The Late Sir Hubert Murray

Letter to the Editor ITAKE strong exception to the state ment in Osmar White’s article on Papua-New Guinea Administration (from Melbourne Herald, and published in September PIM) that “the late Sir Hubert Murray . . . was an old-time anthropologist who thought even mission school-teachers who educated their scholars to the third standard were a pack of interfering, disruptive busy bodies.”

On what authority does Mr. White base this assertion that Murray was an an thropologist? To be sympathetically dis posed towards a branch of science and its practitioners, as the late Sir Hubert undoubtedly was, does not make a man an anthropologist. Never at any time did he, with all his great intellectual gifts, set himself up as one.

The latter part of the same sentence is also palpably untrue and demonstrably false. “H.E.’s” opinion of the value of missions and mission education is well known to those who knew the man or who have taken, the trouble to discover what he left on record on those subjects in his published writings. That particu lar sentence in Mr. White’s article is unworthy of the writer of that very read able book “Green Armour.”

I am, etc.,

Evan R. Gill.

Liverpool, Eng. 10/12/49. (Editorial Note: We agree entirely. Sir Hubert Murray was not an anthropolo gist, and he was a warm admirer and supporter of the work done among the natives by the missionaries.)