Miscellaneous material

Beckerleg’s papers were donated to The University of Auckland Library in 1969 by Wilfred McAra on behalf of the ESPAL society. McAra, a member of the New Zealand Communist Party, worked under Beckerleg’s supervision as a law clerk during the 1920s at the law firm A. Hanna, Solicitors, Auckland. Later McAra was a client of Beckerleg’s, employing him to prepare his will and other legal documents.

While the collection contains a small amount of personal papers including family portraits and correspondence and some material relating to the operation of Beckerleg’s law firm, the bulk of the material, relates to the Dominion and Empire Organisation, which Beckerleg formed to disseminate his views on monetary and social reform.

The collection also includes a small but interesting set of papers relating to Beckerleg’s role as secretary of the New Zealand Democracy Association including correspondence with John H. Hogan and other association members, agendas, meeting minutes and a file of material relating to Hogan’s appeal against his call up for military service by the Man-Power Office in 1943.

The original inventory for this collection was prepared by Kay Stead in 1991, who retained the material in the folders and possibly the order in which it was received by the Library in 1969. When the inventory was prepared in 1991 items in the collection were assigned a single consecutive item number from 1 - 90.

In 2010 as part of work on a guide to the McAra papers held by The University of Auckland the collection was re-housed into acid free folders and boxes. During re-housing some large folders were split to form smaller more easily handled items, where folders were split they were assigned a new two part number to reflect this. During re-housing many of the item descriptions and date ranges were enhanced, however, Kay Stead’s overall arrangement of the collection into series was not altered.