Our oldest building – some runners up

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1870s, 1880s, Arana, St Margaret's

This J.W. Allen photograph looking down on the corner of Dundas and Leith streets was probably taken in the mid-1870s, before the university moved to its current site. The Tilbury family home is at front left, and part of the Scotia Hotel is visible at front right. At the centre, in the middle distance, is the cottage and market garden of James Gebbie. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Album 68, S14-433.

The search for the university’s oldest building turned up several interesting contenders. Mellor House – featured in last week’s blog post – may have won the prize, but it’s a shame not to share some of the tales of other buildings we looked into!

I wouldn’t have got far in my search without the expertise of architectural history experts David Murray and Michael Findlay, who can look at a building and distinguish that some feature, such as the roof angle or style of weatherboard, dates from a particular decade, or that a house bears the distinctive marks of a particular architect. Michael and I wandered around campus looking for buildings which might be particularly old. I then researched their history from a variety of sources. Old rates records, kindly checked by DCC archivist Chris Scott, were particularly helpful in narrowing down dates.

As the old photograph above reveals, there were various houses scattered along Leith Street and the hill below Clyde Street in the 1870s. This area is still home to a collection of old houses which have been incorporated into Arana College. The big question is, how old are they, and did any of the buildings in this photo survive into the 21st century? Of course, one complication is that few houses remain unaltered for over a century! Many homes started out as small cottages and were gradually added to over the decades; a new roof or windows or cladding can disguise their original form.

Joined houses at 107-109 Dundas Street, now part of Arana. Photographed by Ali Clarke, October 2014.

A good example is the two attached houses at 107-109 Dundas Street. The large double bay windows at the front suggest a late nineteenth-century construction date, but closer inspection shows that these windows have been added to an earlier flat-fronted house. In fact, a careful look from above at the chimneys and roof lines (thanks Michael!) reveals that this is the building which appears on that same corner location in J.W. Allen’s 1870s photo. Rates records are patchy for that period, but judging by the date of the photo and the style of the original building we date its construction to the early to mid-1870s.

By 1877 – possibly earlier – this building was owned by Richard Tilbury. Just as the Cook family owned their home for eight decades, the Tilbury family were long-term owners of the joined Dundas Street houses, though the families had contrasting class backgrounds. Richard Tilbury was a Londoner, the son of a waiter. By 1870 he and his younger brother George were living in Dunedin, where both young men married. They worked together as expressmen, meaning they delivered goods to order by horse and carriage. Richard retired from the Tilbury Bros partnership in 1907, leaving his brother and nephews to run the business.

Richard Tilbury was the father of ten children, and saw his share of tragedy. His first wife, Eleanor Farnell, died in 1881, aged 32, around the time she gave birth to their seventh child. The baby followed her to the grave two months later. Two of their older children had also died as infants, and another at three years. In 1882 Richard married Irish woman Kate Finerty, who gave birth to three more children. Their son Harry drowned in the Leith in 1892. Newspaper reports of the accident reveal that the 9-year-old fell into the river just near the family home; there were suspicions that he had a seizure, which he had become prone to recently.

Fortunately not all of the Tilbury children died young; several of the five who survived childhood lived into old age. Their father, Richard Tilbury, died in 1934 aged 89 years, and his wife Kate died 6 years later. Richard left various bequests to his children. One of the pair of Dundas St houses went to his youngest daughter, Henrietta, and the other to his youngest son, William. When Henrietta Tilbury died in 1949, she left her house to be used by her sister Sophia Tilbury during her lifetime; it was then to pass to her niece Thora Smith (William’s daughter). Sophia, the oldest of the Tilburys, lived on at Dundas St until 1964, when she died at the grand old age of 90; William, the youngest, ended up in Waimate, where he died in 1968 at 80 years.

Two generations of the Tilbury family thus owned the Dundas St building for a remarkable ninety or so years. The University of Otago later bought the property and added it to the growing complex of houses which formed Arana. Arana may have been based around the grand Clyde St home of Sir James Allen, but it also came to own a mish-mash of cottages of various ages and styles. However, the Tilbury home remains the only surviving 1870s house identifiable on that side of Leith St in J.W. Allen’s photograph.

This Arana cottage was moved from further up the hill, on St David Street, to Leith Street. It dates from around 1885. Photographed by Ali Clarke, October 2014.

A couple of other houses in the vicinity did rouse our curiosity. The distinctive cottage just around the corner from the old Tilbury home, now painted orange, has the somewhat timeless design of any very simple house! It used to sit at 122 St David Street, and was moved to its current location to make way for new developments at Arana. Rates records show it was built around 1885, a few years after the university registry building.

Was this house at 368 Leith St once Gebbie’s cottage? It is in the right location, and the part at the back appears to be older than the rest of the property. Photographed by Ali Clarke, October 2014.

 

Another house I’m suspicious about is on the other side of Leith St – could this, perhaps, be built around the original cottage of James Gebbie, the nurseryman? Since the house is still privately owned, I haven’t researched it any further. There are, of course, many old buildings in the vicinity of the campus which don’t belong to the university, including some rented to students.

At the top of the hill, in Clyde Street, are some much grander homes. The Allen house, named Arana (a Maori transliteration of Allen), dates from the 1880s, as do several of the others. We wondered about the house at number 96, now known as Thorpe House and part of St Margaret’s College. Council records reveal that this is a contemporary of the university’s geology building – it was constructed in 1878 for warehouseman Joseph Ridley. The house then passed through various hands before it was purchased by solicitor Jefferson Stephens around 1913. I wonder if he socialised with the Cooks, around the corner in Union Street? The house remained in the Stephens family, latterly to Jefferson’s son Oswald Stephens, a teacher, until St Margaret’s took possession in 1980.

Do you have any stories to share of the old houses which have been absorbed into the university and its residential colleges?

Our oldest building

Tags

1860s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Arana, geography, psychology

J.W. Allen took this photograph in the late 1860s from around where Marama Hall is today, on what was known as Tanna Hill. On the right in the middle distance is a circular garden, part of the original Botanic Garden on Albany St. On the left is the Cook family home (now Mellor House). The Leith, which is not visible, wound around the bottom of the hill. The university moved to this site in the late 1870s. Parts of Tanna Hill were levelled for building, notably the land where the Archway Theatres and Applied Sciences Building are now. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Album 68, S14-434b.

I’ve been on an intriguing mission to identify the oldest surviving building on the Dunedin campus. Assisting me were two architectural history experts – David Murray (Hocken Collections), keeper of the wonderful Built in Dunedin blog, and Michael Findlay (Department of Applied Sciences), who sparked the idea for this project and then helped me identify likely suspects. I’m most grateful to them, and also to Chris Scott of the city council archives, who helped with clues in old rates records.

When considering old University of Otago buildings, most people probably think first of the old stone buildings at the centre of the campus. When the university council decided to move operations from the original location in Princes Street, it commissioned two large buildings on its new site beside the Leith in North Dunedin. Work on the chemistry and anatomy building (now the geology building) was completed in 1878, and on the main building (now the registry) in 1879. Both were smaller than they are today, with extensions added in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The St David Street homes for four professors (now known as Scott/Shand House and Black/Sale House) were also completed in 1879.

As the university expanded, it began acquiring properties neighbouring its original block of land. Often these included old houses, which ranged from tiny cottages to substantial residences. Some were later demolished to make way for new buildings but others have survived, including a few which pre-date the geology building. Their original residents had no idea they would one day be living close to a university, let alone that their house would one day be part of it!

The east side of Mellor House, photographed by Ali Clarke, August 2014.

We are pretty certain that the honour of being the oldest building on campus belongs to Mellor House, one of the old Union Street houses now occupied by the psychology department. The house was originally built in 1862 for Thomas Calcutt, a printer who migrated from England to Otago in 1858. As well as continuing to work in the printing trade, Calcutt served as a court clerk and later became a valuer of land taken for public works. He probably picked up the latter job because of his experience as a land speculator, for his 1895 obituary notes that “he displayed much natural shrewdness in matters of business, and made many profitable speculations in landed property.” Early on – certainly by 1861 – he acquired all of the land in the block bounded by Clyde Street, Union Street, Leith Street and the river; there were no houses on the land at that stage. In March 1862 advertisements appeared in the Otago Daily Times for carpenters and painters for “a Dwelling House now building for Mr Thomas Calcutt, Pelichet Bay. Apply to the foreman on the Ground.” By October of that year, Thomas and Mary Calcutt were living in their new home, dubbed Leith Cottage, where Mary gave birth to their son Arthur.

Mellor House as it appears from Union Street. Photographed by Ali Clarke, August 2014.

Sadly, baby Arthur Calcutt died at just four months, but in January 1864 another child was born at Leith Cottage, this time to its new owners, George and Ann Cook. While the Calcutts’ stay in the house had been brief, the Cook family were to own it for eight decades. George Cook was an English solicitor who arrived in Otago late in 1860 and was admitted to the New Zealand bar in January 1861; intriguingly, his wife Ann and one of their children migrated a couple of years earlier, on the same ship as Thomas Calcutt. The final reference I have found to the name “Leith Cottage” dates from 1868, when Ann Cook advertised for a general servant. Perhaps this name was dropped as the house was extended: like many houses of the period it has clearly been enlarged from humbler beginnings.

The house at 93 Union Place, which dates from the early 20th century, was moved there from the site of the new Commerce Building. Photographed by Ali Clarke, August 2014.

By the time George Cook died in 1898, aged 82, he was Dunedin’s longest serving lawyer. He was a careful and conservative practitioner: “an upright, estimable lawyer of the old English school – a man who brought with him to the colony all the traditions and all the prejudices of the English bar, and who resented all innovations.” The Cooks lived in splendid isolation on their property until around 1902, when further houses were added to the block; presumably Ann Cook sold off some of the land after her husband died. Some of the houses built around that time also survive and are now occupied by the psychology department, including those at 99 Union Street (next to the Commerce Building) and 97 Union Street (Galton House). The charming two-storey house on the corner of Leith and Union streets was originally at 103 Union Street, but moved to its current location at the top of the hill in 1990 to make way for the new Commerce Building.

Galton House was built in the grounds of the Cook family home in the early years of the 20th century. Photographed by Ali Clarke, August 2014.

When Ann Cook died in 1907 she left the original family home to son John Alfred Cook. John Cook was another solicitor; indeed he practised together with his father for some time. Law ran in the family: another son, Reginald Cook, was a lawyer in Sydney, while daughter Clara Cook married lawyer Frederick Chapman, who became a well-known judge. Their brother George was a government engineer, while Spencer was a banker and Montague worked for Dalgetys. Later Cook generations also entered the law, and the name survives as part of legal firm Gallaway Cook Allan. John Cook died at his Union Street home in February 1945 at the ripe old age of 92 years and his wife Margaret died four months later.

At that time the university was on the lookout for houses suitable for student accommodation. The roll was on the rise, and would shoot up in 1946 as returned servicemen came to university. It purchased the Cook family home and named it Mellor House in honour of one of Otago’s most successful graduates, chemist Joseph Mellor. A blueprint drawn up for the university in 1945 reveals it as a substantial residence, with six bedrooms, a study and a bathroom upstairs. Downstairs were a drawing room, dining room, library, kitchen, scullery, pantry and bathroom, and there were a couple of outbuildings as well.

The growing university needed room for classrooms and offices as well as student bedrooms, and in 1946 Mellor House began its life as a university building with a dual purpose. Upstairs the bedrooms became an outlying part of Arana Hall. The “Mellor House boys” – a mixture of returned servicemen and young school leavers – had their meals at the main college but slept in the old Cook family bedrooms. Arana still has a delightful photograph of one of the residents dressed in some old Victorian woman’s clothing they discovered upstairs! Downstairs became the home of the newly established Department of Geography. Two rooms were knocked together to create a classroom and the pantry became a staff office. Tea on the verandah was a departmental tradition.

The mixed use of the building could be interesting at times. Saturday morning geography labs were often accompanied by the “Mellor House boys” singing in the shower, and fuses frequently blew due to residents plugging toasters into light sockets. As the geography department grew, it gradually expanded upstairs and into a prefab hut in the garden; the last Arana “boys” lived at Mellor House in the late 1950s. Late in 1964 geography moved to the newly built Library/Arts Building (since replaced with the ISB Building). Mellor House then became home, once again, to a newly established department: this time it was psychology.

The Department of Psychology now has a claim to one of the university’s most modern large buildings – the William James Building, completed in 2010 – and what is almost certainly its oldest building – Mellor House, completed in 1862. I wonder what colonial property developer Thomas Calcutt and the legal Cook family would think of the current use of their home!

 

A tale of 10 libraries

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1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Christchurch, Invercargill, library, Wellington

Hard at work in the library of the University of Otago, Wellington, in 2007. Image courtesy of University of Otago Marketing & Communications.

Last week my post mentioned the popular practice of studying for exams in the sunshine. This week I take a look at another popular student hangout at this time of year – the library. Neil Howard, who was an arts student in the 1950s when the library was in the clocktower building, remembers the “cosy comfort of the little cubicles where we could chat”. The “most terrifying place was the upper Oliver at the northern end where the real swots worked. Here silence reigned supreme, dropped books, coughs, sneezes, splutters were greeted with angry eyes appearing above the top of books while a spoken word suggested the imminent appearance of a bouncer.” The library may have changed, but the mixture of people chatting and “real swots” has not!

Of course a library is not just a study space, for a good collection of books and journals is critical to a university’s teaching and research. In 1872 – a year after classes commenced – the university library boasted just over 500 volumes, and fitted into a bookcase in the council chamber of the original university building (in Princes Street). The first four professors had purchased books, which were supplemented by public donations. The cash-strapped university spent very little on books, or their management, in its first few decades. The library grew to around 8000 volumes in its first twenty years thanks to books gifted by the public, the collection of a short-lived independent reference library committee, and the donation of the provincial government’s library after the provinces were abolished in 1876. The books were kept in locked shelves, with the university registrar, who also served as librarian, holding the keys.

The library received a big boost in 1908 when Dr TM Hocken donated his valuable collection of early New Zealand books, pictures and manuscripts to the people of New Zealand, on condition that they be managed by the University of Otago. A new wing was added to the museum (which was also run by the university) to house the new collection, and the university employed its first full-time librarian, William Trimble, to catalogue and care for it.

Meanwhile, the main university library remained under the care of the registrar in its long-term home, the second floor of the main university building (where the registry is now). Trimble’s successor, Beatrice Howes, was appointed in 1913 to be half-time at the Hocken, and half-time in the main library, finally relieving the busy registrar of library duties. The next big change came in 1935, when John Harris was appointed librarian. He was the university’s first trained librarian, and in his 13 years at Otago brought a new professionalism to the place, improving the collections, the staffing and the access students enjoyed to books and journals.

Eventually the students and books outgrew their library space, and there was no further room in the main building. A brand new library building opened in 1965 on the corner of Albany and Cumberland streets, strategically located half-way between the medical school and the main university buildings. It was an attractive space, two stories high, with a courtyard in the centre; the building also housed several university departments, which later moved into other new buildings, allowing the library to expand.

The 1965 central library was notoriously built around the property of elderly storekeeper William Matthews, who refused to move. His property on the corner of Albany and Castle streets was demolished after he died in 1967, aged 91. Photograph courtesy of Arthur Campbell.

Sadly, once the building was full it had no potential for extensions. Jock McEldowney, who was university librarian from 1961 to 1987, recognised this before the library moved in, and set about some long-term planning to help the library cope with the anticipated future growth in students. His strategy was for “controlled decentralization” – six physically separate libraries around the Dunedin campus, each with senior librarians and the capability to provide full services to students. This was a pragmatic solution, and it remains the university library’s basic administrative structure to this day. It was based around various libraries which had developed in an ad hoc fashion on campus over the years, and added one important new one.

Many departments had developed their own libraries, and some of these were quite substantial. The geographical expansion of the university, together with its frugal funding allocation to the central library, encouraged the practice. When the medical school moved from the central campus to its new Great King Street building (now known as the Scott Building) in 1917, the medical library was born and all the medical books in the central library were moved there. Medical school administrators took over the running of the collection; this later became a point of tension as the medical school and the library sometimes wrangled over the control of the medical library. The expanding medical library moved into a purpose-built space in the new Sayers Building in 1972.

The dental and law libraries gained new status under McEldowney’s library structure. Both were essentially departmental libraries which had grown along with their faculties, and got much improved spaces when their faculties moved into new buildings: the dentists into the Walsh Building in 1961 and the lawyers into the Hocken Building (now the Richardson Building) in 1979. The Hocken Building also provided a new home for the Hocken Library, formerly housed in the museum and part of the 1965 library building. Heritage collections do not, like other libraries, throw out their “old” books, and this made the Hocken especially prone to a need for more space. Its manuscript and photograph collections lived for some years in the former vehicle testing station in Leith Street, before all the collections were reunited in their current location, the former cheese factory in Anzac Avenue, in 1998.

The final library in the “controlled decentralization” programme, the science library, was a new institution, created out of the libraries of several different departments. This was a controversial move, with some departments very reluctant to lose their individual libraries; there was a major battle over Chemical Abstracts. But the advocates of a centralised science collection, with easier access for all students and a professional librarian in charge, eventually won out. The library was able to take advantage of the development of major new science buildings in that period, moving into its current premises in 1977.

The development of the clinical schools of medicine at Christchurch and Wellington in the 1970s presented a new challenge to the library. The university wanted staff and students in these campuses to have equal access to research services. Fortunately both cities had exisiting hospital board libraries, and Otago was able to pool resources with them to create joint library services for the university and healthcare staff.

Back in Dunedin, the decentralization scheme reduced pressure on the central library for some years, but eventually the continuing acceleration of the student roll made a larger building essential. In 2001 the magnificent new Information Services Building was opened, with greatly improved study space for students.

Inside the central library, 2004. Image courtesy of University of Otago Marketing & Communications.

The newest additions to Otago’s collection of libraries came with its merger with the Dunedin College of Education in 2007. The Robertson Library opened in 1981, bringing together the College of Education and Otago Polytechnic library collections. It is named after Bill Robertson, who taught at the polytech and also chaired the College of Education Council and the Otago Education Board. The university library now runs the Robertson Library, supplying services under contract to Otago Polytechnic as well as to its own students. With the College of Education merger the university also acquired the smaller specialist education library on the Southland campus.

From that single bookcase to ten libraries in four cities, the University of Otago library has certainly come a long way! Of course, there have also been major changes in the technologies used by the library, but that’s a whole other story which I’ll save for a later post. Do you have any Otago library memories to share?

Studying in the newly refurbished Robertson Library, 2011. Image courtesy of University of Otago Marketing & Communications.

Exam time

Tags

1870s, 1890s, 1920s, 1940s, 1950s, 1970s, 1990s, 2000s, examinations

Home science students Nona Collis and Sadie Robinson swotting in the Studholme gardens, 1950. Image courtesy of Sadie Andrews (nee Robinson).

It’s that time of year when a sunny day brings students outdoors with their books (or perhaps their laptops). Many a pleasant spot around the north end of town will feature somebody relaxing in the sun while supposedly studying for exams. End of year exams are a big feature of university life to this day, but they are not the be all and end all that they once were. Students’ grades no longer completely depend on that one test at the end of the year, and they no longer have to worry about their exam scripts being lost en route to Britain for marking!

From 1874 to 1961 Otago was one of the constituent colleges of the University of New Zealand, which was this country’s sole degree-awarding institution. It set all the regulations for degrees, including those around exams. The issue of how students were examined was controversial from the very beginning. Should university professors grade the exams of their own students? Should they set the exams themselves? Theoretically, as the curriculum was set at a national level, students throughout the country should be studying the same material and could sit the same exam.

To ensure its degrees had high academic creditibility, the University of New Zealand decided to appoint examiners in Britain. For several decades, New Zealand university exam scripts in the arts and sciences travelled by ship to England, to be graded by examiners who knew nothing of the students’ circumstances. One disadvantage of this system was the inevitable delay. 1870s students did not learn their exam results until the middle of the year; later on results were sent by cable, meaning they might find out how they had done by the end of February. The hard work of students sitting exams in 1897 went to waste when their scripts were all lost in the wreck of the cargo steamship Mataura on its way to England. The external system retained many supporters despite this disaster. The Otago Daily Times commented in the aftermath that the system of marking by eminent British scholars “gives the New Zealand degree distinct and special value, and the New Zealand University is the only one outside Britain that subjects its students to this severe test.”

As time went on, more and more people felt the external exam system was unnecessary, but agreeing on any change proved very difficult for the University of New Zealand Senate. From the mid-1920s Stage I and II BA and BSc exams were set and marked in New Zealand, with professors taking turns in acting as examiners for the whole country (they did this in pairs rather than individually). But only World War II, with its high risk to shipping, finally ended the University of New Zealand practice of sending advanced exam scripts to Britain.

The next step for reformers was to get exams localised to each institution. From as early as the 1890s, medical school professors had examined their own students, with an external examiner acting as quality controller – this was known as the “external-internal” system. Arts and science professors wanted this privilege as well, so they could fit exams better to local adaptations of the national curriculum. The change happened in gradual steps, but by 1949 all arts and science exams were “external-internal”. This was part of a bigger devolution of powers to each institution, and in the 1950s the university colleges earned the right to set their own courses as well as their own exams (though these still had to be approved by the University of New Zealand’s curriculum committee).

The next big change to exams came after pressure from students, who were concerned about the enormous burden of the final exam, which accounted for 100% of their course grade. Students had to complete “terms” in order to sit exams, meaning they had to reach a minimum standard in their course work, but other than that their year’s work counted for nothing. After a campaign for change from OUSA, in 1973 the arts faculty introduced internal assessment – at least 15% of students’ final grades now came from their work through the year. Internal assessment quickly became general, and the coursework component of final marks gradually increased.

OUSA soon regretted the introduction of internal assessment. While it helped people who were bright and worked hard but didn’t cope well with exams, everybody else now had added pressure. No longer could anybody “slack off” during the year, but still pass their course with some last minute cramming before final exams. Students now had to work hard on assignments and tests throughout the year, and final exams still mattered enough to be stressful. There was less freedom to indulge in all the other activities of student life.

The other big change to exam practice came with the reorganisation of the academic year into semesters in 1994. “Final” exams now took place twice a year, which was another blow to the time available for non-academic pursuits. From 2001, the arrival of summer school meant some students faced three sets of exams. We should spare a thought for the academics, too, for they now have two or three spells a year of setting and marking exams.

Exams have come a long way since the 1870s. For Otago’s first century, they counted for everything. For better or worse, internal assessment came to stay in the 1970s, but exams remain an important feature of student life. They may be stressful, but they also provide a chance to shine – my best wishes to all of you who are sitting exams this month!

Sadie Robinson hits the books on the verandah of St Helens Hostel in Regent Road, 1951. Image courtesy of Sadie Andrews (nee Robinson).