The man and his death ray

Was Victor Penny really the inventor of a death ray or was he just someone who liked to reinvent himself?
In 1935, a couple of small articles about an assault on a Takapuna bus depot night attendant in June led on to an extraordinary story in which the New Zealand government might have been fooled into thinking one man could create the ultimate weapon.
Victor Penny was an amateur radio enthusiast. The assault left him badly injured and Penny was taken to hospital and then unusually, he was under police guard.
What was so important about this man that he needed a police guard?
Then suddenly Penny vanished.
What happened next was something out of a science fiction movie.
Penny had said he had discovered something important during his amateur experiments - a kind of ray that could destroy an enemy - taking out whole armies and even bring down planes in flight.
He claimed he had been contacted by foreign agents, threats were made against him and that an enemy state might have been responsible for the assault.
In secret, he was whisked to Wellington and ended up on Somes/Matiu Island, a former quarantine site also used during World War One for holding suspected aliens.
He was provided with sleeping quarters - surrounded by barbed wire and with armed guards and was allowed no visitors.
His apparently long suffering wife Kathleen was later allowed to join him but had separate lodgings.
But what he was working on is still a bit of a mystery.
Then, in March 1936 Penny was suddenly sent home - with nothing to show for his time.
And Peter Fraser - who would shortly be elected Prime Minister - made a disparaging comment in Parliament that: "Penny had been claiming for years he was the inventor of a death ray. We found him under guard and still searching for his mythical death ray at a cost to the country of £1000...a child could have seen there was nothing in it."
So who was this man?
Victor George Marcus Penny was born in 1897 to mechanic father George Penny and his wife Mary Ann Trim in Christchurch, Kent in England.
The family came to New Zealand in 1914.
Penny married his first wife Kathleen emily Penny in 1923 and is best noted for working a variety of mundane jobs, bus driver, and at the police commissioners office in Wellington.
Kathleen died shortly after Penny came back from the island in 1939 and the next year he married Grace Bryce.
He worked at the Post and Telegraph in Auckland and then in 1943 was living in Mount Eden working as a radio engineer.
But after that the pair left for the South Island where they initially lived in Clutha at a presbyterian manse and Penny appears to be a minister.
And later the pair were in Middlemarch.
Penny died in 1970 and is buried in the Green Island Cemetery in Dunedin.
He never did tell about anyone about his death ray experiments.
Photo by Nik.​