‘Home’? J. C. Beaglehole in London, 1926-1929

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 14, Issue 2, 1 October 1981, Page 69

‘Home’? J. C. Beaglehole in London, 1926-1929

T. H. BEAGLEHOLE

‘Believe me’ wrote John Beaglehole in March 1927 to Dick Campbell, a fellow student at Victoria College, who had just been awarded a travelling scholarship, believe me, the man who gets a Travelling Schol. and does not come to the London School of Economics and Political Science has treated his patron lady Fortune in a shady and miserable fashion. . . . My dear Mr. Campbell come here; it is the centre of the universe. Harold J. Laski remarked to me tonight that he would rather be a crossing sweeper in London than a millionaire anywhere else; & by cripes, he’s about right. Keep your undergraduate Oxford and Cambridge—this is life. 1

Beaglehole himself had been in London for five months when he wrote this (and had seen neither Oxford nor Cambridge), hard at work already on a formidable doctoral thesis, and writing home to his parents every fortnight letters of twelve or fourteen pages. They were not the only letters he wrote, but intended as they were for an extended family with brothers, uncle and an assortment of aunts, they give an account of his activities and his views on people and affairs from which one can recapture the feelings he had about both England and New Zealand at that time. For him, it will emerge, the trip to England was not, in any sense, a straightforward trip ‘home’. The attraction of London was of another order. ‘I lived, as it seems in retrospect, intoxicated’, he wrote years later in The New Zealand Scholar. 2

The Beagleholes lived in Wellington at 49 Hopper Street in a house full of books and full of music. Music was domestic, John’s mother and aunts a positive ‘nest of singing birds’, 3 the four boys in their turn played the piano and sang. John progressed to the organ, and played on Sundays at the Unitarian Church. Music was also a communal exercise, a choral exercise, a public exercise. Every year the family went to the Messiah, the ‘immortal masterpiece’ as it was generally known, of Handel; most years to Elijah, the ‘immortal masterpiece’ of Mendelssohn. Mother and aunts sang in the Musical Union (later to coalesce with the Choral Society) conducted by the ‘revered Mr Robert Parker the touchstone of the musical art in

Wellington’; a grandfather played the double bass. 4 The books were a formidable collection constantly growing. Books were exchanged on birthdays and at Christmas. There were the English classics in fine editions, masses of poetry, biography, books about literature and a lot of improving Victorian volumes for which my grandfather, a fellow member with Sir Robert Stout in the Forward Movement and attracted to Unitarianism, clearly had a taste. I have the impression that my grandfather read for his own satisfaction and edification, giving little outward evidence of what he had read save a carefully maintained list of titles. My grandmother, in contrast, sought to share her reading with her sons; she would leave books in conspicuous spots about the house with passages marked which she thought they should read. It was his mother, I suspect, who did most to form John’s literary taste; Jane Austen was a common addiction. It is perhaps worth noting that this literary culture was overwhelmingly that of England, the Times Literary Supplement rather than the Bulletin.

I will resist being tempted into further biographical digression. The point is made that books and music became part of Beaglehole’s life almost from birth. His schooling appears to have been much less significaht in forming the young man who was to gaze enraptured at the London bookshops and to be swept off his feet by the concerts. Mount Cook School was followed by Wellington College and then, after a year selling books in Whitcombe and Tombs, came Victoria University College. F. P. Wilson, Professor of History, had little to give him until, newly graduated, he was offered the position of assistant lecturer which he was to occupy for nearly three years, 1924-26, until he left for London. But if there was not much excitement in class there was plenty outside, tramping, at the Free Discussions Club, editing Spike and doing a good deal to fill each issue, writing verse, even turning out with his brother Keith to run with the Olympic harriers.

On 26 August 1926 Beaglehole sailed from Wellington for Sydney. He walked the deck until he could no longer see ‘the Tararuas & the road to Gollans Valley & Fitzroy Bay & the Karori Beach’. He had a few days in Sydney, was alarmed at traffic going at 30 miles an hour, visited the Mitchell Library and noted they had material relating to Cook’s voyages. ‘. . . it is strongest on history & topography. It has nothing like the collection of rare & beautiful things the Turnbull has’. More importantly, on boarding the Osterley for the trip to England (first-class as he had been awarded a free passage) he made the acquaintance of three lively young Australians in the same fortunate position: lan Henning, a modern linguist going to Paris; W. G. K. Duncan, a political scientist

heading for the London School of Economics; and Raymond McGrath, a post-graduate scholar in architecture and a young man with considerable artistic talent. At that time McGrath was doing a lot ofwoodcuts and he hadjust printed and illustrated a collection of his own poems. Poems, theses, were exchanged and read; McGrath, it was agreed, would illustrate Beaglehole’s book of poems when it came out; McGrath it was concluded ‘has very sound ideas’. But life was far from solemn. Quoit tennis found much favour, talking even more. ‘We do a good deal of arguing; so much so that the place has rather the atmosphere of a miniature VUC. The Sydney lads are right willing controversialists.’ The first-class food was something new (my grandmother was a great believer in a healthy diet and vegetarianism) and on special occasions they really broke out and tried liqueurs at sixpence a head. ‘Creme de Menthe & Benedictine we have tried so far, the first sickly pepper minty stuff, but the Benedictine was good. Don’t tell Bobby Stout.’ Duncan proved to know ‘a whole lot about social problems, also has a sense of humour. . . . He is mad on Bertrand Russell at present. Henning says one day “Who is this Bertrand Russell, anyhow?” Duncan looks at him wonderingly for a moment & then bursts out “Good God! have you ever heard of Jesus Christ?” He is going to London too which is cheerful.’ Was it discussion with Duncan that led to fresh thoughts about the thesis subject? ‘I am thinking I may change my work when I get to England ... to something in political theory; however we’ll

see —the NZ Coy may still be the handiest subject to work on.’ New Zealand was clearly being left behind in more senses than one and just before arriving at Colombo and a first exciting view of Asia, Beaglehole wrote ‘lt is a pleasant sensation to be crossing part of the earth that has really some history behind it & not just a few tuppenny-ha’penny scraps & tenth-rate politics.’ They arrived in London at the beginning of October, everything looked extraordinarily familiar. There were notes of welcome from two Victoria graduates and trampers, ‘largely condemnatory of the country’, but after inspecting the Institute of Historical Research, ‘much to my liking’, and going to his first concert, the family in Wellington was duly informed ‘this country will do me for a while, climate or no climate’.

London was almost overwhelming, the first months a veritable feast of music, of bookshops, of sheer intellectual excitement. He and Duncan were soon established in a large room at 21 Brunswick Square, a house that has now disappeared to make way for the brutal Bloomsbury Centre, opposite the Russell Square underground station. Rent was 175.6 d. a week each, living expenses, outside lunches, five to seven shillings each with a diet mainly of ‘wholemeal bread, raisins & marmalade’, plus whatever fruit could be picked up cheap. Lunch was bought for Is.3d. or ls.6d. or even, at the vegetarian Food Reform Restaurant, for lid. With £3 a week Beaglehole reckoned on ‘£2 for living in all its details & £1 for pleasures—or rather education in a broad sense, books, music, plays etc. What a man needs is about £IOOO yr for 5 yrs.’ What now seems staggering is what pleasures £l a week would then buy.

The first letter from London was finished after he had come home from his first prom. ‘Well, I’ve been in the 7th Heaven —the London pavements were like air beneath me as I walked home, & they glistened like silver; the trees in the square as I turned the corner were the abode of magic. . . . Bach, Handel, Mozart —you can’t beat ’em; I wouldn’t give two damns for anyone else.’ ‘Lets have some cocoa to celebrate’, he said to Duncan, and they did. There were concerts by the London Symphony Orchestra under Beecham and Albert Coates, the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra with Sir Henry Wood, the Philharmonic Society with Wood again, and with Bruno Walter; there was Gilbert and Sullivan ( Ruddigore ), the Royal Choral Society singing a Verdi mass, the Philharmonic Choir in Bach’s B Minor Mass (he heard this a second time a few weeks later), there were Saturday afternoon concerts at St Martin-in-the-Fields with no charge for admission. There he heard Myra Hess play Bach and, he assured his parents, he had put something in the collection box! McGrath booked seats for the Russian Ballet.

I have been to the Russian Ballet twice, & am going again if I can run to it. . . . Some of it is great stuff. . . L’Apres Midi d’un Faun was jolly good, & Prince Igor stunner, likewise Petroushka, & some of the dancing in The Swan Lake; do you remember how we used to see pictures of all these in the Sphere in the old days before the war. I want to see the Fire Bird, so that probably means another 2/4 going plush.

The problem was there was too much to go to. . . . tomorrow there are about four concerts I want to go to, & also a lecture by Bertrand Russell . . . the chief concert is Kreisler playing Elgar & Brahms concertos with the London Sym. Orchestra & Landon Ronald. After a prolonged & horrible conflict of loyalties I came to the conclusion that I would certainly be able to hear B.R. again, but possibly not Kreisler or the Elgar concerto; so I went & got the last 5/9 ticket, not without a good deal of calculation & perturbation of spirit. ... I am darn sorry to miss Russell tomorrow but it can’t be helped. To make up Duncan hears a lot of him —he follows him round like a dog.

The lecturers heard were a mixed lot, ‘an astonishing number of them have been duds —Arnold Toynbee for instance one night put across the most elementary tripe about the Pacific as a political centre in the most pitiful puerile style’. Toynbee subsequently somewhat redeemed himself with a lecture in a Fabian Society series in which Beaglehole also heard Sydney Webb, ‘a little insignificant cove’ who ‘spoke in a conversational way . . . with some jokes, unfortunately not loud enough to hear’, and George Bernard Shaw. ‘Place crowded, with a good number of adorers who rippled as soon as he opened his mouth. Good stuff, but not extraordinarily out of the common for him.’ Shaw the dramatist won greater praise, Man and Superman ‘the finest thing all round for play & acting combined I’ve seen in my life’.

The bookshops were endlessly seductive, John & Edward Bumpus’s in Oxford Street perhaps the greatest lure. There is hardly a letter in the whole series that does not mention books —books read, books admired, books bought, books coveted but too expensive. The first Christmas he bought books to send back to all the family, choosing a facsimile edition of Blake’s Songs Of Innocence (Ernest Benn, 1926, 125.6 d.) for his father, but then deciding to keep it for himself. For his mother, something she could get her teeth into, ‘also I think it will turn out to be one of those books you will be able to quote at meal-times & put markers in for me to read selected passages if I can just sparer minute or two now & again’. He enthused over the Nonesuch Milton, ‘one of the best books I have ever seen’, but at £4 4s. had to say ‘Nuthin doin’. A little later he made up for that by buying the Selected Essays of Edward Thomas published by the Gregynog Press. ‘l’ve been considering it since the beginning of December. It is a very beautiful book.’

Not everything in London won unqualified praise. The Albert Memorial was ‘a hideous abortion’. ‘l’d heard that this was pretty bad, but nothing, no picture, no description, can come up to the horror of the original.’ And there was, of course, another and grimmer side to London. That I will return to in a moment. ‘lt strikes me I am pretty heroic to get any work done under the circumstances’, he wrote, but work had to be done. First, the subject for research had to be settled. He saw Pollard (Professor A. F. Pollard, the eminent Tudor historian, Fellow of All Souls and Professor of English History in the University of London) ‘who is a great man . . . with the result that I shall probably be working under him on political theory of some sort, I think the idea of sovereignty. . . . Pollard reckons that would be far more broadening to the mind than working on NZ history’. It was not plain sailing. He heard that a lecturer had just finished a book on sixteenth century political thought (J. W. Allen, and his Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century) and considered switching to the seventeenth century. Then, realistically, recognising that Allen could hardly have ‘cleaned up the whole of the century’, went back to the Tudor idea and took along an outline ofa proposal to Pollard. This, Pollard ‘proceeded to tear to pieces in a manner rude, if not insulting. However it is something novel for me to have a prof take enough interest in me even to tread on me; so although I was a bit dashed at first I haven’t been unduly depressed on the whole.’ Worse was to follow. He revised the proposal. Pollard was highly critical:

I happened to mention the letters PhD and he was so horrified he nearly fell off his seat —thought I was going for an M.A.! I told him I was one already & had been accepted as PhD student by the Univ. Homily on wonderful character of London MA. Almost superhuman character of London PhD. Well, says I, would I be wiser to get back to NZ history which I know pretty well. Finally he thought yes, I might get a PhD on that. So I have to see Newton the colonial hist man.

Pollard, the ‘great man’, thereafter became ‘that swine Pollard’. Newton ‘turned out very decent’. In his view the subject was relatively unimportant, what was needed was the most intensive grounding in historical method and research, ‘but as I was a colonial student, & wd probably be occupying a colonial chair (which I thought unduly optimistic) the best thing to do would be to take a colonial subject & work under him’. He settled on the subject of instructions to colonial governors between 1783 and 1840, ‘l’m afraid it won’t turn out to be especially readable when finished .. .’ and changed his registration from University College to King’s, which was Newton’s college. While the young colonial was being put firmly in his place by

Pollard he found an ally, more than an ally, a friend, a hero almost, in H. J. Laski, newly appointed to the chair of politics at the London School of Economics. Laski had helped draft the second proposal for Pollard, Laski now agreed however that there was probably something in choosing a colonial subject. Beaglehole wrote to Campbell in March 1927:

This same Laski is a weedy undersized shrimp of a fellow, & now holding down Graham Wallas’ job. He is about 34. God, what a mind! I heard his inaugural lecture, the finest formal thing I ever heard in my life. . . . He wrote all the editorials in the Workers Weekly during the General Strike, of unhappy memory, & stands by every word of them. He is a perfect lecturer, & friendly & companionable enough to be a colonial. God bless him!

Laski’s biographer, Kingsley Martin, in a phrase later quoted by Beaglehole, saw ‘the clue to Harold’s strength and weakness ... in his desire to love and be loved. His argument’, Martin wrote, ‘might be derived from Marx, but at the final test he was a follower of William Morris rather than of Lenin.’ 5 At the Laskis’ on Sunday afternoons one might meet almost anyone: cabinet minister, trade union leader, Indian nationalist, American jurist or playwright. And the talk! If the company was remarkable the talk was even more remarkable —‘I never heard such conversation before’— though Beaglehole did on one occasion report ‘I went to Laski’s on Sunday afternoon and heard some pretty good yarns —one or two of them slightly touched up since I heard them last’. Ultimately perhaps Laski was too good a talker to write the great work on political thought that some believed he had within him. That work however provided the pretext for Laski’s indefatigable scouring of the second-hand bookshops. It was another bond between him and the bookish young New Zealander. The book-collecting can be followed, the flavour of the talk captured, from the two remarkable volumes of correspondence between Laski and the American Supreme Court judge, Oliver Wendell Holmes. In reviewing those volumes, twenty-five years after he first met Laski, Beaglehole sought to sum up the man. At the same time he reveals, I suspect, more than a little about himself.

They [Holmes and Laski] were both, intellectually and emotionally, humanists. They inherited, they passed on, the great tradition of eighteenth century rationalism, they were men of tough and acute mind, of esprit; but each in his own way too was a romantic; the mind of each was touched by an enchanted music that led him beyond the efforts and entablements of the ordinary day. 6

Laski too, was something of an outsider, a radical, a Jew, ‘friendly & companionable enough to be a colonial’. This was becoming the yardstick. At Newton’s Imperial history seminar Beaglehole met

C. W. de Kiewiet, born in Holland, raised in South Africa, already well into his thesis on British relations with the South African republics in the 1850 s and 1860 s. At that seminar ‘most of us are colonials or yanks too; the English highbrow girls I have met give me the pip, & the men on the whole aren’t much of an improvement; give me a Boer or an Aussie any day’. This view of the English went beyond the seminar,

The more I see of the place the more I despise the English & the more I like England. The paradox I leave you to unravel. Stupidity, stupidity everywhere, & the people intensely, passionately proud of it—about the only thing they are passionate about. They are the same in NZ of course, but there is a different shade of erhphasis there.

It was all very well to agree with Harold Laski’s rhetorical flourish about preferring to be a crossing sweeper in London than a millionaire anywhere else. When one came face to face with the misery and poverty that existed in London it was rather different.

We have been having pretty brummy weather lately, with a real dinkum fog on Thursday—an interesting thing for the first five minutes, but ghastly after that; the darn thing nearly chokes you & you spend half the time in blowing smuts out of your nose. Then in the middle of it a bloke sticks me up & wants me to buy a box of soap —nothing to eat since yesterday, ready to drop, etc. etc. The same old yarn. So I buy his soap. The night before another washed out specimen I could have knocked out with my little finger pushed matches at me as I was going into the Institute; I said well they’ll always come in handy, I suppose; & gave him 2d. for a box. He looked at me doubtfully—‘Well, it’s more than they’re worth, you know’ he said. ‘But I’ve been in the infirmary for 15 months, & I don’t know what I’ll do if I have to walk round all night’. I thought a bit & then I chased after him & asked him how many more boxes he had & gave him 6d. for the last one; & he just stood & gazed at me as if I had been the Lord God Almighty. Fair dinkum when a bloke gets that low it’s time they had a change in the country. Another white-faced cove sits in the street down Kingsway all day with his chest covered with medals & knits kids’ caps & socks for a living for a wife & lord knows how many children. And up in Birmingham a crowd of working women got together & signed a petition for a birth-control clinic ... & the Bishop of Birmingham rose in his blasted episcopal righteousness & damned the life out of them.

After the Methodist Sunday School, the Unitarian Church and the Free Discussions Club Beaglehole reacted strongly to the Established Church; .. so far as I can see the only religion that will be any use in the long run will be secular religion, if you can have such a thing. . . . Meanwhile about the only reason I can see for the existence of parsons is that it’s a polite way of giving mental deficients the dole. ’ (I’m sure this crack gave extra satisfaction in the knowledge that it would shock more than one of his aunts!) When

he got to Paris in the summer of 1927 he bought ‘a little bust of Voltaire for 5 francs, to which I pray every night’. Political attitudes aroused a comparable reaction, and reminded him irresistibly of New Zealand. The Society of St George sent a deputation to the Minister of Education demanding ‘the teaching of patriotism in schools, saluting the Union Jack, singing God Save the K etc, & Choirs of Patriotism in the universities . . . give the kids’ hands an automatic impetus to their forelocks whenever they see the Brave Old British Flag, & all may yet be well’. ‘As for the present govt, it seems to consist of one brilliant man, Churchill, one very likeable personality (in private life), Baldwin, one very efficient & inhuman administrator, Neville Chamberlain, & about the biggest collection of blatant or obscure fools a country was ever cursed with. . . .’ he wrote in February 1929.

There was another England to be discovered, Edward Thomas’s England of villages and countryside, of a man-made and age-old landscape. When the first winter drew to an end Beaglehole bought a bicycle (£5 7s. at Selfridges) on which he covered many miles. ‘The country outside London is very beautiful. . . when you get to it; I must say I like the English civilised type of beauty very much, as contrast to the ruggedness of NZ, but the trouble is that London keeps spreading like a cancer. . . .’At Easter he headed for the Peak District, with Laurie Richardson, another old Victoria student; ‘We did about 375 miles on our bikes & got in four days’ good hard tramping. . . . By jingo! it was a good trip, & a great relief to get into the open & look rough again.’ They slept out under hedges or stone walls, selecting, on principle, spots where trespassers were firmly forbidden. The country was tremendous but, he sadly concluded, ‘Grouse appear to be the most important thing in England, the peak & apex up to which the whole of western civilisation works. . . .’ Later, by bicycle, he explored much of the home counties and went up to Cambridge and Ely.

Jobs, the research student’s great preoccupation, come into the letters almost from the beginning of Beaglehole’s stay in London. He talked with de Kiewiet ofjob prospects in South Africa. ‘Capetown University wouldn’t be a bad place for a job’; it was, after all, only seventeen days from England. He talked with Newton: He reckoned that 2ndary school teaching in England wasn’t a bad business, & gave you time for research; but I am not keen on kid-whacking. Also that the Colonial Education service was a good thing; it would probably be in Africa somewhere, looking after the education of little niggers—organising, not teaching, except native teachers. Rise to about £I2OO, retiring at the end of2o yrs on £6OO yr. And of course a cove would have the opportunity of getting well browned up & wearing dinky white clothes & a sun helmet, or shorts; but somehow I don’t think its my line. . . . Of course, once in N.Z. you’re dead so far as history is concerned. On most other things except books & tramping, as far as that goes.

The only reason any NZer I have met over here . . . wants to go back is to see his people. ... I think I’ll have a go at the States or Canada myself, or try to get a Guggenheim grant to stay in London another year. What I should like to do would be to get a job or a schol in the States for a couple of years. I’m sick of these cheap English sneers at Americans; when it comes to a choice between interesting people give me travelled colonials or Americans every time. . . . I’m coming to the conclusion that the States is one of the most important things to study in this here world, Babbit & Elmer Gantry ridden as it may be. It may be pretty batty in some ways, but I doubt if on the whole it’s worse than England or NZ.

Six months later, in May 1928, and this sounds like the Ph.D. student again, now facing an intractable mass of material calling out to be reduced to some sort of order, ‘I wouldn’t mind doing a couple of years teaching now, just for a change, & I wouldn’t mind coming back to NZ for it, if they would pay my fare over here again; otherwise I will be wise to stick here as long as I can, & do all the writing I can, I suppose; because I don’t suppose I’ll do any more once I leave London.’ ‘He will be a fool if he goes back’, he wrote of another student (studying in Paris) who had been offered a job back in Wellington. But New Zealand, stubbornly, was there in the imagination. Soon after they arrived he and Duncan had visited Hampstead Heath:

Believe me, a washout. About twice the size of Central Park, houses all round; infested with bourgeois lovers in pairs making shameless public love in the peculiar English way —most embarrassing to a pair of unsophisticated colonials . . . we lay down on the grass in the driest place we could find, I to dream of the Orongorongo & Duncan to read Wells’s latest omniscience in the Sunday Express. I am reminded of his poem ‘ln the Cotswolds’ which after opening Yes it is beautiful, this old, old land: These houses root their being in the earth. . . . goes on to conclude A wind strikes—and my opened eyes are blind With gazing on an unseen distant place; My deaf ears hear Orongo-rongo’s stones — Bloom bursts on wind-swept hills within my mind.

It could, I suppose, be affectation; epistolary or poetic license. Reading the letters I sense something more than that. New Zealand is dreamed of not only for what it was but for what it might be. Visiting Cambridge and staying with McGrath, Beaglehole thought of the university he would build when he became a millionaire. Cambridge won him over.

I am convinced it is the only way to build a university, though ideally it should be nearer London & the asinine restrictions on students beyond a certain age should be removed. If I were a millionaire I should certainly buy up all that is left of the Hutt Valley, & build a residential university there, in small colleges on the quadrangle system. But it would be co-educational, with men & women in the same buildings; & heads of colleges indiscriminately male or female, & there wouldn’t be any proctors, & very few rules; so the place would probably be put down by the government, & the boys & girls returned to Dick Seddon’s atrocity at Salamanca. It would be a pity to lose the view of the harbour from there, however; so I might pull down our present fantasia in brick & put up something else that would be some use.

And in his next letter: ‘What a place we could have in NZ if we loosened the purse strings & only tried: Cambridge wouldn’t be in it.’ What I think is emerging is not just the dream born of nostalgia for home, but an idea of the positive qualities of the colonial mind. McGrath, Duncan, de Kiewiet were socially congenial; but more than that, they exemplified the kind of sceptical yet civilised minds, the enthusiasm and directness, on which a new society might really be built. Other evidence is noted —a comment on Henry Lawson.

Did you ever read any of Henry Lawson’s stuff? I have been reading While the Billy Boils lately & its good stuff. . . . Only colonial writing I ever read that got there; no waste words, no padding, not much description; but it couldn’t have been written anywhere but in N.Z. or Australia. At other times he took a gloomier view; ‘We’re hopelessly handicapped out there by our distance from anything.’ The Journal and Letters of Katherine Mansfield, which he read on their publication, stirred him greatly. To read the Journals & Letters so soon after her death makes one know her so intimately that it is really painful to finish them ... all I can say is that I feel I know her better than all except one or two of my friends, & admire her to desperation. What hideous, brutal luck she had. . . .

I find I have the identical feeling for N.Z. she had over here. How I’d get on if I came back I don’t know—settle down all right after awhile, I suppose. Anyhow as I don’t earn a living short story writing or get an allowance from the manager of the Bank of N.Z. I’ll have to interpret in my own person the economic conception of history, & go where I can get a job. . . . I would be giving a very misleading impression if I left you with the idea that the letters are largely introspective soul-searching. The strongest impression they leave is of a young man working hard and enjoying life to the full. In May 1928 Elsie Holmes, another fellow student and tramper from Victoria, arrived in London; in October that year Ernest Beaglehole, following in John’s footsteps with a travelling scholarship.

I don’t know that I don’t envy Ern his first year in London —I should like to keep on having first years for about five years, discovering fresh things every time—after a while, though you keep on discovering fresh things . . . you just take them for granted, unless they bowl you over completely, like the Turkish pottery at the V & A. Let alone the Chinese. . . . Work on the thesis progressed steadily. He began writing at the beginning of 1928 and made steady progress as the months passed. In May he was expecting to finish by November, and at the beginning of December reported, ‘I have finished my thesis.’ There was nearly two months of revising and checking and typing before it was handed in. ‘I managed to mentionjane Austen & quote Burke & Carlyle & Dr Johnson & Blake, so what more do you want in a thesis on colonial history.’ The oral examination took place two months later and was like most oral exams —more or less of a formality & more or less of an anti-climax. . . . They said absolutely nothing about it as a whole either by way of praise or blame —I except Miss Penson, who did say she thought it didn’t have enough dates in it, to which the others chivalrously agreed. . . . [They] informed me after a suitable period for mutual consultation that they had decided to recommend me to the Senate for the degree. . . .

Beaglehole had arrived in London in October 1926 and his scholarship had been £2OO a year for two years. Now in his third year, money was running very short. Inspired perhaps by Laski’s stories, he enquired from Bumpus’s what they would pay him for a first edition of de la Mare’s Songs of Childhood which he had bought for ninepence in McKay’s on Lambton Quay in 1919. Bumpus’s offered 30 guineas for it. ‘I said I’d think about it. . . . If I could only find V2 doz things like this, I could finance myself for another year. Daddy will no doubt point out that £31.9.3. is unearned increment & is therefore morally the perquisite of the state; I reply on the contrary it is the natural reward of the capitalist, & of his foresight, wisdom, & hard-earned knowledge. . . .’ He decided to auction the book at Hodgson’s and it fetched £4O 10s. of which he got about £35. This helped, and so did £SO sent over by his father, but the question of a job moved on from the realm of conjecture to that of urgent necessity. At the beginning of 1928 he had turned down the offer of a lectureship at Grahamstown, South Africa. There would not have been time to finish his thesis before starting, and there were other reasons too. No more offers came. He applied for a Rockefeller grant to have another year of research; for a research studentship at Trinity College, Cambridge; for a job in Canada. There seemed a possibility at Manchester, ‘But who wants to go to Manchester?’ Newton went out to India to give advice to the government of the Punjab; perhaps he would come back knowing of something there.

Nothing. There was a lectureship at Auckland. ‘lf I come back I should like to come back to Wellington; at least it has some hills.’ However he applied, and was turned down. ‘. . . there are some reasons why I should be very glad to go back to N. Z.; but it looks at present as if I shall have to go wherever I can get a job. If there is nothing doing at all I suppose I shall have to utilise my free passage home & trust to luck. That is about how things stand at present.’ Things did not change. The dream of writing the life of Sir James Stephen and then (Laski’s suggestion) a book on the idea of Empire

since 1783 faded. He had been asked by J. A. Williamson, who ran the Imperial history seminar while Newton was in India, to write a book on Pacific exploration for a new series of books on pioneering, ‘not that I know anything about either the Pacific or exploration’. It was something he supposed he could do at home, working in the Turnbull Library. More immediately, however, came ‘the worst thud of all’; the Oxford University Press turned down his thesis, ‘too much of a dissertation & not enough of a book’. His parents had sent him a small sum of money to mark the Ph.D. and for his birthday. Before it arrived his mother, who had been ill for many months, died. He spent the money on the two-volume Nonesuch Milton, found in Charing Cross Road, £3 10s. It meant a lot to him. He also in those last months in London grew a moustache, ‘for experimental purposes’, and had his portrait painted by his uncle, George Butler. Just before sailing for home in the Osterley at the beginning of August 1929 he bought the Shakespeare Head Plutarch, in eight volumes, ‘to celebrate my sojourn in & departure from England’. In March 1930 John Beaglehole wrote once more to Dick Campbell. He had just arrived in Dunedin and was about to start ‘commercial travelling in miscellaneous wisdom’. In The New Zealand Scholar Beaglehole writes,

. . . from 1932 onwards for a while politics and social life in our country were not exactly encouraging for the free human spirit. Of course things began to look up, and a university college took me in at last, but I still could not see much point in New Zealand. To be candid, I was not interested in New Zealand —except in so far as I had to be.

The statement sets the scene for a later period, for what he saw as his own discovery of New Zealand. Yet the letters of the London years suggest to me that the contrast is too sweeping, that New Zealand was always a part of him. England was never ‘Home’. That was London or —no, and —London and New Zealand.

A talk given to the Friends of the Turnbull Library, 22 October 1980.

REFERENCES 1 Letters to R. M. Campbell are in the Campbell Papers, MS Papers 1900, Alexander Turnbull Library. Other quotations without an acknowledgement are from John Beaglehole’s letters to his family, 1926-1929, which will in due course be deposited in the Alexander Turnbull Library. 2 The New Zealand Scholar . . . Margaret Condliffe Memorial Lecture, Canterbury University College, 21 April 1954 (Christchurch, 1954) reprinted in The Feel of Truth ed. P. Munz (Wellington, 1969) pp. 237-252. 3 Address by J. C. Beaglehole to annual general meeting, Wellington Chamber Music Society, 23 March 1968. Typescript in author’s possession. 4 Ibid. 5 Review in Parson’s Packet, no. 23 (July 1953) 8-10 6 Ibid.