Centennial Retrospect

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 630, 27 July 1951, Page 6

Centennial

Retrospect

HE thousands of people who converged on Christchurch Cathedral on December 17, 1950, will long remember the solemn and moving Thanksgiving Service wherein the Province of Canterbury affirmed the faith of its pioneers. In old age, today’s children will look back over the years to that historic occasion’ when, with a magnificent fanfare, the trumpeters marked the end of Canterbury’s first century and heralded the new. The radio review that week by week has presented something of the music

and pageantry of this memorable year to listeners will make its final bow when 3YA broadcasts the 51st edition of Centennial Roundabout on ‘Tuesday, July 31, at 8.0 p.m. This time the programme will last an hour-its fifty predecessors were all halfhour broadcasts. In those 60° minutes 3YA will recapture in vivid snapshot the muster of international champions at the Games, the photo-finish on the racetrack, the coaches of the 1860’s as they clatter over the bitumen of the 1950’s. History repeats itself in the Lyttelton Landing, the Randolph Breakfast, the Early Colonists’ eee

Ball, the Bridle Path Pilgrimage, re-enacted by descendants of the pioneers. The unforgettable, incredible loveliness of the Floral Week is recalled-its pageantry and colour in the summer weather, the crowds, the processions, the marching girls. And month after month like a golden thread through the festival, the choirsthousands of voices singing throughout the year. Centennial Roundabout appropriately ends with massed choirs singing the Hallelujah Chorus. The Prime Minister (Rt. Hon. S. G. Holland) will bring the prozramme to a close with a short message ‘conzgratulating the Province on its efforts, and wishing it well for the

future. Messages from Sir Ernest Andrews, Chairman of the Centennial Association, and Mayor of Christchurch for many years, and from the present Mayor (Mr. R. M. Macfarlane, M.P.) will also be heard in the programme. "One of the station’s most popular sessions, Centennial Roundabout, has been edited and compéred these twelve months by E. V. Spencer, Announcer-in-Charge at 3YA. Cheshire-born, Mr. Spencer came to New Zealand in 1938. from London and joined the NZBS at the end of that year as station announcer at 2YZ, then 2YH, Napier. During the war he served with the New Zealand Forces until 1943, when he was seconded eee

from the Army to the Pacific Recording Unit, based on New Caledonia. But he moved farther than the Pacific war theatre as time went on-to such places as Athens, Naples, Florence, Tobruk. "I was only flying through Tobruk," he told The Listener, explaining that he went back to the Army in 1945 and joined the Middle East Recording Unit in Rome, where he was second commentator for 12 months. Returning to England with the first leave party from Italy, he did some recording at the BBC of New Zealand staff in British Forces Clubs. Back in New Zealand after the war, Mr. Spencer returned to 2YZ until 1946, when he succeeded A. L. Currie as Announcer-in-Charge at 3YA on the latter’s appointment as Station Manager of 2YA.