By Barbara Brookes* of
Photo: NZ History.govt.nz
Opinion - Four days after Plunket founder Sir Truby King's funeral on 12 February 1938, the Auckland Weekly News printed a montage of photographs showing the scale of the event.
Women members of the Plunket Society are shown keeping guard over his coffin. Men and women lined Wellington's Lambton Quay to see his funeral cortège pass, while others thronged to Mt Melrose to see his casket being borne to the vault at the Karitane Hospital.
Every newspaper in the country noted his death and printed accolades about his service to the nation and the wider world. Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage described him as a "zealous humanitarian".
Yet 80 years later, King's reputation has taken a battering due to his apparent association with now discredited ideas about eugenics. As one 2019 headline put it: "Plunket's founder was an awful person obsessed with eugenics".
The article suggested Plunket should apologise for the views of its founder, and has been used as a source for evaluating King in the National Certificate of Educational Achievement level three history curriculum.
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