The Dignity of the Crown

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 929, 31 May 1957, Page 20

The Dignity of the Crown

| MUST say how impressed I was with the talk by the late. Sir Arthur Grimble, formerly Acting Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert Islands. He described a revolt by the Chinese working on Ocean Island. A Chinese prisoner had been viciously maltreated by one of the native police; the prisoner escaped and died five days later

of exposure, The entire Chinese labour force, 700 strong, went on strike, and it was up to Sir Arthur Grimble to make peace. How he did so made a fascinating talk. Sir Arthur was caught between his deep sympathy for the Chinese, whose lives were bitterly hard compared with his own, his acknowledgment of his own responsibility in the outrage, and his duty, as the Queen’s representative, to preserve the dignity and authority of the Crown. His account, of how, inscrutably, the Chinese came to terms with him, was as vivid and evocative in its casual, touchingly weary manner, as George Orwell’s famous Shooting an Elephant, and it induced the same warm respect for its author. Colonial administrators are an oft, somewhat excusably, maligned class. Sir Arthur Grimble shows that a powerful sympathy and exceptional insight are by no means incompatible with the responsibilities of his position.