LETTERS TO THE FAMOUS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 821, 22 April 1955, Page 21

LETTERS TO THE FAMOUS

F you were able to write to any of the distinguished people in history whom would you choose? Would it be Louis Braille, Freud, Mrs. Beeton, Cervantes, Boadicea, Lord Shaftesbury, Gutenburg, Edith Cavell? In a letter to any of them it would be appropriate that you sign yourself. "Respectfully yours," because, different as they are in period, nationality, outlook, they were all individualists who gave of themselves to the world. After them, the world has not been the same. Now a series of half-hour dramatic episodes under the title Respectfully Yours has been produced for ZB stations and 2ZA. It will follow For the Defence at 9.0 p.m. on Saturdays, beginning on April 9. The people who are the subjects of each episode are men and women who achieved their objectives or carried out their activities often in the face of opposition or apathy from their contemporaries. Their motives are to be found: in their belief that what ney were doing was right whether they thought it was on their own behalf or for the general good. There was Father Damien, the turbulent priest who gave his life for the lepers of Molokai; Sir James Young Simpson, the Scots doctor who was the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of anaesthetics; Mary Ann Bickerdyke, the Florence Nightingale of the American Civil War; Nils Gustav Dalen, the Swede who invented the automatic beacon and the acetylene torch, losing his eyesight in the process; Sir Harry Lauder; Daisy Bates, a small. frail EnglishWoman who devoted her life to the. welfare of the most primitive Australian aboriginals; and Elias Howe, who invented the sewing-machine very much | as we now know it. Respectfully Yours does not take all its material from the illustrious dead. The series includes the stories of Commander Kerans, of the frigate Amethyst, | whose dash down the Yangtse made headlines in 1949, and of Odette Churchill, and her work for the French resistance movement.