On a foreign field

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1930s, Critic, history, international students, medicine, mining, war, writers

Alexander Maclure (mistakenly named here as Arnold) and other international volunteers arrested while attempting to enter Spain, at an appearance in a French court in 1937. Image from the Workers Weekly, 2 July 1937, courtesy of the Hocken Collections, S16-521d.

I’ve written previously about the university in World War I and World War II, so to mark Anzac Day this year I’m exploring the intriguing and little-known story of an Otago student killed in one of the other conflicts of the 20^th century, the Spanish Civil War. Alexander Crocker Maclure was not your average Otago student. For a start, he came from Canada, not a common origin for students at that time. Born in 1912, Alex Maclure grew up in Montreal. After leaving school, where he did well, he headed to remote northern Manitoba, working as a wireless operator at Fort Churchill. He was, it seems, a man of adventure and one keen to escape his roots in Westmount, a wealthy Anglophone enclave of Montreal. His parents loved their oldest son, but had no time for his leftist politics; indeed, his father chaired the council of the Montreal branch of the Royal Empire Society. In 1931 Alex Maclure enrolled at the Otago School of Mines. We can only speculate about why he came here when he could have attended one of Canada’s mining schools. The Otago school had a distinguished international reputation, so perhaps that was the drawcard; perhaps he wanted also to explore a new country.

There were only around 1100 students at Otago when Maclure arrived, and he quickly earned the reputation of being the most politically radical person on campus. That wasn’t an especially big challenge: a study by Sharon Dooley of Otago students in the depression concluded that most were ‘conservative members of the middle class’, preoccupied with completing their qualifications. There were a few, like future history professor Angus Ross, who were shocked by the poverty they witnessed in those difficult times and took an active interest in politics as a result, but Maclure was unusual in being a committed member of the Communist Party (it expelled him more than once for unorthodox views). Maclure was a driving force behind the formation of the first formal left-wing groups on campus. The Public Questions Union, first affiliated to OUSA in 1932, organised regular discussions and mock parliaments; it also served as a ‘front’ for the Independent Radical Club, ‘an influential cell’ of more radical students, with about 30 members by 1935.

Maclure was heavily committed to his political beliefs. He was always up for a discussion and a very good speaker, though his views shocked many. He started out living at the Dunedin YMCA and later lived in digs in Cumberland and Hyde streets. His university enrolment card for 1935 gave his address as ‘no fixed abode’; that may have been when friends recalled him living in a deserted house, unable to afford heating or food. He had little choice but to turn to his parents for financial support. Writer Dan Davin, a student contemporary, later wrote a vivid portrait of Maclure (disguised as McGregor) in his short story ‘The Hydra’, published in The Gorse Blooms Pale in 1947. It revealed the radical as an extremist, who always ‘seemed too vehement, slightly absurd’; other students threw him in the Leith when he advertised the first meeting of the Radical Club. But Davin also expressed some sympathy with Maclure’s views on food riots by the unemployed, and felt uncomfortable at his conviction and fine for scrawling political slogans on Dunedin footpaths. Maclure wrote about politics wherever he could, including in student publications Critic and the Otago University Review. Meanwhile, he slogged his way through the mining course, completing some of the practical component in the West Coast mines. He took a year off his course in 1933 and it is unclear what he did then; perhaps he simply got a job to fund his later studies. He completed his final course work at the school of mines in 1936; he didn’t receive his diploma, but that was only because he had yet to complete the required thesis about his practical work, often submitted by students a year or two after they left the mining school.

Maclure now had other priorities. Like other political junkies he developed a keen interest in events in Spain, where in 1931 a coalition left-right government took over from the previous deeply conservative dictatorship and monarch, and after the 1936 election a coalition leftist government – the Popular Front – won power. Later that year the right-wing military began an uprising, led by General Francisco Franco, and a brutal civil war broke out in earnest; the war was eventually won by Franco in 1939. The fight was confined to Spain, but it had much broader significance as a battle between the extremes of left and right in a region where fascism was on the rise. Hitler and Mussolini committed resources, including troops, to Franco’s cause and, in the absence of any effective intervention from other countries, leftists around the world recruited volunteers to support the republican government’s battle against the right. The International Brigades, as they were known, eventually included around 40,000 volunteers from 50 countries. Soon after the war broke out Alex Maclure helped set up the General Spanish Aid Committee, later absorbed into the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, which became this country’s major relief organisation for the war.

But Maclure wanted to do more than raise funds. Early in 1937 he returned briefly to Canada, where he joined a group of Canadian and American volunteers heading to Spain. He intended to get involved in the blood transfusion unit, but because of his record as a crack marksman (he won prizes for his shooting ability at school) he was posted to a fighting unit of the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion. The first challenge was to gain entry into Spain, as France closed its border in February 1937. Maclure and some of his companions were captured by French authorities while travelling up the Mediterranean, hidden in the hold of a fishing vessel; together with several others, picked up by border patrols in the Pyrenees; they spent 20 days in a French prison for evading a non-intervention agreement, which supposedly banned all foreign powers from intervening in Spain. The Workers Weekly, the New Zealand communist paper, published a letter from Maclure in jail, as did the Grey River Argus. The prisoners were in high spirits, and received lots of support from French locals. They finally made their way into Spain some weeks later, crossing by foot in darkness over mountain trails.

Maclure’s movements in Spain remain unclear, but he became sergeant in charge of one of the American Division’s machine guns and was reported wounded and missing in August 1937; he died a couple of months later, probably in battle at Fuentes de Ebro, in the Zaragoza (Saragossa) province of northern Spain. News of Maclure’s death reached Dunedin in December 1937; the Workers Weekly proclaimed the heroism of a comrade ‘killed in action defending, with his comrades in the International Brigade, freedom and world peace against the Fascist invaders’. He ‘demonstrated that New Zealand can point to men to whom freedom means more than life itself’. An obituary in the first issue of Critic for 1938 recalled Maclure’s years as an Otago student, noting his ‘considerable’ intellect and his whole-hearted promotion of his Communist beliefs. ‘His enthusiasm, his sincerity, his moral fearlessness earned him the regard of all who respect such qualities’. Critic did not, naturally enough, demonstrate such approval of Maclure’s politics as the Workers Weekly, commenting that ‘there are many who heartily deplore the theories for which Maclure fought’. It did, however, acclaim his sincerity: ‘to whatever creed we cling we can not but feel admiration for the rare and fine qualities in Maclure’s character, qualities that are revealed by his giving up his life for his ideals’.

Maclure was, to the best of my knowledge, the only Otago student or graduate to serve as a frontline soldier in the Spanish Civil War, but a couple of others did play significant roles in journalism and medicine. Geoffrey Cox completed an MA in history at Otago before heading to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1932. He stayed on in England, beginning an acclaimed career in journalism as a junior reporter for the News Chronicle. In the early months of the Spanish Civil War, Cox became the paper’s correspondent in Madrid. The original correspondent had been captured, and Cox suggested he was sent because the paper saw him as junior enough to be expendable. His reports from the Spanish capital, then heavily besieged by Franco’s forces, became one of the few sources of information to the outside world. His vividly written eye-witness account of five weeks in Madrid was published in the book Defence of Madrid the following year. His reputation as a correspondent grew as he reported for the Daily Express from Vienna and Paris in the years leading up to World War II, covering the Anschluss and Munich crisis and the invasion of Poland, then the war in Finland and German invasion of the low countries. After the fall of France he signed on with the New Zealand Division and served with distinction. When the war ended he returned to his career as an English newspaper journalist, later becoming a pioneer of television journalism.

Geoffrey Cox, photographed by S.P. Andrew in 1932. Image courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, reference 1/2-C-22830. Alexander Turnbull Library

Douglas Jolly was another Otago graduate who published a book based on his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, but it had a very different purpose: to equip surgeons for battle. Jolly graduated in medicine in 1930. During his university years, and later, he was heavily involved in the Student Christian Movement, becoming a convinced Christian socialist. When the war broke out in Spain he was in England, close to completing his specialist qualifications as a surgeon. As the republicans lost most of their military medical services with the army rebellion and the Red Cross refused to intervene in an internal conflict, there was a call for international volunteers to support the leftist cause. Jolly immediately abandoned his studies, arriving in Spain in November 1936 with the first contingent of British medics. He was assigned to the XI International Brigade, for whom he formed a 50-bed mobile surgical unit. He gave two years of almost continuous service as a frontline surgeon, only departing when all international volunteers were withdrawn from Spain. He proved an excellent surgeon, ‘courageous and totally reliable’, much respected by all with whom he served. His patients included civilians injured in air raids alongside frontline soldiers, and the settings for the ever-mobile field unit ranged from the basement of a shell-ruined flour mill to railway tunnels and a cave. After the war he campaigned on behalf of post-war refugees, including during a return visit to New Zealand in 1939. When World War II broke out he returned to England and wrote the medical manual Field Surgery in Total War, published in October 1940 to glowing reviews. His advice on abdominal surgery saved many lives, and his systems for dealing with multiple injured patients became the basis for surgical units in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Doug Jolly also signed on with the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving as a surgeon in North Africa and Italy. His long service on the battlefields of two wars eventually caught up with Jolly; after World War II he lost his enthusiasm and confidence for surgery, spending the rest of his career as medical officer at Queen Mary’s Hospital for amputees in London.

Marianne Bielschowsky in April 1939. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Bielschowsky papers, MS-1493/036, S16-521d.

The involvement of two later Otago staff members, Franz and Marianne Bielschowsky, in the Spanish Civil War was less intentional than that of the three Otago-educated people already mentioned. They were already living in Spain when war broke out. Franz Bielschowsky, son of distinguished German neurologist Max Bielschowsky, undertook his medical training in a succession of German universities before completing an MD at Berlin and embarking on a career in medical research in Dusseldorf. Early in 1933 he was dismissed from his job because of his Jewish parentage and fled to Amsterdam. In 1934 he relocated to Madrid, where he became a lecturer in the medical faculty; in the following year he was appointed director of the biochemistry department of the new Institute for Experimental Medicine at the Central University of Madrid. Marianne Angermann, a German biochemist who had worked with Franz Bielschowsky in Dusseldorf, joined him at the Institute in Madrid late in 1935; they were to marry in 1937. Angermann and Bielschowsky refused offers to leave Spain when the civil war began; they did not feel vulnerable and respected the support they saw for the republican government. But as the siege of Madrid lengthened, their research work became impossible. Franz joined the republican medical service and worked at a military hospital in Madrid. The Bielschowskys remained in Madrid after the withdrawal of international medical staff in 1938, but fled Spain early in 1939, as Franco’s forces prepared to enter the capital. They were now refugees for a second time, and as war took over Europe they ended up in England. They both obtained work at the University of Sheffield, where Franz’s research took a new direction, investigating the role of hormones in the development of cancers. In 1948 the Bielschowskys arrived in Otago, where Franz had been appointed director of the cancer research laboratory. Like his work in Sheffield it was sponsored by the British Empire Cancer Campaign Society. Franz continued a productive research career at Otago for 17 years, until his sudden death in 1965. Marianne, who worked alongside him, continued her work until her own death in 1977. She was especially known for her development of various special strains of mice, used worldwide for medical research.

Franz Bielschowsky in 1949, when he was Director of Cancer Research at the University of Otago. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Physiology Department records, r.6681, S16-521c. (I would be delighted to hear from anybody who can identify the woman in this photo).

The Spanish Civil War of the 1930s might be dismissed as foreign by many New Zealanders, but its dramatic progress caught up several people from these distant shores. The involvement of people connected with Otago reflected the international influences – and standing – of this university. There were an international student from Canada whose politics drove him to his death in a fight against fascism, and two New Zealanders – a Cromwell-born doctor and a Palmerston North-born journalist – who took the skills developed at Otago and further honed in England to make their own contributions during that brutal war. Last, but by no means least, came the cultured German scientists whose fortunes became caught up in that war; it was one of the events which led them to eventually settle and make an important contribution in this more peaceful corner of the world.

I am grateful to Wellington historians Simon Nathan and Mark Derby for sharing information about Alexander Maclure. I highly recommend to anybody interested in learning more the book edited by Mark Derby, Kiwi Compañeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War. Mark tells me discussions are underway about a possible memorial to Doug Jolly in his home town, Cromwell.

An update (18 July 2016) – somebody who knew the Bielschowskys has kindly been in touch to alert me that the photo labelled as being of Franz is not actually him! She suggests it may be of Leopold Kirschner. If you recognise this gentleman, I’d love to hear from you.

A further update (20 July 2016) – a couple more people have confirmed that the man in the laboratory photograph is not Franz Bielschowsky, but Leopold (‘Poldi’) Kirschner. Kirschner was a microbiologist and worked in the Medical Research Council’s Microbiology Research Unit. He was another of Europe’s Jewish diaspora.Originally from Austria, he did important work on leptospirosis in Indonesia, but was interned there during the war. He continued the work on leptospirosis at Otago. My sincere thanks to those who helped correct the photo identification. The identity of the woman in the photo remains a mystery – suggestions are welcome!

The ‘latest’ health science – nursing

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1920s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, Christchurch, home science, medicine, mental health, nursing, public health, Wellington, women's studies

Some of New Zealand’s leading nurses of the 1920s, when the university attempted to set up a nursing diploma. They were photographed at the first conference of hospital matrons, held at Wellington Hospital in 1927. Image courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, S.P. Andrew Ltd collection, reference 1/1-018313-F.

The University of Otago is perhaps most famous for its health science courses, but many people are unaware of its contributions to the largest of the health professions: nursing. There have been many twists and turns in the path to nursing education at Otago, which this blog post attempts to map.

Nurse training in this country started out with ad hoc programmes in various hospitals; it was an apprentice-style system, with nurses learning on the job and providing the bulk of the hospital workforce as they did so. In 1901 New Zealand introduced the registration of nurses. From that date general nurses could become registered after completing the required years of training and passing a state examination. Separate registration was later added for obstetric, psychiatric and psychopaedic nurses, along with another roll for nurses who had completed shorter training programmes, with greater restrictions on their practice (known initially as nursing aids, then community nurses, then enrolled nurses, then nurse assistants, then enrolled nurses again). The hospital-based education of nurses slowly improved, with more time dedicated to teaching from dedicated nurse tutors, but there was no higher education available for those tutors. Advancing education programmes became a priority for those who wished to increase the professional standing of nurses and improve the care they offered.

When Otago’s home science school started out in the 1910s, nurses took notice. In 1912 leading nurse Hester Maclean, who edited the nursing journal Kai Tiaki, published there the response of home science professor Winifred Boys-Smith to Maclean’s enquiries about the potential of the school’s new courses for women who intended to enter the nursing profession. Boys-Smith suggested that the diploma course would be ‘incalculably useful to a girl who wanted to become a really efficient hospital nurse, for it would enable her to obtain a sound and much more advanced knowledge of physiology, sanitary science and household economics, than she could afford the time to gain, while she was training at a hospital’. The courses might also benefit nurses already trained who wished to improve their qualifications: Boys-Smith hoped to attract ‘quite a number of the more intelligent nurses, who wish to make themselves especially efficient for the higher posts which offer’. It is unclear whether or not any nurses or potential nurses enrolled at the home science school at this point, but the courses there did become the core of a new venture a decade later.

In 1922, in response to various concerns about the state of nursing education, and advocacy from the Trained Nurses’ Association, the University of Otago council began planning a five-year nursing diploma. In consultation with the home science and medical schools, it approved a curriculum consisting of two years of university courses, two years of ‘ward work and general hospital training’, and a final year of specialised nursing education. An attractive feature of this programme was that it used existing courses at the home science school and hospital and would not require the council to employ any additional academic staff until the fifth year. Meanwhile, the government’s department of health was keen to see an advanced course for already-trained nurses, and suggested the fifth year of the proposed Otago diploma could become that course; it offered to send two senior nurses overseas to be educated as lecturers for the programme. Janet Moore headed to London and Mary Lambie to Toronto in 1925, with the fifth year/advanced programme scheduled to commence in 1926; meanwhile several women started the first years of the programme through the home science school.

Unfortunately, the scheme then fell apart due to a series of misunderstandings between the university and the health department. Neither had explicitly stated who was to pay the salaries of the specialist nursing lecturers. The university council assumed the health department’s involvement and support meant they would stump up the cash required, while the health department assumed the university would pay its own staff. Those council members who had only supported the project on the basis it would cost the university nothing stubbornly refused to commit any funding, even after the nurses’ association offered to pay a contribution. The health department proved equally stubborn over the matter. Admittedly the university was strapped for cash, but it is sad that a programme that could have changed the course of New Zealand nursing education collapsed over the cost of two salaries. Moore and Lambie approached Victoria College (later Victoria University of Wellington), where they got a more sympathetic response to a proposal for a short diploma course for already-registered nurses. The government proved more willing to offer funding for this course, which commenced in 1928 at Wellington Hospital, jointly supervised by Victoria, the health department and the hospital boards association. For 50 years the School of Advanced Nursing Studies, as it became known, was to provide New Zealand’s only advanced education for nurses. The first two students in Otago’s collapsed programme, who had already completed the first 4 years, went on to complete the new Wellington course. One of them, Winifred Fraser, applied to Otago for a diploma of nursing, becoming the one and only person awarded that qualification. Most of the other women partway through their course switched to home science.

After this unfortunate episode, the University of Otago kept out of nursing education for many decades. Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with New Zealand nursing education remained, with high attrition rates, a failure to keep up with new developments and a continuing focus on student nurses as a labour force rather than learners. In 1970 the government approached the World Health Organisation, which appointed Helen Carpenter (director of the University of Toronto’s nursing school) to review the current system. Her report (An improved system of nursing education for New Zealand) led to major reforms. The education of registered nurses shifted from the health sector to the tertiary education sector. Commencing at Wellington and Christchurch in 1973, technical institutes around the country established nursing schools, and registered nurse programmes at hospitals were gradually phased out (though hospitals continued to train community/enrolled nurses). The technical institutes also later developed advanced diploma courses in various clinical fields, taking over the role of the School of Advanced Nursing Studies.

One of Carpenter’s recommendations was that a proportion of nurses should be educated to a still higher level, through universities. She suggested that Otago’s preventive and social medicine department, along with the education departments at Victoria, Massey and Canterbury, could start by appointing a nurse to their academic staff, with a view to building up nursing research and later courses. Otago’s medical faculty proved largely supportive of the idea, but over the next decade various proposed schemes came to nothing. Meanwhile, Victoria and Massey began offering a few BA papers in nursing studies. Proposals from Otago included a diploma in nursing administration, and later a basic-level bachelor’s degree, but neither made it past the University Grants Committee. In 1979, faced with various proposals for new nursing courses, the UGC appointed a special committee on nursing education, which recommended turning down Otago and Massey’s proposals for basic degrees, and another from Auckland for a post-basic bachelor’s degree. Victoria, it suggested, could develop its existing programme into a full nursing degree, complete with clinical education, while Massey should continue its existing courses. Victoria approached Otago’s Wellington clinical school to see if they might cooperate in an undergraduate nursing degree. That scheme got quite advanced but eventually fell through due to the government’s unwillingness to supply funding. Victoria’s nursing programme went into abeyance for a while in the early 1980s, but it later built up a postgraduate school. There were many differing opinions about university-level nursing education but it was, generally, finance that prevented many a dreamed-of programme from getting going. In Dunedin, any sense of urgency for an undergraduate programme that would lead to nursing registration ended once the Otago Polytechnic opened its nursing school in 1984.

Of course, nurses did enrol in a variety of other University of Otago courses. A good example is nursing academic Beverley Burrell, who trained as a nurse at Dunedin Hospital in the 1970s. After developing an interest in education through the playcentre movement, she enrolled in education courses at the university, going on to complete a BA and MA in women’s studies. There was a close synergy between her nursing experience and her university study.

Robyn Beach leading a class in the ‘nursing – high acuity’ paper in the Centre for Postgraduate Nursing Studies premises in Oxford Terrace, Christchurch, 2012. Image courtesy of the Centre for Postgraduate Nursing Studies.

In the end, it was on the Christchurch campus that Otago finally got a successful programme specifically for nurses off the ground. The medical school there offered a wide range of postgraduate courses, undertaken by a variety of health professionals, including nurses; for instance, many nurses completed public health and mental health postgrad qualifications. With the government injecting money into ongoing clinical training for healthcare workers, and increasing demand for nursing-specific courses, in 1997 the Centre for Postgraduate Nursing Studies opened. Initially hosted by Christchurch’s Department of Public Health and General Practice, it grew quickly and soon became an independent centre. Christchurch nurses had long wanted a local alternative to the postgraduate nursing programmes offered by Massey and Victoria universities, but flexible teaching methods, including block courses and distance education, meant the new Christchurch courses soon had students from all over the South Island, and a few from further afield. Starting out with papers on nursing practice and mental health nursing practice, the centre soon developed a range of papers, some generic and others in specialist fields of practice. Students could complete a postgraduate diploma or master’s degree in health sciences, endorsed in nursing, or various shorter certificate courses in specialist fields; the centre also offered PhDs. From 2006 a new master of health sciences option allowed an alternative to the papers plus thesis requirement: students could now complete papers and a ‘clinically applied research practicum’ for an endorsement in ‘nursing – clinical’. This was an important development because it met the clinically-oriented master’s degree requirement for those who applied to the New Zealand Nursing Council for registration as a nurse practitioner, a new level of practice which included prescribing rights.

Beverley Burrell teaching a course for the ‘nursing – leadership and management’ paper in 2011. The class was held in the Philatelic Society rooms, one of many temporary premises used after the usual venues were closed due to earthquake damage. Image courtesy of the Centre for Postgraduate Nursing Studies.

As the nursing centre grew, so did its research. Staff attracted considerable research funding, including from the Health Research Council, and also benefited from Tertiary Education Commission funding targeted at developing research capability in nursing and other health professions which had not done well under the PBRF system. In 2008 Lisa Whitehead received the university’s early career award for distinction in research, recognising her achievements in research on the management of long-term conditions (a field of particular interest for the nursing centre). As its research capability grew, the centre attracted more PhD students from both New Zealand and overseas; by 2012 it had 10 PhD candidates enrolled among its 350 students and had the largest postgraduate programme on the Christchurch campus.

The Addington Raceway was another stand-in venue for nursing courses following the Christchurch earthquakes. Here it is set up ready for clinical teaching for the ‘health assessment and advanced nursing practice’ paper in 2011. Image courtesy of the Centre for Postgraduate Nursing Studies.

The nursing centre has never been short of initiative and has introduced a variety of new courses to meet needs in the health sector. In 2016 it enrolled the first students in perhaps its most exciting venture to date: a new master of nursing science degree, which allows people with a bachelor’s degree in any discipline to complete the professional education required for registration as a nurse in a concentrated two-year programme. While this type of programme has been available in North America for decades and in Australia for several years, it is the first qualification of its type in New Zealand and required new regulations from the Nursing Council. Finally, some 90 years after the first ill-starred attempt, the University of Otago is offering a course which leads to the registration of nurses!