Veteran journalist pens punchy memoir | Canterbury Entertainment | Events, Movies and TV Guide for Canterbury

Old journalists seldom fade away. Eric Beardsley, 85, of Cashmere, proves that, for he has just published a memoir covering eight decades of strife and progress in Canterbury and Christchurch, its people and its politics.

The book is Sliding Down the Hypotenuse (Canterbury University Press), a mix of biography, history and memoir that has delighted readers with its rich humour, punchy observations and its stories of life on the West Coast, and as a boy growing up in the great wilderness of sandhills and scrub that was Aranui in the darkest days of the Great Depression of the '30s.

His closest friend there was Larry Saunders. Both of them went into journalism, Saunders becoming sports editor of the Christchurch Star and Beardsley starting as night message boy at The Press and becoming a reporter, sub-editor and leader writer.

But first there were schooldays at Aranui Primary School and two chapters in the book are devoted to when the strap, and later the cane, ruled in education. But there were good times too at Christchurch Boys' High School. And Canterbury University College, as it then was, opened new pathways for aspiring students, most of them studying part-time while they worked full-time.

After 20 years in journalism, Eric Beardsley tired of working at night and was appointed to a new position as information officer at the university as it began the move from the cramped city site to the new campus at Ilam. His job was to tell the university about itself and to the people of city and province and he achieved that by establishing a printery and producing the fortnightly University Chronicle.

Initially it was known as the five-minute silence, but Beardsley reckoned anything that could silence a university for even five minutes was worth perservering with. He produced some 420 issues, sometimes when overwhelmed by other pressing calls on his time. On his retirement, Canterbury artist Bill Sutton dashed off a cartoon showing the extent of Beardsley's work and it has been incorporated into the cover of the book.

He was a co-author of A History of the University of Canterbury, 1873-1973 and of Design for a Century the History of the School of Engineering.

He also wrote the historical novel Blackball 08, the story of a long but successful strike in the Blackball mine which led to the Miners' Federation and eventually to the election of the Labour Party in 1935. It stayed in power for 14 years.

Old journalists also remember each other.

Gordon Parry, a former Dunedin journalist, who is now 91, read Beardsley's memoir and wrote: "I congratulate you on the way you slid down your hypotenuse so smoothly and gracefully. The book is a delight - insightful, informative, amusing and written in a flowing style I wish I could emulate.'