Vale-David: Ken Ross provides a personal tribute to the late David McIntyre.

• Author: Ross, Ken
• Position: TRIBUTE

During the past six years I often engaged in David's scholarly hours, as each of us frequented the reading rooms at Archives New Zealand and the Alexander Turnbull Library.

We had known each other decades earlier. When he arrived in 1966 at Canterbury University I was an undergraduate, though not one of his students. For three years in the early 1970s, we were both beneficiaries of the Ford Foundation grant to the NZIIA. David, a star performer, undertook presentations, wrote book chapters and pamphlets and represented the NZIIA internationally at conferences. I was the junior executive in the national office at Victoria's Kelburn campus for three years, from April 1970.

Ahead of our reunion at the Turnbull, David's sharp eye and wide array of contacts had registered my progress over the next decades, through the External Assessments Bureau, a diplomatic stint, periods at international think-tanks and my articles in journals such as Survival, The Round Table and The World Today. Then six years ago, having seen me surfacing, mostly in this journal, in fields of scholarship that he enjoyed engaging in, David teamed up with me as a self-appointed scholarly mentor.

Through hundreds of emails we exchanged in the six years, I relished his wisdom and wit. All my drafts from then on were presented to him: he had incisive input no matter what topic I wrote on--our prime ministers from Peter Fraser to Jacinda Ardern, Alister McIntosh, John Beaglehole, Paddy Costello, John Mulgan, General Freyberg (plus his entourage of friends, ranging from Churchill to the New Zealand Second World War brigadiers) and the Commonwealth. Earlier this year, I said I was contributing a chapter in a tribute book to Owen Wilkes and that my piece focused on the June 1968 Omega protest. David leapt in, he had to see my drafts, for Omega was the rare protest he had been entangled in, including when he played a key back-room role between the foreign ministry (George Laking and Ralph Mullins) and the protestors (such as Owen and myself). The contribution was finer for our rapid cut and thrust through February. While he will not see the about-to-be published book, he had the sheer pleasure of fine-tuning my chapter.

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