SOME SCHOOLMASTERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 176, 27 July 1928, Page 6

SOME SCHOOLMASTERS.

The small boy came home recently and told us how greatly he liked the sports master at his school. We gathered that the sports master taught a class in the school, but that that department of his duties was of small importance compared with his work in the playground. Thought I to myself, thought I, there wasn't any such person in the educational world when I was a youngster, at any rate, not in our country schools. The country township schoolmaster of my era seldom troubled his head about our games. His attitude seemed to be that the young devils could amuse themselves as they pleased as long f S -fK v br , eak schoolhouse windows with their shanghais, or stun him with the cricket ball. So we had to develop our frames in our own way, and the Rafferty rules which prevailed would have horrified the modern boy and man. J

There was a time when "Kelly gang" was °"nJTf; time M oy ' The chase led us down the half a mile away, where there were some old Maori potato pits grown over with fern, and the boys whose turn it was to be the bushrangers took cunning coyer while the police mob hunted for them. Making the arrests was a strenuous job, in which the unpopular police often came off second best. And there was the Old Constabulary redoubt on the hill near the little school. One . j the boys stormed it while the garrison resisted with clods of earth and broken bricks and a Constabulary "dead marine" or two I suppose more than half of us were of Irish extraction; we didn't need a sports master to cheer us on.

The very first schoolmaster I recall was a tvpe that would be a curiosity to-day. He was greatly whiskered, and as he sat at his high desk and every now and again rapped it with his hard leather tawse for attention he commanded our whole-hearted fearful respect. The tawse was not at all a pleasant instrument of education on a frosty morning. At half-past nine every morning the master had a big basin of porrido'e brought to him from his house by his daughter and he supped it at his desk, one eve on the porridge and the other on us. I don't" remember what he taught us, but I do remember howsurprised we w-ere when the next teacher came to the school that he didn't have his porridge brought in to him in the mornings. We had imagined all teachers took their breakfasts in school.

T•U V? I ® ter I da y there w 'as a master of mercurial Irish blood who sometimes told us comical stories and sometimes threw slates at us—l know he threw one at me one day, and I deserved it He delighted us once by missing the target" and breaking a window, for which we hoped" he and not the Government would have to pay By wav of contrast, there was a canny old Xova Scotian Highlander, who, I have reason to believe was a classical scholar, but Latin and Greek were not in our little curriculum. His Highland accent was pleasing, especially when he called "kit" "kid." ("Chonnv, where did you lose your kid'") I have much affection for that good old clansmanhe was the first who really taught us anything in that township. * ° There was another, a true-born Englishman, an old retired Imperial Army officer from India. He had commanded a corps of elephants in at any rate that was what we understood from his discourses. He was fond of telling us anecdotes of his army days, and he liked to drill us outside, when he could roar at us in his old army voice the commands bv numbers: "Hun* Hoo!—Hee!— Haw!" All the township knew when the schoolmaster was drilling his squad. Naturally he came to be called unofficially Colonei Hee-Haw. He was a good old sort; we liked his tiger-hunting stories very much. He was too old to trouble about our sports, but he at least tried to inculcate something of manliness and honesty among us. I regret to say that when he left us the ceiling of the schoolroom was stuck full of pens. The school had throwing competitions to see who cdtild dispose of most pens in that way We took a mean advantage of the old soldier's defective eyesight. There came a time when the committee <*ot a young alert London man, a real schoolmaster who didnt mind a rough-and-tumble game of football. He tried to knock a sense of the rules of the game into us. But by that time, alas! schooldays wer® very nearly over, j c