He was named after Rewi Maniapoto, a Māori chief who famously resisted the British military during the New Zealand Wars in the 1860s.

His parents' keen interest in social reform and education influenced all of their children: Rewi's elder brother, Eric, fought in WW1 in the Otago Regiment, NZEF, and rose to the rank of captain.

In 1916, Alley joined the New Zealand Army and was sent to serve in France, where he won the Military Medal.

He joined a political study group whose members included Alec Camplin, George Hatem, Ruth Weiss, Trude Rosenberg, Heinz Schippe, Irene Wiedemeyer, Talitha Gerlach, Maud Russell, Lily Haass, Cora Deng and Cao Liang.

[5] His politics turned from fairly-conventional right-wing pro-empire sentiments to thoughts of social reform.

Using his holidays and taking time off work, Alley toured rural China helping with relief efforts.

[citation needed] After a brief visit to New Zealand, where Alan experienced public racism, Alley became Chief Factory Inspector for the Shanghai Municipal Council in 1932.

Due to his purported knowledge of the Chinese way of war, Colonel Gordon Grimsdale of the Far East Combined Bureau interviewed him after being asked by Major-General Christopher Maltby (who recently assumed the post as General Officer Commanding Hong Kong) about recruiting more Hong Kong soldiers for local defence in face of the coming war.

On the other hand, Alley was "extremely optimistic on the subject of starting a guerrilla unit for the indirect defence of the Colony", and proposed to send "a [suitably] equipped party to Canton to burn Japanese aeroplanes on the Canton aerodrome, or to destroy some important bridge(s)".

He stressed the importance of introducing "pro-Chinese" education for the soldiers and he pro- posed that "the best man he can suggest as the chief organizer is Yeh Chieh Ying (Ye Jianying)", a Cantonese Communist general.

Although imprisoned and "struggled with" during the Cultural Revolution, Alley remained committed to communism and bore no grudges.

[11] "He was in his seventies, a bald, pink-faced man with bright blue eyes, and an inexhaustible flow of conversation.

We sat and talked for most of an afternoon, with Rewi occasionally jumping up to fetch a book or check a point.

He had, he said, lost the best of two libraries, once to the Japanese and again to the Red Guards, who had thrown out his collections and torn up his pictures in front of him.

He was living in the old Italian Legation, which had been converted into flats for the leading foreign friends of China, which were allocated on the "bleak basis" of seniority.

Unlike most of the friends of the Chinese Communist Party who remained in Beijing, Alley had little trouble travelling around the world, usually lecturing on the need for nuclear disarmament.

The New Zealand government did not strip Alley of his passport and remained proud of his ties to important party leaders.

In 1996, Jack Body wrote an opera in three acts, "Alley", based on his life, with libretto by Geoff Chapple.

The Memorial Hall contains an extensive and permanent display of Rewi Alley history and chronicles his contributions as an educator and internationalist in China.

The price of China breaking free of foreign domination and the bad things of its past was enormous.

If it wasn't for the resistance in China during the Second World War, the Japanese would have had tens of thousands more men and they may have got as far as Australia and New Zealand.

Shells bursting and the ground shaking like there was an earthquake, and they were stripped to their skinny waists and just kept unloading the wagons.

I remember as a boy, I was walking along the beach near Christchurch and there was a group of men coming back from a strike, or a picket of some kind.

Suddenly, out of the dunes came police on horseback and they rode into these unarmed workingmen, swinging their clubs as if they were culling seals.

Even here, in the Cultural Revolution, when some young blokes came in here and started breaking things I grabbed one of them and put him over my knee and gave him a proper hiding.

[23] Alley translated numerous Chinese poems and wrote a number of original works.