SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER, THE RT. HiON. H. G.
MENZIES AT NEWINGTON COLLEGE, SYDNEY, ON 29TH
APRIL, 1961
Sir, President-General, and ladies and gentlemen:
I want to confess to you that I camne up here with
some doubt as to how I should begin what I hope will pass for a
speech. As I am an old boy of tUesley College in Melbourne,*
your opposite number, I thought that courtesy might require that
I should address you as " Fellow Methodists" ( Applause) And
then I remembered that I am not; I'm a Presbyterian. ThenI
thought, " Well perhaps", having a look at the Chairman, " I might
begin" because it's a good note 1" r-' llow Presbyterians"
Until I found that a man who had lived for years in Scotland
couldn't pronoiinde Y'ackayo Then to my intense interest I'
found that this is really a very diverse audience because just
as I was trying to settle in my own mind the fine points of
doctrine I discovered that we are practically occupied by the
Dalys, the Ryans and the Fitzgoralds] ( Laughter) So I think
I had better avoid any of these doctrinal differences -and ju~ st
address you as " Ladies and gentlemen".
The first thing that I want to do is to apologise to
you. I am, for the only time for a long time, wearing a rather
dashing looking blue shirt some of you may have noticed it.
I think I ought to explain to you how that comes about* This
morning I had to make a television what do you call it
performance, appearanco, show? Anyhow it had something to do
with television. And when you go on television I say thi? for
the benefit of those of you who have been fortunate enough to
escape it they do their best to improve you and of course
for all of us that is very necessary. But one way of
improving you is to get you to wear a blue shirt; apparently
it does something to you. I don't know; I've never got to-the
inner mystery of it. The other thing is that you sit back in a
deep chair, pretend you're your own wife, and have your face
made up! ( Laughter) Very lightly, mind you, very lightly. A
touch here; and a touch there. The effect of it, I want to
tell you at once, is appalling.
I once did a famous political broadcast I hope my
colleague, Mr. Daly, won't object to this a powerful
political broadcast in the last election. And as my hair, a s
you can observe is white, they thought it was necessary to
preserve the distinction where the forehead ended and the hair
b6gan it's not so obvious in his case. So the young woman
put a certain amount of a pale blue substance in my hair and
it did the trick: everybody could tell I did have hair,
instead of being bald. When we left she said to me, " Now" and
I thought she said " wash it out". What she said, as my wife
told me afterwards, was " Brush it out". But I washed it out;
which meant I washed it in! That night I had to speak in a
very, ve ry strong industrial suburb and to see me standing up
there with a blue rinse ( Laughter) must have cost my candidate
quite a number of votes.
Now I referred to ray wife then. I want to refer to
her again. She didn't come back with me to Australia, not
because she ~ sdeserted me, but because she has remained with
my daughter and her children for various reasons, and she's
going to be back on Friday; and she will be very disappointed
indeed that she couldn't be here.
I am delighted to be present on an occasion like
this. It does great honour to the School that the School should
have had this tremendous addition to its buildings; and it
does great honour to the School that it should have named the
additions after Mr. Nesbitt who has worked so valiantly in the
vineyard of this School for so long. ( Applause) Therefore I
regard it as a 7roat privilege.
Furthermore, I always regard it as a particular
privilege to be invited to do something, however small2 of some
notable event in the history of a great Church School.
Because there are two kinds of things that matter in a School
one is that it should have a continuity of education and
tradition and growth; and the other is that it should have a
continuity of the spirit. These are the two things that matter
in a great Church School. Newington, of course, has stood for
them for many, many years.
ilhen I refer to continuity I refer to something that
is very close to ray heart. It may be said by some that this
represents my essential and deplorable conservatism of L. ind. I
don't know. But I am an inmmenso believer in continuity. I am
not a believer in looking at the past because it is dead; but
looking at the past because it is living; looking at the past
because it reminds us that we are in the groat procession of
life. Any man who walked in the procession of life and who
aims at doing anything in life, who is unaware of what went
before him, unaware of the great truths that have come down to
him, is a foolish man. He is essentially, a short-sighted man.
When we were listening to the words of a Paalm my mind
went back to a time, many years ago now, when I first visited
Chequers in Buckinghamshire, the new country home the old
country home, because it is both, of the British Prize
Ministers, a home presented to the nation in the time of Lloyd
George and now occupied as a place of rest and recreation but
in my experience even more of hard work by Prime Ministers
and those who come to see them.
Many years ago I stood on the utmost fringe of the
Chiltern Hills looking down over the Oxford Plains. The man I
was with had a great feeling for the geography and history of
the country. We could just see the spire of the Church at
Great Kemble where John Hampden went down and made his speech
to the gentlemen of Buckinghamshire against ship money and so
began the whole history of the parliamentary control of
finances. We could see the long road that stretches acrosp the
plains, the Roman road from Andover; we could see on the Jides
of the hills the little ancient, almost ibliterated, marks of
the old British trenches put down at the time of the Roman.
invasion. This is the very microcosm of English history, the
most fascinating place in the world.
And my friend said to me, " You know, over there
Hampden was mortally wounded at the Battle of Chalgrove Field
and he rode off the field slowly, with his head dipping, into
the village of Thane just around the corner of the hill. And
he died there. His men brought him up to Hampden House, just
over here on the hill, and up the drive" to which he latQr
took me " and there at nightfall these men, these Roundheads,
with their lanterns in their hands marched the body of John
Hampden up singing the Paalm that ends" I've forgotten these
words, but the reference is to justifying the work of our
hands. I had it in my mind and it slipped away. That's the
Presbyterian coming out, you see.
Now this seemed to me to be the most marvellous
thing. Here was one of the yreat historic events in England
and the very men who took their magnificent leader dead off the
field were thinking and speaking and singing in terms of the
Bible. That hasn't disappeared; that hasn't gone, This is
still one of the great elements in continuity.
3.
Does anybody suppose that every time a great crisis
arrives in the world and sane, Ean is raised up to deal with it
that he is a sudden accident, Was Churchill a sudden
accident? Unexpected? Unreinforced by history? Unconscious
of a sense of continuity? How absurdl If any boy at this
School wants to understand the continuity of great things in the
world, just as I want him to understand the continuity of what
this School stands for, he right take an hour off and read tho'
speeches of the Younger Pitt at the very turn of the 19th
century. Then read the speeches of Churchill in 191+ 0, and 141t
and 142. He will find that although the mode of expression h~ s
changed, as it always does, here are the sane ideas; here is
the splendid eloquent expression of defiance, of strength, of a
sense of continuity, all of which meant we we the people of
Britain, are not to be overthrown by tyrants,
There it is. This is a marvellous thing, the sense
of continuity. And the people who live as if we were here today
and gone tomorrow, I don't envy then I'm sorry for then.
Unless we have a sonse of continuity, unless we know wrhat our
fathers and our grandfathers bestowed on us, what ideas are in
the currents of our minds, almost at the moment of our birth,
we know nothing. We must feel that in our tine just as the
boys of Newington today, I hope, will feel that in their tine
we and they are not only the inheritors but in our oiwn fashion
the creators, the people who continue the tradition, who build
on it, who improve on it, who are not just reactionary in th~ eir
minds, who look forward, who are free in their minds and
enterprising in their thoughts, but who always know the
foundations on which they build. This is, I think -well it is
to me at any rate a stimulating thought on an occasion of
this kind. It is easy enough for the old boys of a School to cone
back and become a little sentimental about when they were at
school, to glorify the wit with which they replied one day to
the Maste r, a wit almost entirely retrospective, to be sayinig
something sentimental about the " good old days" when probably
half of them hated a good deal of it as it occurred, That is
all very well, very agreeable, I do it myself, I'm not being
superior. I can equal anybody in these amiable hypocrisies on
a suitable occasion. In reality however, down in their heapts
they look at the school not in a backward-looking sense, not
0 remembering what a superb foot~ aller Tom was, or what a
wonderful cricketer Jack was, but as something that they
themselves have helped to make in their own time. They won't
say so because they would think that rather pompous. And
therefore I will say it for them: it is something that they
have helped to make.
That is true too, about all the boys who are here,
old and young; truest of the old who are about to leave. But
for all of them true because this is a school that is
established, that was established in the beginning, that
continues to work, realising that you may have all the clevqrness
in the world, you nay have all the scientific skill in' the
world; but the one thing that will save the world will be
civilised minds. And civilised minds are minds conscious of
the past, aware of responsibilities of the future, ard~ above
all with standards in their minds, standards of faitri, standards
of the spirit that will enable them to avoid the bitter wretched
paganisma that has beset the world in the last 50 years.
Sir I want to say no more -I've spoken too long.
But I did want to tell you, so far as icould, what I had in my
mind in accepting this invitation and in telling you how
delighted I am to open, as I now do open, this wing. ( Applause)