Roderick Haig-Brown’s words ring as true today as they did in 1965.
In 1965 the man that Life magazine once lionized “as the most eloquent of modern-day fishing prose writers” gave a barnburner of a speech in Victoria. Roderick Haig-Brown told the Canadian Authors Association at Victoria’s Empress Hotel that he hated the present Socred government. He described British Columbia as a profligate province and listed what he hated most:
“The shoddy, uncaring development of our natural resources, the chamber of commerce mentality which favors short-term material gain over all other consideration, the utter contempt for human values of every kind.”
LINK (via Resilience)
I received an Old Boys (they’re called Carthusians, you know) News email from his and my old school only yesterday. News about some British Member of Parliament bigwig Old Boy visiting the school recently to open a new pupils’ boarding house, about its annual Founder’s Day Dinner in pre-Christmas partytime early December London at which old boys gather in a very fine medieval building and fine dine and drink (but not get expelled for doing so – and never be mentioned by the school again, a place normally very keen to let everybody know about its great and famous old boys – as Roderick Haig Brown was), plus some stuff about present and former pupils’ mentoring and networking schemes (how to get bigger and ‘better’ jobs through your Old Carthusian connections, basically). and music and sport at the ‘old place’ etc.
You were wise to get out of it when you did, Roderick.