LAKE DISTRICT AND NEW ZEALAND

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 31, 7 February 1939, Page 2

LAKE DISTRICT AND NEW ZEALAND

ADDRESS BY SIR HUGH WALPOLE TO REVISIT DOMINION NEXT AUTUMN Photographs of the English Lake District and New Zealand struck “an emotional note’’ for Sir Hugh Walpole when he presided at a lecture in Keswick by Mr. Alan C. Browne, who recently returned, to England from the Dominion, states a London correspondent. Sir Hugh said that the combination of the two was all the more exciting because, having made the Lakes his home for nearly 18 years, he was going back to New Zealand next autumn for the first time since he was five years old. Remarking that he was not going to preach, Sir Hugh said that New Zealand must seem, because of the state of the world at the present time, one of the freest and most beautifully safe and remote countries. No country was safe any longer, but about New Zealand many of them had the feeling that it was untouched. And then one thought of the English lakes, so small, compact, and so exquisitely beautiful, and the fear of its being touched came forcibly to 'he mind. He was not going to advocate the making of the lakes country safe by making it a National Park or in other ways. There were those who thought the lakes were the most beautiful thing they knew: to others the lakes meant that they brought tourists and money; and others again felt that it was their home; and some felt all these reasons, but there was a common ground on which they all met, and that was the beauty of the lakes.

If that beauty was going to be spoilt, it would be spoilt from every point of view, and they would all lose what they had got. One little petrol station, one little ugly house, one little road that did not belong to the countryside, because so small was the place, so beautifully set and perfectly arranged by God, upset the symmetry, balance, and colour, and the beauty went. Therefore, he was not going to say that this exquisitely beautiful thing must be a national park, that this house should not be built, or that road touched, but if every one of them would feel that if the beauty were spoilt something would be lost, even those who thought of it from a commercial point of view, would sec to it and say that these beautiful things must not be touched. He hoped that whenever they got the chance they would say to everybody that it must be kept untouched, and that they would feel that that was their part in the battle—the battle against spoiling anything so lovely.