A look back at New Year’s Eve, 1923
would start at 9am.
In other overseas news, engineer Alexandre Auguste Eiffel, whose company had built that outlandish tower in Paris, the highest in the world, had died four days earlier at the age of 91.
Palmerston North’s vital statistics for December had recorded 31 marriages (of which five had been solemnised by the registrar), 31 births and 18 deaths.
The local fire brigade’s official year ended in June; since then, firefighters had responded to 39 calls. Brigade superintendent WH Barnard said a new fire station was planned to open in Cuba St and ‘‘the installation of a system of street fire alarms will be proceeded with’’. The borough council planned to increase the town’s somewhat low water pressure in the coming year, and brigade inspector Hugo declared ‘‘that is an important consideration in firefighting’’.
On the entertainment front, the Kosy cinema on The Square was screening Know Thy Child ,a movie set in Australia and starring Vera James, originally from Dunedin (‘‘daughter of the well known secretary of the racing club’’).
The petite Miss James, who’d moved to Australia in 1919, told a Sydney reporter ‘‘with a shake of her bronze shingled head’’ that she’d been lucky in Hollywood. ‘‘Every girl wants to be in movies … breaking into movies without pull is about as tough as hitting your head against a stone wall’’. James’ movie was silent – talkies wouldn’t arrive in Palmerston North for another six years – and she would make only a few more films before fading from sight.
On the previous Saturday a large Opera House audience had applauded the ‘‘international nightingale, Madame Lipkovska’’.
Blonde Russian diva Lydia Lipkovskaya, originally from an obscure Bessarabian village (later part of Ukraine) was renowned for her sweet, incredibly high lyric soprano voice. At the time of her Palmerston North concert she was 29 and at the peak of her prowess, but this nightingale was destined to die in poverty in 1958, forgotten except by music historians.
Entertainment of a different kind was supplied by Fuller’s Vaudeville company, which advertised its coming local show featuring Miss Odiva and her performing seals and sea-lions. Advance publicity declared: ‘‘Miss Odiva possesses abnormal powers of diving. Her most spectacular item is the feeding of five seals at the bottom of the glass tank. She has the power to stay underwater for a longer period than the seals.’’
The Manawatu Standard editorial (here abridged) summed up 1923: ‘‘It has been an eventful year. For many of us it has brought mingled sorrow and happiness, anxiety and care. The year began inauspiciously, amidst a world of unrest and disquietude, with the menace of war in the near east, and the loosening of the ties which have held Great Britain and France together since 1914 … ‘‘
However, New Zealand had seen improvements in trade and production, and under Prime Minister William Massey’s ‘careful management’, increased financial aid to settlers and returned soldiers.
‘‘Man pays the common debt to Nature, and passes, as the years roll by … to his appointed rest … it is for those who remain to take up the tasks they have laid down, and to live for the good of their fellow men. If they do that, the wish of most people tomorrow will be fulfilled in 1924, which will then become in every sense of the term, a Happy New Year.’’