Radical Carrington

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1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Arana, Carrington, Stuart House

A happy group of Carrington residents in the late 1940s. Standing (left to right): ?, D Whalan, ?, B Pohe, N Parris, R Williams. At front right is Ben Whitiwhiti. Image courtesy of Bill Dawson, from an album of Robin Cook.

When Carrington opened 70 years ago it had one major difference from Otago’s older residential colleges – it welcomed both men and women. That was pretty radical for the 1940s, and for a few years Carrington was Australasia’s only ‘co-residential’ student hall of residence.

The Stuart House Council’s decision to run a mixed residence was a pragmatic response to the needs and opportunities of the time. It evolved out of a successful experiment at their earlier student residence, Stuart House, which was absorbed into the new Carrington. In 1940 Harold Turner, the assistant minister at Knox Church, where many parishioners were students, came up with the idea of opening a small student hostel in the former Presbyterian Women’s Training Institute at 638 Cumberland Street (where one end of the Student Union is now). He formed a committee with several other enthusiasts, among them George Carrington (secretary of the Otago Education Board) and successful businessmen Cecil Wardell (of the flourishing Wardell’s grocery firm) and Gifford Laurenson (of the equally flourishing bakery firm). Turner later described them as ‘a private voluntary group on a religious but interdenominational basis’.

In 1941 Stuart House, as they renamed the Cumberland Street property, opened to 29 men, some of them accommodated in an ‘annexe’ at the former Training College building across the road (now part of the physical education school). In 1942, with many male students headed off for military service but an influx of women students, the council decided to change Stuart House to a women’s residence. Since some men had already been offered places, they found bedrooms for them in private homes nearby but kept them as ‘associate members’ of Stuart House, which they attended for meals and social activities. This makeshift arrangement proved unexpectedly successful; it was popular with the residents and Turner, the warden, was pleased that the house was ‘much quieter and more orderly than it was last year’.

With no shortage of demand for student accommodation, the Stuart House Council always had an eye out for suitable buildings which might be converted. In 1942 they persuaded the university to purchase Arana, the home of the late Sir James Allen, and lease it to them. It opened as a residence for men in 1943. In late 1944 another good property, located on Heriot Row, came on the market. Carrington bought it on spec, having heard a rumour that the government was planning to provide money for teachers’ college student accommodation. Fortunately this proved correct, and after some delay the Otago Education Board funded the building, leaving its management in the hands of the council (now named the Stuart Residence Halls Council). Like Stuart House and Arana, Carrington was open to both university and teachers’ college students.

Building a float for the 1946 capping procession, in front of the first house purchased for Carrington. The man with saw in hand is Murray Menzies, who became a surgeon. Image from Pat Menzies, courtesy of Carrington College.

Students moved into the new Carrington Hall in 1945 – women into the former Halstead property and men into one of the two neighbouring houses the council had purchased. The generous grounds of the old houses provided room for yet more accommodation and in 1947 a brand new wing named Stuart House opened, along with more temporary buildings made from army huts. In that year Carrington provided a home for 105 students, being 53 men and 52 women. The original Stuart House in Cumberland Street became flats in 1947; the council sold the building in 1952.

Even the laundry was once segregated! A photo taken by 1953-4 resident Lex Familton after a raid on the women’s drying room. Image courtesy of Carrington College.

So, the radical experiment in accommodating women and men in the same residential college happened rather by accident, but since it proved a success it was allowed to continue. Of course the liberals of the 1940s weren’t quite as liberal as those of later generations, and there were strict rules about the mixing of men and women at Carrington. They could socialise freely in the communal spaces, but for the first few decades they had segregated bedroom wings/houses. Until 1976 all of the wardens were clergymen, some more conservative than others. Legend has it that one warden and his wife would listen in at the men’s doors to ensure any women had left before 7p.m. In 1973 the integration of buildings commenced, though men and women still had separate floors for many years.

Turner wrote in the 1950s about the advantages of mixed residences, where the sexes could socialise in a ‘natural and happy’ way and form ‘decent and sensible friendships’. Pranks and raids were less extreme than in some of the men’s colleges and, overall, it made ‘the men less crude, and the girls less giggly’. Co-residence could be ‘too distracting for some students’, though, suggested Turner, and some argued that it was ‘good for men to spend some years in a thoroughly masculine environment; presumably the parallel position is true of women’.

Though some university authorities got pretty het up about mixed flatting in the 1960s, they saw the advantages of mixed residential colleges, especially as the number of women students grew and eventually overtook the number of men. University College (Unicol) opened in 1969 as another mixed residence, albeit with men and women living in separate towers for many years. During the 1970s Studholme, Salmond, Arana and Aquinas all went co-ed, St Margaret’s joined the trend in 1981, and in 1983 the oldest colleges – Selwyn and Knox – finally and controversially lost their positions as bastions of masculinity (some would say chauvinism!).

Gymnastics at Carrington, from the album of Robin Cook, a resident of the late 1940s. Image courtesy of Bill Dawson.

Meanwhile, the trailblazer Carrington continued on its happy way as a residence open to all. As neighbouring properties came on the market they were absorbed into the college, which now provides accommodation for around 240 students in an attractively landscaped collection of 11 buildings, some of them refurbished large old homes and some of them purpose-built. The Stuart Residence Halls Council eventually sold both Carrington and Arana to the university, which now directly manages these colleges. With the funds obtained, the council then made very generous gifts back to the university, endowing the Stuart Chair in Science Communication and the Stuart Chair in Scottish Studies.

Do you have any memories to share of the early decades of Carrington? Can you identify anybody in the photographs? If so, I’d love to hear from you!

Our oldest building – some runners up

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Our oldest building

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Becoming part of Asia

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Africa, Arana, Asia, biochemistry, Colombo Plan, international students, mineral technology, mining, Pacific, physics

Oo Khaik Cheang, Philippa Wiggins and an unidentified person at a farewell morning tea for Oo in the Department of Biochemistry, c.1964. Photograph courtesy of the Hocken Collections, Department of Biochemistry records, MS-4113/009, S14.512b.

In the middle of the twentieth century Pakeha New Zealanders, who had for generations looked “home” to Britain, became increasingly conscious that they were part of the Asia-Pacific region. The arrival of Asian students on New Zealand university campuses as part of the Colombo Plan played no small part in this changing perspective of the world.

The Colombo Plan – named for the city where it was signed, Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) – was a 1950 agreement between various Commonwealth countries to promote economic and social development in Asia and the Pacific. There were various aspects to the scheme: more developed nations sent money and technical expertise to countries in need of assistance, and they also provided education within their own tertiary institutions for promising students from developing nations. Around 3500 students came to New Zealand as part of the Colombo Plan during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. This country then withdrew from that aspect of the scheme, though the Colombo Plan survives today, considerably modified from its origins of over sixty years ago.

Otago’s first Colombo Plan students arrived in the early 1950s, with numbers gradually building up. In 1965 there were just over 160 international students on campus, more than half of them from Asian countries. Probably most, if not all, of the Asian students were here on the Colombo scheme. The largest group came from the countries which would later form Malaysia: 39 from Malaya, 11 from Sabah and 8 from Sarawak. Another 10 came from Thailand, 8 from Singapore, 8 from Hong Kong, 2 from Ceylon, 2 from Indonesia, 1 from Java and 1 from Burma. A quarter of these Asian students were women. Otago also had 28 international students from Africa and 26 from the Pacific Islands that year.

The Colombo Plan students completed courses in a wide range of disciplines. Most lived in residential colleges for at least part of their course, and in recognition of this the government provided funding for the university to expand its residential capability. The money was used to extend Arana Hall (now Arana College), with its new Colombo Wing opening in 1968. But authorities were keen for the Colombo Plan students to be integrated throughout the community, so they were spread around all the colleges, and also enjoyed the hospitality of New Zealand host families during holidays.

Arrival in Dunedin, with its less than tropical climate, could be something of a shock for students from Asia! Furthermore, especially in the early years of the scheme, many New Zealanders were unaccustomed to the presence of ‘foreigners’ and treated anybody speaking in another language with suspicion. Fortunately, other members of the community made a real effort to welcome the visitors and the students themselves appreciated the opportunity to learn about Kiwi culture. Some really threw themselves into student life. One outstanding example of this is Mazlan Othman, who arrived in Dunedin in the early 1970s as an undergraduate science student and went on to become the first woman to complete a PhD in physics at Otago. She enjoyed all the capping events, attended protest rallies, played in a band, worked in a restaurant, visited the mountains and enjoyed long discussions at the pub with other students. She learned to appreciate New Zealanders’ egalitarian outlook on life.

Some of these mining students are likely to have been at Otago on the Colombo Plan – they were clearly getting into the spirit of Otago student life! Freshers’ welcome 1964, Department of Mineral Technology album, MS-3843/005, S13-561b, Hocken Collections, University of Otago.

Like many other Colombo Plan graduates, Mazlan Othman went on to a successful career. She returned to Malaysia to teach, and later worked in the Prime Minister’s office to oversee development of Malaysia’s national planetarium. She then became Director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. Many became university lecturers in their home countries. Oo Khaik Cheang, who features in the photograph above, became Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur). He completed a PhD on “The biosynthesis of bacterial cell wall constituents” at Otago, graduating in 1965. Others went on to signficant political careers. A well-known example is Sulaiman bin Haji Daud, who graduated in dentistry from Otago in 1962. Over many years in Malaysian politics he served as minister in various portfolios, including education and health. Soedjati Djiwandono, who studied education, politics and languages at Otago before completing post-graduate qualifications in London, became a distinguished political scientist in Indonesia.

The Colombo Plan offered the opportunity for students to complete qualifications not yet available in their home countries, and to bring the benefits of that learning to their home communities. But the plan also had great benefits for the host countries. It brought a new diversity to the student body and introduced New Zealanders to new cultures. Lifelong friendships were forged in Otago’s residential colleges, lecture theatres, labs and the student union. The scheme brought some especially bright minds to Otago, for competition for the scholarships was fierce. The connections made through the Colombo Plan would have a very long impact on the university, as the goodwill built up encouraged further generations of international students to enrol here. It is no accident that the largest group of international students at this university in more recent decades has been from Malaysia, which was also the home of the largest group of Otago Colombo Plan students.

Did you attend Otago under the Colombo Plan? If so, do you have any memories to share? Can you help identify anybody in the photographs? I have published the image of the mining students on this blog previously, but I’m yet to identify any of the people, or the location!

Update – 27 March 2014: Many thanks to Alison Finigan of the Alumni Office who found a mining graduate at an alumni function in Kuala Lumpur who identified some of the people in the mystery photograph! Among the men standing are Boon Meer Prasart (left), Vivoon Petpaichit (3rd from left), Chai ? (wearing dark glasses) and Paichit Patasorn (right). All four were from Thailand. Can you add any more details?

Another update – 16 December 2014: A big thank you to Nic MacArthur who identified Ray Soper as the man standing second from left in the photograph of mining students at their freshers’ do. Ray graduated with a BSc in 1967, a couple of years ahead of Nic, who graduated with a BSc (Hons) in mineral technology in 1969. A check of the graduation programmes also reveals what are hopefully the correct names of three of the Thai mining students. Viroon Petpaisit graduated BSc in December 1965, while Paichit Pathnopas and Sunan Boonmeeprasert were awarded Bachelors of Engineering in December 1966. I’m still wondering what the venue is – anybody out there know?

More information – 26 July 2016: My thanks to Jean Kennedy, who identified the man in dark glasses in the mining student photograph as Riew Kongsangchai, who graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in December 1965. Jean became friends with the Thai mining students through the International Club in 1963 and remembers them as ‘the best cooks among the Asian students’; they shared a flat in Clyde Street.