Sir, - Please allow me to claim back Sir Keith Hancock who was wrongly described as British by Senator Maurice Manning (April 17th). Born in 1898, reared in Bairnsdale, Victoria, and graduating in history from the University of Melbourne in 1919, he was an Australian and thought of himself as such.
Senator Manning may have been mislead because Sir Keith spent the early and middle adult years of his very long working life in England. Following his 1930s work on the Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, he spent the war year in the UK Cabinet Offices planning the "Civil Series" of the official war histories. But he preferred to refer to his "britishness" with a small "b" (see his Testimony of 1985, p. 40). As he headed towards his nineties, he was still briskly walking to his room at the Australian National University where he was Emeritus Professor of History and he walked as an Australian citizen. - Yours, etc.,
Elm Park Avenue,
Ranelagh,
Dublin 6.