Refused Rhodes Scholarship

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 114, 29 August 1941, Page 5

Refused Rhodes Scholarship

" A JOURNALIST pure and simple," is how J. B. McGeachy, BBC Commentator, describes himself. He is a Scots-Canadian with the tang of both countries in his voice. If asked what his claims to

fame are, he is apt to reply, "Well, I’ve never written @ Book" ‘To make up for that, he has packed into his twenty years of journalism a wide experience

of the North American continent. He is of Highland blood, his family belongs to the sept of MacDonalds of Clan Ranald, in the south-west isles of Scotland. He himself was born in Glasgow ~--where his parents still livein 1899. In his fourteenth year he left for Canada in the great pre-war flood of emigration. Finally, he won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford-and did

not take it up: Me is, he believes, the oniy man whe has ever done so; and he sometimes wonders whether, if he had his life to live again, he would make the same choice. To his boyish imagination the lure of journalism overcame even the rare chance of going to Oxford. That lure has held him ever since. It brought him to London immediately after Munich, and it holds him there in the midst of the blitz. To him it is the place where things are happening. But he does long for one thing-light. The nightly blackout is to him, as to many others, the most trying feature of the war; and he finds himself yearning, as he gropes his way to the BBC studio, for the bright lights of the Western Hemisphere.-(A talk froas 2YA.)