Around Town

Service was limited at first to English. Classics. Mathematics, and Chemistry—but quickly extended to include Law. Biology, Modern Languages, and Economis. The first timetables show that nearly all lectures were after 5 p.m. or on Saturday mornings—so even then V.U.C. was primarily a haunt for part-timers.

Agitation began early for Victoria to have a roof over her head of her very own. The Students' Association founded in St. Paul's Schoolroom is co-oval with the College itself, and (at first called Students' Society). Sydney Street, supported the College Council (prime mover: Sir Robert Stout) in a series of man-ouevres designed to obtain the Government's assistance in securing a suitable site for permanent buildings, with room for expansion.

First choice was Mount Cook (site today of Tech. and the Museum, then of a particularly ugly prison). An eminence above yet in the midst of the City, with a grand view and handy to transport, this seemed the ideal spot But the Government had other plans for the site, and offered Victoria instead the old Ministerial Residence in Tinakori Road (now a Dental Clinic Annexe). This was rejected as an insult.

Another suggestion that the lands set apart for "higher education" in the '50's and occupied Wellington College should be handed over to V.U.C. met with such indignant resistance from the former's Board of Governors that it was dropped.

For two years Victoria carried on a rather tentative corporate existence in far-flung corners of the town. The V.U.C. Debating Society, sponsored directly by the Students' Society in its own first year of life, established the V.U.C. tradition at its Friday evenings in the Sydney Street Schoolroom, where it voted that commerce was antagonistic to art, and that no event in the history of the Colony had had a more injurious effect than the dispatching of contingents to South Africa. Downtowners flocked to hear students wrangle, and as early as 1900, M.P.'s were induced to take the V.U.C. platform on a motion of confidence in the Government.