Edmondsallan Hello New Zealand Patriotic Fund and the National Art

edmondsallan - Hello - New Zealand Patriotic Fund, and the National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum, and was a member of the Canteen Fund Board, as well as being regimental colonel of the Canterbury Regiment. He remained a prominent public figure until the end of his life, although he was so quietly spoken as to be somewhat ineffective as a platform orator. Many honours and awards were given to Kippenberger in recognition of his war service. In 1944 he was made a CBE, and in 1945 he was appointed a CB and made an officer of the US Legion of Merit. He was knighted in 1948, and received an honorary LLD from the University of New Zealand in 1955.

Kippenberger was involved in controversy over his stand against the 1949 rugby tour of South Africa because of the exclusion of Maori players. After he publicly expressed his views in the Christchurch Press , there was a storm of protest from a rugby-mad New Zealand. While Kippenberger received many letters of support for his statements (including some from South Africa), the tone of the letters of condemnation was extremely hostile and aggressive. For Kippenberger, the issues involved in this dispute were very clear. If Maori were good enough to represent New Zealand on the battlefields of the world, this representation should not be compromised on South Africa’s rugby fields. It was a battle he lost. As he wrote to a friend, ‘I say it with some bitterness, Rugby is King and the dead are only bones’.

Kippenberger’s natural tolerance was strained as the Cold War gave more prominence to the issue of domestic communism. He gave representatives of the Communist Party of New Zealand leave to speak before the RSA’s national convention in 1950, but during the Korean War he publicly lambasted communists as ‘rogues or dupes or traitors either potential or intended’.

In the post-war years, Kippenberger’s health was not good and he suffered from frequent headaches and blackouts. On 4 May 1957, while preparing for his wife’s release from hospital, where she had been seriously ill, Kippenberger collapsed and went into a coma. He died the following day in Wellington Hospital of a cerebral haemorrhage. Ruth Kippenberger died in 1967.

Howard Kippenberger was New Zealand’s most popular military commander, and perhaps its most talented. He was of average height and rather slight in build and gave the impression of being wiry. Charles Upham said he had ‘a keen, alert look about him’, while another soldier said that he had ‘steely eyes’ that ‘bloody near looked into your soul’. No other New Zealand commander inspired such loyalty and devotion from those who served with him. In September 1943 Driver A. O. Eyles composed a military march he named ‘Kippenberger’. On Anzac Day 1983, in Christchurch cathedral, a brass plaque in honour of Kippenberger was unveiled and dedicated by returned servicemen and women of the Canterbury province: ‘ “Kip” was the most respected man in the New Zealand Army … He had a phenomenal memory for names and faces, he was no man to insist on rank, and his very manner of speech seemed to the Kiwis to be absolutely right’.

During the war years, and even more so after them, Kippenberger became a symbol of New Zealand achievement. He symbolised for many, too, the pain and the cost of New Zealand’s participation in the war. His military library was purchased from his estate by the New Zealand Army in 1957. It is now housed in the Kippenberger Military Archive and Research Library, Queen Elizabeth II Army Memorial Museum, in Waiouru. I know he was very popular among his fellow " kiwis " Some how - even though he was of " German " descent- he had real " mana "
He knew how to lead men into battle . What a great maori chief he would have made . I wonder if it is possible he may have had a touch of some " maori " blood in him. ??? No ? He may of you know . Blood tranfusions and all that !!! I wonder ?