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1910s, 1930s, books, campus fiction, classics, drama, film, Rhodes scholars, writers
Many talented creative writers have graced the university with their presence. Acclaimed fiction writers who studied at Otago have published in a wide variety of genres: crime novelist Vanda Symon, popular fantasy writer Juliet Marillier, master of the short story A.P. Gaskell, literary novelist Fiona Farrell, and of course the incomparable Janet Frame. Many of New Zealand’s greatest writers have also spent time at Otago, not as students, but as holders of the Burns Fellowship (a few, like Farrell and Frame, have done both). And let’s not forget the staff: did you know that the talented Liam McIlvanney, Professor of Scottish Studies, moonlights as a crime writer, or that Rogelio Guedea, senior lecturer in the Spanish programme, is a best-selling novelist in Mexico?
Despite all this creative power, the university has seldom featured as a setting for fiction; ‘campus fiction’ has not, it seems, been a popular genre in this country. That makes the 1970 novel of Dan Davin, Not here, not now, all the more interesting. The book is closely based on the experiences of Davin and his wife Winnie Gonley as Otago students of the 1930s. It centres on Martin Cody, a brilliant young working class Catholic boy from Southland. Cody is an arts student who drinks, dances, plays rugby, falls in love (more than once), writes, questions his religion, and eventually wins a Rhodes Scholarship (after failing to make it in his first attempt thanks to a rumour which, if true, would reflect badly on his moral character). Many other still familiar institutions of Otago student life are vividly portrayed in the novel: disputes within the students’ association, controversies over what should appear in Critic, slaving late at night over books, and finding kindred spirits at a religious group (the Catholic Students’ Club – now CathSoc). Of course some commonplace aspects of 1930s life have long gone, including the once ubiquitous figure of the landlady, who featured large in the lives of the many students living in private board.
University of Otago Latin picnic at Whare Flat, 1932. Dan Davin is on the far right, with Angus Ross in front of him and Christopher Johnson to Davin’s right. Other students include Frank Hall (back left), Winnie McQuilkan (centre front) and Ida Lawson (in dark jacket behind her). The Classics staff, Prof Thomas Dagger Adams and Isabel Turnbull, are at front left.
Image courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Ref: 1/2-166716-F. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22884184
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of student life; as reviewer Michael Beveridge commented in Landfall, “as a novelist Davin has been a first-rate historian”. Davin is probably best known for his novels and short stories about the Southland Irish Catholic community and for his war history and novels, but Not here, not now is also well worth a read. An earlier Davin novel, Cliffs of fall, is also partly set at the University of Otago (and is still on my growing ‘waiting to be read’ list). Davin himself studied classics at Otago, went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, served with distinction in World War II, and had a long career in publishing with Oxford University Press.
A poor scholar by C.R. Allen, published in 1936, is another novel about a working class boy who gains a Rhodes Scholarship. It charts the progress of the hero, Ponto, from his kindergarten days to Oxford, with a couple of brief chapters devoted to his time at the University of Otago: lectures, football, capping and dances all feature. The novel is set in the 1900s and 1910s, and brilliantly evokes the streets and landscapes of north Dunedin prior to World War I. Though Allen had been blind since the 1910s, he knew this environment well: he lived with his family at Arana – later to become a university residential college – and studied for the Anglican priesthood at Selwyn College. Unsurprisingly, All Saints Church also looms large in the book.
Another intriguing 1930s novel is The wind and the rain, by Otago medical graduate Merton Hodge. This was adapted by Hodge from his hit play of the same name, which had an impressive three-year run on the London stage. Film versions came out in 1938 and 1959, the latter starring Alan Bates. It is a story of a group of medical students sharing lodgings and, though the setting is Edinburgh, Hodge’s colourful characters were, according to a 1930s newspaper, “moulded on personalities he met while at Otago University, one of them being a well-known doctor at present practising in the South.” If you know who that might be, I’d love to hear from you!
Can you identify any more of the students in the photograph? Do you know of any other novels with University of Otago settings which I can add to my reading pile? If so, please get in touch. Then there are the poems and films …. I’ll save those for future posts!
University of Otago 1869-2019 
Dear Ali
Very pleased to see your blog, to which Barbara Brookes alerted me.
I am Dan and Winnie Davin’s eldest daughter, and a historian.
I have a written a couple of articles which partly deal with my mother’s time at Otago: ‘Flight to the Centre: Winnie Gonley, 1930s Colonial Cosmopolitan, in Journal of World Systems Research 6:2, 2000 (http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr); and ‘Community, Life-Cycle, Diaspora: a Daughter’s View’, in Communities of Women: Historical Perspectives, ed. Babara Brookes and Dot Page, Otago, 2002. You may like to add them to your bibliography.
Power to your elbow.
Anna
Hi Anna, it’s lovely to hear from you. I heard you speak about your mother at the ‘Communities of Women’ conference all those years back! It was a fascinating paper and you really brought her to life. I’ve never forgotten the story of her grandmother (or perhaps mother?)’s great delight on hearing, when on her own deathbed, that her great rival had just died! But I haven’t seen the other article – I’ll certainly add them both to the bibliography. Thanks very much, Ali
Hi Ali
It isn’t made all that clear in the novel, but elements of John Dolan’s “Pleasant Hell” (published 2004) were set here at Otago: he taught in the English Department from 1993.
Thanks very much for that tip Barry – I’ll definitely add it to my reading list!
Hello Ali,
I have happened upon your Dan Davin story in the context of him being about to be added to the Octagon, Dunedin, writers’ walk plaques. I am able to add a further name to the caption for the photo of the Latin picnic at Whare Flat, 1932. I recognise my father, Christopher Johnson, as the man in the pale shirt, just above Dan. George Christopher Nevill Johnson (1913 – 1953) was the same age as Dan; they were good friends at OU, shared studies in literature and languages. As I understand it, the two of them were the Otago nominees for the Rhodes Scholarship in the same year; Dan got one but Christopher didn’t on some technical hitch about being English (he was born in Canada to English parents; his father was vicar at All Saints Church 1928-35). My parents maintained the friendship with the Davins … I especially remember Dan visiting us in Dunedin in March 1959; my mother Jean and stepfather Len Logan visited Dan and Winnie on a visit to UK in 1970; including staying in the Davin thatched-roof cottage at Dorchester.
Peter Johnson
Thank you very much Peter – I’ve added your father’s name to the caption. It’s great to have somebody else identified. There were certainly some impressive intellects at Otago in those years – I wonder what they chatted about at the picnic!
Hello Peter, I was interested to come across a reference to your father. I am currently editing the letters of Arthur Prior to Ursula Bethell and he mentions that in 1936 Christopher Johnson read him Arthur Clough’s poem about Luther. I was wondering if Arthur and your father continued to stay in touch- and what happened to your father?
Hi Michael, I alerted Peter to your comment and he sent me the following information to post here (partly in response to my earlier comment too!).
You wondered what did they chat about at the picnic … Latin poetry perhaps? Interesting to hear from Mike Grimshaw about my father reading poetry to Arthur Prior. I have no knowledge of their friendship. The sharing of poetry in the 1930’s might have been much more verbal than in today’s world of photocopiers, websites, emails, and texts. Hence I have a poetry anthology compiled by my father: a loose-leaf folder of thin-paper quarto sheets, a few of them typed but otherwise copied out with fountain pen, most in English, but also some in French, Latin, and Greek.
What happened to my father? Christopher Johnson (1913-1953) graduated from OU with Honours in Latin and French. He married Jean Sharp (1913-1978) who had graduated MA (English and Botany) also OU. After war service as a fighter pilot with the RNZAF he was a teacher at King Edward Technical College in Dunedin, and also Education Officer, and finally Commanding Officer of the Territorial Air Force Squadron at Taieri Aerodrome. He had a passion for mountains and mountaineering, and from 1947 to 1951 was Editor of the NZ Alpine Journal (wherein some of his writings). About that time he wrote and read a series of radio talks ‘I am a Mountaineer’, and wrote the script for the 1949 Brian Brake film ‘Prelude to Aspiring’. The following year he was involved with Brake’s unfinished colour film ‘Aspiring’. Because of his knowledge of mountain in the Matukituki valley, he became involved in the aerial part of a search for missing trampers in January 1953; as observer in an RNZAF Harvard he was killed when the plane crashed.
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Thank you Peter & Ali,
I had wondered my Christopher’s name was somewhere in my memory- I have used the tv documentary ‘Aspiring’ (20016) in my teaching on land and identity. This has been very helpful- and expands the ever-increasing circle of Arthur Prior connections- which included Dan Davin when the Priors were in the UK in the early days of WW2.