birth_date: 1910-08-11 00:00:00
avg_rating: 4.2
name: James Bertram
about: James Munro Bertram was a New Zealand 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. His great-grandparents on both sides had arrived in Wellington in the 1840s. He spent ten years of his 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 Charles Brasch and Ian Milner (the son of headmaster Frank Milner). Between 1929 and 1931 he studied English literature at Auckland University College, where he met the third of his closest friends, J. A. W. Bennett James Munro Bertram was a New Zealand 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. His great-grandparents on both sides had arrived in Wellington in the 1840s. He spent ten years of his 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 Charles Brasch and Ian Milner (the son of headmaster Frank Milner). Between 1929 and 1931 he studied English literature at 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 Movement magazine, Open Windows. In 1932 Bertram received a Diploma in Journalism and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.Bertram was briefly a student volunteer special constable during the Queen Street riots of April 1932, to find that his sympathies for those from less-privileged backgrounds had grown.Studying at New College, Oxford, he was awarded a first class honours degree in English in 1934 and a second class honours in Modern Languages (French and German) the following year. He was active in rugby and left-wing clubs including the University Labour Club and he initiated an Oxford Branch of the Independent Labour Party. During university vacations he visited Italy in 1933, the Soviet Union in 1934, Germany in 1935 where in Munich he witnessed a rally led by Hitler, and visited the Soviet Union for a second time in 1936.[3]Following Oxford Bertram was briefly an international correspondent with The Times in London but left after the editor Geoffrey Dawson refused to run his article predicting a sweeping victory for Labour in the New Zealand 1935 general election. He then took a short-term teaching position at St. Paul's School, in Hammersmith before accepting an offer by the Rhodes Trust in late 1935 for a one-year travelling fellowship to Japan and China. He was twenty-five at the time.In January 1936 Bertram arrived in the then Peiping (Peking/Beijing)[5] with commissions from several British publications including The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman to write freelance articles on Asian issues.On December 12, 1936, in Peking Bertram observed an anti-Japanese student demonstration of some five thousand students which he described in his article "The Twelfth of December". It was later learnt that General Chiang Kai-shek had been seized earlier that day by the North-eastern Dongbei troops loyal to the Young Marshal in Xi'an until Chiang agreed to enter into a united front with the communist forces against the Japanese. Bertram travelled to in a difficult eleven-day journey including crossing the frozen over Yellow River on foot to report on what later became known as the Xi'an Incident /Sian Incident or the Xi'an (Sian) Mutiny. He was the only foreign journalist to reach the city which was under blockade by the Kuomintang. Mail and telegraph communications being blocked, Bertram joined Agnes Smedley in providing radio reports on the situation in the rebel capital during his month-long stay. The Xi'an Incident is seen now as a turning point in modern Chinese history as it marked the formal end of the ten year civil war between Nationalists and Communists and the beginning of an effective United Front of resistance to Japan.In Xi'an Bertram received a radio message from Mao Zedong, inviting him to become the first official 'British' visitor to Yan'an (Yenan). Bertram spent nearly a month in Yan'an during which time he conducted an extensive series of interviews with Mao in his cave-dwelling during which Mao expounded the Japanese objectives and the strategies he believed that the Chinese should adopt to defeat the Japanese. "Interview with the British Journ ...more
death_date: 1993-08-24 00:00:00