Early Days in Canterbury

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 631, 3 August 1951, Page 12

Early Days in Canterbury

LETTERS FROM NEW ZEALAND, 185053, by Charlotte Godley, edited by John A. Godley; Whitcombe and Tombs; 21/-. THE JOURNAL OF EDWARD WARD, 1850-51, introduction by Sir James Hight; The Pegasus Press.

(Reviewed by

R. M.

Burdon

|" ten without thought of future publication, often contain aspects of the truth that are omitted from more responsible documents. Mrs. Godley’s- letters to her mother, which certainly fall within this category, have the added advantage of being written to one who was so completely ignorant of the New Zealand scene that the background of every event described has to'be sketched in detail with nothing taken for granted. The Godleys arrived at Port Chalmers in March, 1850, stayed there a few days (finding the place beautiful but the inhabitants "a very drunken set"), and then went on to Wellington, paying a brief visit to Port Cooper on the "way north. The future capital was their residence for the next six months; during that time its climate, amenities, and inhabitants were the subject of Mrs. Godletters, when writ-

ley’s shrewdly observant comments. A Wellington man may be recognised anywhere "by his always having his hand on his hat." (Did that saying come into vogue the day the first settlers landed?) In the streets one saw Maoris of all ages playing with whipping tops. "A peculiarity of Maori babies is that they don’t cry." The Lieutenant-Governor, Mr. Eyre, whose marriage is a subject of much gossip, is very unpopular and shamefully bullied by Sir George Grey. Mr. Domett is "quite a gentleman, and clever."" Mr. Henry Petre would be quite good looking if his features had not "that sort of lengthened look that you may see in your own by consulting the back of a silver spoon." When the first four ships arrived at Lyttelton, Mrs. Godley, as wife of the Canterbury Association’s chief agent, was already there with her husband, her keen eyes taking in every detail of a strange environment, and until her final departure for England early in 1853 her letters continue to provide a running commentary on the life of colonists newly settled ashore. Visiting the Fitz Geralds was always a trial, because of the "horribly ferocious bulldog" kept

chained at the front door, which tried. to bite everyone who passed in. Mr. Fitz Gerald, by the way, used to wear "the most frightful long brown holland blouse, left very open, with a belt and turn-down collars, and on wet or cold days he sallied forth in the celebrated green plush shooting jacket." The news items served up for an absent mother’s gratification have become a documentary source of great interest and considerable value. As an exile longing for home and not expecting to stay in Canterbury, Mrs. Godley wrote with the detachment of a mere onlooker at the passing show of early colonial life. Accounts of the settlement’s progress, voluminous and pragmatical, may be found elsewhere, but as an intimate picture of a segment of English society conditioning itself to strange surroundings these letters are unique. Mention is made in them of "three Mr. Wards, brothers, the youngest about fifteen, and Irish . . . and very nice." The eldest brother, Edward, kept a diary, now published by the Pegasus Press in a handsome edition that is likely to find much favour with collectors. Covering the period from September, 1850, when the Charlotte Jane sailed from Plymouth, up till June 22, 1851, the day before the two eldest brothers were drowned in a boating accident, the Ward Journal serves admirably as an adjunct to the Godley Letters.

Possessing all the attributes of* a firstclass journalist, and obviously writing with a view to being read, if not actually published, at some future time, Edward Ward is more restrained than Mrs. Godley in his personal references, only showing faint signs of irritation when the Honourable James Stuart Wortley abuses his hospitality, or when Lord Frederick Montagu makes a beast of himself in public. Ward must have taken Pains to set down his thoughts in orderly fashion. The entries in his diary are carefully purged of boring details. and free from monotonous repetition, even on the long outward voyage when one day must have been very like another. After an exploring expedition across the plains from Riccarton to Oxford (a much overrated place in his opinion) he took up 100 acres on Quail Island and went to live there with his two brothers. From then onwards, until the fatal accident, stockraising and housebuilding are the main themes of his daily chronicle, How much richer the early records of Canterbury would have been if Edward Ward had survived, if Charlotte Godley had stayed longer! For the sake of the future one hopes that someone today is writing social intelligence reports comparable with hers, or that some diarist, who sees the essentials of the contemporary scene as clearly as Ward, is committing his impressions to paper.

RUSSIAN PHYSIOLOGIST

PAVLOV: A BIOGRAPHY, by B. P. Babkin; Victor Gollancz. English price, 25/-. FTER the King of Sweden had presented Pavlov with the Nobel Prize for physiology he remarked to Emmanuel Nobel, "I am afraid of your Pavloy. He does not wear any orders, Surely he is a socialist." Obviously this remark dates the incident. It was 1904, and Pavlov was 55, already recognised as a great scientist and one of the brilliant men who worked in the stimulating cultural atmosphere of the 19th Century Russian intelligentsia-in the tradition of Mendeleev, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Tchaikovski and Rimsky-Korsakov, To such a man the change from being paid in gold coin by the Imperial Treasury to being paid by cheque from the Soviet Ministry of Finance was only important in. so far as it gave him and his fellow scientists better facilities for scientific work. It is possible, however, that because Lenin looked on Pavlov with benevolence, and, on his death in 1936, the Soviet Government erected a monument to him, the non-scientific world may take a biased view of his work. They might feel justified if they react to what the* behaviourist John B. Wat-son-the inspirer of American advertis-ing-made of him or to G. B. Shaw’s diatribes against him. But they would be wrong. Pavlov’s work, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, remains almost half a century later the foundation of medical knowledge in the normal and pathological physiology of the gastrointestinal tract. Section three of the biography, which deals with this, is the most absorbing in the book. The section on conditioned reflexes is difficult to read and is disappointing, partly because it does not crystallise the basic contribution Pavlov made in this field (namely, the technique of studying the functions of the cerebral cortex), and partly because it should have been possible to LLL ‘|

assess where conditioned reflexes stand today with psychologists, psychiatrists and physiologists. The first part of the book is bedside reading, but the reader should be warned that the author, though able to treat with objectivity the physiology of digestion, in which he himself is an expert, has somewhat distorted views on Pavlov’s swearing and rather unscientific

views On politics.

W. B.

Sutch