Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home (8 page)

On the morning of Thursday, January 29, 1959, the boys at Austin Street began packing and loading furniture on the watch of their new guardian for the move out of the capital. The journey was complete by five o’clock that afternoon. Fifteen kids were now resident in the new institution, built to accommodate 22 boys. It had been ‘quite a scramble’ completing the move, the inaugural entry scribbled in the new institution’s logbook noted: ‘Boys excited but settled reasonably well. Supper and lights out at 9.30 pm.’ More of the same followed the next day. Elsewhere in the records,
kids are referred to by their first names, the talk is of movie outings, trips to the local baths and softball games, a sweet and light record that dovetails nicely with the recollections of others of the institution’s initially relaxed environment.

‘My management style was mostly the necessities,’ Howe later recalled. ‘I wanted to provide for the kids who came into Epuni, have them better dressed or at least to have footwear, and to look better for being with us. It was partly based in my schooldays, when the poor little beggars there used to have bare feet or sandals most of the time, particularly in winter. They were all so very poorly looked after. And that sort of clouded my position at Epuni, made me want to do things differently. My kids would be well dressed. My kids would be well looked after.’

Howe’s emphasis on ‘the necessities’, obliquely reflecting the economic collapse of the 1930s, is telling, because it’s easy to forget that we are now much further removed in time from the world that shaped him. Howe was raised amid the realities of the Great Depression. The Depression had been unforgiving, it caused many a young life to totter; it wiped out his father’s business, too. Maurie’s old man used to paint vehicles, spring carts they called them, a fancy name for horsecarts, which he would delicately decorate along the shafts. Afterwards he did whatever he could to scratch and save. One of Maurie’s brothers went into accountancy; the other became a chemist. Maurie wanted something with a degree of security — but also the opportunity to offer security to others.

Meanwhile the new operation, which was designed and built to similar specifications as the facility in Hamilton, was taking shape. Among the new principal’s first duties was convincing the neighbours that the project posed no threat to life, limb or, especially, local property values. This was all the more pressing since the plan was to purchase more adjacent land to build staff housing and extend the capacity, first to 28 and ultimately to 42,
along with a new gym. The neighbours weren’t an easy sell. Some of them thought Howe was a liberal do-gooder.

This wasn’t entirely incorrect. He
was
liberal by the standards of the time, or at the very least a man of many parts, and many of the staff he worked with in the early years saw themselves in a similar light. ‘You have to keep in mind that, yes, the Child Welfare Division and some of its employees, by today’s standards, might be seen as awfully conservative, schoolmarmish or whatever, but in the day they were terribly progressive, or that’s how we saw ourselves,’ one of his early colleagues recalled.

For proof of how relatively liberal the residential crew in Wellington was, one only needed to consider how wards were attended to at a similar ‘receiving home’ in nearby Palmerston North, where the regional office kept an imposingly large
leather-bound
book in which the various punishments meted out to kids in care were duly recorded: John Doe; date; such-and-such an offence; punishment: six strokes on bare breech or, alternatively, ‘covered rearquarters’.

Among those charged with administering the corporal punishment, at least until he moved to Auckland in the mid-1950s, was H. Lucas Hunt, JP, as he invariably introduced himself. The father of future Labour Party MP Jonathan Hunt, Hunt Snr was a portly man with a stentorian voice who took his work seriously. He used a pushbike to get around town — a cane clipped on the crossbar — and dispensed his corporal duties with a swinging arm likened by one person who knew him to a roast of lamb. This was certainly not the kind of Dickensian style Howe wanted to see introduced at the new institution.

Maurie arranged a number of neighbourhood meetings in the hope of putting paid to the idea that, as he later expressed it, ‘even in this enlightened age, residents in the immediate vicinity consider the Home to be something between a penal institution
and an industrial school’. Fiddlesticks, he argued, appealing as eloquently as he could to any residual local sense of noblesse oblige. This was to be an open institution, he told them, a progressively minded venture dedicated to the care and nurturing of young lives damaged largely through no fault of their own, and even those who had committed offences were hardly in the big league, usually nothing more spectacular than shying some rocks through a window, shoplifting or truancy, in one case even converting a
horse
. Bad luck in getting caught, some might have said — and some still do.

Decades later in Britain, a distinguished senior doctor caused a mild controversy after he admitted to the
Guardian
newspaper that he burgled his school twice at the age of 16, commenting that it did not stop him having a successful medical career — because he was never incarcerated for the offences. The consultant paediatrician, who went on to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, made the confession in light of a familiar controversy in which a youngster from an economically disadvantaged background was denied a place at medical school simply because he admitted committing a burglary as a boy. The doctor said he would not be surprised if others in the medical profession had committed similar crimes — it was simply a matter of good luck in having not gone down the reformatory track, he suggested.

Yet it’s easy to see why Epuni’s construction in the late 1950s might have been viewed with unease in a neighbourhood that had expended considerable effort over the decades to keep at bay the socialist spectre that had enveloped much of the Hutt Valley. Howe felt no small satisfaction when many of those same individuals agreed to give him the benefit of their very large doubt. But he had also been concerned that ignorance of the institution’s work would be detrimental to the happiness of the kids he hoped to enrol in one or other of the local schools.

The older boys, too, he wanted to see working at local businesses. So he put up as convincing a case as he could muster (his departmental supervisor later lauded it as a ‘very fine piece of public relations work’) and the locals pronounced themselves moved. Indeed, one of the neighbours who began as a fierce critic of the new venture ended up climbing over his back fence adjoining the grounds and joining in the sporting activities with Howe and his boys.

To Gary Hermansson, a young residential social worker at the time, Howe came across as a ‘good fellow, somewhat severe at times and authoritative, you know, perhaps a bit over-strong on the kids’. The new manager was ‘slightly aloof, but he had his heart in the right place’. Another of the short-term placements of the time was a young trainee social worker named Aussie Malcolm, who in late 1964 had a brief stint as an acting housemaster at Riverside Drive shortly before heading north to become a welfare officer in Palmerston North. Both positions offered the future government minister a vantage point from which to observe the Howe style.

‘Maurie was a product of the YMCA culture, very straight down the line and conservative in his personal life,’ Malcolm said. ‘He saw things in very simple terms, without excess, and he lived by the schedule: shoes are to be cleaned, beds are to be made, and so forth. He must have been passionate, but I don’t remember him showing that passion in any other way than being there day after day after day. He didn’t get angry with any kid. He didn’t get soppy with any kid. He didn’t show any emotion to any kid. He just … was.’

Years later, as a Cabinet minister in the National government of the early 1980s, Malcolm had an unusual encounter with his former boss. At this point he had a foster son ‘who was not without his problems’. Eventually, the Department of Social Welfare decided that the boy should be sent to Epuni Boys’ Home. Malcolm, who was opposed to the idea, said he would accompany the child to
Epuni rather than having his ward carted off by a social worker. The day before the scheduled drop-off, however, then Social Welfare minister George Gair became ill, and Malcolm unexpectedly found himself appointed in his colleague’s stead. When Malcolm and the boy arrived at Epuni, Howe was on duty and greeted the pair. It was a historic meeting of sorts, for there on the doorstep in the one person, accompanied by a tearful 12-year-old, was an ex-colleague, a reluctant parent and the Minister of Social Welfare. And how did Howe respond? ‘He was just Maurie,’ Malcolm recalled. ‘That was always the thing.’

For all the Zen stillness, though, Howe believed in discipline, increasingly so as the years passed. Observers saw it in the little things. ‘Things like rugby in the gym,’ Malcolm said. ‘I mean, these were healthy boys playing full-on tackle rugby on a hard floor with hard walls. Boy, did those guys go for it. But, you know, all I had to do was raise my hand in the air and there would be instant silence. That always impressed the heck out of me. And that was to do with the style of Maurie Howe and the staff. They’d somehow inculcated this tradition, if you like, that when the supervisor or the housemaster’s hand went up, you stopped and you were quiet.’

And it was there to be seen in the bigger things, too. Despite the relatively trifling offences that many of the designated youth offenders in care may have been sent down for — only about one-third of the inmates had been committed to state care because of offences against the law, usually in the order of petty offences against property, truancy or, occasionally in the case of older inmates, carnal knowledge — Howe knew how to bring a reprimanding hand to bear.

A random search through some of the early records throws up the typical case of 11-year-old Donald, who was committed to the institution early in 1962 after being caught shoplifting a pack of cigarettes. Arriving at the institution that March, he was promptly
locked in what was a precursor to the future ‘secure’ block, a makeshift little room separated from the rest with a permanently locked window and a bed that was taken out during the daytime, while he was sent to work in the garden.

For reasons that are not explained, he was neither enrolled at a local school nor allowed to socialise with the other inmates. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he soon attempted to escape — three times over an eight-day period at one point — which only seemed to stiffen the institution’s resolve to stick to its original course of confinement, which well pleased his adult supervisors. ‘Epuni Boys’ Home,’ Howe wrote, ‘has given [Donald] a better appreciation of what could be expected following any future misbehaviour.’ Presumably it did, for readers emerge none the wiser on the boy’s ultimate fate.

Howe wanted to manage the operation in as relatively easygoing a fashion as possible. This he achieved for some considerable time. The kids went to their local schools and jobs, returning of their own accord in the afternoons and settling back in for the evening routine. Problems of note were few and far between. Newcomers were processed in a similarly easygoing style. In an arrangement that would have been unimaginable in the following decades, boys often arrived under their own steam. Such was the case with an unescorted 15-year-old ward sent down from Wairoa, who simply hired a taxi for the final 30-kilometre leg of his journey from Wellington railway station to Epuni. Alighting at the door, the boy realised he had no money; Maurie stumped up the fare.

Relatively few serious problems showed up in the early years, the worst to be found in the existing records being a long complaint about the tendency of some parents to show up unannounced and demand to take their offspring on an impromptu outing. One Christmas a chapter of boy scouts swung by to present their counterparts at Epuni with £20 they had raised doing odd jobs for the less fortunate. The religious people came by, too, with their
songsheets and biblical tracts and whatnot.

For its part the institution appreciated the outside attention — keeping the operation open to public scrutiny was an important principle — sometimes even soliciting local reporters to come and see the experiment unfolding within the new buildings. A profile published in the
Evening Post
captured the project in suitably rosy colours, gushing:

The article made further revelations: among the spare-time activities most enjoyed by the lads, ‘clay modelling, carpentry, art, aeroplane models and stamp-collecting’ enjoyed pride of recreational place, occupying many during the hours in which they were not forging ahead in the one-teacher school, in which some were even performing remarkably well on account of not being ‘in competition with more clever children’.

Even the ‘highly polished corridors that are maintained by the boys’ warranted favourable mention, with writer Rita Thomas perhaps being unaware that employing children as young as seven to work with industrial-sized floor polishers contravened international labour laws. Nevertheless, Thomas warmed to her theme, praising the institution’s initiative in having established a dedicated secure unit, used only, according to the reporter, in cases

The piece concluded on a hopeful note. While many of the inmates ‘felt a sense of shame’ at their predicament, some of them yet ‘seemed to have tremendous initiative and drive and if channelled into voluntary community work it would probably help them while helping others’.