The Editor

Waimarino Bulletin, Volume 1, Issue 1, 31 May 1983, Page 2

The Editor

Our editor, Dennis Beytagh (the name is Irish in origin), was born in Shanghai in 1924 and spent his early years in China where he attended the Cathedral School until the age of 10. In 1935 his family moved to Canada and, for the next 3 years, he continued his schooling in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 1938 the family moved again — this time to the U.K. where he completed his f'ormal schooling in the Cotswolds during the early years of World War 2. In 1942, at the age of 18, he joined the Royal Navy and for the next two years served in destroyers, first as a rating and then as an officer on convoy escort duties in the English Channel ("E-boat alley"), the Western Approaches, North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. He took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944 and later that year, after 'commuting' across the Channel between Portsmouth and the beach-head for three months, transferred to the Royal Indian Navy. He was sent to Bombay for a crash course in Urdu (Hindustani) and the fundamentals of the Moselm, Hindu and Buddhist faiths and practices before joining his first RIN ship, with an all Indian crew, in Calcutta. Based in Calcutta he took part in various operations in the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, accompanying the Allied SEAC forces from Assam down through Burma and Malaya to Singapore as the Japanese army retreated and finally surrendered. In August 1946 Dennis was 'de-mobbed' and opted to take advantage of the retraining and education schemes being offered by the UK government to personnel of the wartime armed services. At the age of 22 he enrolled for a 3-year course in Design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. On completion of the course he was employed as a full time designer with various advertising agencies and industrial design teams until he set up his own freelance design practice and started to teach part time in 1954. In 1955 he moved with his

young family (he now had three children) to New Zealand and settled in Wellington where he worked again as an advertising agency artist before setting up another free-lance design practice in the capital. In 1960 he was invited to join the staff of the Wellington Technical College Art School (later to become the Wellington Polytechnic School of Design) to establish a new course in Graphic Design. He was appointed supervisor of this course which was later renamed Visual Communication Design. In 1972, after 12 years at the W.P. School of Design, Dennis decided to take a break from teaching in order to resume a more active role in the actual practice of design and communication. After a brief spell in Europe he returned to become project edit&aatf . a 656 page book (I h^PjTair Manual) which was being published by Readers Digest in Sydney. He stayed with Readers Digest in Sydney for 3 years helping with the preparation and publication of other books and then, in 1975, he returned to New Zealand where he was again appointed course supervisor at the W.P. School of Design. v He remained at the Polytechnic for the next 5 years and then in 1980 was invited back to Sydney by Readers Digest to undertake further work in their Special Books Publishing Projects department. In 1982 Dennis f^fl^.ed to New Zealand an^^cided to live in Ohakune where he had built a house eight years earlier. It was fortuitous that at that time the editor of the Turangi Chronicle and Ruapehu Guardian was looking for someone to report on activities in the Waimarino area so Dennis has been your 'local' reporter in that newspaper since early 1982. During this time he has seen the demise to two other local community newspapers but he is also aware of the pressing need to establish another truly 'local newspaper' in the Waimarino region and is confident that, with the support of the community, the Bulletin will be a success.