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!

 

The first residential college

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1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Knox, Selwyn, theology

The first Selwyn building, photographed in the early 1900s. Another storey was added in 1930, together with a new wing. On the left is the Selwyn Collegiate School building, erected in 1907. After the school closed in 1911 it became part of the college. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Selwyn College archives, 84-086/062, S16-503a.

There are many friendly rivalries between the University of Otago’s 15 residential colleges, but there’s one honour that nobody can ever take away from Selwyn College: that of being the oldest. It opened in 1893, but the planning behind it went back another twenty years or so, almost to the university’s beginnings. As I explained in a recent post, when the university moved from the centre of town to its current Dunedin campus in the late 1870s it had to abandon initial plans of providing student accommodation due to lack of funds. Students who couldn’t stay at home needed to find their own place to live, generally in private board. Over the years the cash-strapped university naturally prioritised teaching facilities when it planned new developments, and the idea of providing student residences fell well down the wish list. Studholme, which opened in 1915 to provide both accommodation and practical experience to home science students, was the only university-initiated hall of residence until Unicol opened as a centennial project in 1969.

The churches and – in the case of Arana and Carrington – groups of community-minded Christians, stepped in to fill what they saw as a need. Church people were concerned for the well-being of their own young people who came to Otago from all over New Zealand to study in its ‘special’ schools, including medicine, dentistry and mining. Residential colleges enabled them to provide oversight and pastoral care to students. In the case of the first two colleges – Selwyn and Knox – they also had connections to theological training.

Selwyn was the brainchild of Samuel Nevill, first Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Dunedin (which covered all of Otago and Southland). The southern church was small and short of funds, but Nevill was determined to set up theological training locally and began a long fundraising campaign for a college in 1872. As he later remarked, ‘however much we may desire to obtain clergy who have had the great advantage of Home [that is, English] training, we cannot afford to rely only upon such a source of supply’. Also in 1872, two students started out as candidates for the Anglican ministry, living in Nevill’s own home (thanks to a wealthy wife, he had built his own substantial residence, Bishopscourt). Through the years he continued to accommodate others, with various clergy serving as tutors. In the face of considerable apathy and opposition, Nevill’s fund for a college slowly built up and at the 1886 synod the bishop announced ‘I have taken another step forward in this matter by the purchase of a house, very conveniently situated in relation to the university, which I should wish future students to attend if possible’. This house – destined to become the warden’s residence – became home to the theology tutor for the next few years.

Building finally got underway in 1891 and in 1893 Selwyn College – named after New Zealand’s first Anglican bishop, George Augustus Selwyn – opened its doors to its first six students. It was, from the beginning, a ‘mixed’ college, open to men studying at the university alongside the candidates for the priesthood; the foundation residents included five candidates for holy orders plus one medical student. This was seen to be advantageous to both groups, as Bishop Julius of Christchurch explained when the foundation stone was laid. Theological students would ‘be infinitely advantaged by contact with men who are training for other professions, and for the knowledge they will gain there … from those who look upon life from other points of view’. These other students, meanwhile, would ‘have the advantage of association with men, brave, spiritually-minded men, men already given heart and soul to God’s service, and they cannot fail to be better for such influence’.

The college struggled in its first few decades due to its ongoing lack of funds. By 1909 there were 25 residents and, with no shortage of applications, the warden was anxious to expand. In 1911 Selwyn Collegiate School closed and its building became part of the college. This was a private school for boys that had been taken over by the Anglican church and installed in an old house in the Selwyn College grounds plus part of the warden’s residence. In 1907 a brand new classroom block was opened for the school but it failed to attract enough students to keep going. The former classrooms became rather austere bedrooms for Selwyn residents. Some residents had their rooms in a neighbouring house purchased by Alice Woodthorpe, the warden’s wife, and later the college’s Board of Governors, which took over management of Selwyn from the St Paul’s Cathedral Chapter in 1914, purchased other neighbouring houses. The wardens’ families – wives, mothers and sisters – played an important part in college life in the early decades, often serving as matrons and cooks.

A Selwyn College bedroom/study, from an album by photographer C.M. Collins. It probably dates from around 1930, when the new wing was added. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Selwyn College archives, 84-086/062, S16-503b.

Resident numbers dropped during World War I and the college actually closed for a year in 1918, after warden Robert Woodthorpe left. In 1919 LG (‘Algy’) Whitehead began a long reign – 31 years – as Selwyn warden, earning widespread respect and affection. He set about renovating the rundown buildings and, with the superior fundraising skills of politician James Allen to hand, was able to raise enough money to build a new wing of the college and add a third storey to the original building. Opened in 1930, the new wing included a splendid dining hall funded as a memorial by the family of the Massey brothers, killed in World War I. Life at Selwyn remained spartan by today’s standards, but was becoming increasingly comfortable. Later on, in the 1950s and 1960s, further buildings and extensions took the roll up to over 90.

Early Selwyn residents soon developed communal traditions, with some surviving into modern times; perhaps most famous is the Selwyn ballet, which dates back to 1928. The theological students were quickly outnumbered by others, particularly medical students. Nevertheless, religion remained an important influence, and until the mid-1980s all the wardens were Anglican clergy. They conducted services at the adjacent All Saints Church, which students were expected to attend. Algy Whitehead started regular high teas around 1920. He was a wine connoisseur who noted that it started as ‘a soft drink affair. Then it ascended to wine, but later degenerated to beer’. One of Selwyn’s most famous former residents, Rhodes Scholar, surgeon, Olympian and Governor General Arthur Porritt, later recalled that life in Selwyn in the early 1920s was ‘cosmopolitan to a degree, very free and easy (in contrast to Knox!) and though we were relatively few in numbers we could produce a team in almost any sport. Despite our “Boys about Town” reputation we were 100% loyal to our “Headmaster” – the Rev Algy Whitehead (and his two spinster sisters who cared for our material and domestic welfare) and tried to ensure that our not infrequent pranks brought no odium on him’. Knox, in good Presbyterian fashion, had much stricter rules about alcohol, but was more liberal in allowing female visitors. Both of these colleges developed a reputation for misogyny in later decades, and Selwyn was the last Otago college to admit women, in 1983 (even then protest from male residents and alumni continued for some years).

Another photo, this time of a common room, from the C.M. Collins album. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Selwyn College archives, 84-086/062, S16-503c.

Residential colleges are now a central part of life at the University of Otago, but the tradition of living in college was slow to get off the ground. It took twenty years of determined effort for Bishop Nevill to get the first, Selwyn, opened. Otago has many reasons to be grateful to the man whose vision established a place which has provided a home for thousands of its students, and set an example for others to follow!

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?

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 lives of presidents

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1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, international students, Maori, sports, women

A gathering of former OUSA presidents at the association’s centenary in 1990. Image courtesy of Hocken Collections, OUSA archives, MS-4225/306, S15-500e.

This year the Otago University Students’ Association celebrates 125 years of existence. To mark the occasion, I thought it would be interesting to look back at 125 years of student presidents. On 20 May 1890 a general meeting of Otago students decided to form an association and at a second meeting on 30 May it was formally established, with William Edward Spencer as the first president. Spencer, a 26-year-old postgraduate science student, was an “able and energetic” president. There was “no man who was more enthusiastic at [the association’s] inception than Mr Spencer,” commented his successor, Alexander Hendry. Like many students of his era, Spencer had a career in teaching. He had already worked as a pupil teacher for some years before starting university study in the mid-1880s and may well have continued to teach while completing his degrees in arts and science. After completing a year as OUSA president he became a school inspector. He later worked in senior positions for the Department of Education in Wellington, including 11 years as editor of the School Journal.

Many “able and energetic” young men and women have followed in Spencer’s footsteps as president, though of course there has been the occasional rogue among them. I’ve heard stories that one 1990s president, who shall remain nameless, could always be detected approaching by the perfume of marijuana. Others have made dubious financial decisions. Most, though, have been upstanding characters in a very demanding role as chair of the association and public spokesperson for Otago students. In some years there was stiff competition for the role, and winning the election required considerable charm, ambition and political nous.

As the photo of presidents gathered for the 1990 centenary suggests, the presidency was pretty much a male Pakeha preserve until the 1980s. There were some notable exceptions, one being the most famous former president, Peter Buck, also known as Te Rangi Hiroa, after whom an Otago residential college is now named. He was OUSA president in 1903 while completing his medical studies. He became a key figure in the Maori renaissance of the early twentieth century, represented Northern Maori in parliament, and was later a distinguished anthropologist. Another trailblazer was 1971 president Ebraima Manneh, the first international student in the role. He led OUSA during a turbulent year of student protest over the university’s discipline regulations. He later became a senior public servant in the Gambia, his home country.

For many years women served on the OUSA as “lady vice-president” – a role popularly abbreviated to “lady vice”. In 2006 the OUSA, which bestowed life membership on its former presidents, extended the privilege to Nola Holmes (nee Ross) as a representative of “all of the women who served OUSA on the executive and in assisting roles since our beginnings whose contributions, before the 1980s, were largely unacknowledged.” Ross, the lady vice-president in 1947, was remembered for holding the association together when the University Council forced president John Child to resign after he made controversial speeches about sexual and religious freedom. Finally, in 1983, Phyllis Comerford served as OUSA’s first female president and she was succeeded by another woman, Robyn Gray. Since they broke the barrier, a third of the presidents have been female. They include the only person to serve two terms in recent times, Harriet Geoghegan, who was president in 2010 and 2011.

Quite a few people served two terms as president in the association’s earlier decades, but only one has served for three years – the gloriously named Philippe Sidney de Quetteville Cabot (best known as Sid). Cabot was president in the mid-1920s; he had previously been president of the Teachers’ College Students’ Association. He was also one of the instigators of the national organisation, the National Union of Students, serving as its founding president. Cabot completed several degrees at Otago and overseas, eventually becoming a clinical psychologist. He was very good at sport, playing a game for the All Blacks in 1921. Other presidents known for their sporting prowess include Colin Gilray (1907 president) and Frank Green (1936) in rugby and Bill Hawksworth (1934) in cricket. 1988 president Jon Doig, the first from the School of Physical Education, became Chief Executive of the Commonwealth Games Council for Scotland.

Unsurprisingly, several presidents continued in politics beyond their student days. Besides Te Rangi Hiroa, the best known is Grant Robertson, OUSA president in 1993, who is now member of parliament for Wellington Central and a highly-ranked member of the Labour caucus. Those who have worked long-term for the association remember him as one of the most capable presidents. A few others from recent decades have directed their political skills towards the public service, with several working for Foreign Affairs and Trade: David Payton (1974 president), Kirsty Graham (1992), Chris Tozer (1996) and Renee Heal (2007). From an earlier generation, Doug Kennedy, 1937 president, renowned for his pranks and radical politics, became Director General of Health for New Zealand. Until the 1960s many presidents were, like Kennedy, medical students (though few of them shared his radical politics). After that medical presidents became rare, and in recent decades law and/or politics students have been prevalent among presidents.

Some presidents went on to mark their mark in the academic world. Alexander “Swotty” Aitken, the 1919 and 1920 president, was a famous mathematician. Others had distinguished academic careers in demography (Mick Borrie, 1938), physics (Jack Dodd, 1946), economics (Frank Holmes, 1947) and medicine (Jack Stallworthy, 1930-1931; Ken North, 1953; Murray Brennan, 1964). Many became well-known doctors or lawyers, and 1968 president Bruce Robertson was a Court of Appeal judge. Some, like 2001 president Ayesha Verrall, are at earlier stages of careers which hold much promise.

Congratulations to OUSA on reaching its 125th anniversary! Do you have any stories to share of former presidents? And I’d love to get in touch with Phyllis Comerford or Ebraima Manneh if you’re out there! (my email is ali.clarke at the university).

2014 OUSA president Ruby Sycamore-Smith was the 12th woman to take on the role. She is pictured during art week. Image courtesy of OUSA.

The janitor’s tale

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1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, general staff

William Harris, complete with his trademark umbrella and straw hat. Image from the Otago University Review, September 1923.

‘Professor’ W.H. Harris had no academic qualifications, but he was once Otago University’s “best-known personage”. The title of professor was bestowed on him by generations of students who encountered this great character in his daily work as the university janitor, or as he strolled up to town in his distinctive straw boater, always carrying an umbrella. His 30 years on the staff provided a peaceful end to a life full of adventure.

Born in Kent in 1852, William Henry Harris went to sea when he was just 9 years old. He joined his father, a marine sergeant, aboard HMS Rattler, serving as powder-boy and captain’s boy. Young Harris roamed all over the world, visiting Europe, South America and Asia, and famously getting lost in the streets of Shanghai during the Taiping rebellion. On his return to base he had a try at the printing trade, but after just a year on land he re-joined the navy. He served on various vessels, including HMS Cumberland and HMS Cossack. Aboard the Cossack, Harris took part in the supression of the slave trade off the coast of Africa, of piracy in the China Seas, and of blackbirding in the Pacific Islands. He was “a type of the old die-hards who composed the old-time Imperial Navy,” reported the Evening Star in 1919.

Harris left the navy in 1872 – still only 20 years old – and proceeded to work in a great variety of jobs in Australia and New Zealand: wool-pressing, harvesting, tin-digging, bush-felling, sailmaking, stone-breaking and gold prospecting, among others. But the sea continued to draw him, and he served aboard various vessels of the mercantile marine around the coasts of Australasia. In 1893 he finally settled down in Dunedin, winning the job of university janitor over 90 applicants. Perhaps it was his wide and varied work experience that made him the most attractive candidate; in any case, he proved ideal for the role, and remained until his death in 1923, aged 70.

Harris revelled in his position as janitor. As an ex-navy man he appreciated order and ensured things were kept according to the rules: he didn’t hesitate to throw the Chancellor out of the library when it was time for closing. Maintaining the coal fires which heated the university was an important part of his duties. Agnes Blackie, who commenced as a student in 1915 and went on to a long career as physics lecturer, recalled that nothing annoyed “Prof ‘Arris” more “than for students to go into a lecture room between classes to sit by the fire. To prevent this he conceived the idea of hanging rows of cast-off coats and hats outside the room doors. This shabby collection certainly gave support to the idea that students were always poor.” She also remembered, though, his kindness to students.

Harris’s feats of memory were legendary. He quickly learned the names of all new students and told them tales of their parents’ activities on campus. He proved “an inexhaustible mine of information” for anybody wanting to track down former students. His naval experiences remained fresh in his memory and he enjoyed recounting tales of his many adventures, sometimes writing these down for newspapers or the Otago University Review. Agnes Blackie wrote that “now and then a quaint letter with one of his reminiscences would appear in the press, but first he would bring it to one of his friends among students and staff for comment and correction of spelling and wording.” You can read an example here; this letter written to the Otago Daily Times in 1914 about exploded British naval vessels was sufficiently interesting to be republished in the Hawera and Normanby Star. It must have been a proud moment when Harris was introduced to the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George V and Queen Mary) during their Dunedin visit in 1901, and told them he had served on HMS Hero when the Duke’s father, later King Edward VII, travelled to North America in 1860.

The university has employed many interesting and charismatic people over the decades, but in his day William Henry Harris stood out as “a rare personality, as outstanding in his way as any professor.” He earned several paragraphs in the 1919 jubilee history of Otago, and an obituary as long as that of the classics professor in the student publication, the Review. That obituary commented, “No man loved the University more than he. His monument will be the heart of every student who knew him.” There can no longer be any former students alive who knew the wily janitor, but we can pay tribute here to one of the great characters of the university’s early decades.

 

 

From natural philosophy to physics

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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!

A tale of 10 libraries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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