“Manners Makyth Man”
Our English Heritage in School and University .

(By O. N. Gillespie .) (Railway Publicity photos.)

Provincial Council Chambers, Christchurch, South Island, New Zealand. (Avon River in the foreground.)

The task of defining the word “English” has puzzled world writers for centuries. However subtly-minded they may he, however acute as observers, however highly trained as critics, they are baffled to find the proper verbal symbols to explain the essential qualities of the race that governs, in such a cheerfully haphazard fashion, a quarter of the earth's surface and a quarter of its people. The ceaseless permeation of English ideas makes for them a further problem. One well-known Continental writer says this: “The majority of Frenchmen and Germans have doubtless never been conscious how completely they have adopted the ideals of English civilisation, having made them so completely their own that they have forgotten their origin… To-day social life is English, as in the eighteenth century it was French.”

Millions of words have been wasted to find some explanation for this resistless march and the query remains unanswered. The one truth that remains is that English culture, in its strictest and narrowest nationalistic sense, has a spiritual and practical power that makes it the greatest living and effective force in the world. I dare to suggest that this is due to its intrinsic rightness; so in this article I want to show how this heritage of our British forbears has been cherished and brought to full fruition in our New Zealand, the country farthest away from its land of birth.

This puzzling person, this mystic being, the “Englishman,” is created, in the main, in his school and university, both of which exist in the Dominion. For the occasion, I am choosing to write about the two Canterbury institutions because they are nearest in outward appearance to their English predecessors, and for no other reason. There are many great schools in New Zealand that rival Christ's College; and Otago University with its unique history deserves an article to itself. The two North Island University colleges have their virtues and are worthy younger brethren to Canterbury College. Still, as our illustrations show, there is an atmosphere

The Double Arches, Canterbury University College, Christchurch.

in the two Canterbury places under review which is wholly and inescapably English. Here is something of the manner of Eton and Oriel, the insubstantial essence of Harrow and Caius. Christ's College is an English public school, no more, no less. It was founded in 1850, and is, therefore, three years older than Wellington, twelve years older than Clifton or Malvern, and fourteen years older than Haileybury. It is only seven seven years younger than Marlborough. Through the happy magic of our milder skies and richer growth, the effect of age is obtained in a very few years in lawn and close and ivied wall. I like to think, too, that that process is similarly and proportionately swift which deepens and enriches the love of boys for their old school. I know that such a thing is a perceptible and warmly held possession page 13

Entrance to Christ's College, Christchurch.

of old boys of Christ's College, and that, to them, Bene Tradita, Bene Servanda, is not merely a Latin phrase about maintaining a good tradition.

The buildings of Christ's College today are of striking beauty. The Chapel is an aesthetic jewel, built in 1867 and quaintly described in the first edition of the School List, “from the designs of Mr. Robert Speechly, the then resident Architect of the Cathedral, and is an admirably proportioned stone building 64 feet in length by 20 feet in width.”

Fifty years ago, transepts and a sanctuary were added and to-day it is worth a pilgrimage, for anyone who appreciates perfection. We had better walk round the “Quad” and take the buildings in their order. On the left as we enter the gateway with its enormous tree sentinels on either hand, is the Memorial Hall (interior shown in our pictures), and next are the Cloisters and the New Classrooms which were, by the way, built sixtyfive years ago. Then there is the Chapel, and sitting next is “Cotterill's,” whose corner abuts on “The Big School,” the oldest stone building in Christchurch with walls two feet thick and a wonderful steeply pitched roof. The rest of the square contains the handsome Hare Memorial Library, School House and “Jacobs.” Through the alley is a nest of handsome new classrooms, the gymnasium, and “lab.” before the playing fields are reached. Parts of it might be a thousand years old, and in some inexplicable fashion, the whole rambling village of edifices blends into one harmonious whole.

It is the work of men who dreamed dreams; English dreams. From the very first arrival of the first body of colonists, the idea of establishing a college on the lines of the Homeland was warmly taken up, and in the fourth number of the Canterbury Papers (May, 1850), there appears the detailed scheme “for the establishment of a College in or near the capital city of the settlement of Canterbury, New Zealand, and to be called the Christchurch College.” This was transmuted to deed; and so the “Big School” and the Chapel rose “for the promotion of sound piety and useful learning more especially within the said province of Canterbury.” The story of the selection of the site is fascinating. It was first in Lyttelton and there was a difficulty in finding where to place it in Christchurch. Bishop Selwyn had to be outmanoeuvred. He was the First Warden and was opposed to having it near a town, but the founders said “Our Englishcolleges are so, Winchester, Harrow, Rugby, Eton.” And so the present

The “Cloisters,” Christ's College, Christchurch.

ideal dwelling place was chosen. Listen to the clarity and charm of the minds of those men of long ago: “The river encloses it on three sides, a fine clear stream, wide and deep enough for boating. Round the banks I can already see in my mind's eye a walk planted with trees, the regular promenade of the place like Christchurch walk, Oxford … . we have sketched out in imagination a handsome central street, running through the City, terminated at one end by the College and its gardens.”

Do not forget, either, that Christ's College has kept pace with the march of progress. It has modern open - air class - rooms, up to date laboratories, and all the equipment of an advanced English public school. Its sports organisation is on English lines, and, in our illustrations, do not miss the river and boating facilities.

Its scholars have earned distinction as well as its athletes. Its roll of Old Boys contains names that are known the world over, and in the Dominion its formative influence has been one of wide incidence and abiding strength. Its Pantheon of masters and governors is worthy of reverence, and I can only say that it includes great names of both England and the Dominion.

The first plan for Christ's College was that it should minister to the needs of two classes, schoolboys and adolescents. They thought, those pioneer bold spirits, that this would be the educational centre of the Southern Hemisphere and that pupils would be attracted from India and Australia. But, as the province rapidly grew in wealth and importance, the need for a University College proper became page 14 page 15

Interior of the Memorial Hall, Canterbury College.

manifest. In 1871 was formed the Collegiate Union which combined representation from Christ's College and the Museum Trust and School of Science. In the generation that had passed since the foundation of the settlement, the province had made miraculous progress. Wheat was showing a profit of #5 per acre on land that had been purchased for #2 only. The population was over 50,000, a hand-picked selection of purely British stock with “an abnormally large proportion of the most active ages.”

Otago was also flourishing and there, with Scottish resolution, the Provincial Government, without more ado, set up a teaching institution, The Otago University. This changed the nature of the problem, and there grew a dislike for the idea of confining university training to one city. The Canterbury Union supported the broader view, led by the able Henry John Tancred. There was a deal of marching and counter marching but the birth of the central Parliament and the abolition of the provinces, eventually brought about the form of the University of New Zealand which now exists. It is simply an examining body to which are affiliated the four colleges.

While all this was going on in New Zealand, the revolution in the conduct of Oxford and Cambridge was taking place. They had become moribund, stifled by religious tests and innumerable restrictions, and teaching was almost at a standstill. In the curiously effectual way of Englishmen, reforms proceeded at a rapid rate and at Cambridge, Girton College and Newnham Hall women were actually admitted. Among the “giants in those days” of Canterbury were many Cambridge men, notably Bowen, Rolleston, and Joshua Williams, and Canterbury College owes much to their advanced ideas.

In 1877, the present College main building was opened, and one of the marvels of the ceremony was the electric light illumination of Worcester Street by Professor Bickerton. From that great day, its growth has been the steady and wholesome development of a living organism. It has always been old-countryish in its air of dignity, its insistence on gown and mortar-board, but it preserved a spirit distilled from the daring of the men of the new land. It had the first

Christ's College Boat-sheds, and the picturesque Avon River.

woman graduate in the British Empire, and the first woman M.A. This latter was Helen Connon (Mrs. MacMillan Brown) described by the late Louis Cohen, “looking in her sedate beauty like some fine thing touched with the spirit of ancient Greece.”

It is sometimes ascribed to luck, but it must be set down to the sterling wisdom and selective judgment of those early great men of ours, that Canterbury College started its life with a trinity of teachers who were complementary in their qualities, and for whose equal the world might have been combed without avail.

Professor Bickerton, the unruly, lavishly hospitable, universal genius, was the first. His fireworks, his partial impact theory, his “free love” discussions, his never-failing fund of spirits “filling the atmosphere with a kind of intellectual champagne.” his endearing oddities of behaviour, stay in memory and make him one of the great figures of all time in the history of the College. Professor MacMillan Brown was the youngest of the trio, but the second to arrive. He became a world figure in literature and sociology but his enduring monument will be the fire of love of literature which he kindled in his lifetime of teaching. He was an Oxford man, winner of the coveted Snell Exhibition, and he arrived in the little colony with honours thick uopn him. He was a teacher of original genius. It is said that in two years his elementary Greek classes could translate from sight any classic author. He was a dominating and tremendous personality, but his Sunday morning break-