Aquinas, Dalmore and Aquinas

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1950s, 1980s, Aquinas, Dalmore, Dominican Hall

 

Taken from the Aquinas building site in the 1950s, this photograph shows part of its fabulous view over campus and city. Image courtesy of Aquinas College.

Aquinas College is yet another part of the university which marks a milestone this year: it opened 60 years ago, in 1954. It hasn’t been open for 60 continuous years, though; strictly speaking, this is its 54th year as a residential college. In 1948, with a surge in student numbers in the wake of World War II, there was a growing need for student accommodation. The Catholic Bishop of Dunedin, James Whyte, wrote to the Dominican Order in Australia, asking if they might do something about “the crying need in Dunedin of a hostel for the Catholic students who come here to the Medical School.” The Dominican Sisters had opened Dominican Hall, which catered for women students, in 1946, but there was no similar facility for men. The churches were heavily involved in providing accommodation for Otago students. The Anglicans built Selwyn College (opened 1893) and the Presbyterians Knox (1909) and St Margaret’s (1911). Their founders wanted to promote education, meet an obvious community need, and provide pastoral care to their young people. Though the colleges were open to students of all denominations and none, the Catholic Church naturally hoped to provide a facility which would keep its student members under its own wing.

In response to the Bishop’s request, in 1949 Fathers Leo McArdle and Denis Crowley arrived in Dunedin to take over Sacred Heart Parish in North East Valley and begin planning the new college. The Dominican Sisters, who had been providing Catholic education in Dunedin since 1871, donated land adjacent to their Santa Sabina Convent for the new project. Located at the top of a steep hill, it had expansive views over the city and directly across North East Valley to Knox College (Knox and Aquinas residents sometimes howled at one another across the valley and became natural rivals in student hijinks). The Dominican Fathers raised funds through public subscriptions, a bank loan and a government subsidy, and building commenced in 1951. The design was an early project of renowned Dunedin architect Ted McCoy; it won him the New Zealand Institute of Architect’s gold medal.

An early view of the building. Image courtesy of Aquinas College.

In 1954 the first residents moved into Aquinas Hall, named in honour of the great medieval theologian St Thomas Aquinas, the most famed of Dominican friars. The 72 pioneering residents – all men – included many medical and dental students, but also a variety of others, including physical education and teachers’ college students; about two-thirds were Catholic. Fathers Bernard Curran and Ambrose Loughnan and Brothers Martin Keogh and Peter O’Hearn joined Father McArdle to form the college’s first Dominican community; the death of founder McArdle late in 1954 was a great loss to Aquinas. In keeping with the scholarly goals of the college, and of the Dominican order, the residents had a large library and tutorial rooms as well as their common rooms and chapel. Early residents hold fond memories of the friars and of life at Aquinas; they quickly developed into a close community and indulged in all the usual student activities and pranks (including stealing all of Knox’s cutlery).

The 1966 residents of Second Floor North pose for the Aquinas magazine, ‘Veritas’. Image courtesy of Aquinas College.

Aquinas flourished through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, but in 1980 it was in trouble. The problem was not peculiar to Aquinas; that year the Vice-Chancellor reported about 100 vacancies in Otago residential colleges. The university roll had increased a little, but would actually decline in 1981 and further in 1982; to aggravate the situation in Dunedin, an increasing number of students were now based at the Christchurch and Wellington clinical schools, and the teachers’ college intake had dropped. The days when many students stayed in a college for their entire degree had gone, and more and more were now going flatting after a year or two. There was simply less demand for college accommodation. The Dominican Sisters stopped offering student residence at Dominican Hall in 1978; at the end of 1980 the Dominican Friars closed Aquinas with much regret, as they could not afford to keep it open. They sold the building to the Elim Church and part became a backpackers’ hostel for some years.

By the mid-1980s the University of Otago roll had begun to rise again, and from the late 1980s it boomed. The university was desperate to find accommodation for first year students. In 1984 it opened a ‘temporary’ residential college – Helensburgh House – in the Wakari Hospital nurses’ home (it was to survive until the university instead secured in 1992 the former maternity hospital which became Hayward College). The former Aquinas Hall – purpose-built as a residential college – was clearly ideal for the university’s purposes and it managed to purchase the building from Elim Church and open it under a new name – Dalmore House – in 1988. Seventy-three brave students and warden Reywa Clough moved into the run-down facilities, which were slowly upgraded. At the end of the year the university managed to secure the lease of the neighbouring former Santa Sabina Convent, which became an extension of Dalmore and home to a further twenty or so residents. Today the expanded and much improved facilities are home to 165 residents. The former chapel is now a gymnasium, but the Catholic heritage of the college was marked in 1996 when, with the permission of the Dominicans, it was renamed Aquinas.

Do you have any memories to share of Aquinas/Dalmore/Aquinas?

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Masterchef, Otago style

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1910s, 1920s, 1940s, 1950s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, Abbey, Aquinas, Cumberland, Dalmore, food, Hayward, Helensburgh, Knox, St Margaret's, Studholme, Toroa

St Margaret’s residents, complete with crowns, at a special patriotic dinner to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. Photograph courtesy of Dorothy Page.

This week the University Link hosted a quintessentially 21st-century event: a cooking contest, complete with mystery box, compulsory ingredients, celebrity judges and audience. This was not just any old cooking contest, but Otago’s fourth annual Residential College Chef of the Year event. Wade Kennard and Owen Newbould of Abbey College took top honours with their two plates: scallops with fondant potato, pea mash and red pepper sauce, and scallop ceviche; and rabbit braised in cola (the compulsory ingredient), served with Peking duck pancakes, salad and chilli caramel sauce. The Studholme College team came second and Cumberland third. Bragging rights went to Cumberland in 2010 and 2012, and to Toroa in 2011. The contest, organised by Otago’s College Catering Manager Gary McNeill, is designed to demonstrate the skills of these “unsung heroes” of student life, responsible for producing 2.5 million meals a year.

Everyday fare in residential colleges is, of course, not usually quite this lavish, but it has progressed a long way from earlier years. Producing good food for three meals a day for a large group on a tight budget is never easy, and until recent decades it could be very difficult to find an experienced and trained cook willing to take on the task. Studholme was opened in 1915 to provide a residence for home science students, and also to provide a venue for those students to gain practical training in institutional management. Whether or not this made its food superior to other colleges I don’t know!

College chefs have varied enormously in skill, and some regular dishes became notorious. In 1950 residents of St Margaret’s campaigned for the abolition of jam roll, composed of “flour & water & apricot jam”. The Sunday roasts under one particular St Mags cook were known as “cardboard and string”. In 1928 Knox residents voted that “the unsavoury indigestible unpalatable compound of dough immersed in fat plus bacon be excluded, banned and barred forever from the breakfast menu. Likewise the equally indescribable Yellow Peril.”

These days there is a wide variety of dishes on offer, but monotony was a real feature of the “plentiful but plain” food of the past. To a large degree this reflected New Zealand’s wider food culture, and many students came from homes which also served up the same basic dishes of “meat and 3 veg” at every dinner. Dinner at Knox in the early to mid-twentieth century usually included meat and vegetables, with a boiled pudding to follow. The only choice was between beef and mutton, and between rice and potatoes. During the 1940s rationing reduced food choices even more. From 1944 to 1948 meat was rationed, but by value rather than volume, meaning colleges relied heavily on cheaper cuts of meat, particularly sausages, to feed the hungry hordes.

Sometimes students were more conservative about food than their cooks. Many Knox residents were suspicious of innovations like muesli and yoghurt, introduced to their menu by new catering manager Sue Stockwell in the 1980s; they dismissed salads as “rabbit food”. Other residents appreciated the greater choices. By the 1990s they could select between one vegetarian and two meat options at every dinner, with a five-week recurring menu. Some of the colleges also added halal options to cater for the needs of Islamic students.

Some of the food choices at the older colleges may have been unpopular, but at least the food was freshly cooked. The new institutions of the 1980s and 1990s – Helensburgh, Cumberland, Hayward and Dalmore (the re-opened Aquinas) – had their meals cooked at the University Union via the cook-chill system. After Cumberland installed a full production kitchen and expanded and renovated its dining room for 2001, it was able to report “a more satisfied resident”.

Various colleges have developed traditions of special dinners – annual dinners, valedictory dinners, founders’ dinners, and the like. At a time when most students lived in their college for several years, St Margaret’s held a special joint 21st birthday dinner. And then there are the special dinners for one-off occasions, such as the coronation of 1953. Quite why Knox felt it necessary to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar in 2005 I am uncertain, though it did provide a good excuse for a party! These are occasions when the college catering staff have a chance to shine, and today they show a little more flair than they did in the mid-20th century, when the most likely choices for a special dinner were a roast with trifle or pavlova to follow. Still, the cooks of the past did not completely lack imagination – at the St Mags coronation dinner all the food had a patriotic theme, including the red, white and blue coconut ice!

Do you have any stories to share of memorable college cooks or memorable college meals?

The vanishing hall of residence

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1980s, 1990s, Aquinas, Cumberland, Dalmore, Hayward, Helensburgh

Helensburgh House, from the University of Otago accommodation brochure, c.1989

Abbey, Aquinas, Arana, Carrington, City, Cumberland, Hayward, Knox, St Margaret’s, Salmond, Selwyn, Studholme, Toroa, University … these days there are 14 residential colleges associated with the University of Otago. The colleges (known as halls of residence until 2006, when the remaining ‘halls’ and ‘houses’ were renamed ‘college’) have played a vital role in a university where the majority of students come from out of town.

Each college has its own distinctive and interesting history, from the first, Selwyn College (established 1893), to the most recent, Abbey College (established 2008). For this historian, though, the most intriguing residential colleges – and also the most difficult to research – are those which no longer exist! One which might easily be forgotten because of its distance from the university campus is Helensburgh House, home to over 100 Otago students each year from 1984 to 1991.

Helensburgh was an ‘instant’ hall of residence, created at short notice in response to a crisis. Student numbers at Otago declined slightly in 1981 and 1982. Some of the colleges reduced their capacity and Aquinas closed. Meanwhile some old privately-owned student flats were demolished. When student numbers grew again, accommodation became very tight and in early 1984 the university accommodation office had 300 prospective students without a place to live. To avoid losing all these potential students, the university arranged to lease the former nurses’ home at Wakari Hospital from the Otago Hospital Board. Within weeks Helensburgh House was a fully functioning hall of residence, though the absence of a large kitchen meant residents’ meals had to be transported from the University Union.

Critic was concerned that Helensburgh House would provide “a bleak introduction to life in Dunedin” for students. The big problem, of course, was that it was so far from campus – several kilometres, up and down hills. Fees were kept lower than in other halls to compensate for residents’ transport costs. There were some advantages – the rooms were large and the grounds attractive – but the distance factor would always keep Helensburgh well down the list of most popular halls of residence.

In 1984 the university accommodation officer reported that demographic statistics suggested the current high level of first year university students was unlikely to persist for more than 5 or 6 years – it seemed unwise for the university to invest major capital into new student accommodation. Instead, the university continued to lease Helensburgh House from the Otago Hospital Board. By the late 1980s it was becoming evident that the demographic predictions of 1984 were inadequate, as an increasing proportion of school leavers wanted to attend university. The number of ‘EFTS’ (equivalent full-time students) at Otago doubled from 7000 to 14,000 between 1983 and 1993. In 1988 the university bought the former Aquinas Hall and re-opened it as Dalmore House (later renamed Aquinas). In 1989 the university also took on the lease of the oldest Dunedin Hospital nurses’ home building, previously earmarked for demolition. Thus Cumberland House came into being – like Helensburgh it opened at very short notice in response to a rapidly rising demand for accommodation.

Helensburgh House ended its life as a student residence at the end of 1991. It would have continued for longer had the Otago Area Health Board not wanted its facility back. In 1992 Cherry Farm Hospital – the board’s major mental health facility – closed and some of its services were shifted to Wakari Hospital. Fortunately for the university, the board had other accommodation available thanks to the move of its maternity services into the main Dunedin Hospital ward block. The former Queen Mary Maternity Hospital was converted into a new student residence, Hayward Hall, which opened in 1992.

It may not have had the bucolic charms of Helensburgh House, but Hayward was much more conveniently located close to the university campus. Glenys Roome (formerly Low), who was warden at Helensburgh throughout its career as a student residence, became warden of the new Hayward Hall, presumably transferring some of the atmosphere of Helensburgh to Hayward. In 1989 she reported that over the years Helensburgh had “maintained a very close-knit community with a friendly family atmosphere which is appreciated by students. Every year we have a problem at the beginning of the year with students wanting to leave because of the distance from campus, but once this is overcome the majority are very happy to be at Helensburgh and are very loyal.”

Are you one of that rare breed, a former resident of Helensburgh House? I’d love to hear more about life at this ‘temporary’ hall of residence!

Helensburgh House, from the University of Otago accommodation brochure, c.1989