John's Life at Victoria and in the circle of family and friends based on the college and on his home in Karori was remarkably full. Yet he came to have a parallel, almost separate, life based on the Centennial Branch (later the Historical Branch) of the Department of Internal Affairs . How this began he recounted in his 1954 lecture The New Zealand Scholar : Some time in the late thirties I met a very remarkable man, and I became involved in the work of a government department and the preparations for celebrating the New Zealand centennial. I did not want to be involved; I regarded the whole thing as indulgence in a series of fatuities, all of them depraved, from which a sensible person ought to be exempt. I ended by undergoing a process of conversion, slow and awkward, into a conscious New Zealander. It was very largely, though not entirely, owing to the remarkable man. Let me be precise in my memory. I was coming out of a side entrance to Parliament Buildings one day when a stocky figure in an overcoat and an old cloth cap, who was going in, stopped me and without preamble said, 'I agree with you in every judgment you made in that book of yours [the Short History ] except about Massey; there was a great deal more to Massey than people think; I could tell you a lot about Massey' -- and immediately passed on. This was my first -- I