James Munro Bertram

James Munro Bertram (11 Aug 1910 – 24 Aug 1993) was a Rhodes scholar, a journalist, writer, relief worker, prisoner of war and a university professor.

Bertram was born in Auckland on 11 August 1910, son of Ivo Edgar Bertram, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife, Evelyn Susan Bruce. He spent his early childhood in Melbourne and Sydney, and attended church schools. He returned to New Zealand for secondary schooling at Waitaki Boys' High School, where he befriended Ian Milner and Charles Brasch. Between 1929 and 1931 he attended Auckland University College, where he met the third of his closest friends, J. A. W. Bennett.

He edited a literary magazine, "Phoenix", and with Bennett co-edited a Student Christian magazine, "Open Windows". Following the Queen Street riot of 1932 Bertram briefly enlisted briefly as a special constable. In 1932 Bertram received his Diploma in Journalism and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

Studying at New College, Oxford, he came first in English and second in Modern Languages. He was active in left-wing clubs and rugby.

Following Oxford he became an international correspondent with the Times. In 1935 he received a travelling fellowship from the Rhodes Trust to visit China, where he learnt Mandarin in Beijing for a year. The fellowship was renewed for 1937 and he travelled to Xi'an where General Chiang Kai-shek had been captured by communist sympathisers. He was the first British journalist to interview Mao Zedong and travelled for five months with the Eighth Route Army in northern China. He wrote two books on these experiences: "Crisis in China" (1937) and "North China Front" (1939).

Bertram began to more actively support China, and performed aid work with the China Defence League, for whom he gave fund-raising lectures in a tour of the US, and led a convoy of supply trucks from Haiphong in Indochina to Yan'an. Part-way through this journey England declared war on Germany, and he returned to New Zealand. Shortly later he returned to Hong Kong to continue work for the China Defence League.

He spent a few months as relief press attaché to the British ambassador in Chungking, but returned to Hong Kong until it was seized by the Japanese in December 1941. A volunteer gunner, he became a prisoner of war in awful conditions until the Japanese surrender nearly four years later.

After the war Bertram returned to Japan as an adviser to the New Zealand delegation to the Far Eastern Commission.

During 1946 Bertram wrote "The Shadow of a War" (1947). He also travelled throughout New Zealand as a CORSO representative, directing aid to Soong Ch'ing-ling and to Rewi Alley. He applied, successfully, for a senior lectureship in English at Victoria University College, Wellington.

In 1947 he married Jean Ellen Stevenson, a successful journalist and an old friend of Ian Milner's, and they settled in the Hutt Valley (near Wellington) in 1949. They had no children. Bertram continued as an academic until his retirement in 1975. He specialised in the lives and work of A. H. Clough, and Matthew and Thomas Arnold. He was given a personal chair in 1971. After his retirement he was general editor of the New Zealand Writers and their Work series, wrote on Charles Brasch and Dan Davin, and edited Brasch's memoir, "Indirections". In 1981 he received an honorary LittD.

Bertram was a strong supporter of New Zealand literature. He helped Charles Brasch to found the "Landfall" journal, and wrote many literary reviews, especially for the New Zealand Listener. In 1985 he published some of his reflections on New Zealand writers.

For some years he remained active in communist groups such as the Society for Closer Relations with Russia and the New Zealand China Society, and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Victoria University to develop an Eastern Studies department.

James Bertram died in Lower Hutt on 24 August 1993, survived by his wife.

References

*Thomson, John. [http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/dnzb/default.asp?Find_Quick.asp?PersonEssay=4B27 "Bertram, James Munro 1910 - 1993"] . Dictionary of New Zealand Biography website.