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.
[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.
[4] 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.
In January 1936 Bertram arrived in Beiping[5] with commissions from several British publications including The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman to write freelance articles on Asian issues.
In Beijing Bertram studied Chinese including at Yenching University where one of the men he shared a room with was Wang Rumei who was later to be better known under his Communist Party name of Huang Hua as the longest-serving foreign minister of the PRC after Zhou Enlai.
[8] Snow introduced Bertram to key figures as Soong Ching-ling (the widow of Sun Yat-sen), New Zealander Rewi Alley, the Chinese writer Lu Xun, and the American revolutionary activist Agnes Smedley.
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.
[10] 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.
The CDL was a relief committee formed in Hong Kong to help maintain Norman Bethune and the International Peace Hospitals in China's northern war area.
Bertram witnessed first hand the devastating effect of the bombing of the Tokyo-Yokohama area, and saw the coming of the victorious Allies by air and sea after the Japanese surrender in 1945.
[17] In early 1946 Bertram was back in Japan as an adviser to the New Zealand delegation led by Sir Carl Berendsen to the Far Eastern Commission, which was working out the details of Occupation policy under the Allied Supreme Commander, General Douglas MacArthur.
Bertram described "this unexpected trip as therapeutic; it gave the opportunity to work off all the hangovers of prison camp, and perhaps help in one or two small ways to see that belated justice was done".
In 1947, fifteen years after they had first met,[21] Bertram married Jean Ellen Stevenson, an editor with the New Zealand Listener and they settled in the Hutt Valley (near Wellington) in 1949.
An UNRRA ship was taking a stud flock to China and Bertram organised a public appeal, as a result of which an additional 50 sheep were purchased and earmarked for the Bailie School.
"I felt I might begin with a critical study of Clough's poetry, then switch to the impulsive Tom Arnold, whose abrupt changes of political and religious faith covered in one lifetime the whole gamut of Victorian disbelief and belief.
I could not help feeling that this inner circle of Dr Arnold's favourite pupils ...had some resemblance to our own little Waitaki group, Frank Milner's cognoscenti, just as painfully caught between Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, between C.S.
In 1960 he accepted a Carnegie travel grant to prepare an extended report on both English literature and Oriental studies as taught in North American universities.
"No one at this time, could have foreseen the savage rift with Krushchev's Russia that was to follow, still less the internal tensions and sudden violent excesses of the so-called Cultural Revolution."
During the Beijing visit he was re-introduced to his old friends including his former roommate at Yenching University, now Deputy Foreign Minister, Huang Hua and Rewi Alley.
Premier Zhou Enlai hosted a welcoming function at which they were introduced to senior leaders of the regime including Mao Zedong, He Long, Zhu De, Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi.
[32] In 1986 he travelled to China as an honorary guest of the Chinese government for the fiftieth anniversary of Chiang Kai-shek's capture during the Xi'an Incident, and also visited the Shandan Bailie School for the first time.
So I hope in my recollections of some critical years of war and revolution may throw light, for readers, on recent history in the Pacific zone.
[44] The first piece was "The Twelfth of December"[45] in which Bertram wrote about an anti-Japanese student demonstration in Beijing in 1936 on the day that the Xi'an Incident took place.
James McNeish wrote about Bertram in his book Dance of the Peacocks, New Zealanders in exile in the time of Hitler and Mao Tse-tung.
The scholarships were launched at Victoria University in July 2010 and were announced in Beijing by the New Zealand Prime Minister, the Rt Hon John Key.