The Little Country.

1935

Thomas Nelson and Sons

Robert Bruce Godward was born in Invercargill in 1916. He gained a Diploma in Fine Arts at the Canterbury School of Art, and trained as a teacher. After the Second World War, when he registered as a conscientious objector, he went overseas and studied psychotherapy in Switzerland. For many years he worked as an art psychotherapist at ‘The Retreat’, a famous Quaker psychiatric hospital in York, England. He returned to Invercargill in 1982, and lived with his sister until his death in 1992. Godward’s important collection of books, many of them splendidly bound, was donated to the Hocken Library. The bookplate, a portrait of Bruce Godward in his youth, was by his friend Rita Angus.