James Munro Bertram

James Munro Bertram (11 August 1910 – 24 August 1993) was a New Zealand Rhodes scholar, a journalist, writer, relief worker, prisoner of war and a university professor.

Bertram was born in Auckland on 11 August 1910, son of Ivo Edgar Bertram, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife, Evelyn Susan Bruce. His great-grandparents on both sides had arrived in Wellington in the 1840s. He spent ten years of his childhood in Melbourne and Sydney, and attended church schools. He returned to New Zealand for secondary schooling at Waitaki Boys' High School, where he befriended Charles Brasch and Ian Milner (the son of headmaster Frank Milner). Between 1929 and 1931 he studied English literature at Auckland University College, where he met the third of his closest friends, J. A. W. Bennett. He edited a literary magazine, Phoenix, and with Bennett co-edited a Student Christian Movement magazine, Open Windows. In 1932 Bertram received a Diploma in Journalism and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

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.

Studying at New College, Oxford, he was awarded a first class honours degree in English in 1934 and a second class honours in Modern Languages (French and German) the following year. He was active in rugby and left-wing clubs including the University Labour Club and he initiated an Oxford Branch of the Independent Labour Party. During university vacations he visited Italy in 1933, the Soviet Union in 1934, Germany in 1935 where in Munich he witnessed a rally led by Hitler, and visited the Soviet Union for a second time in 1936.

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. 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. He was twenty-five at the time.

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