landing place at Cascade was strewn with wreckage, supposed to be from the Dishot and Mary Ann. The embankment facing the sea was utterly destroyed.