Women in charge

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1880s, 1910s, 1920s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 2010s, home science, war, women

This month Otago students elected Ruby Sycamore-Smith as their students’ association president for 2014. With Harlene Hayne as vice-chancellor, the two most public leadership positions in the university are now held by women. As women account for around 57% of Otago students, this seems only appropriate. It is not so very long ago, though, that such a scenario seemed unthinkable.

Caroline Freeman, Otago’s first woman graduate. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, S13-186a.

Otago University admitted women as students from the beginning, thanks largely to a campaign organised by Learmonth Dalrymple, who had also campaigned for a girls’ high school in Dunedin. The first woman to graduate was school teacher Caroline Freeman, capped with her BA in 1885. Like many students of this era, Freeman did not find it easy to complete her course, failing several subjects (including history and political economy on three occasions!). But she and other early women students also faced an additional barrier of gender discrimination: not every professor approved of higher education for women.

In the 1890s fewer than 20% of Otago students were female, but numbers grew slowly in the early twentieth century. During both world wars women were a more notable presence on campus as men were called away to military service – in 1918 almost half of students were female. But this was only a temporary situation and after both wars females dropped again to what seemed their ‘natural’ position of a third or fewer of Otago students. In the late 1960s persistent growth in the female proportion of students began and in 1986 women outnumbered men for the first time – a position that has persisted ever since. Unsurprisingly, the 1970s and 1980s were also a period of considerable tension on campus over feminist issues, as radicals among the growing female student body led campaigns against some of the more chauvinistic student traditions. The opening of a women’s room, banned to men, created huge controversy in 1983. It was the initiative of Phyllis Comerford, the first female president of OUSA.

Professor Rawson and Professor Benson in 1923. This marriage spelled the end of Helen Rawson’s academic career. Photograph courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Sir Charles Fleming collection, ref 1/2-129013-F.

Women staff faced their own difficulties. The School of Home Science, which opened in 1911, was a female preserve which provided a rare opportunity for senior appointments to women. Winifred Boys-Smith became Otago’s – and New Zealand’s – first woman professor when she took on the chair of home science and domestic arts in 1911. In several other departments women had teaching roles; indeed, some departments were only kept going through the war years thanks to women staff. But these women generally remained in lowly positions and were not offered the same opportunities for advancement as their male colleagues of similar abilities.

The convention that women ought not to work after marriage put a stop to many a potential academic career. An outstanding example of this is Helen Rawson, who succeeded Boys-Smith as Professor of Home Science. When she married Noel Benson, the Professor of Geology, in 1923, she resigned and, like many women of this era, threw her energies into unpaid community and voluntary work, while providing support for her husband’s career.

During the 1960s married women began to enter the university’s academic workforce, though not everybody approved. They might receive support and encouragement from their departments, but often faced criticism from the wider community, and particularly from earlier generations of women who had not had the same opportunities. Women with young children faced particular criticism and also practical difficulties due to a lack of childcare facilities – a large part of their wages could disappear as they paid for nannies or other private arrangements.

Women have come a long way since the 1960s, with equal pay legislation, improved childcare facilities, and wider opportunities for employment and promotion. In 2012, 47% of Otago’s academic and research staff (measured by full-time equivalents) and 65% of general staff were women. They remained, however, under-represented in senior positions, both academic and general. So, all power to Harlene Hayne and Ruby Sycamore-Smith as they lead the University of Otago in 2014!

A growing campus

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1950s, 1960s

Aerial view of the main campus and surroundings in 1955, photographed by Bill Wilkinson. Image courtesy of Melville and Nancy Carr.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates more visibly the growth of student numbers through Otago’s history than the expansion of its campuses. Various aerial views of the central campus show how remarkably the university and its surroundings have changed. This wonderful image was photographed in 1955 by Bill Wilkinson, a dental student who belonged to the Air Training Corps.

In 1955 there were just over 2000 students at Otago, 850 of them studying medicine and dentistry, whose buildings are not visible in this photograph. There were also 500 or so students at Dunedin Teachers’ College, then a separate institution from the university. The Teachers’ College buildings are visible at the top right of the photo, on the corner of Union St and Anzac Ave. Though the buildings, which opened in 1939, appear substantial, they were destroyed in a major fire in 1968.

In the late 1950s, soon after this photo was taken, student numbers began to increase rapidly and by 1966 had doubled to 4000. In 1972 the 6000 landmark was reached. To cater for this growth the university needed more buildings, and some major construction projects took place in the 1960s. At one point the university authorities debated which direction the campus should expand in – should it be towards Logan Park, or towards the central city? Both had advantages, but eventually the construction of Otago Polytechnic to the east of the university campus put paid to any great expansion in that direction. Instead, the largest building projects of this era moved the university closer to the Medical School.

The most dramatic change to the streetscape was the removal of the housing in the block bordered by Union, Cumberland, St David and Castle streets (opposite the clocktower), to make way for the five large science buildings constructed in the 1960s and 1970s. As this photograph reveals, that block was packed with housing, including some tenement dwellings which were little better than slums. Many houses could only be reached via small lanes.

Some grander buildings also made way for the university expansion. The large house second on the right from St Margaret’s College (in the block behind the clocktower) was ‘Appin’, originally built in the 1880s for Captain Angus Cameron, Chief Marine Superintendent of the Union Steam Ship Company. The university took over the house around 1949 and at the time of this photo it was home to the Department of English. You can read more about Appin’s history in David Murray’s excellent blog, Built in Dunedin. It was demolished, along with the neighbouring houses, to clear space for Unicol, which opened in 1969 as the university’s centenary project.

Other major buildings opened in the 1960s were to the right of the area in this photograph: the University Union, Walsh Building (Dental School), Arts Building and University Library. Again, numerous houses made way for this expansion and the library (since demolished to make way for the current Information Services Building) had to be designed around one old dwelling whose owner refused to sell.

One further noticeable change to this area since 1955 is the closure of some roads to traffic. As you wander past the Staff Club, you might like to recall that it was once on a busy intersection. Parts of Union and Castle streets were later made pedestrian only, enabling the landscaping which helps make the campus so attractive today. The Staff Club was, at the time of this photograph, the Registry; it was originally built as the Dental School, and was later home to the Law Faculty before becoming the Staff Club in 1980.

Sporting gentlemen

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1890s, cycling, recreation, sports

The Otago University Cycling Club, circa 1897. Image courtesy of Hocken Collections, S13-245.

It’s a big sporting week in Dunedin, with a Bledisloe Cup match here next Saturday, so it seems appropriate that this week’s blog post should be about sport. This wonderful photograph from the Hocken features one of the most popular sports of the late nineteenth century, cycling. The 1890s was the “golden age” of cycling. Improvements to bicycle design, such as the pneumatic tyre, rear wheel drive and diamond-shaped frame, made riding more efficient and comfortable, and bikes really took off as a means of transport and recreation.

The Otago University Cycling Club was formed in 1896 and was one of several local cycling clubs, among them the large Otago and Dunedin clubs, and the smaller Mimiro Ladies’ Club, High School Club and Railways Club. Several hundred riders took part in the combined ride for the official opening of the season in October 1897. This photograph was taken around that year, perhaps before the university club’s own handicap road race in July. Though there is a glaring absence of women here, another photograph of the club from around the same period does include two women, so they were not excluded from membership.

Herbert Black, a School of Mines student, won the 18-mile race from Outram to Mosgiel and back by way of Allanton with a time of 53 minutes. He is seated second from the right in the middle row of the photograph. Seated on Black’s right is medical student Thomas Will, who was club captain that year. The blurry figure seated on the far right is Edward Howlison. He does not seem to have been a university student or staff member, but was a very important figure in the Dunedin cycling community. Around 1895 he went into partnership with Frederick Cooke to manufacture and sell bicycles – the firm later expanded to sell motor vehicles and Cooke Howlison remains a major vehicle dealer in Dunedin to this day.

The second-place getter in the 1897 race, law student William Downie Stewart, is standing fifth from left, with another law student, Leslie Williams, on his left. Stewart later had a notable career as a lawyer and politician, serving in cabinet for many years. Another well-known politician appears in this photograph – the gentleman with cane and splendid moustache standing second from the right is parliamentarian James Allen (later Sir James). He was a life member of the University Council and later served as Chancellor; he was also a long-serving cabinet minister in the Reform Government and Minister of Defence during World War I. He was a vice-president of the cycling club, together with several members of the university staff; this was probably an honorary role, though Allen was a keen sportsman who had represented Otago in rugby. Another gentleman not dressed for cycling, standing next to Allen on the far right, is law lecturer William Milne.

The club’s first captain, seated on the ground at front left, was John McPhee. Like many early Otago students he was a school teacher who studied at university part-time – he completed three years of terms but does not seem to have ever graduated. Only two other people in the photograph have been identified. Just in front of the door, in bowler hat with head in profile, is Dr Macpherson, and the man standing fourth from the right is Mr Fogo. If you know anything about these two men, or if you can identify anybody else here, I’d love to hear from you!

Some fine fellows

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1870s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, botany, geology, zoology

When it started out, the University of Otago was a tiny institution, located in a settler community established less than three decades earlier, and as far away as possible from the ancient centres of learning of Europe. Despite these obvious disadvantages, it attracted some remarkably talented scholars to its staff. The first four professors – John Shand (mathematics and natural philosophy), George Sale (classics and English), Duncan MacGregor (mental and moral philosophy) and James Gow Black (chemistry) – were all fine teachers and scholars. They were also young and energetic, and presumably motivated by the opportunity to stamp their mark on a new institution and a new country. Of course, like any large institution Otago has employed a few deadbeats and rogues over the years, but they have been well outnumbered by men and women following the high standards established by those early professors.

These days the university actively publicises the achievements of its staff and students, but it has not always been so diligent about this and some remarkable people passed largely unknown in the wider community, and even within the wider university. An example comes from a golden period in the science faculty in the 1930s and 1940s. There weren’t many students majoring in science then – numbers first hit a hundred in 1943 – though many of the staff were kept busy teaching students in the ‘special schools’ (medical students numbered several hundred each year, dental students over a hundred and home science students passed the hundred-mark in 1939). Recently I had the privilege of meeting Ann Wylie, who lectured in the Department of Botany for many years and remains very alert and active in her nineties. She started out as an Otago student in 1941 and recalls some of the outstanding scholars in the science faculty at that time. “I don’t think anyone else realised,” she comments, that the faculty “really had exceedingly famous people on its staff.”

John Holloway in the Department of Botany garden, c.1931. Image courtesy of the Department of Botany.

When Ann Wylie went to teach at the University of Manchester she discovered that people there knew all about John Holloway of Otago’s Department of Botany. Holloway, a New Zealander, was an Anglican priest with a passion for plants. After graduating from the University of Auckland he worked in various parishes around New Zealand and for a couple of years in England. He was lecturer in botany at Otago from 1924 to 1944, when ill health forced his retirement. Holloway was an active researcher who did pioneering work on ferns and their relatives. The significance of his scholarship was recognised in his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) in 1937; he had been a Fellow of the New Zealand Institute (later renamed the Royal Society of New Zealand) since 1921 and served as its President in 1939 and 1940.

In both of these honours Holloway followed in the footsteps of one of his Otago colleagues, William Benham, Professor of Biology. Benham was President of the New Zealand Institute 1916-1917 and elected a Fellow of London’s Royal Society in 1907. A graduate of University College, London, he taught at Bedford College for Women and at Oxford before arriving in Otago as professor in 1898. He retired in 1937 but remained an active presence in the university well into the 1940s. Benham was a highly-regarded zoologist who researched and published widely but had a particular interest in earthworms.

In 1941, yet another Otago science faculty member of this period joined the list of Fellows of the Royal Society: Noel Benson, Professor of Geology from 1917 to 1950. Benson was born in England but grew up in Tasmania; he was educated in Australia and at Cambridge. Benson carried out pioneering work in petrology in various parts of Australia before arriving at Otago in 1917; he then expanded his work to include the rocks of New Zealand. He was a tireless researcher and his obituary from the Royal Society commented that “his output and range of published research was amazingly large and though his geological outlook was wide he was a master of detail.”

The achievements of these three men are all the more remarkable when we take into account the special challenges they faced in what was then a small remote institution. They had very wide responsibilities. Benham had to teach botany as well as zoology until 1920, when Winifred Betts became the first Otago staff member dedicated to botany. When Holloway took over from her in 1924 he was the Department of Botany, as Benson was the Department of Geology in his early years at Otago. Holloway’s room in the basement of Otago Museum served as the botany lecture room, office and laboratory for many years and he did all the teaching, administration and lab preparation, as well as running the botany garden. Benson, likewise, did all the teaching and administration for geology, along with the menial chores of the department. Perhaps more irksome than this, though, was the academic isolation – lacking colleagues in their own field, they could only communicate with scholars of similar interests by mail or after a long journey.

As we celebrate the achievements of Otago staff of the twenty-first century, let’s also spare a thought for their remarkable predecessors of the early twentieth century!