Jim Ring, Nelson

Mark Honeychurch - 8 July 2024

I’ve been in contact with a lawyer on and off over the last couple of years regarding one of our old members - old both in terms of when they joined the society, and in terms of their age. Jim Ring was a frequent contributor to our Journal, the NZ Skeptic, writing both articles on a wide range of topics and many Letters to the Editor. Sadly Jim passed away last year, and the conversations with the lawyer, who was a friend of Jim’s in his later life, were about a collection of books of skeptical interest that he had collected over his lifetime and wanted to donate to the NZ Skeptics.

Our NZ Skeptics book collection was given to the NZARH (the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists, based at Rationalist House in Auckland) many years ago, and so I’m arranging for these books to be shipped straight to them. Hopefully their new librarian, Tarsha, won’t mind too much that I’m giving her more work to do!

I don’t know much about Jim, having sadly never met him, but the first thing I know is that he lived in Nelson. I know this because all of his Letters to the Editor were signed off with “Jim Ring, Nelson”. Having talked with Jim’s lawyer friend a few times over the last couple of years, and skimmed through the articles he wrote for us, I can tell you that Jim was born in England and brought up in the Exclusive Brethren, moving to New Zealand in the 1960s as a 10 pound Pom. He had no children, but was married to Fleur - and both Jim and Fleur had a variety of interests that they spent their time on. Just within Skepticism, Jim was interested in and wrote articles for us about Creationism, UFOs, Doomsday predictions, alternative medicine, circumcision, cryptozoology and more.

Outside of Skepticism, Jim had a few other interests, and in each of these it seems that he both dedicated a lot of his free time, and excelled. I was told that he was a well-known cactus grower, and indeed a brief search online was enough to inform me that he has been published in both Cactus World and the British Cactus & Succulent Journal. Similarly, he was a freshwater fisherman, and was apparently known in local fishing circles as the magician of the Motueka. He kept diaries of all his catches, which he put back, and those diaries are now being used by a conservation group as a valuable resource on the history of freshwater fish stocks in the Nelson region.

As well as leaving us his book collection, Jim also left us $100,000. We will receive the money in the next month or so, and it will be a welcome addition to our funds. This might be a timely reminder for our members that, should you wish to, you are more than welcome to leave us a gift in your will. It’s through these kinds of contributions that we’re able to tackle some of the larger projects we’ve taken on over the years, and we hope to continue with more of these in the future.

Below is the first article Jim wrote for our Society, one of several he wrote that focused on fire walking. If you want to read more from Jim, you can check out a temporary link to a test website I’ve built for validating the code I’ve written to import our entire back catalogue of articles into a new CMS (you may notice, if you decide to poke around the site, that the last import for this data set was back in August last year):