New Zealand lawyer and politician
Allan "Martyn" Finlay (1 January 1912 – 20 January 1999) was a New Zealand lawyer and politician of the Labour Party. He was an MP in two separate spells and a member of two different governments, including being a minister in the latter where he reformed the country's justice system.
Biography.
Early life.
Martyn was born in Dunedin to Baptist missionaries who had worked in India. His father died when he was two and his mother was forced by economic circumstances to take in boarders. He used to push his brother Harold, ten years older and with polio, two miles to Otago University in his wheelchair. With the oncoming depression, Martyn had to leave school to get a job at the end of fifth form - he had wanted to be a doctor. With a job as an office boy in a law firm at the age of 16, he was able to study law part-time at Otago University for eight years before getting his LLM with First Class Honours. In 1934 he was the winner of the Otago University Law Society's prize in evidence.
He got a scholarship to the London School of Economics and got a PhD in 1938 before becoming a Resident Fellow at Harvard. He met many influential intellectuals in London including Harold Laski, who encouraged him to enter politics. He returned to NZ in 1939 and was employed as a private secretary to Cabinet Ministers Rex Mason and Arnold Nordmeyer. Finlay was impressed by Mason's mastery of the legal system and was impressed that he devised and drafted almost all of his legislation himself.