Judge Alpers.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19164, 22 November 1927, Page 10

Judge Alpers.

The death of Mr Justice Alpers, which took place yesterday morning in Wellington, will be especially regretted in Canterbury, where the Judge spent the greater part of his life. Those who knew him intimately were aware of qualities of mind and heart which the public only dimly divined, but to the public at large it was the picturesqueness of his personality which made the deepest impression. There was the fact, to begin with, that he was not British born, and was already a fairsized boy before he could either read English or speak it; and in the second place, when he had grown up and achieved distinction as a writer and speaker of our language, he turned suddenly to law and in a few years had made a new reputation in an entirely different field. Many readers of The Press will remember the work he did, for a considerable stretch of years, as leader-writer and contributor of special articles, and yet he had been a leading barrister for ten years and a brilliant Judge for three years before the illness came which carried him off at sixty. We leave it to others to say precisely how high he climbed in those sixty years as teacher, author, orator, and advocate, and to mention also, as he would have wished, how strangely, and almost dramatically, he would occasionally turn his back on knowledge and remain cheerfully ignorant. But no one who ever met or saw him ever made the mistake of regarding him, even in his most perverse and theatrical attitudes, as ordinary or small. Indeed the strongest proof of his exfra-ordinariness was the fact that he continued to the end to bulk largest in our own City and Province, where he had been exposed to all the risks of familiarity for forty years.