ALEXANDER TURNBULL: HIS LIFE HIS CIRCLE HIS COLLECTIONS

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 7, Issue 2, 1 October 1974, Page 19

ALEXANDER TURNBULL: HIS LIFE HIS CIRCLE HIS COLLECTIONS

A biography launched

The dedicated, conscientious and impartially judicial labours of Dr E. H. McCormick for some five years culminated in the launching of the biography at the end of July. It was a comment on the accepted physical inadequacies of the Exhibition area in the Free Lance building as well as on the great interest in the event that two functions were necessary to place the biography firmly in the hands of Friends and first-line readers. The initial gathering, that of the Friends of the Turnbull Library, was in the early evening of Monday 29 July and the second, at the invitation of the body responsible for commissioning and publishing the book, the Alexander Turnbull Library Endowment Trust, was at the same time in the evening of the 30th.

Dr McCormick was present at both functions to receive thanks and congratulations, official and private. Professor D. F. McKenzie as President of the Friends conveyed his enthusiastic appreciation to which Dr McCormick appropriately replied, before submitting to the ordeal of signing copies for an impressive queue of purchasers. At the second evening, Sir Alister Mclntosh as Chairman of Trustees introduced the Minister of Education, the Hon. P. A. Amos, who formally congratulated the author and the Library. Dr McCormick’s second piquant and individual speech of acknowledgment within 25 hours was followed by an address from the Chief Librarian, Mr. Traue, who by placing the biography and the heritage of its subject in a wider context, made an almost impassioned but effective plea for continuing and essential support from benefactors of today and tomorrow.

Nothing in print dates more rapidly than a commemorative speech—even Lincoln at Gettysburg has been cut down to size by modern commentators —but we have a duty to place on record the remarks of the Minister and the Chief Librarian as typical of the feelings of many at the functions. Our tape recorder again proved its fallibility but Dr McCormick has kindly resurrected his acknowledgments on the second occasion. We are grateful particularly for the biographical overtones; somewhat less muted and uninhibited in the original version and its subsequent private gloss. The Editor, too, would like to take this belated opportunity as the book’s partial instigator and often harrassed consultant, to express his profound satisfaction and pleasure at every aspect of the work and its production. It is as difficult for him to express adequately his gratitude to Dr McCormick publicly as it has been privately in the two years since the text was completed.

Remarks by the Hon. P. A. Amos, Minister of Education On this occasion, the launching by the Library’s Endowment Trust of the biography of Alexander Turnbull, we are gathered together for a twin purpose—to congratulate the author, Eric McCormick, on a fine piece of sustained research and presentation on a subject fraught with many challenges to the biographer’s skills, and to honour Alexander Turnbull’s public spirit in bequeathing his library to the community. The two, the man and his library, are inseparable, and Dr McCormick has managed with great skill to relate the man and his times to the building of his library; to show how an otherwise ordinary man, once fired with the passion of the collector could create a quite extraordinary library.

It is a big book in all senses —five years of research and writing, 350 pages, a detailed catalogue of a great private library in the making, and a thick slice of New Zealand’s social and intellectual history. But if one has the courage, as the Endowment Trust had, to bring together a scholar with Dr McCormick’s reputation and New Zealand’s greatest book collector, then one must expect a big book. In his lifetime, Alexander Turnbull built a superb library of 55,000 volumes plus thousands of pictures, prints, maps and manuscripts most of them relating to New Zealand and to the Pacific, but with other strong collections, particularly in English literature. On his death in 1918 he willed the collection to ‘His Majesty the King ... to constitute a reference library in the City of Wellington ... to be kept together as the nucleus of a New Zealand national collection . ..’

It is a Wellington library, but national in its scope and interest, and it was fitting that in 1966 it became a research and reference arm of the National Library of New Zealand within the Department of Education, and that it will be housed in appropriate surroundings with the rest of our national collections in the new National Library Building, the first stage of which has just begun in Molesworth Street.

Alexander Turnbull has had to wait 56 years for his biography (a lengthy period in this more ‘abrasive’ age when biographies can be summoned to appear within a day of one’s achieving greatness) because his reputation has been created by his Library. If it had been dispersed on his death, this biography would never have been written. This Library and its growing reputation have constantly enhanced the standing of its creator. One of the fundamental principles which the Educational Development Conference has suggested should inform and shape educational policies is that ‘The search for meaning, purpose and identity in life is necessary for the health of both the individual and society.’

Might I suggest that the same is true of a nation, and that the role of a research library like Turnbull, with its all embracing collections relating to every aspect of life in New Zealand, which has provided generations of scholars from Turnbull’s day to the present with the raw materials of our history, is to assist us, scholar or citizen, to conduct our endless search for meaning, purpose and identity in our history.

Reply by Dr. E. H. McCormick. Wellington abounds in associations with my past. I have only to look round this gathering to recognize a number of faces familiar—in rather different manifestations —since schooldays. Professor McKenzie brings back recollections of his more substantial near namesake, my first academic patron. And the Minister’s presence reminds me that a few doors from here, in buildings now demolished, once flourished a unique educational establishment. One half, known as Banks College, provided tuition for embryo accountants and typists as well as cramming facilities for adolescents who had left school without securing the indispensable Matric or Public Service Entrance. The other half, Wellesley College, was a preparatory and secondary school for the sons of gentlemen and the professional classes, to make a fine and perhaps invalid distinction.

The twin institutions, so different in character, were presided over and owned by Mr Harry Amos, a notable man in his day —athlete, Rotarian, clubman, tycoon —and not least notable because he had succeeded in extracting substantial profits from the unpromising business of education. I met him—or, more accurately, I called on him by appointment—in the late twenties when, after a spell of sole-charge teaching in Nelson, I wanted to return to the city to continue university work and, I suppose, further my career. Mr Amos was willing to help and employed me to teach at his two colleges, paying me £SOO a year. After about eighteen months, my savings from this princely emolument plus the proceeds of a scholarship enabled me to leave for Europe.

Looking back, I recognize in Mr Amos (the other Mr Amos) one of the earliest of my good angels—those benign figures who have appeared at critical junctures to give direction to my purposeless activities or to smooth my path once I had committed myself to some project I was ill equipped to undertake. I have known many such ministering spirits in the course of a chequered existence. I recall with special gratitude Dr G. H. Scholefield who, I suspect at the instigation of the youthful A. D. Mclntosh, rescued me from post-depression penury in Dunedin and brought me back to Wellington. Here I was introduced to a conspicious member of the shining host, J. W. Heenan, and met other representatives—J. G. Beaglehole, Oliver Duff, John Pascoe—all associates and mentors in Centennial enterprises.

I pass over nearly two decades and a further clutch of angelic presences to light on Clyde Taylor, then the Turnbull’s Chief Librarian, who went to endless trouble to house the Field-Hodgkins collection and make it available for my use. Not only that but he arranged for the publication of a small exercise in pedantry on the subject of Abel Tasman. His successor, John Reece Cole, performed a similar service some years later in commissioning me to edit the journal of Edward Markham, an exercise that led to more rewarding work on Augustus Earle. Now, to skip a rather barren period, I come to the biography of Alexander Turnbull. Here benign presences hover thickly and debts are many: to the Turnbull Trustees for commissioning the book and so patiently awaiting its completion; to Graham Bagnall, at once its chief begetter and solicitous midwife; to Clyde Taylor who must now be awarded a double, if not triple, halo for relinquishing his own claims (only for the present, I hope) and generously helping with sources. Next throng seraphim from the library staff: chief among them Miss Margery Walton, so regrettably absent today; Mr. Murray-Oliver, the living link with so much of the Turnbull past and the acutest of my critics; Mrs. Scott and Mrs. Starke of the manuscript room, ever vigilant on the author’s behalf and Alexander Turnbull’s; Mrs. Paul whose taste and typographical skill are reflected in the book’s design and illustrations. Nor must I omit acknowledgements to the distant printers who so faithfully carried out their exacting —and sometimes contradictory —instructions. All these with others mentioned in the preface have contributed to what is, in reality, a common enterprise. So much generosity, so much altruism, so much self-effacement, so many good angels—one is almost compelled to believe in heaven.

The Chief Librarian, Mr. J. E. Traue, concluded the formal proceedings Turnbull died in 1918 at the age of fifty. He had some standing in Wellington as a businessman and a collector, enough to be caricatured in the Free Lance of 1912 by a local versifier: Alec Turnbull’s a bookhunter bold Who lavishes leisure and gold On pamphlets terrific About the Pacific And books on the Maoris of old Fifty-six years later he is honoured by a full-scale biography written by Dr Eric McCormick, commissioned and published by the Alexander Turnbull Library Endowment Trust Board with the financial assistance of the Henry Baxter Fleck Memorial Publications Fund, and launched in a State library which bears his name, a major division of the National Library of New Zealand.

Walter Turnbull, the shrewd Scot who founded the family fortune, should be well pleased with the return on his son Alec’s investment in this Library.

But we should be mistaken and very badly misled if we view this simply as the story of a successful businessman who bought his own memorial. Alexander Turnbull had no conscious desire for a memorial; he was a modest man with the selfless aim of building a New Zealand national collection to, as he put it, ‘assist future Searchers after truth’. While we may honour him with eulogies and a biography we honour his memory in a more fitting manner by respecting his intention, the creation of a national collection. Turnbull was perceptive enough to discern a need in his society well before it was officially recognised and he lavished his leisure and gold in meeting that need. This function tonight is further evidence, if that is now needed, that his judgment was right, that New Zealand was in need of a national research collection to assist it to discover the truth about itself.

By collecting books above all, Turnbull made certain that his intentions would be fulfilled. Man is by nature a collector, and the collecting instinct reaches its apotheosis in books. No other product of man is so much man himself, and so capable of inspiring other men. Turnbull’s collection has served to inspire almost three generations of scholars, librarians, collectors, members of the public, and even Governments, from time to time.

Unfortunately in 1918 when Turnbull left his collection to the nation the government was not inspired. They accepted the gift, purchased Turnbull’s home on Bowen Street to house it, appointed Johannes Andersen as librarian, instructed him to care for it, and thought their job well done.

The climate of opinion which had impelled Alexander Turnbull to build his collection had changed. That extraordinary but premature outburst of personal, political and national self-confidence that marked the coming of age of the first New Zealand born generation at the end of the nineteenth century, reflected in the literature, the social legislation, the labour laws, the reaching out towards a New Zealand destiny in the Pacific, had passed. It was not until the approach of the 1940 Centennial that the challenge implied in Turnbull’s legacy began to be recognized officially.

Government awareness of the importance of research collections has increased as New Zealand society has matured. The National Library Act of 1965, the commitment to the construction of a National Library building on Molesworth Street, the willingness to provide special funds to build the Turnbull collections, all are indications of the growing support of Governments.

If I had to characterise Government’s performance of its trusteeship of Turnbull’s bequest I think I would choose the language of horseracing. ‘Government’s track record is solid but not outstanding. A conscientious starter with few expectations. Responsive under strong public stimulation. With experience is showing signs of developing a strong finishing run. Not among the front runners.’

The front runners were consistently elsewhere, among Turnbull’s friends and acquaintances in business and scholarship, other collectors, and increasingly among the public at large. They had one thing in common, they shared Alexander Turnbull’s faith in the importance of a New Zealand national collection. Their names from the great to the humble are recorded in the bookplates, the named collections, the named bequests, the special funds, the donation book and the annual report. The Man tell Collection, the Trimble Collection, the Shirtcliffe Endowment, the Sir Joseph Kinsey Collection, the Earp Collection, the Earp Bequest, the Percy Watts Rule Collection, the Von Haast Papers and the Von Haast Bequest, the Sir John Ilott Collection, the Alexander Coutts Bequest, the Fleck Bequest with the Fleck Special Fund for rare books and the H. B. Fleck Memorial Publications Fund which has made the publication of this biography possible. The Atkinson Collection, the Sir Harold Beauchamp gift, the Henry Wright Collection, the Mathew Cable Collection, the Field Collection; Sir Alexander Howard’s Bequest, one of the latest, of £5,000 worth of sixteenth century books, mostly bibles, and in 1962 the first of a new kind of gift, the British Petroleum purchase of the Guy Scholefield papers as a gift to the library.

These are some of the thousands who have given books, manuscripts, pictures and money to build on Alexander Turnbull’s nucleus. Together, government and private support has more than trebled the collection in 56 years. Although I have no wish to under-emphasise the importance of money, or in any way to suggest to government and others that we don’t need more, it has taken more than money to build this kind of library. Belief, belief in the importance and value of a comprehensive research collection has been necessary. And on that note it is appropriate that I should turn from the public which has given so generously, to the public’s servants, the librarians, Alexander Turnbull’s librarians.

Johannes Andersen, Clyde Taylor, John Cole, Graham Bagnall, men who with Turnbull shared John Milton’s belief that books are not dead things but they are indeed man’s truest immortality—that Shakespeare is more surely the substantial first folio than the shadowy man of Stratford. Men imbued with Turnbull’s passion for collecting, each of whom has built his personality and his beliefs into the collections. Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull, bookman, New Zealander, collector par excellence, would be proud of what his librarians have wrought. I

hope that he will forgive us if in our quest for excellence in some fields we have neglected others dear to his heart. The John Milton collection, Turnbull’s other great collection alongside the New Zealand collection, has not received the support it deserves. We hope to do better. I have on other occasions attempted to define the essence of this extraordinary institution. I have likened it to a pyramid, a man-made artifact, built with loving care, book by book, manuscript by manuscript, by picture, sketch, map, plan, photograph, to provide an eminence to enable the scholar and the citizen to see a wider horizon, even a new country. I have called it the collective memory of a nation. I have called it a burning glass, a lens to enable us to focus on our past. But on this occasion I think it best to leave the definition to its founder, Alexander Turnbull. ‘Those who come after us will be discriminating enough, I feel sure, to blow away the mists ... that obscure the real history of the Dominion and to bring into view the men who really worked with their hands and risked their lives for the good of their country. My books and manuscripts I hope will assist future searchers after the truth.’