The Park Street residences

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1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Aquinas, Dominican Hall, Wesley Hall

Otago has a great collection of residential colleges, some long-established and others quite recent; less well-known are those that flourished briefly but no longer exist. One of the most popular posts on this blog is about Helensburgh House, a ‘temporary’ hall of residence from 1984 to 1991. Today I explore the history of two others that have gone: Dominican Hall and Wesley Hall.

Dominican Hall. It was originally built in the 1880s for Robert Gillies, a businessman and amateur astronomer who included an observatory in the roof and named it Transit House in honour of the Transit of Venus. An OUSA listing of student residences for 1967 noted that at Dominican Hall ‘most necessary facilities are present although there is generally a theme of austerity’. Any austerity must have contrasted with the surviving ‘opulent elegant detail’ of the building, from embossed plaster ceilings to Minton floor tiles and ornate door handles. Image courtesy of Dominican Sisters archives, F15/5/1.

Like the other churches, Catholics saw a need to provide for their young people coming from around the country to Dunedin. In 1945 the Dominican Sisters, a teaching order at the forefront of Catholic education in Otago since arriving in 1871, purchased a grand stone home in spacious grounds in Park Street. In 1946 it began a new life as Dominican Hall, a residential college for 20 women students. One of them, Shona Scannell, later recalled that they formed a ‘lovely family … We went to the pictures together and had social sports groups. I thought it was wonderful’. In 1948 the sisters had additional bedrooms added atop the building; with that and other alterations plus the purchase of a neighbouring property in 1953, Dominican Hall expanded to house 48. Some women had single rooms but, as in most residential colleges of the day, others shared. Residents of the ‘dormitory’ reported on their exploits in the 1960 Dominican Hall magazine. ‘Life with seven in a room can be rather hectic’, noted Maureen Donnelly, but ‘a great sense of comradeship has grown’. They took part in all the social and sporting activities on offer, and ‘If there is any trouble we are all in it together, be it smoking in unlawful places, creeping in rather late, or just not sweeping the floor. We have formed a Rock’n Roll Recorder Group and at one stage our singing was of such quality it was mistaken for the radio’.

Students singing compline led by Father Ambrose Loughnan OP, Dominican Hall, in 1956. Religion was an important feature of Dominican life. The students were cared for by a small group of sisters and a resident chaplain; they hosted visits from the bishop and meetings of the Catholic Students’ Club, held retreats and had their own branch of the Children of Mary sodality. Image courtesy of Dominican Sisters archives, F15/8/2.

Not to be outdone by the Anglicans (who established Selwyn), Presbyterians (Knox and St Margaret’s) and Catholics (Dominican and Aquinas), in 1958 the Methodists joined the student accommodation business. Like several other institutions, Wesley Hall started with the purchase of a private residence. The Park Street home had room for 14 students – all men – and a resident matron, with the Methodist Central Mission’s superintendent acting as non-resident warden. The bedrooms were rather small and ‘no studies are provided’, reported the OUSA in 1967, ‘but there is a common room with piano and table tennis table’. The crowded conditions did not deter some residents. At the end of 1961 matron Elsie Maclean reported: ‘we seem to have some bright lads at present and the majority are anxious to return again next year … Several will be spending their fourth year here’. Their behaviour was generally ‘quite good till about midnight when apparently they become restive and noisy but as this seems to be the usual procedure in the student world, we patiently wait till the spasm subsides’. As a small institution Wesley Hall struggled for recognition by other colleges, though the residents organised events, such as ‘a very enjoyable’ hockey match and lunch with the women of Dominican Hall in 1964. The 1963 and 1964 presidents noted the perils of having too many residents from one district – in this case, Gore – which ‘tends to create a rather narrow range of acquaintances’. It could also ‘cause a certain amount of friction and suspicion ie “Who told my parents that I took so and so out last week?”’, suggested Kenneth Thomson.

The large Park Street home which became Wesley Hall was originally built in 1918 for lawyer Herbert Adams, but later run as a guest house. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, John McIndoe Ltd records, MS-3247/584, S17-564b.

Unlike several other residences with small beginnings, Wesley Hall did not grow larger, though that was the original plan. Methodist Superintendent David Gordon explained in 1970 that the Central Mission planned extensions for years, but on consultation with Otago VC Arthur Beacham concluded ‘with the rising running costs for a hostel, we should build nothing smaller than a 100 bed hostel’. As time passed and the ‘optimum size’ increased, the project grew ‘entirely beyond the resources of the Central Mission’. The government offered subsidies to organisations building student accommodation – that helped with the initial set up of Wesley Hall – but the cost of a new building was significant and the church had other priorities for social service funding. It ‘decided reluctantly’ to close Wesley Hall at the end of 1970; it had run at a loss throughout its 12 years. The building which had housed lively young men as a student residence was purchased by the Department of Health to become ‘a Hostel for the Rehabilitation of Alcoholics’.

An oversupply of accommodation for women led to the end of Dominican Hall; at the end of 1978 the Dominican Sisters announced it was closing. At its peak, it accommodated 50 residents, but by 1978 had just 28, though ’40 can be taken comfortably’. The decline was due to ‘the growth in larger, more modern hostels’, suggested Sister Bernadette (UniCol opened in 1969 and Salmond in 1971). As a small institution it could not afford to carry many vacancies in a period of rising expenses; the demand for improvements to meet DCC fire safety regulations was the final straw. For women who preferred a Catholic residence a new option was available, with Aquinas accepting women in 1979, but it also closed at the end of 1980 after a downturn in the university roll (the university purchased and re-opened it in 1988 after the roll surged again). In their day, Dominican and Wesley were obviously lively places which contributed to the welfare of their residents and the university; it was economics which spelled their end.

Dominican residents ready for a 1955 ball. Back row (from left): Clare Ryan, Judy Knight, Marlene Prentice, Bernadette Lloyd, Kathleen Kennedy. Front: Mary Horn, Pauline Burke, Clare Curran, Yvonne Young, Margaret Potts. Image courtesy of Dominican Sisters archives, F15/9/3.

My thanks to the Dominican Sisters for the wonderful photographs from their archives. I’d love to hear from anybody with photographs of Wesley Hall!

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.

The childcare revolution

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1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2010s, childcare, women

The crèche in its original premises in the old All Saints Church Hall. The notes on the back of this photo are difficult to decipher. The voluntary helpers are identified as Vivienne Moss (although that name is crossed out) and Jenny Heath. The child facing the camera at the centre is Rebecca, with Rachael nearest the camera. Please get in touch if you can confirm any names! Photo courtesy of the Otago University Childcare Association.

There is one organisation affiliated to the university which, although unknown to some students and staff, has had a big impact on the institution since it began nearly 50 years ago: the Otago University Childcare Association (OUCA). During the university’s first century there were few women academics, even fewer married women academics and scarcely any with young children. Microbiologists Margaret and John Loutit arrived at Otago from Australia in 1956; Margaret obtained part-time work as a botany demonstrator and then microbiology lecturer while working on a PhD. As a working mother she encountered considerable criticism. Her salary was mostly absorbed in paying for private childcare, but her hard work was rewarded with the completion of her PhD in 1966; she then became a full-time academic and eventually a professor. For many others, motherhood spelled the end of any academic career, while most students abandoned degrees when they gave birth. In the 1960s and 1970s, when many New Zealanders married young and, whether married or not, also had children young, that meant a lot of ‘academic wastage’.

Improving childcare provision helped the next generation of women. Several younger staff wives instigated the university’s first crèche, designed to provide part-time childcare for students. Since the university was unwilling to provide childcare, the founders set it up as a community venture; the vicar of All Saints Anglican Church offered the use of the old church hall. They invited women students to a meeting late in 1968 and ‘it was evident from the animated discussion that a nursery would fulfil a need’. The University Nursery Association – later renamed the Childcare Association – was a parent cooperative, with Jean Dodd as first president; she was a lecturer’s wife who previously set up a playcentre in Leith Valley. The nursery/crèche (both names were used at various times) opened in 1969 with kindergarten teacher Barbara Horn and Karitane nurse Ann Leary as its first supervisors; parents provided assistance according to a roster.

Outdoor play and learning in the 1990s. Photo courtesy of the Otago University Childcare Association

The new affordable and convenient crèche, together with new access to contraception, made a big difference to women, comments one student of that era, Rosemarie Smith: ‘gaining control over fertility and creating childcare revolutionised women’s access to education – and also to employment in the university’. She ‘graduated in 1971 with a BA and a baby thanks to that crèche’, and worked on the general staff for a couple of years. There was some resistance to the crèche. Most people in positions of authority in the university – generally men – saw no need for it, but there was also resistance from women uneasy about working mothers. There was, however, a demand for childcare and the association grew quickly, from 39 paying members in 1969 to 83 in 1971. That year it moved into the Cumberland Suite (an old house) of the University Union and in 1973 into a house at 525 Great King Street. That was provided by the university as temporary accommodation, since it intended to demolish the building to make way for a carpark. Instead it became a long-term home for the association, which expanded into two adjoining houses in the 1980s.

Childcare became more respectable as increasing numbers of middle-class married women joined the workforce. OUCA helped overcome some resistance in its early years by insisting it was a part-time service, but from 1980 it offered full day care. The service was increasingly used by staff, although students retained priority. In 1994 there were 138 families using university childcare; 71 were staff and 55 were students. It remained affiliated to, rather than owned by, the university, although the university provided its buildings – including splendid new Castle Street premises in 2014 – and small grants from the university and students’ association covered a small portion of its expenses. Unsurprisingly, given its clientele, OUCA attracted highly capable people to its management committee. Among the parents who served were some who subsequently held senior posts in the university, including future vice-chancellor Harlene Hayne; she was succeeded as president by historian Barbara Brookes, who suggests it ‘was perhaps the most important committee in the university in terms of the connections we made’. Brookes, her husband (also an academic) and children all made, through childcare, ‘deep friendships that nourish us today’.

Behind the facades of several villas in Castle Street, across the road from Selwyn College, Te Pā opened in 2014 as new premises for the Otago University Childcare Association. It incorporated four childcare centres, including a new bilingual centre, Te Pārekereke o Te Kī. The association also continued to run a centre at the College of Education. Graham Warman photographs, courtesy of University of Otago Marketing and Communications.

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.

 

Building a medical campus

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1910s, 1920s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, anatomy, biochemistry, library, medicine, microbiology, obstetrics and gynaecology, pharmacology, pharmacy, physiology, preventive and social medicine, surgery

An aerial view showing the medical school and hospital buildings, c.1970. The low-rise 1950s building replaced by the Sayers building can be seen between the Wellcome and Ferguson buildings, with cars parked in front. At the hospital, the clinical services building, opened in 1968, can be seen, but construction is yet to begin on the ward block, which opened in 1980. Several of the buildings in the block east of the hospital are now part of the university: the original Queen Mary maternity hospital now houses the surveying school and marine science department; the 2nd Queen Mary hospital is Hayward College, and the old nurses’ homes are Cumberland College. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, University of Otago Medical School Alumnus Association records, MS-1537/806, S17-517b.

There’s a significant university anniversary this year: it’s a century since the medical school opened its first Great King Street building. Otago medical classes started out in the university’s original building in Princes Street, but soon moved to the purpose-built anatomy and chemistry block (now the geology building) on the new site near the Leith. Opened in 1878, the new premises incorporated a lecture room, dissection room, preparation room, morgue, laboratory, anatomy room and professor’s office for the medical school. The facilities weren’t large – they were designed to cater for classes of a dozen or so – and the building was extended in 1883 and again in 1905, to provide for the expanding school and its first physiology professor. As medical student numbers continued to expand, from 80 in 1905 to 155 in 1914, space became desperately short and the medical faculty won government approval for further extensions to the anatomy and physiology departments, plus a new building to house the pathology and bacteriology (microbiology) departments, along with other subjects being taught in far from ideal conditions in the crowded hospital.

The site of the new building – in Great King Street, opposite the hospital – was controversial. Some university council members wanted all new developments to be on the existing campus, but medical academics wanted to be closer to the hospital, and the chancellor, Andrew Cameron, was on their side. Sydney Champtaloup, professor of public health and bacteriology, revealed the thinking behind the move during the 1914 public appeal for funds for the new building. After completing their studies in anatomy and physiology, which would still be taught at the university, said Champtaloup, ‘students are intimately associated with the Hospital. At present students attend some classes at the University, and have then to proceed to the Hospital for others, and to return to the University later. This involves a great waste of time and energy. All lectures and practical classes for senior students should be held in a suitable building near the Hospital’. He also pointed out that the hospital and university both required bacteriology and pathology labs, and ‘a combination of these requirements in one building makes for efficiency and economy, but that building to meet Hospital requirements must be either in the Hospital grounds or in its close proximity’. Although he didn’t mention it, Champtaloup would have to waste considerable time and energy himself if the new building wasn’t close to the hospital, since he was in charge of its bacteriology services.

The bacteriology and pathology building, later known as the Scott building, which opened in 1917. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, University of Otago Medical School Alumnus Assocation records, MS-1537/636, S17-517a.

The public appeal raised the goodly sum of £8000 (over $1 million in 2017 values), which included £2000 from William Dawson (a brewer who made a fortune as one of the founders of Speight’s) and £1000 from members of the medical faculty. It was matched by the government, though the project ran considerably over budget thanks to ‘the presence of subterranean water, later found to characterise the whole area’, along with rising prices due to war conditions. The new building, designed by Mason and Wales and built by Fletcher Brothers, opened in 1917. Of brick with Oamaru stone facings, its neoclassical style seemed quite plain to contemporaries; the Evening Star noted some ‘pretty stained glass’ in the entrance hall was ‘one of the few ornamentations’. The building was large and well-lit, with a lecture theatre able to ‘seat 150 students and give everyone plenty of elbow room’ and other smaller lecture rooms; they incorporated facilities for the latest technology, the lantern slide. The pathology department was on the first floor and the bacteriology department on the second floor; there were also rooms dedicated to medical jurisprudence and materia medica (pharmacology), the library, specimen museum and an assortment of staff and student facilities. ‘The roof is used for store rooms, etc.’, reported the Star with some delicacy; that was where animals and food stores were housed.

The new building was just the beginning. Medical dean Lindo Ferguson had ambitious plans; he imagined the school expanding to take up the entire side of the Great King Street block facing the hospital, replacing its collection of old cottages and shops. Not everybody approved, and there was another battle over the new anatomy and physiology building. In 1919 university council members decided that further extensions to those departments should be on the main university campus, provoking a determined – and successful – campaign by the medical faculty, medical association and ODT to have them change their minds and instead construct a large new building adjoining the 1917 one. Physiology professor John Malcolm countered one of the main objections to the Great King Street site: ‘It had been said that the social life of the university was cut in two through the existing arrangements; and if that were so how about the scientific life of the university? Was it not cut in two as well? The most important was the human life’. After considerable delays in raising funds, in 1927 a splendid new building – ‘one of Dunedin’s most handsome’, declared the ODT – was opened. Designed by Edmund Anscombe in brick and stone facings to complement its neighbour, it provided accommodation for not just anatomy and physiology, but also the ‘sub-departments’ of histology, biochemistry and pharmacology. It had the ‘necessary classrooms, laboratories, and research rooms for a school averaging an annual class of 50 students’.

At the opening of the new block, Ferguson joked that ‘if a dean were content he was not fit to hold his position. No one knew the shortcomings of a school better than the dean, and if the dean thought that enough had been done he should be pole-axed’. He continued to dream of further expansion, and had already foiled suggestions the new dental school building should be immediately next to the medical school; instead its new 1926 building (now the Marples building) was constructed on the next block. Ferguson’s successors took up his scheme and in the midst of World War II work began on yet another large building. It had the prosaic name of ‘the south block’, but later the various buildings were named after the medical deans, according to their chronology, and it became the Hercus building, after third dean Charles Hercus; the earlier buildings were named for the first two deans, John Halliday Scott and Lindo Ferguson.

The Ferguson building (opened 1927), with the Scott building (1917) and Hercus building (1948) in the distance. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, University of Otago Medical School Alumnus Association records, MS-1537/637, S17-517c.

The south block was in brick and of similar scale to its neighbours, but the similarities ended there; it was a striking example of art deco, designed by Miller White and Dunn. Hercus recounted how the Minister of Education, Rex Mason, ‘turned down our original severely utilitarian plan with the statement, “This is not a factory, but a national building of great importance, and it must bear the marks of its function”’. The new design incorporated various artworks, most notably a sculptured marble panel by Richard Gross above the main Hanover Street entrance; there were also plaster murals inside. Building was a challenge because of wartime labour and supply shortages; four Dunedin building firms – Love, Naylor, Mitchells and McLellans – formed the Associated Builders consortium to complete the project. Some students obtained holiday work helping with the demolition and ground works for the foundations, which were dug down 15 metres, but the foreman ‘had to keep his eye on them because many would jump the fence and be off’. The building opened in 1948 and boasted 210 rooms; it became a new home for the preventive medicine, pathology and bacteriology departments and had two dedicated research floors, one of them for animals.

The new south block (Hercus building) under construction in the 1940s, looking east along Hanover Street. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, University of Otago Medical School Alumnus Association, MS-1537/631, S15-619f.

The next building development was less imposing and not destined to last for long: a single-storey brick building, completed in 1956 next to the Ferguson building, provided a space for the surgery and obstetrics and gynaecology departments. Next to it, on the corner of Frederick and Great King Streets, appeared in 1963 the Wellcome Research Institute. Funded entirely by the Wellcome Trust, which was created from a pharmaceutical fortune, the new building was a tribute to the important research on hypertension by Otago medical professor Horace Smirk, and provided a space for various research teams. It soon developed the nickname ‘Hori’s whare’, while the dental school was ‘Jack’s shack’ after dental dean John Walsh and the pharmacology department in the old Knox Sunday school was ‘Fred’s shed’ after its professor, Fred Fastier. The Wellcome building was designed by Niel Wales, the latest generation in old Dunedin firm Mason and Wales, which had also been responsible for the Scott building; the new building’s international style, with its simple forms and lack of ornamentation, reflected the architectural fashion of the period.

The next buildings took the medical campus further into the realms of new architecture. In 1972 the medical library acquired a new home in the Sayers building, named for the fourth dean, Ted Sayers. The building, which replaced the 1950s surgery and O & G construction, also included accommodation for the medical school administration. A year later the multi-storey Adams building (Bill Adams was the fifth dean) emerged behind it, with an entrance from Frederick Street; it provided new space for the preventive and social medicine, pharmacology, pharmacy and surgery departments, along with the university’s higher education development centre. The Sayers building was designed by Alan Neil of Fraser Oakley Pinfold. A 1994 exhibition on University of Otago architecture suggested his ‘use of fair-faced concrete is an essay in Brutalism’. The Adams building was designed by Miller White and Dunn and the design was recycled in the microbiology building, opened in 1974 on Cumberland Street. The 1994 exhibition noted its utilitarian architecture: it ‘appears to have been designed from the inside out’ and ‘no thought appears to have been given to the external appearance .… Built in the tradition of tower blocks in a park-way, it does not invite inspection of detailing’.

The new Sayers (front) and Adams buildings in the 1970s. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, University of Otago Medical School Alumnus Association records, MS-1537/665, S17-517d.

With the 1970s buildings completed, Lindo Ferguson’s 1910s vision of a medical school encompassing the length of the block was fulfilled. Indeed, the school was already spreading much further afield, with microbiology and biochemistry buildings on the new science campus in Cumberland Street and new developments in Christchurch and Wellington. At its Great King Street home base, the school was a showcase of 20^th century architecture, from neoclassicism and art deco to international style and brutalism. Across the street, Dunedin Hospital, whose presence had drawn the medical school to this location, also went through multiple developments. That, however, is a whole other story.

Of pills and potions and poisons

Tags

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.

Photo mysteries

Tags

1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, capping, Christchurch, food science, Helensburgh, languages, Maori, medicine, microbiology, physical education, recreation, St Margaret's

This is a plea for help! Today’s post is rather different from previous ones. I’m posting some photographs I’d like to know more about. Some have appeared on the blog previously, while others are new. They’re all interesting images that I’m thinking of including in the University of Otago history book, and it would be great to have more details before they appear in print. Do you recognise any of the people or places or activities, or can you help with missing dates? If so, I’d love to hear from you, either by a comment on this post, or by email or letter (the ‘about’ page has a link to my university staff page with contact details).

I’ve gathered lots of images from archival, personal and departmental collections over the last few years, but I’m still short in some areas. In particular, I’m keen to locate photos relating to activities involving the commerce division/school of business and the humanities division (though I have a good supply of photos for the languages departments). Zoology, maths and psychology are other departments I’d like to find more images for. Where more general images of student life are concerned, I’d love to find a few photos relating to life in student flats and to lodgings and landladies. I have plenty of capping parade photos, but some other photos of student activities would be great. Overall, the 1980s are a bit of a gap in my lists of potential illustrations, so I’m on the lookout especially for anything from that decade, and to a lesser extent the 1960s, 1970s and 1990s. Another major gap is for images relating to the Christchurch, Wellington and Invercargill campuses. If you have any interesting photos you would be willing to lend to the project, please do get in touch!

Now, on with the mystery photos …

1. Gentlemen dining

Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Irvine family papers, MS-4207/006, S16-669a.

These gentlemen, about to indulge in a little fine dining at the Christchurch Club, have connections to the early years of the Christchurch Clinical School (now the University of Otago, Christchurch). Those I have identified so far were either senior Christchurch medical men or Otago administrators and members of the Christchurch Clinical School Council. That council was organised in 1971 and met for the first time in 1972. Max Panckhurst, an Otago chemistry professor who was on the council, died in 1976, so the photo must date from before that, and since it also features Robin Williams, who completed his term as Otago Vice-Chancellor in 1973, it probably comes from the early 1970s. Do you know the exact occasion or year?

The men I have identified are, starting from Max Panckhurst, who is closest to the camera with fair curly hair, and working clockwise: LM Berry, Carl Perkins, George Rolleston, Robin Williams, Leslie Averill, Alan Burdekin (Christchurch Club manager,standing), Bill Adams, LA Bennett, Robin Irvine, unknown, unknown, Pat Cotter (partly obscured), D Horne, Don Beaven, unknown, Fred Shannon, Athol Mann, JL Laurenson. Do you recognise anybody else? Or have I got any of these wrong? Some other potential candidates, who were also on the Clinical School Council, are EA Crothall, DP Girvan, TC Grigg and CF Whitty.

2. Burgers

Were you a Burger? After I published a story about Helensburgh House, a student hall of residence in the former Wakari nurses’ home, I met up with Glenys Roome, who had been its warden. She kindly shared some photos, including these three. Helensburgh House ran from 1984 to 1991 – I’d love to identify which year these were taken, and perhaps some names!

 

3. The missing singer

Photo courtesy of Michael Shackleton.

All but one of the members of the 1952 sextet in this photo are identified – can you help with the full name of the young man third from left? His first name was John. The lineup was, from left: Linley Ellis, Richard Bush, John ?, Keith Monagan, Michael Shackleton, Brian McMahon. The story of the sextet featured in an earlier post.

4. On the rocks

Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Otago University Tramping Club records, 96-063/036, S15-592b.

This is one of my favourite photos – it’s already featured on the blog a couple of times and is sure to end up in the book! In the original tramping club album it is identified as being at Mihiwaka, but somebody kindly pointed out when I posted about the tramping club that this is most likely taken from Mount Cargill. Do you recognise this spot? And can you identify any of the 1946 trampers?

5. Phys-eders

The School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences has kindly shared some of their photo collection. The photograph on the beams was taken in the 1970s – were you there, and do you know the exact year? How about the others – any ideas where and when they were taken, or who the people are? I published a post about the early years of the phys ed school in an earlier post, and there are photos on that I’d love to have more information about too, so please take a look!

6. Te Huka Mātauraka

Photo courtesy of the Māori Centre

This photo was taken outside the Māori Centre, Te Huka Mātauraka, in 2002 and featured in a post about the centre. Can you identify anybody?

7. Microbiologists

Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Department of Physiology records, r.6681, S16-521c.

This photograph is a good example of the value of this blog. In the original, the man is identified as Franz Bielschowsky, of the cancer research laboratory. When I included it in a story featuring Bielschowsky, people informed me that the man here is actually Leopold Kirschner, a microbiologist working in the Medical Research Council Microbiology Unit. It was probably taken in 1949. Typically for that period, the female assistant is not named – do you know who she is? What, exactly, are they doing? I suspect health and safety procedures have changed since then!

Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, University of Otago Photographic Unit records, MS-4185/042, S15-500d.

Here’s another microbiology-related photo, taken during the first hands-on science camp in 1990 – it featured in an earlier post about hands-on science. Can you identify any of these high school students? I’m curious to know if any of them ended up as University of Otago students!

8. The St Margaret’s ball

Image courtesy of Peter Chin.

This photograph, taken at an early 1960s St Margaret’s ball, featured in a story about Chinese students at Otago. At centre front are Jocelyn Wong and Peter Chin – can you identify anybody else? Exactly which year was it?

9. Picnickers

 

Image courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Ref: 1/2-166716-F. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22884184

The Latin picnic was a popular event in the early twentieth century. This photo was taken at Whare Flat in 1932 – it featured in an earlier post about writers at the university. People identified so far include Dan Davin, on the far right, with Angus Ross in front of him and Christopher Johnson to Davin’s right. Other students include Frank Hall (back left), Winnie McQuilkan (centre front) and Ida Lawson (in dark jacket behind her). The Classics staff, Prof Thomas Dagger Adams and Mary Turnbull, are at front left. Can you identify anybody else?

10. In the food science lab

I featured these mystery photos quite some time ago on the blog, and people have identified Rachel Noble, a 1980s student, as the woman in the centre of the bottom image. The food scientists tell me these students were in the yellow lab, possibly working on an experimental foods course or the product development course run by Richard Beyer. Can you help with the date, or identify any of the other students?

Images courtesy of the Hocken Collections, from the archives of the Association of Home Science Alumnae of NZ, MS-1516/082, S13-556b (above) and S13-556c (below).

 

I have quite a few other photograph puzzles, but will save those for future posts!

Update

Thanks very much to those of you who have identified some of the mystery people already – yay! And thanks for the kind offers of further photographs. For those with photographs, here are a few instructions. If they’re already digital, that’s great. If you are scanning them, it would help if you make them high resolution (say 300dpi), preferably in TIFF format, but JPEGs are okay. If they are hard copy, I’m happy to scan them for you if you’re willing to lend them to me – I promise to return them promptly. I can pick up items if you’re in Dunedin, otherwise you can post them to me (it’s probably easiest if you send them to Ali Clarke, c/o Hocken Collections, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054). Remember if you’re sending images that you need to be willing for them to appear, potentially, in the new university history book (due out 2019) or on this blog! I’ll send you a form to sign granting permission for their use in university publications. Any published photos will be attributed to you; do let me know if there’s a photographer I should clear copyright with as well. Thanks 🙂

 

A home for art and artists

Tags

1910s, 1920s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, art, arts fellows, benefactors, library, physical education

Curator Donald Jamieson in the Hocken pictures stack, 1965. Photograph courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Box-240-004, S16-102b.

Otago does not, like some universities, have a fine arts programme; the highly-regarded Dunedin School of Art, established in 1870, is part of Otago Polytechnic. But the university has not neglected art: it has an art history programme, a prestigious fellowship for artists and one of New Zealand’s finest art collections.

That collection began when Thomas Morland Hocken donated his large collection of publications, archives, maps, photographs and paintings to the University of Otago, to be held in trust for the people of New Zealand. The deed of trust was signed in 1907, and in 1910 – shortly before Hocken’s death – the Hocken Library opened in a new wing of the Otago Museum (which was then run by the university). Hocken’s donation included over 400 pictures. Although his wife Bessie Hocken was a painter and photographer, he was not really interested in art for its aesthetics, but for the evidence it provided for research into his true passion, New Zealand history. The artworks he donated ranged from landscapes to political cartoons to paintings of Māori people and activities, and many included keys created by the Hockens to identify people and topographical features. Over the next few decades the library purchased further artworks and others were donated; the first published catalogue of the pictorial collection, dated 1948, included hundreds more works. Like the original collection, additions were mostly acquired for their historical interest, but they included many fine drawings and paintings. A great example is John Buchanan’s 1863 painting of Milford Sound. Linda Tyler, formerly pictorial curator at the Hocken, described this 1920s acquisition as ‘one of the icons of New Zealand art’; she recently discussed it on radio as her favourite New Zealand painting.

From the 1950s the Hocken pictorial collection took a new direction thanks to the influence – and generosity – of some noted art experts and collectors. Poet and editor Charles Brasch headed a new Hocken pictures subcommittee and – not without some opposition – shifted the acquisitions focus from history to aesthetics, and to include modern works. Brasch’s friend Rodney Kennedy made the first of many significant gifts to the Hocken in 1956 with 23 drawings by Colin McCahon. Kennedy attended the Dunedin School of Art in the 1920s and had many artist friends and a fine collection of New Zealand artworks; he was well-known around Otago as a long-serving drama tutor for the university extension department. Brasch, too, began gifting paintings in the late 1950s; both men gave further significant artworks during their lifetimes and by bequest. The Hocken’s important collection of McCahon’s works started with Kennedy and Brasch, but continued with gifts directly from McCahon and a bequest from his parents. Charlton Edgar, who taught at the Dunedin School of Art in the 1930s, gave nearly 400 works to the Hocken in 1961. This gift – known as the Mona Edgar collection in honour of his wife – ‘would update the Hocken with thirty years worth of modern New Zealand art’, wrote Tyler; it ‘changed the historical orientation of the collection irrevocably’. In subsequent decades the Hocken continued to purchase and receive generous donations of New Zealand artworks both modern and historical; by 2007 it held some 14,000 pictures. Those artworks have appeared in many exhibitions (in Dunedin and beyond) and publications and some can now be viewed digitally on the Otago University Research Heritage website. Dr Hocken little knew what he was starting when he gifted those 400 or so works depicting the history of New Zealand to the people of this country!

From 1966 the Hocken benefited from the existence of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, named in honour of one of New Zealand’s greatest artists. Modelled on the university’s Robert Burns Fellowship for writers, which had commenced in 1959, the new fellowship offered artists the opportunity to live in Dunedin for a year with a secure income and studio space provided; they had complete freedom of expression to work on projects of their choice. Anonymous ‘friends of the university’ made a large donation which endowed the fellowship, designed to aid and encourage painters and sculptors and foster interest in the arts at the university. The university was becoming an important patron of the arts, with fellowships for composers and dancers and children’s writers to follow later. Such fellowships were few and far between in New Zealand, so they carried considerable prestige.

Michael Illingworth, photographed in his studio by Max Oettli, 1968. Illingworth was the first Frances Hodgkins Fellow in 1966. Image courtesy of the Hocken Collections, P2011-027, S16-102c. Reproduced with the kind permission of Max Oettli and Dene Illingworth.

The rules stated that potential fellows needed to have ‘executed sufficient work’ to demonstrate talent as a painter or sculptor, and shown that they were ‘a serious artist’ who would be ‘diligent’ in developing their talent and would benefit from the fellowship. There was no requirement for applicants to have any formal education in fine arts, ensuring ‘mavericks’ would not be cut out. The university – or, at least, its selection committee – from the beginning showed a willingness to be bold and support innovative and sometimes controversial artists. The first Frances Hodgkins Fellow, Michael Illingworth, made the news a year earlier when his painting As Adam and Eve, on show at Auckland’s Barry Lett Galleries, attracted an obscenity complaint to the police. That incident cemented the painter’s frustration with the conservatism of middle-class New Zealand. A friend, the writer Kevin Ireland, later described Illingworth as ‘a person with a blunderbuss conversation and philosophy – he sprayed out and hit everything yet his art was so worked and jewel-like and carefully done’. The fellowship got off to rather an unfortunate start when Illingworth left halfway through his 1966 tenure, claiming he couldn’t work in the studio provided. The second Frances Hodgkins Fellow, sculptor Tanya Ashken, found Dunedin more congenial. Among the friends she made was Philip Smithells, director of the physical education school; she joined the students in his gymnastic classes and her observations of their movements and poses contributed to her new sculpture. Following her fellowship there was an exhibition of her work in the foyer of the museum (where the Hocken was still located).

Finding a suitable space for the fellows proved a long-term challenge. In 1975 the Cumberland St house where fellow John Parker had his studio was demolished partway through his term and he moved into an alternative in Leith St. In 1978 fellow Grahame Sydney declared the latest space, near the Leith, ‘a completely satisfactory studio’, but that one didn’t last either. The 2008 fellow, painter Heather Straka, noted that the then studio in Union Street West had good light and hours could pass without her realising: ‘Before I know it, it is 1am and I am still working’. For the past few years the studio has been in a prefab near the Albany Street music studio. Another challenge was funding. Although the original anonymous gift was intended to endow the fellowship permanently, by the late 1970s inflation had eroded the value of its income, along with those of the Burns and Mozart fellowships. The university held a successful appeal to boost fellowship funds, attracting donations from individuals and businesses, along with a government grant. In 1986 the university decided to withhold the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship for a year to build up its capital, but donations from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council and M.W. James Trust meant it could be offered for a shorter term of 6 months. Since then, the fellowship has been awarded every year.

The list of former Frances Hodgkins Fellows is a veritable who’s who of the New Zealand art world. Many of the artists held the fellowship fairly early or mid-career and went on to great acclaim, such as Ralph Hotere (1969), Marilynn Webb (1974), Jeffrey Harris (1977), Gretchen Albrecht (1981), Fiona Pardington (1996 and 1997), Shane Cotton (1998) and Seraphine Pick (1999). ‘It’s flattering to be in such good company’, said Heather Straka during her tenure. ‘Everyone who has come through this residency has been of quite good note and has produced great work while on the residency’. Freedom from financial worry – for a year, at least – led to the production of many fine works of art: John Ward Knox, the 2015 fellow, described it as ‘a windfall of time and space and freedom’ to create. The Hocken showcased the work of each fellow through an exhibition hosted soon after their tenure, and acquired some of those works for its collection.

If you’re in Dunedin, take the opportunity to see some of the highlights of the Hocken at its current exhibition (on until 22 October). And keep an eye out for the exhibition to be held later this year at the Hocken Collections and Dunedin Public Art Gallery to mark 50 years of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship. If you’re further away, you can still enjoy many of the Hocken’s art treasures in digital format – happy viewing!

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 Nobel connection

Tags

1940s, 1950s, biochemistry, medicine, physics, physiology, research

Staff and senior students of the physiology department in 1951. Front row, from left: Laurie Brock, Ken Bradley, Prof Eccles, Eric Hook, Charlie Morris, Wilfrid Rall. Middle row: Arthur Chapman, Jack Coombs, Yap Tien Beng, Molly Bradley, Graham Jeffries, Pearl Cousins. Back row: Arnold Annand, Ron Stevenson, Dan Whyte. Photo courtesy of the Department of Physiology.

At first glance, the Otago physiology department’s one-page annual report for 1951 appears somewhat mundane. It listed student numbers, staff changes, research topics and publications, but it was a simple factual report and made no comment on the teaching workload (which was heavy), research productivity and quality (high), or the achievements of departing staff (remarkable).

A closer look at the 7 publications listed provides further insight into goings-on in the department. Two appeared in the leading journal Nature: ‘Plasticity of mammalian monosynaptic reflexes’, by departing professor Jack Eccles and senior lecturer Archie McIntyre; and ‘The afferent limb of the myotatic reflex arc’, by McIntyre. Several others appeared in the local publication Proceedings of the University of Otago Medical School, including ‘Action potentials of motoneurones with intracellular electrode’, authored by physiology lecturer Laurie Brock (a recent Otago medical graduate), physics lecturer Jack Coombs (another Otago graduate) and Eccles. That article – just a page and a half long – was the first published report of an important breakthrough in neurophysiology research; it was a significant step in the work that won Eccles a Nobel Prize in 1963.

Eccles, born in Melbourne in 1903, commenced at Otago in 1944, bringing impressive credentials from his years as a physiology researcher in Oxford and Sydney. He replaced John Malcolm, who had been physiology professor since 1905. Malcolm was an active researcher, highly respected for his work in biochemistry and nutrition, but Eccles was to take the research activity of the department to a new level. First, though, he had to reacquaint himself with the whole of physiology in order to teach medical students, something he had not done for some years. Preparing 75 lectures for second-year meds, plus others for first-year meds, along with a completely new laboratory course and discussion groups, meant his research ‘virtually came to an end’ during that first year, Eccles later recalled. He did design some of the medical students’ lab work to assist his research, as Miles Hursthouse explained: the professor ‘conducted many interesting experiments, some of them on us! At our practical sessions we had to endure having needles stuck into a muscle, then contract that muscle while measuring the electrical impulse and rate of propagation’. There weren’t many staff to assist, though Eccles was grateful for those he had, including Norman Edson, appointed associate professor of biochemistry in 1944. Biochemistry was a rapidly-growing field, and in 1949 it split from physiology to become an independent department with Edson as inaugural professor; the two fields continued to work closely together despite the administrative separation.

Though he had little time for research in 1944, it was ‘important in my scientific life above all my post-Sherrington years’, recalled Eccles (Charles Sherrington being the distinguished neurophysiologist who inspired him at Oxford). It was then he met the great philosopher Karl Popper, who was teaching at Canterbury. Hearing of the stir that Popper was creating among the scientists of Christchurch, Eccles and Edson invited him to visit Otago. Eccles was heavily influenced by the ‘inspiring new vision of science that Popper gave us’, most notably by his message ‘that science is not inductive, but deductive’. With Popper’s urging, Eccles set about designing experiments that would test a hypothesis ‘in its most vulnerable aspects in an attempt at falsification’. He was keen to prove his theory that messages crossed the synapses of nerve cells by electrical rather than chemical means.

By 1945 Eccles was busy experimenting alongside his teaching duties. David Cole, future dean of the Auckland medical school, completed a BMedSci degree with Eccles that year, recalling that ‘the ebullient JCE’ had ‘ideas tumbling out of his mind’; students appreciated ‘the invaluable experience of working close to the edge of scientific knowledge’. The professor’s lab was ‘a huge cage of chicken wire’ and ‘almost a caricature of the mad scientist amongst his oscilloscopes, wires and animals’. Another student recalled the day that Eccles ‘arrived in great excitement, having, he said, a testable hypothesis about inhibition which had come to him, like Archimedes, in the bath that morning. He retired to his wire cage for 24 hours or more, being fed sandwiches through the door’.

Neurophysiology experiments required sophisticated and intricate electronic equipment; Eccles acknowledged that such technology ‘rapidly outstripped my understanding …. My indebtedness to my associates is immeasurable’. In his travels around the world, he noted, ‘I have left … a trail of elaborately designed shielded research rooms stripped of equipment!’. To Otago he brought not just specialist electrical equipment, but also a technician, Arthur Chapman. He also made the most of the technical expertise he found in Dunedin. Arnold Annand, whose electrical expertise had been honed during service in the Air Force, joined the physiology department as a technician in 1948, beginning a career of almost 40 years building and maintaining equipment for the university’s health science departments. In 1950 Eccles asked Jack Coombs, a ‘shy genius’ who had been lecturing in the physics department since 1940, to design a machine capable of the electronic stimulation and recording he needed for his experiments. Coombs came up with devices which remained, for many years, ‘the best general research instruments for electrophysiology in the world’, said Eccles. Coombs also participated in the neurophysiology experiments. Eccles attracted PhD students – then a rare breed – to Otago. For instance, Wilfrid Rall, a Yale graduate, came to study with Eccles, remaining on as a lecturer for several years before returning to pioneering neuroscience work in the US. Another important recruit to the department was Archie McIntyre, an old Australian neurophysiology colleague. Eccles convinced McIntyre to join him at Otago, where he became senior lecturer in 1949.

Eccles at work on an experiment, assisted by Molly Bradley, in 1951. Photo courtesy of the Department of Physiology.

The breakthrough 1951 experiment required the insertion of a tiny electrode, less than a micrometer wide, into a single nerve cell in the spinal cord of an anaesthetised cat; the action potentials of the cell could then be measured. Similar experiments had been carried out on frog muscle fibres, but never successfully on mammals. The day that revealed that synaptic action was chemically mediated, thus disproving Eccles’s theory of electrical transmission, was remarkable not only for that result. The experiment lasted for many hours, but for some time Eccles was left to tend it alone while one of his colleagues, Laurie Brock, delivered the baby of the wife of the third member of the team, Jack Coombs! As an enthusiastic disciple of Popper’s deductive method, Eccles was happy to accept that his theory was false, becoming a ‘belated’ convert to English neuroscientist Henry Dale’s hypothesis of chemical synaptic transmission even in the central nervous system.

Although Eccles was to carry out further ground-breaking experiments in neurophysiology, they didn’t take place in Dunedin. At the end of 1951 he departed for a plum job as founding physiology professor at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, attached to the recently-established Australian National University, Canberra. There he could carry on his research without the distraction of the heavy teaching load which he found a burden at Otago. Jack Coombs (whose younger brother Doug was geology professor at Otago for many years) and Arthur Chapman followed Eccles to ANU, as did some of the specialised equipment. But he left behind a strong legacy of experimental neuroscience at Otago and, by no means least, his much-respected colleague Archie McIntyre, who succeeded him as physiology professor. Under McIntyre’s leadership the department continued to attract talented research students and staff and maintained a strong experimental focus, albeit one less focused on neurophysiology, as new staff with other interests within physiology joined the team.

Ted Jones, who became a prominent neuroscientist in the USA, arrived at Otago as a medical student a few years after Eccles departed. He could not recall ever being told that Eccles had carried out groundbreaking work ‘in one of those rather grubby basement rooms of the Lindo Ferguson building. If Eccles was remembered at all it was for his irascibility, not his scientific achievements’. Perhaps the subsequent award of a Nobel Prize alerted later students to what this man had achieved in the world’s southernmost medical school – certainly it’s something we can celebrate today!