Top Eighties At Breakfast

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31116, 20 July 1966, Page 15

Top Eighties At Breakfast

From

BRUCE HEWITT,

N.Z.P.A.

Games Correspondent)

KINGSTON (Jamaica). On their first morning in Jamaica, New Zealanders in the Empire Games village wiE look out on a scene far removed from a New Zealand mid-winter day.

The temperature by breakfast time will be in the top eighties and from their quarters in the University of the West Indies they will see a vista of flowering tropical trees against a backdrop of steamy green mountainsides. Around them will be 80 acres of magnificent lawns and trees, once a Spanish colonial indigo estate, then a British sugar plantation and more recently a horse and cattle stud farm. The university began building the campus 25 years ago and the buildings are all in modern spacious pattern and big enough to take 3000 students. New Zealand was yesterday allotted a block in the university's Irvine Hall as living

quarters. The whole New Zealand team will have its meals there but the New Zealand girls will be quartered in the women’s college, Mary Seacole Hall, which takes Ls name from a famous Jamaican who served as a nurse in the Crimean War.

The men's quarters are named after Sir James Irvine, vice-chancellor of St. Andrew’s University, in Scotland, who was chairman of the commission which recommended a university for the Carribean. A magnificent statue out side the games stadium will remind New Zealand visitors who saw the Canterbury Centennial Games of the dynamic, long-legged Jamaican runner, A. Wint. The huge crouching figure is referred to generally as the “Arthur Wint Statue,” but it is a composite of four famous Jamaican runners. The four—L. Laing, G. Rhoden, H. McKenley and Wint—set a world record time of 3min 3.9 sec for the 4 x 400 metres relay at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952. An engraving of the statue (appears on the reverse side of the gold, silver and bronze ! medals to be won at the i games.