A Few Hares to Chase by Alan Bollard

Author:Alan Bollard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198747543
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2015-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

I remember calling at his room when he had been tracing through the (MONIAC) circuits. He was a trifle disgusted because they were not complete. He said ‘at least Heath Robinson contraptions always worked’. (Maurice Kelly n.d., personal communication)

And there was another improvement to Bill’s fortunes. He had met a woman.

Romance and a wedding

Around 1952, Bill Phillips attended a London dinner party given by a friend at the LSE called Bonny Brockway. There he met a New Zealand woman called Valda Bennett. She was a 27-year-old Aucklander. Valda had been brought up in Grafton, one of a family of six, the only child of her war pensioner father’s second marriage. Her father had been pensioned off shell-shocked during the war. Valda had done a rather adventurous thing: she had travelled by liner across the world to Britain on her own—unusual for a young woman to do in those unstable post-war years. She found a position as an office worker in the City of London.

They started going out together. Speaking years later she said she found Bill Phillips ‘very interesting…quiet, but to the point’. ‘Romantic?’ ‘No—normal, a man of action…but modest.’ Valda reported that Bill was always terribly busy, but they made time to go out to dinner. Sometimes he would invite her to visit him at his LSE office or his room at London House. He would talk about his upbringing, school, the farm, running a cinema. But he was a closed book on the war.

He was ‘very low key…didn’t show emotions…matter of fact’, says Valda, recalling that in her flat it was something of a joke whenever Bill rang up to apologize that he was too busy to take her out. Valda’s abiding memory was that he was effectively doing two jobs at LSE, both lecturing and researching, and that was very demanding—she accepted that he really was too busy. In fact Bill always devoted himself to the work in hand, spending very long hours at the LSE, with limited time and emotional energy for other interests. With some girlfriends that might have mattered, but Valda seemed quite self-contained and accepting of this slow approach to dating.2

Bill was no spring chicken. He was nearing 40, and starting to rebuild his life after the war. He now had a position with a salary, albeit low. And for the first time he had prospects, for it was becoming clear that he possessed some unusual talents. Valda herself was well past the average female marrying age of around 20 in those years. They both felt that the time was right.

On an autumn day in September 1954, Alban William Housego Phillips married Beatrice Valda Bennett at the Kensington Registry Office. The choice of the registry office was one of convenience, neither of them being churchgoers. The friends of Bill who had supported him through the MONIAC days, Richard and Phyllis Langley, attended as witnesses, and one of his colleagues Dr Alan Day was his best man. They celebrated with lunch at a restaurant

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