An English story

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1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1910s, 1920s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, 2000s, arts fellows, English, linguistics, writers

The English Department staff outside their premises in Cameron House, a grand two-storeyed family home on Leith Street (later knocked down to make way for UniCol), in 1961. Until tutorials were introduced, the department fitted into a small room in the Clocktower Building. From left: Keith Maslen, Lenore Harty, Gregor Cameron, Alan Horsman, Margaret Dalziel and Bob Robertson. Dalziel later became Otago’s first woman humanities professor and Pro-Vice-Chancellor. Image courtesy of the Department of English and Linguistics.

English is one of Otago’s founding subjects and has always been one of its most popular. In 1871 George Sale, the Cambridge-educated classics professor, taught an English class of 22, though it was an unfamiliar task for him. At his inaugural lecture Sale commented that neither Cambridge nor Oxford had a professor of English so he looked to the Scottish universities for inspiration; he concluded that their teaching encouraged ‘that very vice which it should be the especial object of a University to eradicate – shallowness and superficiality. He was therefore compelled to strike out a line for himself’. 1871 English students started the session with Chaucer, plunging straight into Middle English. When the class progressed to ‘the more modern language’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets after its ‘thorough and profitable perusal of the Canterbury Tales’, it earned a report in the ODT; perhaps the reporter was a student.

In 1881 Sale handed his English classes over to John Mainwaring Brown, another Cambridge graduate, appointed to a new chair of English, constitutional history (for law students) and political economy (economics). Brown was popular – and less intimidating than Sale – but his career ended tragically when he disappeared during a tramping expedition in Fiordland at the end of 1888. With the arrival of Thomas Gilray in 1890, Otago had its first dedicated professor of English; a period of remarkable stability followed as the chair was held by just two men, both Scots, for three decades each.

Gilray was highly organised but not the most engaging lecturer: Muriel May, a student of the 1910s, recalled that he ‘taught by dictating at a relentless pace to his benches of scribbling students in the Lower Oliver classroom …. at the prearranged dates we regurgitated. There were no seminars, no discussions, originality was not fostered nor were personal opinions encouraged’. It didn’t help that he was bound by a national syllabus, with exam papers marked by strangers in the UK. Gilray’s death came as a shock: he collapsed while reading the lesson at the university’s jubilee church service, held in Knox Church in 1920. His successor, Herbert Ramsay, was ‘one of the university’s best lecturers’ and students delighted in his thoughts on Shakespeare. The course and teaching methods remained conservative. Ramsay boasted in a 1950 valedictory speech to the University Council that he never asked them for more staff. He and long-serving lecturer Gregor Cameron did all the teaching, with one additional junior lecturer from the late 1940s; they remained committed to the Scottish lecture-only system. John Greig, a Scot who taught in England, the US and South Africa, introduced radical changes as professor from 1952 to 1956. No fan of the conventional lecture, Greig introduced group tutorials; as a consequence, English’s academic staff jumped from three to seven, plus part-time tutors. He also modernised the curriculum, adding works by twentieth-century authors (Sean O’Casey, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf) and New Zealand poetry and short stories.

The inclusion of New Zealand literature in university courses was controversial. As Otago lecturer Robert Robertson explained, it was generally taught as ‘a dutiful recognition’ that first-year students should be aware of New Zealand poetry. There was an element of colonial cringe, but teaching local literature was hard work for staff, who had only ‘partial bibliographies, few collected works, no collected letters, not a standard biography, incomplete histories only and a scattered body of occasional criticism of varying merit’. Alan Horsman, a New Zealander who studied and taught in England, arrived as Otago’s new English professor in 1957. He recalls it as a significant year, with the publication of Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry and Ian Cross’s The God Boy, novels which stood comparison with the best English writing; there was already poetry ‘of top quality’. He was reluctant, though, to introduce a paper devoted to New Zealand literature. Lawrence Jones, an American who arrived as lecturer in 1964, found Otago students responded more enthusiastically to Janet Frame than Thomas Hardy, and his research interests shifted to New Zealand literature. In 1977, in response to student demand, an honours paper fully devoted to New Zealand work was introduced; further undergrad courses followed and research expanded.

Burns Fellows received a year’s salary, a room in the English Department and complete freedom to write. Not all writers found the year easy, but others thrived during their first opportunity to write full-time. Cilla McQueen, the 1985 and 1986 Burns Fellow, is photographed in contemplative mood in the fellow’s office at the 50th anniversary celebrations of the fellowship in 2008. The office was then occupied by Sue Wootton. Image courtesy of the English and Linguistics Department.

Cross and Frame were both recipients of the university’s Robert Burns Fellowship for writers, commenced in 1959. In addition to providing some of the country’s greatest writers an opportunity to create without financial stress for a year, the fellowship was important for the English Department, which hosted the fellows. Staff and students interacted with them: ‘It was a very good thing for the department to have practising writers around, available to be talked with’, says Horsman. Some, like 1966 and 1967 Burns Fellow James K. Baxter, participated in classes. He ‘would come to a class occasionally and make his experience available. He would speak to the class about prosody in a way which, from a practising poet, was authoritative’, recalls Horsman.

Otago ventured into linguistics in the 1970s and in 1990 its small programme moved into the English Department; from 1994 students could major in linguistics. Another applied field which mushroomed in the 1990s was writing. It began when other departments expressed concern over students’ communication skills. In 1993 English introduced a paper on ‘the fundamentals of effective speaking and writing’; it was designed for health science students, for whom it was compulsory until 2006, but other departments at various times recommended or required it and other students also found it useful. It morphed into ‘English for university purposes’. Later the department expanded beyond the remedial or introductory with courses in advanced writing, writing for the professions and a creative writing paper in poetry.

Greg Waite (at centre, with beard), discussing the Textbase of Early Tudor English Project with participants at a conference in 1990. Waite and Alistair Fox started this early example of digital humanities in 1984, producing a machine-readable corpus of early Tudor literary texts, with particular focus on poetry. The project was largely completed by the late 1990s and transferred online in 2002. Image courtesy of the English and Linguistics Department.

Two new endowed chairs expanded the department in a Celtic direction. In 2006 Peter Kuch was appointed as Eamon Cleary Professor of Irish Studies and in 2009 Liam McIlvanney became Stuart Professor of Scottish Studies. Both are literary scholars (and McIlvanney has a sideline as a crime writer). They provided intellectual stimulation to an English Department already a mix of the old and the new: along with esteemed scholars of historic writers (for instance, Jane Austen expert Jocelyn Harris) it employed up-and-comers with interests in digital literature, post-colonial literature and the avant-garde, among other fields. Its writing programme was also a ‘sizeable operation’. Meanwhile, Middle English, Old English and Old Norse were still spake here. Rick McGregor, a 1992 PhD graduate, came from Auckland to research the use of Icelandic sagas by a modern Swedish writer because Old Norse remained on offer in the south; Otago’s blend of conservatism and innovation has distinct advantages!

Chaucer, the English Department’s first text, has never gone out of fashion. Giving a Chaucer reading at Colin Gibson’s retirement function in 1998 are, from left: Greg Waite, Nicola Cummins, Bill Dean and Colin Gibson. Image courtesy of the English and Linguistics Department.

Looking back at history

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1880s, 1910s, 1920s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, art history, economics, history, law, library, Maori, politics

Professor Angus Ross engaging another generation of potential history students at the Taieri High School breakup ceremony, 1965. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Taieri College archives, AG-629-015/060, S17-542a.

History has been around for a while! It first appeared at the University of Otago in 1881 when John Mainwaring Brown, the new professor of English, constitutional history and political economy, taught constitutional history to a class of two students. It was a subject designed for lawyers, covering ‘the development of the English Constitution, and of the Constitutional relations between the Mother Country and the Colonies’. The course, compulsory for the LLB degree, was also open to BA students. Mainwaring Brown’s career was cut tragically short when he disappeared during a tramping expedition in Fiordland in December 1888. The university council recognised that it would be difficult to find somebody capable and willing to teach all of the subjects he had covered and appointed a new professor of English, with separate lecturers for constitutional history and political economy (economics). Alfred Barclay, one of Otago’s earliest graduates and a practising barrister, taught constitutional history for many years, except in the early years of the 20th century when the law school was closed and the subject wasn’t offered.

Harry Bedford, Otago’s first ‘English history’ lecturer. This photograph, taken by William Henshaw Clarke around 1902, was his official portrait as a Member of Parliament. Image courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, General Assembly Library parliamentary portraits, 35mm-00168-f-F.

In 1914, history emerged as a subject in its own right with a new course in ‘English history’. It was taught by Harry Bedford, who had been Otago’s economics lecturer since 1907. Bedford had an impressive CV; he was a brilliant local graduate who started his working life in his father’s tailoring business, served a term in parliament, and practised law while lecturing at Otago. The syllabus for ‘English history’ included ‘a study of the outlines of the History of England, including the development of the constitution down to 1900’, with a more detailed study of a different period each academic year. Constitutional history continued as a separate course for law students, and Bedford also devoted two special lectures a week to ‘Modern History, as prescribed for Commerce students’ from 1916. Bedford was an inspiring teacher and his appointment to a new professorship in economics and history in 1915 came as no surprise. Sadly, he was another promising young professor destined for a tragic death; he drowned during a beach holiday in 1918. With the times still unsettled due to war, the council appointed Archdeacon Woodthorpe, the retired Selwyn warden, as acting professor. But they felt the time had now come to separate the growing disciplines of economics and history, and in 1920 John Elder of Aberdeen was appointed to a new chair in history, endowed by the Presbyterian Church.

Though the Presbyterians selected, appropriately enough, a ‘conservative and hard working Presbyterian’ from Scotland as Otago’s first history professor, Elder brought considerable innovation to the chair. He continued an extensive publishing career commenced in Scotland, producing both popular and academic works on New Zealand history at a time when ‘it was highly unusual for colonial professors to publish anything’. His developing interest in New Zealand’s history was also reflected in the curriculum, which expanded to include more coverage of this country and other colonies among the broad survey courses on offer. He valued archival research highly; this was made possible thanks to the resources held at the Hocken Library, and Elder required MA students to complete a thesis based on such sources. His dour manner didn’t endear him to students, though, and he soon put a stop to a young lecturer’s introduction of seminar discussions: ‘These young men like to hear themselves talk but you’re paid to lecture … So long as I’m head of this department, there’ll be no discussions’.

William Parker Morrell, photographed in 1930 while studying at Oxford. Image courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Judith Morrell Nathan collection, ref: 1/2-197548-F.

In 1946 William Morrell – who featured in an earlier blog post on absent-minded professors – succeeded Elder as professor of history. He was a local graduate who studied and taught at Oxford and the University of London, and published widely on imperial and New Zealand history; he later took on the important role of writing the university’s centenary history! Morrell believed not only that history illuminated the present, but that the political state was worthy of study in its own right, and it was through his influence that politics joined the Otago syllabus, initially as part of the history department. Ted Olssen, an Adelaide graduate, was appointed to teach political science and classes commenced in 1948. Students emerging out of the war years and their clash of political ideologies demonstrated an appetite for the subject; it grew and became a separate department in 1967.

Like his predecessors, Willie Morrell believed that New Zealanders’ study of history needed to start with the histories of Britain and Europe, but an imperial framework meant that regions which had come under European control – including New Zealand and the Pacific – also appeared on the syllabus. Gordon Parsonson, who first joined the department as assistant lecturer in 1951 and remains an active researcher in his late 90s, was partly hired because of his interest and experience in Melanesia, acquired during World War II military service there. Angus Ross was another lecturer with expertise on New Zealand and Pacific history, though his distinguished war service had been in Europe. After many years in the department he succeeded Morrell as professor in 1965 and ‘steered the department away from the legacy of imperial history by making appointments trained to look at imperialism from the perspective of the colonised’. John Omer-Cooper, a specialist in African history, took up the newly-established second chair in history in 1973, while Hew McLeod, who became a world-renowned expert on Sikh history and culture, joined the department to teach Asian history in 1971. From 1975 a revamped curriculum gave students majoring in history broader choices; previously compelled to start with European history, they could now, if they wished, focus instead on New Zealand, Australia, the Pacific or Asian history.

Barbara Brookes and Ann Trotter at a Federation of University Women event at the Fortune Theatre, 1993. Image courtesy of Ann Trotter.

Under the umbrella of the histories of various regions, new themes began to emerge, often led by younger staff. Erik Olssen and Dorothy Page, both appointed in 1969 and both future heads of department, became pioneers of social history and women’s history respectively. Ross had a policy of appointing women where possible; although Morrell had also appointed a couple of women in the 1940s, men had long dominated the staff. The policy of recruiting good women academics continued and by the late 1980s they made up nearly half the department. In addition to Page, there were Barbara Brookes (another women’s history expert), Ann Trotter (who taught Asian history and subsequently became assistant-VC for humanities), Pacific historian Judy Bennett and long-serving lecturer Marjorie Maslen.

Angela Wanhalla and Judy Bennett in 2009. Photograph by Sue Lang, courtesy of the history and art history department.

As part of the new movement towards social history, Olssen embarked on the Caversham project, a long-running study of historic residents of southern Dunedin. Generations of honours and postgrad students mined the huge store of data for new insights into work, politics, gender, culture and society in New Zealand’s earliest industrial suburbs. Other new themes which became popular in the late 20^th century included environmental history and intellectual history (the history of ideas, incorporating science and religion), while world history provided an antidote to specialism in particular places and eras. A growing – if belated – awareness of the significance of Māori perspectives of history saw the appointment of Michael Reilly to a joint position in history and Māori studies in 1991. He later became full-time in Māori studies, but in the 21^st century the history department was fortunate to recruit two brilliant young Ngāi Tahu scholars, Angela Wanhalla and Michael Stevens.

History, like any other department, had its ups and downs through the years; funding was often tight and the trend towards lower enrolments in the humanities led to a loss of two staff in 2016. Art history joined the department in 2001, with a change in name to the history and art history department in 2008. Throughout, it remained a highly productive department with an excellent research record, ranking first in New Zealand for history and art history in the 2003 and 2006 PBRF rounds. It was no slouch in teaching either; in 2002, when OUSA gave its first teaching awards, history was the only department to have two people – Tom Brooking and Tony Ballantyne – in the top 10. As a proud graduate of Otago’s history department, I can testify to the great skills of its staff!

Recruiting a new generation of students, 2016-style. These secondary students, photographed at Toitū Otago Settlers Museum, were attending a ‘hands-on history’ course run by the university. Photograph by Jane McCabe, courtesy of the history and art history department.

 

Of pills and potions and poisons

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1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1920s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, chemistry, medicine, pharmacology, pharmacy, physiology, toxicology, Wellington

Making up supplies of the new wonder drug, penicillin, in the pathology department’s sterile solutions unit in 1949. In the 1960s the new pharmacy school took over ‘the factory’. Please get in touch if you can identify the woman in this photo! Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Prime Minister’s Department photograph, Box-184-007, S16-102a.

The University of Otago’s interest in pills and potions and poisons dates back to its earliest years. In his first annual report on the university laboratory, in 1875, chemistry professor James Black listed all the analyses he had carried out for the public and local officials. They ranged widely, from food and drink he tested for adulteration to coal and minerals and cement he tested for quality. Also on the list were some samples which suggest intriguing mysteries: in June 1874 Dr Niven of Roxburgh sent medicine, pills, a piece of tart and some lung balsam for testing, while in October Dr Cole of Tokomairiro sent urine and other samples to be tested for poison. Toxicology was thus at the very origin of Otago’s work in the pharmacology field.

It was the establishment of the medical school, though, which led to the first employment of a specialist in drugs. In 1883 John Macdonald was appointed lecturer in materia medica, as pharmacology was then known. The first medical school historian, Dudley Carmalt Jones, described Macdonald as ‘a big, handsome Scotsman of a striking presence …. a man who never quarrelled, and never did anything unethical’. As well as teaching students about drugs, he gave clinical teaching as one of the Dunedin Hospital honorary staff, his specialty being skin diseases. Macdonald taught materia medica according to ‘Edinburgh tradition’, with long lists of drug preparations to be memorised. Students also learned the practical skills of pharmacy, including the visual recognition of drugs and the making of pills, ointments and potions. These skills were taught at the hospital by its dispenser. The first to teach medical students their pharmacy skills was Dr John Brown, ‘a dear old eccentric teacher’ who was hospital dispenser for many years. This well-known character was apparently quite lenient with the students, but his successor refused to sign them off as ‘fully competent’, only recording that they had ‘regularly attended’; he also suggested that ‘grave danger’ could be avoided if they learned the theory of materia medica before tackling the making of medicines.

Although the early pharmacology lecturers focused on teaching rather than research, there were some interesting studies taking place around the university. As I wrote in an earlier post on this blog, New Zealand’s first home-grown medical graduate, Ledingham Christie, was awarded an MD degree in 1890 for his research into the toxicity of the tutu plant. In time-honoured mad scientist fashion, after observing the effects of the tutu berry on cats, roosters and rabbits he tested it on himself, taking a month to fully recover! Otago’s first physiology professor, John Malcolm, began working on tutin soon after his 1905 arrival, together with research assistant and hospital physician Frank Fitchett. Their authoritative study On the Physiological Action of Tutin was published in 1909. The following year Fitchett – a local lad who had returned to Dunedin after completing the final years of his medical training in Edinburgh – became pharmacology lecturer. Medical students enjoyed his lectures, even though they took place at 8am, for he filled them with a great fund of entertaining anecdotes from his years of medical practice. In 1920 Fitchett was promoted to be part-time professor of clinical medicine and therapeutics. He visited medical schools in England and Scotland to check out their pharmacology programmes; Otago needed to adapt its teaching to meet the changing requirements of the General Medical Council. Practice in hospital dispensing – ‘condemned’ as unnecessary by the council – was dropped from Otago’s medical syllabus and replaced with a practical class, modelled on Edinburgh’s, in the writing and analysing of prescriptions, and observation of the effects of drugs.

In 1940, after Fitchett retired, Otago had the good fortune to recruit the brilliant Horace Smirk to a new full-time professorial post in medicine. He was a Manchester graduate who worked in London and Vienna before becoming pharmacology professor in Cairo; he continued his pioneering work on drug treatment for high blood pressure in Dunedin. The new professor started out with a boosted staff of lecturers and researchers and within a few years had added further to his team. It was largely in honour of Smirk’s work that Otago received a large grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1961 for a new research building. Smirk had ‘tremendous vitality’, recalls Fred Fastier, one of his pharmacology team (later a professor himself). His colleagues wondered if this had something to do with the enormous quantities of tea he consumed; was his ‘curiously strong brew’ converted into something special ‘by a process apparently acquired in the land of Egypt’? It didn’t, however, work the same way for them.

Meanwhile, the Medical Research Council set up a toxicology research unit at Otago in 1955. Frank Denz was recruited back from England to his home country as first director; with a team including chemist Jack Dacre he began work on food additives such as colouring agents, ‘chosen because they were in extensive use but had not had adequate toxicological assessment’. Denz also taught in the pathology department; after his death in 1960 a very small team carried on with toxicology research. In 1968 the MRC convinced Garth McQueen of the pharmacology department to become director of the unit; he was an Australian who came to Otago in 1954 to work on hypertension with Horace Smirk and stayed on as lecturer in clinical pharmacology. In 1964 McQueen established the New Zealand National Poisons Information Centre, inspired by Dacre’s observations during study leave in the United States. It started out as a one-man operation, run from the Dunedin Hospital Emergency Department, and grew into a busy standalone 24/7 public service with an enormous knowledge base; alongside it McQueen developed New Zealand’s Centre for Adverse Drug Reactions and the Intensive Medicines Monitoring Programme (IMMP). Developed in the wake of the thalidomide tragedy, these, too, provided important public services, recognised with dedicated government funding from 1982 (the IMMP closed in 2013 after losing funding).

Another important 1960s development started out in a very small way: in 1963 six students signed on for a new Otago pharmacy degree. Pharmacists had been pushing for higher education for decades. New Zealand had been registering pharmacists since 1881, requiring them to complete an apprenticeship and pass exams; various private colleges developed. In 1960 the profession finally succeeded in getting a new pharmacy diploma course underway at the Central Institute of Technology (CIT); the Otago degree course was intended for those destined for specialist positions as researchers, lecturers, hospital pharmacists or manufacturing pharmacists. Pharmacy academics were thin on the ground, so the vice-chancellor persuaded pharmacologist and ‘born optimist’ Fred Fastier to administer the new course. Two highly regarded local pharmacists – analytical and consulting chemist Roy Gardner and Dunedin Hospital chief pharmacist John Conroy – ‘came to the rescue’ and became part-time lecturers for the specialist pharmacy subjects. The old Dental School Annexe (next to what is now the Marples Building) was converted to provide specialised labs for the pharmacy programme and sterile solutions unit, which pharmacy took over from the pathology department. The sterile unit – better known as ‘the factory’ – had been manufacturing supplies, including solutions of penicillin and other drugs, for many years to sell around the country; the pathology professor had kept it going in the hope it would prove useful for a future pharmacy department.

Pharmacy student Alan McClintock and technician Sandra Barkman identifying ‘unknown’ chemical compounds in Rob McKeown’s pharmaceutical chemistry lab, c.1983. Image courtesy of Hocken Collections, University of Otago Photographic Unit records, MS-4368/085, S16-669c.

There was plenty of demand for Otago pharmacy graduates and lots of interest in the course; the annual intake was quickly increased to 20 and in 1975 to 25. In 1971 Harry Taylor, who had been heading the CIT programme, became Otago’s first pharmacy professor. A 1981 retirement tribute noted that Taylor saw pharmacy flourish ‘in the most decrepit building in the university, with his administrative work performed in an office no bigger than a commodious cupboard’, but in 1985 it finally moved into better accommodation in the renovated Adams Building. The pharmacy programme was also renovated under energetic Canadian professor Donald Perrier, who introduced a more clinical focus to the degree, which was popular with students. The class continued to grow, taking its biggest jump in 1991; that year, following a long period of political wrangling, a degree became the minimum standard of entry to the pharmacy profession, the CIT course closed and all New Zealand pharmacy training shifted to Otago (from 1999 pharmacists could also qualify through the University of Auckland). The pharmacy department was upgraded to become the pharmacy school, with Peter Coville – affectionately known as Papa Smurf – as first dean.

While pharmacy developed its own postgraduate programmes and research, staff in pharmacology, psychology and several medical school clinical departments also continued a wide variety of research concerning pills and potions and poisons. Some of these had big consequences. In the 1970s McQueen and Otago paediatricians were among those who revealed the toxicity of popular antiseptic hexachlorophene on premature babies. It was widely used from the 1950s onwards in the fight against staph outbreaks in maternity hospitals, but carried its own dangers. Perhaps the most dramatic finding concerning prescribed drugs came through a group of young researchers at the Wellington campus in the late 1980s. Physicians Julian Crane and Richard Beasley and pharmacologist Carl Burgess, all from the medicine department, were suspicious that a popular asthma drug, fenoterol (marketed here as Berotec), might be contributing to an unexplained epidemic of asthma deaths. They asked epidemiologist Neil Pearce of the Wellington campus’s public health department to join them in a study. The results, published in the Lancet in 1989, were explosive, revealing an association between asthma deaths and fenoterol. As with many epidemiological studies, the findings proved controversial. The drug manufacturer, Boehringer Ingelheim, conducted a remarkable campaign to discredit the study, but they weren’t the only ones to dispute it: other researchers, including some of Otago’s own, also resisted suggestions that fenoterol was dangerous. Further studies confirmed the asthma research group’s findings and government subsidies for fenoterol were withdrawn; it was research which prevented many asthma deaths in New Zealand and around the world. From investigating suspicious lung balsams in the 1870s to uncovering dangerous asthma inhalers in the 1980s, we have many reasons to be grateful to Otago researchers.

A sporting university

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1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, physical education, recreation, sports

The women’s A grade hockey team of 1920. Back (from left): R. Patterson, W. Elder, G. Lynn, F. Barraclough. Centre: E. Stubbs, H. Sellwood (captain), Prof George Thompson (president), V. White (deputy captain), M. Morton. Front: E. D’Auvergne, I. Preston. From Otago University Review, 1921.

With the Olympics underway, it seems a good time to think about sport! The first serious sporting fixture at the University of Otago involved rugby, though it was a very different sort of game back then. In 1871 there were just 81 students enrolled at Otago, but they managed to muster a team for a 22-a-side football game against Otago Boys High School. It extended over several hours and two Saturdays and ended in a draw. George Sale, the young classics professor and an old boy of Rugby School, played alongside the students, and in 1884 he became inaugural president of the Otago University Rugby Football Club. Cricket wasn’t far behind rugby, with its first match also in 1871, against the Citizens Cricket Club. Cricket historian George Griffiths suggested this first match was ‘archetypal’, for it ‘began disgracefully late, two selected players failed to turn up, and University were resoundingly beaten’. George Sale was again one of the team. Enthusiasts formed a University of Otago Cricket Club in 1876, but it only lasted three seasons; a second attempt survived from 1895 to 1900. The university managed to scratch together teams for one-off matches, but it was in the 1930s that it again managed to get together a club which played regularly in the local competition.

Taking a break during the home science tennis tournament of 1952. Photo courtesy of Sadie Andrews.

Tennis was one of the most popular early sports, for it required few people and could be played by men and women together. In 1884 students petitioned the university council to provide a tennis court and it duly obliged; the students formed a tennis club and within a couple of years had raised funds to lay down a second court. The tennis club, like many, had its ups and downs through the years. In 1890 one of its courts had to make way for the new School of Mines building and this was not the last time tennis courts were to provide an ideal flat site for building expansion; in the 1970s the Archway Lecture Theatres took the place of tennis courts.

The Otago University Bicycle Club, featured in an earlier post, was founded in 1896, and a year later the University Gymnastic Club began meeting weekly for ‘both exercise and amusement’. By 1901 the ‘noble art’ of boxing was an important feature of the club: ‘It is a huge treat to see a couple of junior Meds punching each other vigorously’, noted its correspondent in the Review. The gymnastic club was very short of members though, and may have evolved into the more specialist boxing club, which was up and running by 1910.

Hockey was another favourite with both men and women. ‘The hockeyites are enthusiastic and promise great things’, noted the Review in 1905, when both women’s and men’s clubs got started. Otago women students were early adopters of basketball (known as netball from 1970). This new sport, which some found preferable ‘to the more strenuous game of hockey’ was taking off in Dunedin schools and church organisations. University teams played in local matches in 1915, the year that the Otago Basket Ball Association, New Zealand’s first, was established, and by 1918 there was an established university club. The Golf Club, consisting of ‘some thirty enthusiastic players’, got started in 1920. Later to start than some other sports clubs, but destined for a flourishing future, was the rowing club, founded in 1929. It started out using the facilities of the Otago Rowing Club, but by the late 1930s had acquired its own boats and had dozens of members. In subsequent decades the growing university was able to support an ever-broadening range of sports clubs, from archery and taekwondo to diving and badminton, and of course some students also played for clubs outside the university.

Preparing to set off in the men’s harrier race, 1952. Photo courtesy of Sadie Andrews.

Students didn’t have to join a club to enjoy sports. Many a scratch team was put together for a bit of fun, such as the regular annual footy matches between dental and mining students. Residential colleges promoted sports as well, forming teams and playing against other colleges. Soon after Otago’s second college, Knox, opened in 1909, it began playing tennis, hockey and rugby games against the first college, Selwyn. In 1932 they institutionalised their sporting rivalry with the Cameron Shield, hotly contested in various codes ever since. Arthur Porritt, an early 1920s medical student and Selwyn resident, recalled that ‘statutory work accomplished, we indulged to the maximum extent possible in sport …. “Billy” Fea and Mackereth – two “All Blacks” – were our heroes – and we rejoiced in winning the Inter Varsity Tournament’. Porritt was an outstanding athlete himself, winning a bronze medal in the 100m at the 1924 Olympics in Paris (famously portrayed in the film Chariots of Fire, but with a fictional character representing Porritt). Athletics took off at Otago when the Easter Tournament between the four university colleges commenced in 1902. Soon after that first tournament – hosted and won by Canterbury – Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) presided at the founding meeting of the Otago University Amateur Athletic Club. The club ran annual ‘inter-faculty’ events, where students of Otago’s various faculties competed for athletic glory; they served as trials for the Otago tournament team. In 1923 the athletic club acquired ‘an offspring’, the University Harrier Club, which held Saturday afternoon distance runs. The harrier club reported in 1930 that its ‘finest individual performance’ came from one J. Lovelock, ‘the best distance runner whom Otago University has yet produced’. Jack Lovelock, a medical student of 1929 and 1930, headed to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1931 and became ‘one of the most celebrated of all Olympic champions’, winning gold in the prestigious 1500m race at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Women harriers ready to set off, 1952. Photo courtesy of Sadie Andrews.

Otago students have become sporting stars in many codes through the years. Some came to Otago for its physical education school, which for several decades offered the country’s only sports science tertiary qualification. Many of its alumni became household names, such as netballers Adine Wilson and Anna Rowberry, rugby players Anton Oliver, Josh Kronfeld and Jamie Joseph and cyclist Greg Henderson. Farah Palmer first took rugby seriously after arriving in the south; she went on to lead the Black Ferns to three world cup wins and complete a PhD in physical education. But sports stars came from other disciplines as well. In 1998 Otago claimed a national ‘captaincy treble’: Palmer was captain of the Black Ferns; Taine Randell, a 1997 law and commerce graduate, captain of the All Blacks; and Belinda Colling, a 1998 psychology graduate, captain of the Silver Ferns. Completing a degree while representing your country or province in sport was no easy feat and some sports people dropped out or took longer than usual to finish their studies. In 1990, for instance, John Wright, captain of the New Zealand men’s cricket team, graduated with a BSc in biochemistry, completed after a 15-year break from study. In 2012 the university celebrated when two former students, Hamish Bond and Nathan Cohen, won gold for rowing at the London Olympics; both had studied commerce at Otago before sport took over and they switched to distance education via Massey University. The students’ association recognised its star sportsmen and women with ‘blues’ for outstanding achievements. It also provided financial support for various sports clubs and their facilities. One of the biggest OUSA investments was the Aquatic Centre, opened in 2002 as a new home for the rowing club, which had lost its old premises and boats in a 1999 fire. The splendid facilities presumably contributed to Otago’s long run of success in national and international rowing events in subsequent years.

University sport can be pretty casual! ‘Burgers’ playing volleyball in the spacious surroundings of Helensburgh House, a hall of residence from 1984 to 1991. I’d be delighted to hear from anybody who can identify the year this photo was taken. Photo courtesy of Glenys Roome.

Of course, most students had lesser sporting abilities, and OUSA also developed premises for those who just wanted to keep fit and have fun. Smithells Gym provided room for some indoor activities, but the needs of the physical education school took priority there. OUSA built its Clubs and Societies Building in 1980 to cater for a wide range of activities, and it was soon hosting aerobics classes and weight training. It quickly proved inadequate for the rapidly growing student roll, providing an incentive for the OUSA to take part in a new scheme proposed by the Otago Polytechnic Students Association. The two associations and the university purchased and converted a former stationery factory in Anzac Avenue into the Unipol Recreation Centre, which opened in 1990 and immediately became a hive of physical activity. The university itself developed a recreation services department in 1984, hiring out equipment and organising courses and trips. Recreation services also held the contract to run Unipol. In 2012 Unipol moved to a larger purpose-built space in the new University Plaza building, attracting a jump in student use. Soon afterwards OUSA sold its share of Unipol to the university, unwilling to commit more funds and confident that the university had student needs at heart. Student president Logan Edgar cited the famous example where Unipol had refused a gym booking to the All Blacks ‘when it would have limited the space of students attempting to work out’. OUSA put the proceeds towards a major upgrade of the Clubs and Societies Building (then known as the Recreation Centre), completed in 2014.

This shot of officials at the 1953 interfaculty sports, held at the University Oval, demonstrates the commitment of staff to university sports. From left: Michael Shackleton (medical student), Prof Philip Smithells (Physical Education), Prof Angus Ross (History), Stanley Wilson (Surgery), Prof Bill Adams (Anatomy), Dr Bruce Howie (Pathology), Prof Jack Dodds (Physics), Dr Gil Bogle (Physics). Photo courtesy of Michael Shackleton.

Throughout the university’s history, its students and staff have played an important role in local sport, some as participants and administrators and others as spectators. Indeed, cheering on the local team on the terraces of Carisbrook or, more recently, in ‘the zoo’ at Forsyth Barr Stadium, is an iconic part of ‘scarfie’ culture. This no doubt contributed to the university’s 2014 decision to sponsor the local super rugby team. That decision raised many eyebrows and attracted some opposition, notably from the Tertiary Education Union, unhappy with the extent of spending on marketing within the education sector. Fortunately, the university’s sponsorship coincided with a big improvement in the Highlanders’ results, and when they won the championship in 2015 with ‘University of Otago’ emblazoned on their shirts it was a proud moment for their sponsors. The Highlanders have had another good season, even if they didn’t retain champion status; now it’s time to cheer on our Olympic athletes!

An administrative note

Regular readers may have noticed that this blog post is later than usual. From now on I will be putting up new posts every 4 weeks, rather than every 2. That’s simply because I need to devote more time to writing the book this blog project arose from!

 

Lodgings and landladies

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1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, accommodation, boarding houses, flatting, lodgings, women

Many homes near the campus took in a lodger or two, and larger buildings might become boarding houses. This detail of Forth Street from a 1925 photograph demonstrates the range of housing close to the university – many of these later became student flats. Image courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, The Press (newspaper) negatives collection, reference 1/1-008298-G.

One of the most important characters in student life during the university’s first century was not a member of the university at all, but that notorious figure, the landlady. Original plans for the current Dunedin campus, occupied by the university from the late 1870s, included residential accommodation for both students and professors. However, due to lack of funds the intended ‘boarding establishment’ was dropped, along with some of the staff accommodation (four houses for professors did go ahead – these are now known as Scott/Shand House and Black/Sale House). Students from out of town had to find their own place to live. Independent flatting was unheard of in the university’s first 50 years, and even after the churches set up residential colleges (Selwyn in 1893, Knox in 1909 and St Margaret’s in 1911), private boarding appealed to many as a cheaper option. Local newspapers from the late-19^th and early-20^th centuries include numerous ads from students looking for board, plus a smaller number advertising rooms specifically for students.

We know sadly little about the women who provided this essential service. Some local families had one spare room they rented out to help the household coffers, but many landladies were widows or single women who offered several rooms to lodgers, this being their only source of income. If the premises were large enough – some housed around 10 people – this would be termed a boarding house. An 1884 street directory lists several boarding houses close to the campus: Mrs Henderson Morrison and Mrs Eliza Fisher had boarding houses in Albany Street, Mrs Isabella Maffen in Clarendon Street, Mrs Mary Coles in Dundas Street, Mrs Lucy Stuart in Union Street, and Mrs Margaret Maher in Leith Street; Charles Crapp, also in Leith Street, was one of the few male boarding house keepers. Of course, at that early date, when Otago had just 120 students, many of their boarders were working men and women. As the university grew, students became a larger part of the accommodation market and landladies advertised specifically for them. Caledon House was providing accommodation in Albany Street by the mid-1870s; it provided ‘every convenience’, including harmonium and bath, according to one 1881 advertisement. This and earlier ads made no mention of students, but by 1896 it was listed by then-landlady Mrs Johnston as ‘Private Board and Residence; convenient for students; every home comfort; terms moderate’.

The standard of boarding accommodation varied. In 1890 medical students Charles Hector and Bartholomew Wilford, both from Wellington, boarded with Mrs Taylor. In the manner of every generation of concerned parents, Charles’s father was unhappy to discover him ‘hard at work in a cold room – no fire’, when visiting town. Bart Wilford became ill with rheumatic fever shortly afterwards. He and Charles apparently shared a room, and Bart was moved to the sitting room with a nurse to care for him, while Charles was sent by his father, perhaps concerned for the spread of infection, to other lodgings. When Bart developed possible symptoms of typhoid, Hector’s father wrote to his wife: ‘I have told Charlie that he must not go back to Mrs Taylor’s again. The back premises are not what they should be’ (a discreet reference to the toileting arrangements). Sadly, Bart Wilford died soon afterwards of his acute rheumatic disease.

Ads for student lodgers from the Otago University Review, May 1900.

In 1932 the university council established a new board of control with council, staff and student reps; though prompted by disciplinary issues it was concerned for the well-being of students and its sub-committees included one for lodgings. That committee compiled a list of ‘approved’ lodgings and took some responsibility for their conduct and the matching of students with rooms. Long-serving physics lecturer Agnes Blackie chaired the lodgings committee for some years and recalled the procedure. ‘In early December the chairman visited the approved lodgings to find out about probable vacancies. The landladies would almost unanimously declare that nothing on earth would induce them to take students again. A second visit in January would find them cheered up again and willing to re-enter the fray’. Though Blackie was sometimes called on to make peace between landlady and lodgers, she found complaints about student boarders were rare. She developed considerable respect for these women: ‘I came to have a kindly feeling for the landladies; many of them were battle-scarred veterans who had conducted lodgings for many years, terribly over-worked, but very proud of their past students and what they had done in life’. After Blackie’s stint, the administration of the lodgings committee was taken over by a part-time lodgings registrar; this later evolved into the student accommodation office.

Students were not always easy lodgers. In a 1953 publication on residential halls, Harold Turner pointed out that a shortage of good private accommodation was partly students’ own responsibility: ‘The householder whose peace was disturbed at 3 o’clock by lodgers returning from a party, who finds his electric heater left on all night, the bedding burnt by cigarettes, ink splashed on the furnishings, bicycles repaired in the bedroom or his lodger in bed with his boots on, will not be inclined to accept students the following year’. A word of advice appeared in the 1946 Otago University Review: ‘Suppose you get something (wherein at home you would only kennel an ill-favoured cur), then let tact and discretion be your motto. Don’t comment audibly on the odd-looking whiskery old goat in the picture above the mantelpiece – it is probably the relict’s late lamented. Also, take your boots off when you pinch her coal, for be you never so scientific, you cannot explain that keeping the light burning till 2 a.m. makes you an economic proposition at fifty shillings a week’.

Some fortunate lodgers could enjoy ‘all the comforts of home’, but many experienced frustrations with ‘petty restrictions and nagging concerning the use of various facilities’. There was often, noted Turner, ‘inadequacy in the physical conditions, in the lighting, heating, provision for privacy or for quietness for study’. This was, of course, the payback for cheap accommodation. That cheapness was important, because it opened the world of university education to people of humbler means. The working class origins of most landladies also played a role in keeping students from middle class or more privileged backgrounds in touch with the concerns of working people as they dined at their table each day. Most landladies provided regular cooked meals and this was a big convenience for students.

As the number of places in residential colleges grew and flatting became popular, private board began a terminal decline and the landlady became a rare beast. Flats might be just as cold, dark and noisy as a boarding house, but they offered a new level of freedom, which became an increasing priority for young people. Boarding places couldn’t keep up with the growing student roll anyway. There was a ‘diminishing number of old fashioned land ladies’, noted the 1965 accommodation office report, though there was always a response to university appeals to the public to take in boarders. That year 12% of all Otago students were living in private board, down from 17% in 1957; by 1975 the number had plummeted to 3%.

‘Your typical landlady can be classified under two headings – a) Avaricious. b) Maternal’, wrote a 1940s student. Some were eccentric, some irritating, and others much loved. Do you have any stories to share of landladies? I’d love to hear more personal stories about these great characters from Otago’s past!

Economics – science, art or business?

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1870s, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, accounting, economics, history, mathematics, mental science, statistics

Michael Cooper, professor of economics from 1976 to 1994, gives a lecture. Cooper, whose field of expertise was health economics, also held various senior management roles and chaired the Otago Area Health Board during his time at the university. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, 692.00119, S13-217i.

Economics is sometimes derided as the ‘dismal science’, but where does it fit in the taxonomy of academic subjects? Is it a science, an art, or a commercial subject? At Otago the answer has varied through the years. Political economy, as economics was officially termed here until 1916, was one of the founding disciplines of the university. That is hardly surprising for an institution established in a place where new theories of colonisation had been attempted in practice and where a large gold rush had recently occurred: economic theory was a visible force.

In the early days, with few staff, subjects had to be yoked together. Political economy came under the umbrella of mental science, which also covered mental and moral philosophy (or, as we now call them, psychology and philosophy). The first mental science professor, Duncan MacGregor, initially offered a course combining ethics and economics to senior students, but by the late 1870s political economy was a stand-alone course. From 1881 political economy became the responsibility of the new professor of English, John Mainwaring Brown. The calendar for 1882 reveals a course covering six topics: the nature and history of economic science; the production of wealth; the distribution of wealth; attempts to improve the present system of distribution; the exchange of wealth; and the economic functions of governments. After Mainwaring Brown disappeared during a tramping expedition in Fiordland in 1888, the university council decided his replacement as professor should be responsible for English alone, with political economy taught by a separate lecturer. Various lecturers followed, with gaps between appointments meaning economics wasn’t taught in some years; from 1895 to 1906 Frederick Gibbons, who had been Otago’s mathematics professor since 1886, also served as economics lecturer.

The next lecturer, the popular Harry Bedford, was one of Otago’s own graduates. Though still in his twenties he had an impressive CV: he had served a term in parliament, and practised law while lecturing at Otago. Initially appointed to economics, he later added history and law to his lecturing portfolio, and when the university created a new chair in economics and history in 1915 he became professor. Bedford was an inspiring teacher who also led classes for the Workers’ Educational Association; he was much mourned when he drowned in 1918. While an acting professor – Archdeacon Woodthorpe – was appointed, the university council felt the time had now come to separate the growing disciplines of economics and history. In 1920 – almost fifty years after first offering classes in political economy – Otago for the first time appointed a professor solely responsible for the teaching of economics.

Meanwhile, the growing university in 1913 arranged itself into faculties: arts/science, dentistry, home science, law/commerce, medicine and mines. Economics was part of the arts/science faculty, and when the arts and sciences split into separate faculties in 1944 it remained with the arts. Most students in economics in the first half of the twentieth century completed a BA degree, but there was also a growing group of commerce students. The BCom degree was introduced by the University of New Zealand, which awarded all degrees in this country, in 1905 and in 1912 Otago began teaching commerce subjects. Most students – and lecturers – were part-time and many were interested only in completing a professional qualification in accountancy, but for those who wanted to complete the full commerce degree course, economics was compulsory.

There was clearly considerable cooperation between the arts and commerce faculties in arranging economics courses to suit all students. In 1920, for instance, ‘the principles of economics’ offered ‘a general introduction to the subject’, covering ‘production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of wealth; the economic functions of government; the elementary principles of taxation’. This was a course designed for the commercial accountants’ exam. The ‘pass degree’ course covered similar material but with ‘more detailed study of prices, money, and banking, and elementary trade’. Other courses available for honours and bachelors’ degrees included ‘advanced economics’, ‘currency and banking’, ‘logical and statistical methods’, ‘economic history of England’ and ‘economic geography’.

The wide range of courses offered set a challenge for the economics staff, but this didn’t prevent an enviable level of research, publication and public engagement. One of New Zealand’s earliest PhDs was earned in Otago’s economics department by Walter Boraman in 1929; he researched the history of public finance in New Zealand. In the early 1930s Professor Allan Fisher and lecturer Geoffry Billing (who became professor himself in 1947) both studied abroad thanks to Rockefeller Fellowships, with Fisher also taking a year’s leave to act as economic advisor to the Bank of New South Wales. Student numbers remained small, but started to grow rapidly, like the rest of the university, in the 1960s; the stage one class had to be split in 1970.

In 1952 Professor Billing, previously dean of the arts faculty, became dean of the commerce faculty. Economics was now part of both these faculties, though it continued to be administered through the arts faculty. Billing raised the possibility of a new combined faculty of economics and commerce, but nothing came of the suggestion at that time. Tom Cowan, the accountancy professor who succeeded Billing as commerce dean in 1960, wrote much later that ‘there was some fear of dominance by Economics, as indeed happened in some universities overseas’. Cowan, too, advocated a closer relationship: ‘With my own background in Economic studies, I am convinced that tendencies within New Zealand universities for Economics departments to distance themselves from Commerce departments have been contrary to the national interest’. There was a need, he suggested, ‘to bridge a gap that seems to disregard the common ground and interdependence of economic and business studies’.

In 1989 the University of Otago was restructured into the four academic divisions which survive to this day: health sciences, sciences, humanities and commerce (also known as the school of business). Over the preceding decade the number of commerce students had risen rapidly, from around 10% of Otago student enrolments to over 20%; by 1988 about three-quarters of economics majors were working towards commerce rather than arts degrees. Given a choice between the humanities and commerce divisions, the economics department chose to go with commerce. This was a sad loss to the humanities, but a real boon to commerce, which now gained the full commitment of one of the university’s oldest disciplines. The fine scholarly record of the economics department proved critical to the division as research funding became ever more important; some of the other commerce disciplines did not have strong research traditions and economics gave the business school more credit with other scholars and, more importantly, with funders. Economics remained a subject available for both arts and commerce degrees; from 1999 it was also available as part of the philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) major for a BA. But economics also had a wider reach, appearing on the BSc schedule from 2002 as part of a major in economics and statistics, and from 2012 as a major on its own.

The issue of where economics fits as a discipline is a subject of considerable philosophical debate. At Otago, the answer is that it is an art, a science and a business! For over a century it was under the rule of the arts, but in the 1980s commerce took over. Throughout, it has been a popular subject with a strong research record. Do you have any memories to share of the ‘dismal science’ at Otago?

Preparing for the health professions

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1870s, 1880s, 1900s, 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, anthropology, biochemistry, biology, chemistry, dentistry, English, mathematics, medical laboratory science, medicine, pharmacy, physics, physiotherapy

A familiar sight to HSFY students of recent years – popular teacher Tony Zaharic of the biochemistry department. Image courtesy of University of Otago Marketing and Communications.

Health Sciences First Year (HSFY) is a term very familiar to anybody who has been around the university over the past couple of decades. Students aiming to enter one of Otago’s undergraduate health science degrees – dentistry, medical laboratory science, medicine, pharmacy and physiotherapy – complete this shared course in their first year of university study. Entry to the professional degrees is also available to some graduates, but most come via the HSFY course, which brings a large number of students to Otago. The course has undergone a few changes since it first appeared under this guise in 1998 and it was built on a much older tradition of the ‘intermediate’ year; I thought it would be interesting to look back over the long history of first year health science courses.

When the medical school started out in the 1870s it could only offer the first two years of a medical course and students headed overseas – most often to Edinburgh – to complete their training. Prospective doctors had to register as medical students, which required them to pass a ‘preliminary examination in general education’. Once registered, medical students started out on their two-year course in chemistry, biology, anatomy, physiology, surgery and clinical instruction at the hospital. From 1885 students could complete their entire medical course at Otago. To obtain a New Zealand medical degree, they needed to pass an intermediate exam, followed by three professional exams. The intermediate exam covered a general university science prospectus of biology, physics and chemistry.

The dental school opened in 1907, offering a four-year degree, later extended to five years. Students had to formally register for the course and this required passing the same preliminary exam as medical students. Also like medical students, they took the standard first-year courses in physics and chemistry, but added to the biology requirement was a course in dental anatomy. There was little rest for dental and medical students, for as soon as their first-year exams were over they commenced their specialist courses with a ‘summer term’. For many years there was, however, no competition for places: anybody who could pay the fees, complete the courses and pass the exams could qualify as a doctor or dentist.

In 1941, faced with rising student numbers and significant overcrowding, the Otago medical school for the first time limited entry to its second-year classes, initially to 100 students. Some places were reserved for graduates and people repeating second year, but for most students entry came through obtaining the best exam marks in the intermediate course. No intermediate medical student could afford to rest on their laurels now: competition for entry to medical school varied from year to year but was generally tough. Some of those who did not gain entry to the medical course instead enrolled for dentistry. From 1945 the specialist dental course disappeared from first year and prospective dentists took exactly the same intermediate course as prospective doctors, that is, first-year chemistry, physics and biology (zoology and botany). Unsurprisingly, the dental course then became crowded, exacerbated by an influx of returned servicemen to university. From 1947 entry to second-year classes in the dental school was also limited, initially to 50 places.

Dental students working in the prosthetics lab in 1949. Before reaching this stage they had to overcome the hurdle of a competitive intermediate year. From left: Brian Arkinstall, Jim Armour, Reece Baker, Clive Bayley, Rod Beattie and Nick Bebich. Image courtesy of Elaine Donaldson.

The medical school began offering a Bachelor of Pharmacy degree in the 1960s, though most New Zealand pharmacists trained through a technical institute diploma course until 1991, when Otago’s newly independent school of pharmacy became the country’s sole training programme for pharmacists. The intermediate year for pharmacy was the same as that for medicine or dentistry – chemistry, biology and physics.

The intermediate health science courses remained essentially unchanged for many years, though there were of course some changes to the content of the basic science courses, reflecting new scientific developments. Over time, though, questions arose about the suitability of the criteria for entry to health science courses: did New Zealanders want their doctors and dentists selected purely through their ability to obtain top marks in science exams? Academic ability and scientific understanding were clearly important, but the best health professionals also needed some sympathetic understanding of the human condition and good communication skills. Extensive changes to the medical curriculum in the 1970s included modifications to the long-standing biology/chemistry/physics requirement of the intermediate course. From 1973 students took four subjects in their intermediate year: chemistry, biology and any two subjects of their choice from the arts or sciences (those who hadn’t got 50% or more in either maths or physics at bursary level had to include one of those among the two options). While some students stuck with the sciences, others branched out, with anthropology a popular choice. From 1981 students without an arts background were forced to think more laterally, as those without 50% or more in an arts subject at bursary level had to include an arts paper in their medical intermediate programme. The dentistry intermediate also added a fourth subject, taken in any of the arts and sciences, in 1980. Pharmacy retained a more scientific focus for longer. It added a statistics paper to its biology, chemistry and physics intermediate year from 1975. It was not until 1988 that pharmacy intermediates had a wider choice: they could then choose between physics and statistics, freeing them up to take their fourth course from any within the science, arts or commerce offerings.

Concerns remained about the communication skills of the medical profession. In 1993 the English department introduced a new paper primarily designed for health science students (though also open to others): ‘language, style and communication’, an ‘introduction to the fundamentals of effective speaking and writing’. This became a compulsory part of the intermediate years for medicine and pharmacy, unless a student had a good pass in bursary English; dental students were also advised to take an approved English paper from 1995.

1998 brought the biggest change yet to intermediate courses, with a completely revamped programme named Health Sciences First Year. Controversially, the course had to be taken in Dunedin; previously students had been able to complete their intermediate year at any university. Cynics noted that this increased Otago’s student numbers and thereby its funding. This was undoubtedly true, but there were also sound academic reasons behind the change. First, it was difficult to make fair comparisons between applicants who had obtained their grades in intermediate subjects at a variety of institutions. Second, and more important, Otago could now tailor its Stage 1 courses more closely to the needs of the health sciences and transfer some of the overcrowded specialist curriculum into first year. The course included two brand new compulsory papers – foundations of biochemistry, and chemistry: molecular reactivity – together with the biology of cells and biology for health sciences. Students without exemptions also needed to complete introductory physics, introductory biostatistics and the English language, style and communication paper. Students needed a total of 8 papers, leaving them to choose between 1 and 4 other subjects. This course became the common intermediate year for medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, medical laboratory science and physiotherapy degrees. The change was most radical for physiotherapy, which previously had a tightly-structured first year programme with papers specifically designed for the profession (the Bachelor of Physiotherapy degree was jointly taught by the university and Otago Polytechnic from 1991, with the university taking sole responsibility from 1996).

HSFY was modified over the years to cater for changing health priorities and learning needs. Biostatistics morphed into epidemiology, a specialist biological physics paper was added, the compulsory English paper was dropped (except for those who failed a diagnostic test) and in 2007 a new acronym – HUBS – entered the Otago lexicon. ‘Human body systems’ replaced the former biology papers; it was a significant modification aimed at improving students’ self-directed learning skills. Throughout, the HSFY course attracted many enrolments and competition for entry to second-year classes in the professional degrees remained intense. Debate continued – and will probably never end – over selection methods. Grades remain the number one criterion, but some courses now also require prospective students to pass a psychometric test, the Undergraduate Medicine and Health Sciences Admission Test (UMAT), a widely-used tool devised in Australia. At Otago UMAT became part of the admission process for medicine in 2003, for dentistry in 2005 and for medical laboratory science in 2007; the dental school also interviewed prospective students from 2005. For some decades a number of places have been reserved for the best Maori and Pasifika applicants, because New Zealand needs more Pacific Island and Maori health professionals, while more recently the medical and dental programmes have also targeted students from rural backgrounds with a commitment to rural practice, to help overcome serious shortages of rural health practitioners.

Are you a survivor of HSFY or one of the older intermediate courses? Do you have any memories to share?

The cost of an education

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1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, allowances, bursaries, fees, loans, scholarships

Students protest about the rising costs of education, 28 September 1993. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, OUSA archives, AG-540/011, S15-500b.

How much did you pay for your degree? This year marks the 25^th anniversary of the introduction of the ‘user pays’ philosophy into New Zealand tertiary education, so I thought it would be interesting to look back over university fees through Otago’s history. Comparing costs over a long period is not straightforward, but fortunately the Reserve Bank’s inflation calculator at least allows us to take inflation into account. In the graph below, I have calculated the total compulsory annual fees for the cheapest degree, a Bachelor of Arts, at every tenth year – these include tuition fees, exam fees (a substantial additional cost until the 1960s), various administration fees and students’ association fees. I adjusted these totals according to the Consumer Price Index to 2015 equivalent values, giving a rough idea of the changing ‘real’ costs over the years.

Otago students made a substantial financial contribution towards the cost of their education in early years, but fees remained unchanged for long periods and with inflation their real costs declined. In 1920 tuition fees were much the same as they had been in 1880, at three guineas (£3 3s) for each ‘standard’ course (an arts subject, for instance) plus an administration fee of one guinea (£1 1s). Examination fees – payable to the University of New Zealand – added costs of a guinea per subject (and there were also additional one-off charges for the award of a degree, not included here). From 1890 there were also students’ association fees to take into account: in 1920 these amounted to 10s 6d for men and 7s 6d for women (the gender differential disappeared soon afterwards).

Specialist degrees cost more. The 1920 calendar advised that the total tuition, administration, OUSA and University of New Zealand fees for a five-year medical degree came to £177 9s ($15,728 in 2015 values), provided it was completed in the minimum time; for the many who repeated years it would cost more. At the same time a four-year dentistry degree would set a student back £120 15s ($10,702 in 2015 values) and a four-year home science degree cost around 55 guineas ($5119 in 2015 values).

Fees were relatively high again in 1930 and 1940, but declined steadily in real terms through the 1950s before jumping significantly in the mid-1960s; by 1968 they had reached their highest level to date. The 1970s and 1980s were decades of high inflation. While OUSA fees crept up as a consequence, tuition fees remained unchanged from 1968 to 1981, meaning a very significant decline in real costs; small rises through the 1980s were well below the rate of inflation and by 1989 compulsory annual fees were at their lowest ever level: tuition fees cost $288, OUSA fees were $101.20 and the welfare service fee $26.40, making a total of $415.60, equivalent to $754 in 2015 values.

In 1990 tuition fees jumped due to major government reforms, part of the neoliberal revolution of that era. Tertiary education, once seen as a public good, was redefined as a private benefit to which students should make a more significant financial contribution: ‘user pays’ was the mantra of the age. OUSA campaigned vigorously against the change. In 1989 over 5000 members joined a protest march, over 4000 signed a petition and over 3000 wrote to banks opposing a proposed loans scheme. Other than a delay to the loans scheme, such protests (which took place all over the country) were to no avail and Otago’s tuition fees quadrupled overnight, from $288 in 1989 to $1250 in 1990. Worse was to come as the new National government came to power in 1990 and continued the reforms commenced by the Fourth Labour Government. The government steadily reduced the level of funding per student, leaving universities no choice but to increase their fees; by 2000 tuition costs to students had doubled again and they continued to rise steadily through the twenty-first century. One rationale behind the reduction in government funding per student was to offer more places and make tertiary education more widely available; that was achieved, as student numbers grew, but it came at a heavy cost to students.

Of course, fees do not tell the whole story; they don’t even account for the entire cost of study. All students had to purchase text books and many had extra expenses for field trips, equipment and so on. These could be considerable. To take just one example, 1920 dental students (mentioned above) could expect to pay about £8 for books and £36 for instruments (a total of $3900 in 2015 values), increasing their course costs by more than a third. Though they could use these items once they had graduated, or sell them on, they still had to come up with the funds to begin with. Accommodation and living costs were another considerable financial burden for students. Unlike fees, these tended to keep pace with inflation, meaning their real costs did not fluctuate so dramatically through the years.

On the other side of the ledger was student income. There were always scholarships – funded by the government, the university or benefactors – for the most gifted students, but what of the average student? In Otago’s early decades few people from working class backgrounds made it to university; it was simply beyond their financial means and many did not even attend secondary school. Some wealthy university students were supported by their parents, but others generally had to work while studying part-time. Many classes were held in the evenings to cater for the large number of students who worked full-time, frequently as teachers, and Otago was sometimes known as ‘the night school on the Leith’.

In 1907 the government introduced bursaries which covered tuition fees for those who obtained credit in the scholarship exam, but were not among the handful eligible for a scholarship. This still provided for only the top echelon of students. Over the next fifty years new provisions evolved and by 1959 – the year of the Parry Report on New Zealand universities – there was an array of schemes offering assistance to about 60% of New Zealand students. The level of support, however, was low – many received only the cost of all or part of tuition fees, with no living allowance. Meanwhile, generous grants, covering both tuition and living costs, were paid to those on teacher studentships, though this bonded recipients to government service after graduation. The report suggested ‘more generous general bursaries are required in order to induce more young people to forgo immediate earning power and undertake full-time university study.’

From 1962 a more generous scheme essentially paid the tuition fees of all students eligible for entrance to university. In addition, full-time students with Higher School Certificate, plus those without HSC who had passed a first-year course, received a bursary. With the addition of vacation earnings, most students could survive on this bursary and full-time study became more accessible (particularly to men, who could earn more in holiday work than women). With various modifications this bursary scheme remained in place until 1989, although payments did not always keep pace with inflation and holiday work was not always readily available. The economic reforms of the late 20^th century spelled the end of this bursary scheme, and from 1989 students received a less generous student allowance, means-tested according to parental income (or their own income if 25 years or older). In 1992 the student loan scheme began and students, who now had to pay for rapidly increasing tuition fees, could borrow from the government to fund their study. Student loans initially charged interest from the time they were drawn down. From 2001 interest was not charged until a student had left education, and interest was abolished in 2006 for those who remained living in New Zealand. Over time, access to allowances tightened up and more and more students needed to borrow to cover living costs as well as fees, with increasing complaints of the inadequacy of student allowances; many students accumulated large debts.

Ready access to a full-time Otago education is no longer limited to the well-off or the very clever, as it was in the university’s early decades. But the broadening of participation has been accompanied by higher fees and lower allowances, with government loans becoming the means to tertiary education for those without privileged backgrounds. Scholarships are now more important than ever for those who want to graduate without a large burden of debt, and the University of Otago recognises this: a recent announcement of new and improved entrance scholarships will be welcome news for some.

Another photograph of the Otago student protest against rising fees, 28 September 1993. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, OUSA archives, AG-540/011, S15-500a.

The first medical graduate

Tags

1870s, 1880s, medicine

Dr WL Christie, photographed during World War I, when he served as a surgeon in the British Army. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, MS-1643/011, S14-650a.

New Zealand’s first home-grown medical graduate had an interesting career and deserves to be better known. Working towards that end is another Otago medical graduate, Ron Easthope, who is now retired after a long career in cardiology in Wellington. Ron has recently written a biography of Ledingham Christie and kindly allowed me to use it for this story.

After early administrative delays, Otago’s medical school got underway properly with a two-year course in the late 1870s. In their first year, students took courses in anatomy, chemistry, zoology and botany, and in their second year had clinical training. They then proceeded overseas – most often to Edinburgh – to complete their medical training. In 1883 the university gained official approval for the expansion of the medical school to offer a full medical course, which then took four years. The first local candidate, William Ledingham Christie (known as Ledingham Christie), had already started his course – he passed classes in chemistry, biology and anatomy in 1882, and in mental science, senior anatomy and surgery in 1883.

Christie was born in Dunedin in 1860; his parents William and Mary had arrived from Scotland a few years earlier. William had some success in the goldrush at Gabriel’s Gully and used the proceeds to build the Caledonian Hotel in Dunedin. But Mary did not like their children growing up in the hotel environment, and in 1869 they sold up and established a farm at Warepa, in South Otago. Ledingham, like the rest of the Christie children, did his share of work on the farm, but by the age of 17 he was teaching school. After receiving tutoring in his spare time, he passed the matriculation exam which enabled him to start at university in 1882.

After successfully completing the first two years of the medical course, Christie took a year’s break and went back school teaching until the university had appointed the necessary staff. In 1885 he was able to return to his full-time studies. As Dorothy Page comments in her history of the medical school, Christie was “just the sort of person for whom the course was intended, as there was no way his family could have found the money to send him to Britain.” Easthope notes that Christie lived in spartan lodgings and his parents, though perhaps unable to spare him cash, helped in other ways: “He learned to take with a good grace the smiles and jokes of his fellow students who met him when carrying to his lodging a side of bacon or other offering from the farm.” After completing his course in 1886, Christie was duly capped as the University of New Zealand’s first MB (Bachelor of Medicine) in October 1887.

Ledingham Christie set up in general practice, first in Outram and then in Milton. His zest for learning remained strong and in 1890 he was awarded an MD degree for his research into the toxicity of the tutu plant. In time-honoured mad scientist fashion, after observing the effects of the tutu berry on cats, roosters and rabbits he tested it on himself, taking a month to fully recover!

In 1892 Christie travelled to England, having employed a locum for his practice and placed his young daughter in the care of her grandmother (his wife had died of puerperal sepsis four years earlier). He intended to obtain advanced qualifications in surgery and return to New Zealand, but ended up spending the rest of his career overseas. He acquired his Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1894. By then he had run out of money, with his practice back in New Zealand collapsing early on after the locum left. After taking a couple of locum positions in England himself, later that year he became house surgeon at the Bristol Hospital for Sick Children and Women.

Christie was horrifed at the standard of treatment provided at the Bristol hospital, and after campaigning unsuccessfully for improvements he left after a year. Determined to improve the health of poor children, he remained in Bristol, setting up a clinic to treat babies, educate their mothers and train women volunteers (later replaced by professional staff) as health visitors. Christie was also elected to the Board of Guardians for the Poor and the Bristol City Council, where he continued his work to improve the lot of the disadvantaged of the city. His wife Ethel, who assisted in his work, wrote: “He was easily the best known man in the city and became almost legendary, not by any seeking of his own but by a natural consequence of his collisions with ‘vested interests’ in the attainment of such aims as clean milk, decent houses, regular work, efficient hospitals & higher education.”

By 1911 the Bristol city authorities were starting to take over the work with disadvantaged children and Christie felt he could ease up on his highly demanding career. He considered practising in London, but instead another new adventure beckoned – he became medical officer for the Borneo Company in Sarawak. In this isolated location (communication with the outside world was through a weekly steamer from Singapore) he ran a hospital and laboratory, taking care of the medical needs of a wide range of patients, including Javanese from the rubber estates, Chinese miners and shop keepers, Sikhs, Tamils and Malays.

On the outbreak of World War I the Christies returned to England (taking an interesting journey there via China, Russia and Scandinavia). Ledingham, who was now 55 years old, wanted to do his bit, and convinced the British Army to take him on as a surgeon. He spent the next 3 years operating on troops at military hospitals in England. He was a popular member of the team, but ill-health eventually forced him to leave late in 1918. After the war Christie was keen to return to Asia. For six months he served as locum for a friend who was an eye surgeon in Singapore, and then spent a very busy year in charge of a hospital of the Duff Development Company in Kelantan (Malaysia). After retiring due to illness, Christie died in 1920 on the way back to England and was buried at sea near Suez. His widow Ethel then trained in bacteriology and became involved in ground-breaking microbiology research; she also did relief work in Russia during the 1920s and later provided support for Russian refugees in England.

Ledingham Christie’s portrait – presented by Ethel Christie – now hangs prominently in the Otago medical library. The university can certainly take pride in its very first medical graduate. He was intelligent, hard-working, adventurous and determined; above all he led a life dedicated to serving humanity.

I am most grateful to Ron Easthope for sharing his work on the lives of Ledingham and Ethel Christie. If you’d like to learn more, copies of his biography of Ledingham are available at the Hocken and Dunedin medical  libraries. And all are welcome to a talk Ron is giving this week to the Wellington Medical History Society: ‘William Ledingham Christie: the remarkable life and times of Otago Medical School’s first graduate’ (Wednesday 4 February 2015 at 7pm, Small Lecture Theatre, University of Otago, Wellington).

Since this is my first blog post for 2015, a happy new year to regular readers. This year I’ll be putting up a new story every second Monday morning. While I enjoy blogging the previous weekly schedule was a bit demanding – I need to dedicate more time to writing the actual book!

From natural philosophy to physics

Tags

1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, benefactors, mathematics, physics

The physics staff and senior students in 1926. Seated are (from left) lecturer Agnes Blackie, Professor Robert Jack and lecturer Robert Nimmo, who was about to head to England for postgraduate research and would eventually succeed Jack as professor. Everybody has signed their name on the back of the photo, but I haven’t been able to match all the names and faces. Others include Helen Thomson, Phyllis Sutton, Allan Harrington, James Horn, William Somerville and Harold Taylor, who would all graduate BSc in 1927, plus Doris Wheatley and Evelyn Franklin. Later departmental photos show Agnes Blackie surrounded by men, but physics was clearly less of a male bastion in 1926! Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Department of Physics archives, MS-3846 Box 2, S06-516.

I’ve written about the beginnings of various departments created in the 20th century, but this week I look at the early decades of a subject which has been around for much longer: physics. John Shand was one of Otago’s first professors, appointed to the chair of mathematics and natural philosophy in 1870. “Natural philosophy” was an old term for “the study of natural bodies and the phenomena connected with them.” By the 1860s it was being overtaken by the term “physics”, though less so in Scotland; this may explain why Otago stuck with the traditional “natural philosophy” for its professor until the 1920s. Shand concentrated on teaching maths to begin with, but in 1881 and then from 1884 onwards he provided specialist classes in physics. As the university grew, the council appointed additional professors. In 1886 mathematics and natural philosophy were divided into two chairs; Shand chose to continue with physics and drop maths.

One of the remarkable features of physics at Otago is that until 1948 it had just two professors. Shand retired after 43 years of service and his successor, Robert Jack, after a mere 34 years. So, for nearly eight decades these two men had enormous influence on the research and teaching of physics in this country. I’ve written about both previously on this blog (here for Shand, and here for Jack). They were well remembered by many students, including health science students who sometimes struggled through their compulsory physics course! “Bobbie” Jack also became famous among the wider public as a pioneer of radio broadcasting. The professors weren’t the only long-serving staff, though: Agnes Blackie was assistant and then lecturer from 1919 to 1958, and Stan Hughes was a technician from the early 1920s to 1978.

Professors are important figures in university departments today, but once upon a time they held greater sway. Agnes Blackie, who started out as a student in 1915, recalled that they got to know their professors well, for “the professor was the whole department. In some of the larger departments – English, Physics, Chemistry – there might be an assistant who marked essays or practical books or helped with practical classes. For the rest, the professor did everything, gave every lecture, supervised every practical class.” She remembered Jack was “a bundle of nervous energy” whose workload meant “he curtailed his hours for sleep. He gave at least seventeen lectures a week, never giving a lecture without preparing it the night before; demonstrated eight hours weekly in the first year laboratory; spent a great deal of time helping students in the advanced laboratories; and then there was all the rest he had to do.”

Calendars for the 1890s outline the courses taught in Shand’s day. They provided broad coverage of various aspects of physics: heat, sound, light, static electricity, magnetism and current electricity. Textbooks included Deschanel’s Natural Philosophy, Garnett’s Heat, Tait’s Light, Thomson’s Electricity and Stewart and Gee’s Elementary Practical Physics; the advanced class used Maxwell’s Theory of Heat and Treatise on Electricity; Glazebrook’s Physical Optics and Gray’s Absolute Measurements in Electicity and Magnetism. As well as these physics courses, Shand taught the paper in elementary mechanics and hydrostatics: this was classed as part of mathematics by the University of New Zealand, but considered a traditional part of natural philosophy. When David Richards, who had an engineering background, became Professor of Mathematics in 1907, Shand handed over to him the teaching of mechanics, which was then renamed applied mathematics.

Shand and Jack were both renowned as thorough and clear lecturers, often faced with students who had been inadequately prepared at high school. Demonstrations kept their classes interesting. Blackie recalled that Jack’s lectures “were amply illustrated with applicances that the lecturer obviously enjoyed demonstrating. Wheels ran up hill, gyroscopes performed strange feats, waves ran along ropes, strings and tuning forks vibrated in resonance, light turned itself into brilliant colours, sparks cracked from electric generators, and I for one sat there fascinated.”

A generous bequest to the university by watchmaker Arthur Beverly, who died in 1907, provided a boost to the teaching of physics and mathematics with scholarships and funding for additional staff. In 1909 Thomas Hamilton became the Beverly Demonstrator in Physics, “the first adequately paid assistant any professor ever had,” according to university historian WP Morrell. In 1915 funds from the bequest also allowed the appointment of a “mechanic” – I guess we would now call him a technician – for the physics department. Another generous endowment, this time from the Mackenzie family of Walter Peak Station, enabled the appointment of Charles Focken, a Melbourne and Oxford graduate, as Beverly-Mackenzie lecturer in physics from 1926.

Physics has been located in the Science III building since 1977; prior to that it was in the “physics building” – the southernmost extension of the main clocktower building. The extension was built in the early 1920s, taking over the space once occupied by a large silver birch tree (transplanted to the Andersons Bay home of the architect, Edmund Anscombe) and a tennis court. Before getting its new wing, physics was squeezed into the original part of the clocktower building, together with many other departments. Laboratory work took place underground, in the basement.

I’ll close this post with a little inspiration from Agnes Blackie, who wrote some wonderful reminscences of her many years at Otago. She was a true fan of her subject: “I can’t imagine a better subject for a lecturer. Brimful of interest, it illumines and explains the world of everyday experience yet leads out in the furthest realms of space and inwards to the intriuging mysteries of the very small.” Long live the physics department!