CONFERRING OF THE HONORARY DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF
LETTERS UPON THE PRIME MINISTER. SIR ROBERT
GORDON MENZIES, KT, CH. QC, MPP AT WINTHROP HALL,
UNIVERSITY OF VjSqRPN USTRALA
29TH APRIL, 1964+
Speech by the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Menzies
Mr. Chancellor, Mr. Pro-Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen
Never in my life have I permitted myself to
make a speech with my hat on and, therefore, in breach of
all the rules, I take it off,
I have been having a most fascinating time
tonight. My mind went back to the several occasions when I
got a Degree myself that I had earned; all my others are the
unearned increment, I don't know what the position is today,
but in my day the Bachelor of Laws had a hood with,... what
do they call b. at fur? Vermin or something ( Laughter) around
the edge of it. It cost you three guineas to hire it. The
Master's Degree was exactly the same but it had no fur trimming
and it cost you five guineas to hire it. ( Laughter)
As all these distinguished graduates came up
tonight, I wondered whether they were still exposed to these
raids on the privy purse on such a celebrated occasion in their
lives, but I had another thought as thay came up. You know,
I'm getting along in years now and I begin to think thiat all
the graduates are young and all the policemen are young. I
suppose that's true enough, but when tonight I watched them
come up Bachelors or Arts and then came along dentists.
They all looked so young. ( Laughter) It was hard for me to
believe that as soon as practicable, they will be saying to
poor victims in the chair, " Open your mouth a little wider,
please" and then using that superb phrase that all dentists
have invented they don't say " Spit" they ray " Let that cat
please" ( Laughter). I could quite imagine it, It was great
fun, but when a most talented young man came along to be given
the degree of Master of Arts for a thesis: " Personality
Characteristics of Habitual Traffic Offenders",( Lauaghter) well,
I thought for a moment I had better speak to my colleague, the
Minister for Customs and have his thesis banned. ( Laughter)
Then, of course, it is not for me to take on, in
open combat, the Public Orator, except that all of those of
you who have vestigial remains of your Latin in your minds will
not have failed to realise that he is a Professor of the new
pronunciation. Now this is one of the great problems. I say
this to all of my fellow Latinists here tonight, male and
female, this is one of the great problems, how you pronounce it.
Oh dear, I went through most of my life thnking that disjecta
membra was disjecta mzembra but tonight I was reminded that it
is disyecta membra ( Laughter) Don't talk about Julius Caesar
it's Yulius.( Laughter) I was reminded of Julius Caesar tonight
when that charming young woman gave me thie crown, and I remembered
a few scraps from Julius Caesar in ray acknowledgment.
Well, now, this is not the first Public Orator
under whom I have suffered. ( Laughter) It is a very odd ' thing
but when you get to my stage of life and you have been able to
do a little that's all in ' the university field, but you
feel you've done it with great good will. people in the
universities attach importance to it andwhen I look back on
the number of unearned degrees that I have had al~ l over the
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world, I blush for shame. I know a lot of people in Australia
think that I am not capable of blushing ( Laughter) but I am,
I think that on seventeen occasions these strange unpurchased
fruit have fallen into my lap. Bjut I remember four of them.
I wonder, Mr. Chancellor, I wonder if I might, even at this late
hour, take your time by mentioning very briefly four recollections,
because they are all different.
One is that 7 as you have been told, I was given a
degree at Oxford. Fascinating occasion, highly distinguished
by the fact that one of my co-graduands was Margot Fonteyn who
is now in Australia.( Laughter) She and I have no superficial
resemblance whatever, ( Laughter) She had two great advantages
over me. One was that she is decorative and the second is that
she came late in the list. I had the great misfortune in being
first in the list, only because I happened to be Prime Minister
of Australia. We~ marched up tho High Street, went into the
Divinity School and there, our Master of Ceremonies gave to all
of us pieces of paper which contained on the one side the Latin
of what was to be said about us and on the other side the
English. This man was bilingual whoever did it. He did the
Latin anci he did the English ai least I have always assumed
that, Unfortunately for me all the others had a chance of
sitting down and reading and looking wise, but I was first up,
so I had no chance of looking at my English at all. The
Public. Orator hc did his subject well. He had the new pronunciation
thank aod the Chancellor, at that time Lord Halifax, had
the old pronunciation and between the two of them I arrived
at an average sort of an ide.-as to what was going on.
Well, my luck was in because I stood there you
can't imagine it, any of you who are not utter highbrows, you
can hardly imagine what it meant standing there in the presence
of all the great and learned in this great seat of learning,
with the Public Orator declaiming past your right ear in the
most impeccable Latin Which T knew had to cc-ntain a couple of
jokes because that's he way Public Orators go on. ( Laughter)
I want to tell you and this is the proudest boast
of my life that I listened, I tried to appear intelligent;
there were two jokes and I laughed at each of them at the time.
( Laughter) This I regard os my greatest moment and nfterwards
I spoke to the Plublic Orator and I said, " You know, that was a
great strain on me, but still, I got the points didntt I?"
He said, " Yes, you did. You did very well."' I said, " The
one comfort I had was that when I looked around in the theatre
to see all these immense scholars, none of them saw the joke,
none of them understood a word of what was being said ( Laughter)
and this made me feel that it would not be true to say that a
little Latin is a dangerous thing. It is better to have little
than none," 1 That was a great occasiont
On another occasion, I was given a degree by
the University of Laval in Quebec, a French Canadian University
and L'oval is a most fascina-ting place, quite seventeentheighteenth-
century in its character. As they were giving me
degree, noduta euto oe mistranslation in some
correspondence ( Laughter), I thought that my tinec had conae to
speak sorme of ray reply in a species of French. So I did, about
15r0 words, all with loving care. I walked up and down the night
before and I rehearsed this, you see, and I was delighted at
the result because although nobody present understood a word I
said, they were all with the highest possible courtesy, looking
at each other and saying, 11Tl essa-ie, ii essaio" and I thoughtthat
was rather agreeable. ( Laughter)
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Another one that I recall, and I must got bock to
tho Latin, but I won't keep you long is the Royal University of
Malta. My wife and,-I arrived in Malta one day and had a tremendous
day, about foar days in one. We went all over the island we
attended this and that. It was very hot; we got very we through;
we got very tired, but we went on and on and on, and in the long
run, I was driven down, looking as proud as a lord mayor ( if you
know what I mean) ( Laughter) ( Applause) down through the streets,
to receive a degree. The Governor was Lhe Chancellor and somebody
else was the Vice Chancellor. They had given me, just before we
had set out on our driving the oath that I was supposed to take,
an oath, about, I would think, four or five hundred words. I hu-d
to kneel at a faldstool and read out this oath and it was in
Latin, and I had no timie to give it the study that it no doubt
deserved as we were galloping up and down the island.
When I arrived at the University, I said with that
impudence that has served me fairly well in my life, I said to
the Vice Chancellor, " Quickly, quickly, my dear boy, old pronunciation
or new?" ( L. aughter) This is very important. He said,
" Itts all right, nobody will ever know" ( Laughter) " Take my
advice, you mumible" l ( Laughter) So I took his advice and I knelt
there qnd I mumbled. My wife was very annoyed with me. My staff
said, Never heard you mumble like that before". " Wellill I said
" I mumbled on the best possible advice". ( Laughter)
Then on another occasion this is the last one
I1ll quote to you, though it is the earliest in point of time,
in 194+ 1, when Winston Churchill was, of course, at the peak of
his powers, Great Britain and all the rest of us were in the
very throes of a struggle for existence, I was in London and I
went down to Bristol to be given a degree at Bristol of which
Winston Churchill was then Chancellor. A few hours before we
arrived, the place was bombed and the Great Hall at Bristol was
burnt and the whole town was in smoke and fire, It speaks volumes
for the durability of the true university spirit that the ceremony
went on. It went on in the Senate Chamber, a small place the
American Ambassador the President of Harvaird, myself, Winston,
the Chancellor. All the faculty came in with their academic
robes thrown over the battledress, all smoke-stained, with the
fires burning outside, smoke down the street,
This was a memorable, an unforgettable occasion.
And the ceremony went on, and it went though in the normal fashion
and then the old man who, of course added to his tremendous
spirit a lovely sense of the dramatic, said to me, " La. 0t's go
outside and let the people have a look at us" ( Laughter) and he
lit a fresh cigar and we went on to the front steps. I had a
few movies taken of this by some convenient arrangement, There
were the people; there was the smoke; there was the fire, and
they all rose to it because their leader had not cancelled an
arrangement in a great seat of learning but had made it clear
that whereas the struggle must continue, learning must never be
cast down. That, to me, is one of my unforgettable nomories,
And, Sir that duly sunnarises everything that I
would like to Says ft has been my great privilege to do something
about the universities, I go back to the time when Sir Keith
Murray came out to be Chairman of a Committee, and I agree, I had
a great deal to do with that, but from then on what was created
has gone on, I almost bel~ ieve of its own momonum. Once as a
result of his Committee, once we-had established tha,-t the progress
of the universities was something that was vital to the existence
of Australia, that notion itself developed a momentum which I don't
believe anybody, however stupid, could have stopped, We set up
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I the Universities Commission. We have had the most unbelievable
co-operation from the State Governments because never forget
that although the Commonwealth Government, stepping somewhat
outside its constitutional responsibility, has found many millions
for the universities so have the Governments of the States.
This has been a joint enterprise of the most exciting kind, and
I believe that in the result, great things are happening to
Australia and the future of our country is liable to be improved
beyond all our imagining.
Sir, I said something this afternoon about the alleged
conflict between science and the humanities, I don't want to
repeat it, All I want to say is that it is our business in a
university, your business, our business as people who are
concerned to reconcile the study of matter of phaysical or
chemical lorms or elements with the study o1 man both individually
and socially. This is really the great challenge to the world
in the second half of this century, to have people not only
clever in a scientific sense and that's essential7 if the world
is to make material progress, that's essential if we are to do
our duty by the now countries in the world which need growth
and need improvemont, and that also in the doing of all these
things we should never forget that the most important thing on
earth after all is man, woman, the human being who must be
understood, who must be encouraged, who must be, wherever necessary'
catered for, because otherwise science can become an inhuman
monster and without it, human beings can become academically
disposed without purpose, without drive, without ultimate
ambition for the rest of the world, This is a great joint
enterprise and I know of no places in which it can be conducted
half so well as in the universities.
Of course, it is quite possible to be an able scientist
and to be ignorant of a lot of the things that have boen referred
to tonight. It would be a pity, it would be a calamity, but it
is also happily quite possible and increasingly probable to be
a scientist with a clear view of humanity and an acute sense
of social responsibility. Look back on the biochemists. I remember saying to
somebody two or three years ago, in fact I think it might be found
in some essay I wrote, that when people in some of these great
over-populated countries of the world the Chinese continent,
the Asian mainland looked into the sky and saw a sputnik passing
across above the horizon and marvelled at it and sa-id, " Isn't
this tremendous. The people who can do this must be the masters
of the world," a little information to them would have let them
know that half of them would not be looking at it if it were not
for the work of the medical researchers in the Western Hemisphere
the biochemists, the people who produce all the antibiotics, the
enormous discoverers, the oculists in the field of the brain.
Think of all these wonderful things that have been done by the
scientist and the applied scientist and we get a rather better
balanced view of mankind.
Sir, I believe that the course that is open to all of
us is to study and practise the humanities against the background
of a world which expands or contracts as scientific knowledge
grows or fails, This is the great thing that we must remember
and therefore, Sir, living as we do in an era of brilliant
cLvernoss and immeonse manterial achievement, the like of which
our great grandfathers would have regarded as utterly impossible,
living as we do in this era, we still have to face up to it that
whether the close of the twentieth century, our century, will find
us credited by our successes, with a groat contribution to true,
human, spiritual and intellectual devolopment, will be a question,
part of the answer, perhaps m., ore than part of the answer, will have
to be provided by the vision and faith and sense of mission of our
universities. Mr. Chancellor, I thank you.