VETERANS’ REUNION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 June 1938, Page 10

VETERANS’ REUNION

FROM A MUFTI POINT OF VIEW. (To the Editor.) Sir, —As a privileged invited guest at Saturday's reunion social evening of the Masterton branch of the South African War Veterans' Association, might I be permitted in your valuable columns to express my personal gratitude and at the same time to incidentally recall into fading and lesser review that once memorable occasion in local Press history when the printers of the Wairarapa assembled in the old Empire Hotel upper diningroom to extend their hearty welcome to their erstwhile comrades, Returned Troopers Cullen, Green and Roydhouse, come fresh back to work among them at the conclusion of the long-drawn-out veldt and kopje campaigns. Two things stand out prominently in association therewith, the admirable chairmanship of the late Mr Arthur C. Major (editor-proprietor of the “Age”) and the musical as well as Rugby prowess of the genial giant, Mr “Tiny” McMinn.

Listening last evening to the martial , vocal numbers of several of Master- . ton’s leading soloists, so thunderously applauded for their spirited rendering of later martial songs for the most part, memory could but revert to similar outbursts of applause and chorusjoining at the hands of one and all when the Kipling-period songs such as “Dolly Gray” and the then evergreen (at least promised) “Soldiers of the Queen” reverberated the room, sent stout beverage glasses tinkling and generally made the welkin ring. The newer songs and their choruses — heard sung under equally inspiring circumstances —are but added reason to believe, more firmly than ever, the perhaps trite but nevertheless true saying that “Old Soldiers Never Die,” but simply fade away. . Comradely interspersed at tables with visiting members of the Upper Hutt branch of the Association (15 in number), who marched upstairs to the skirl of the bagpipes played by the young son of one of its veterans, and local members from the outskirts of town and some from the Carterton branch, their genial chairman (Major Stanley Fletcher), to welcome their most spectacular arrival, the added presence of our 'worthy Mayor and member for the district and his predecessor and the ex-Mayor of Upper Hutt and the present Mayor of Lower Hutt, in the persons respectively of Mr\ Jordan, Mr Robertson, Mr Sykes, Mr McCurdy, Captain Andrews (excouncillor of our town), not forgetting the executive responsible for the gathering, nor Major Irving (president of the local branch of the R.S.A.), it was not long before the happy assemblage was —per medium of songs and toasts and speeches and harmony—generally in closest alliance with the spirit of the gathering in the usual Digger way. It seems but yesterday the good old troopship Waiwera, with New Zealand’s first contingent of New Zealand soldiers, to help fight the battles of the Motherland in faraway places, embarked and sailed away. But yesterday, as it were, we saw one or other of succeeding contingents follow in their wake, and noted the jaunty swaggering steps of one and all of them heading through the streets of Wellington and other cities to join their earlier-going comrades as, in since-emulated greater military arrays; but, with no greater elan than they.

Quietly present, but prominently associated with the success of the evening, one notes the still penetrating and steady gaze of the local secretary of the Association, the indefatigable veteran, J. V. Dolan, D. 5.0.; and to whose good-hearted spouse fell most of the providing arrangements of the bounteous fare done ample justice to by one and all who later toasted her health to musical honours, when most of it (the fare), like the old song, had gradually “faded away.” Resplendent in their panoply of medals and coloured ribbons, the mere sight and hearty handgrip of Staff Sergeants-Major Ritzma and Collins, of old Trentham and Featherston camp days, brought back to the writer's memory, at least, some grim remembrance of their tutorship.—l am, etc., N.J.B. Masterton, June 12.