IN THE BEGINNING….

The forgotten first day ---enrollment. My father waits midst mounds of clay and top-soil, sitting in his little Bradford truck. Carpenters, electricians and plumbers clatter on all sides. Dad is eager for his son to get the secondary education denied him by world war and depression. But at 8am he is off the mark too early. Eventually, a comfortable old car pulls in, and a tall, rather distinguished, man with memorably bushy brows, emerges, and with a friendly smile invites my father in to the new admin block. Dad comes home triumphantly that evening …’you’re first on the roll!’

Opening day in February, 1954, and I do not feel first of anything, just a perplexed, awkward little third former, one of 200 being jostled into a makeshift assembly hall, no more than a wider section of corridor. We were of course gathered in what is now the girls, but what was then Kelston High School, a brave co-ed experiment to challenge prevailing single-sex grammar schools. Leslie Colgan’s address that day set the tone and content for the next five years…we were the tradition- makers, setting the standards for years, even generations, to come.

Tradition works when it sets standards for emulation. In education, it has frequently stifled innovation, individuality, and enterprise. The first years at Kelston have been described by former staff and pupils as unusually happy ones. One suspects that the very lack of tradition helped. At what was then the very edge of the city, we enjoyed a kind of ‘frontier’ freedom. The teaching staff, hand-picked by Mr Colgan, had an enthusiastic sense of new beginnings and new possibilities. We were, of course, suffering from a lack of physical and intellectual resources—a pathetically tiny Library, inadequate gymnastic equipment and facilities, half-formed sports fields, the missing Assembly Hall, and, perhaps most critically, the stimulation that comes from daily interaction with older and more experienced pupils. But then we did have a keen egalitarian spirit, a readiness to improvise and battle on in the face of adversity that I know stood many of my generation in good stead when facing later challenges in higher education and employment.

Kelston in its very first years existed in a curious mix of suburbia and countryside. In a way, we mirrored perfectly broader social changes going on in mid 50’s New Zealand. We had been growing up in the years of dusty metal roads, runaway gorse, half- derelict claypits, and hand-built ABC buses grinding and crashing ancient gearboxes up and down our bush-clad hills. Many of us wore our first shoes at Kelston High School. In all of West Auckland, only ‘downtown’ New Lynn had anything approaching a ‘night-life’, and then of course only on Fridays or Saturdays. Heavily-chaperoned school and church hall dances featured girls in petticoated, ballerina-length dresses nervously awaiting an invitation to dance from the massed, facing ranks of sweaty boys in school blazers with matching fluorescent socks and ties. The climax of such sexually-repressed evenings was always the spotlight waltz, when someone perched on a step-ladder with a torch would catch couples snatching a quick kiss in the dark.

In 1955,late in our 4^th form year, the film Blackboard Jungle, and its accompanying Bill Haley ‘ Rock around the Clock’ soundtrack and album, hit New Zealand with hurricane force. Betty Gilmore’s ballroom dancing classes in the KHS corridors suffered near- terminal decline, leather-jacketed ‘milk-bar cowboys with snarling Harley-Davidsons highjacked meeting spaces outside New Lynn dairies, while the greased- back D.A’s of the’ bodgies’,and the short ,petticoat-laden skirts and winkle-picker footware of the ‘widgies’, set the new fashion extremes. We teenagers had arrived as a new social force with a distinctive culture and music calculated to spread a deep unease amongst our parents’ generation. The Delta cinema in New Lynn, with its unique scattering of double ‘lover’s seats’ (armrests mysteriously missing), fairly heaved with adolescent passion every Saturday night. Many relationships between Kelston pupils forged in that steamy mezzanine endure to this day…my own is one!

Respectable New Zealand was shocked by the new teenage scene. The official Mazengarb enquiry into ‘Juvenile Delinquency’ focused on the new co-ed high schools of Auckland and the Lower Hutt. In 1956, KHS was swept with rumours that it was being investigated for pupil misconduct. Certainly, the decision to split Kelston into two single-sex schools was taken around this time. If it was a response by nervous education authorities to political and other pressure groups, it was a serious over-reaction. There were certainly some rough edges to the enrolment, but by today’s standards, pupils in Kelston classrooms were well-behaved, obedient and considerate. Girls were far more likely to be held back by parental discriminations favouring boy’s careers, than by any ‘hanky panky’ in the corners of classrooms or playgrounds.

In any case you could never tell where some unofficial classroom activities might lead. A certain fifth former experimenting in the science room with illicit distillation of alcohol. Surely that’s not the long-time head of New Zealand’s largest wine-making conglomerate?

The early KHS benefited from a number of outstanding teachers. Leslie Colgan, founding headmaster, a physically imposing man, rugby enthusiast, a traditionalist with a twinkling eye, combined a natural authority over staff and pupils with an intense human interest in his charges. Len McKillop, deputy headmaster, was one of New Zealand’s finest mathematicians, a shy but kindly man who produced a succession of outstanding students. Jack Osborn, head of English and modern languages worked miracles with the slenderest theatrical resources, directing memorable productions of challenging plays by Wilde, Barrie, Shaw, and Wilder. Joan Herdman, deputy head (girls), brought a grammar school respect for diligent research and elegant style, and inspired her history students. Bob Bean, later headmaster, presided wisely over burgeoning commercial courses, and who could forget the brisk military discipline of LT Brown whose bark was worthy of a Guards’ sergeant-major. A trio of younger teachers, John Rose, Bob Barrack, and Don Hunt, took us beyond our suburban streets on field trips to hydro-electric projects, dairy factories, Waitakere bush tracks and, most memorably, the snowy slopes of active North Island volcanoes. Garth Tapper, head of Art and one of New Zealand’s finest portrait painters inspired students who went on to international careers. Perhaps the greatest "character" was Eiley Blake, later to be Mrs Anderson, first head mistress of KGHS. She will be forever remembered by the first generation of boy pupils for her disconcerting colour combinations, and her unorthodox striptease, featuring belts and shoes as mathematical and blackboard aids.

Happily some of our founder teachers are still with us. Others sadly have passed on, all I hope with the thanks of past pupils ringing in their ears.

Harold Moores (KHS 1954 – 1958)