Boy's-Eye View of Disappearing History

Ohinemuri Regional History Journal 36, September 1992

Sketched by C W Malcolm

Boy's-Eye View of Disappearing History

This is a boy's-eye view of the Paeroa District High School as it was from 1911 till 1920. It has been sketched with careful accuracy from a rare and somewhat indistinct photograph. All except the Primer Room on the high ground at the extreme right has now disappeared. Why a boy's-eye view? Because it is viewed from the boys' playground and is the rear of the building. The girls were in those days strictly separated from the boys, their playground being in the front of the building between it and the large corrugated-iron drill hall belonging to the military.

Neitherthe girls nor the majority of Paeroa's adults would have seen this aspect of the school except on rare occasions for most approached it from the town along Wood Street where the frontage, with its large main doorways, faced them.

This rare view, except for the boys, had a bleak, cold southerly aspect from which sometimes snow was seen on Te Aroha Mountain. The view is packed full of history. The wooden building, numbered (1) is the closest to Wood Street. By the efforts of the Fire Brigade it was saved from the fire in 1910 which destroyed the rest of the school except the detached Primer Room still (1991) standing. Until the school (2) to (5) was rebuilt in brick and plaster in 1911, classes were accommodated in the cheerless drill hall whose roof is shown in the sketch above and beyond the school.

From the sketch I have omitted the chimneys in the centre of each of the classrooms, also the flagstaff which was erected on the apex of the high school room situated in the front of the building and therefore not seen from this side. Also omitted are the large "domes" for ventilation placed in the centre of each roof ridge to draw out the stale air from the classroom below for there were no ceilings but a vast cavern above the pupils' heads rising to the apex.

The rescued Standard 1 and 2 classroom (1), its classes separated by a green curtain across the middle, was connected to the brick building by a porch, the girls entering from the front of the school, the boys through the rear door seen in the sketch. If the headmaster, from his study (3) wished to visit this room he made his way through the Standard 5 and 6 room (2), opened a door at its rear, descended a step or two, and crossed the connecting porch.

When extensive alterations to the school were made, this wooden classroom was moved across the boys' playground ultimately to its south-west corner (Wood Street and Thorp Street) until it was sold to a farmer for a hay shed in Cadman Road near Tirohia.

When I entered the school in 1911 when the old building was a mere patch of ashes, the Primer Room, with a porch for the boys (seen in the sketch) and one for the girls, had a tiered floor and each row of desks rose a step above the row in front as in a grandstand. Many will be unaware of this arrangement since it has long since been removed and a level floor substituted.

The rigid segregation of boys from girls meant that, though the girls had easy access to their classrooms through three doorways in the front of the building, the boys, from their sloping clay playground were not so fortunate. There was the doorway between rooms (1) and (2) and one other narrow door entered by a narrow porch seen in the sketch between the headmaster's study (3) and the Standard 5 & 6 classroom (2). Sometimes the boys of Standards 3 and 4 (room (5), would make their way through the gap at the end of the hawthorn hedge between it and the wooden fence and round the end of their classroom to the front of the building to enter one of the main doors. At times the high school boys followed the same route or ducked through the other gap in the hedge to use the same entry as the Standard 5 & 6 boys.

The comfort and convenience of our teachers was not very much considered when the 1911 building was erected. Their common-room (4), as well as the headmaster's study was situated on the cold south side of the school. This was general practice in those days. Further, the teachers' room was only the narrow width of a passageway for when the school was extended in the 1920's this is just what it became - a section of the corridor to the additional classrooms.

But though relegated to the back of the school, we boys, without a football field, kicked rugby balls to the danger of each other, made slippery slides in the wet weather, scooped holes in the clay surface for games of marbles, spun tops in season, and those fortunate enough to possess pocket-knives, engaged in the harmless pastime known as "knifey". And following every morning interval we were regimented into our classes for physical drill. When the weather was frosty we lined up for "warming-up" exercises before entering those large classrooms with their one small stove which miserably failed to heat the vast area. Kind teachers would allow the frozen to leave their desks and stand by the fireside until numb fingers could hold the pen!

In the triangle now made by Nahum, De Castro, and Lewis Streets was the school's horse paddock and next to it the senior boys' vegetable gardens, a pattern of magnificent, well cultivated neat plots separated by trim pathways. From Standard 5 upward we were soundly taught agriculture and gardening and it was a joy to work in this elevated situation or to sit eating our lunch supplemented by our own grown produce such as radishes more or less cleaned of the rich black soil, and there below us that more distant rear view of our school from which, for a happy period, we had escaped but, as the late Lord Cobham, when our Governor-General, said in one of his great speeches, "One of the queer things about school is this: You only begin to realise what you owe to your school long after you have left." And long after I, myself, have left the old school, I am of the firm opinion that the building of 1911, with its considerable alterations and additions from 1920 onwards, should never have been demolished. It is an unnecessary loss to history which I have endeavoured to recapture in my sketch.

PAEROA SCHOOL ALTERATIONS & EXTENSIONS 1920

Paeroa School Alterations and Extensions 1920 Play Slideshow Pause Slideshow