The Henson Journals

[61]

Saturday, April 27th, 1929.

AUCKLAND CASTLE

I filled the day with writing cheques, letters, &c, and looking round on the ravages of dilapidation. The very cold weather has held back the vegetation so that the country has still a bleak almost wintry appearance. Daffodils are in flower, but the wall–flowers are only beginning to blossom. A football game was proceeding in the Park when I walked there during the afternoon.

That odd youth, Noel Lamidey, who was a clerk in the Chapter Office, when I was Dean, writes to me from Melbourne, sending me some excellent photographs of the Australian blacks, & a very intelligent discussion of Australian affairs. ["At present I am not too widely possessed of this world's goods, but then I have youth, (for I am only 34 on the 19th), ambitions, and ideals, which I hope, may one day carry me over the top." The youth, as I remember him, was a very anaemic, feeble–looking person, who seemed predestined to an early death.

[62]

He tells me that at a trials of a local Labour leader – Holloway, Secretary of the Trades Hall Council – for inciting the Lumber Workers Union to defy the decision of the Arbitration Court, the knave had the impudence to refer to me as providing a precedent for his advocacy of law–breaking. "In a statement to the Unionists and the Press, he said: "the best way to defeat bad laws is to ignore them, & I strongly advise members to ignore all orders or requests which encroach upon the rights and principles of collective bargaining." … In his defence he, the accused man, claimed to speak as he did under moral laws, & that [British history teemed with incidents of men & women who had ignored laws in defence of liberty and freedom of speech. Sir Edward Carson had defied the Government in what he believed to be the rights of Ulster, &] quite recently the Bishop of Durham had urged the people to disobey the law with regard to the new Prayer Book, and had gone unpunished." He was fined £50.

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