A century of engineering

Press, 9 May 1987, Page 23

A century of engineering

Design for a Century. A History of the Schoo! of Engineering, University of Canterbury 1887-1987. By Diana Neutze and Eric Beardsley. University of Canterbury, 1987. 350 pp. Illustrations, bibliography and index.

(Reviewed by John Pollard) The courtly letter reprinted here came from the former Provincial Engineer, now Canterbury’s grand old man of engineering. The recipient was Chairman of the Canterbury College Board of Governors. The members of his board became the first of many to rise to the bait of "carried out financially without much initial expense.” (Such ploys have oft been necessary to cope with smallminded amateur administrators.) At the afternoon meeting the second stock ploy was also invoked — the one that someone else “will get in first.” In this case the someone else was the University of Otago. Wisely Malet took his board into committee. When the board reconvened the proposal to establish a School of Engineering was a fait accompli. “The Press” applauded, the "Lyttelton Times” lamented. “What good will a school do which will only increase a class far too numerous already?” What good indeed? As the School’s centennial begins “The Press’s” initial applause has been marked by the production of more than six thousand graduates of high repute, the zeal of research teams that have won world renown, and a reputation for continuing to be the best place in New Zealand to learn that strange combination of art and. science which is engineering. Nor on the Ham campus are the engineers perceived to be a race apart, presiding over greasy mechanics or administering to the wants of panting engines. Their faculty is an integral part of the academic life at Ham, their science has been recognised by six Fellowships of the New Zealand Royal Society. It was not always so. The Board of Governors began the School not with a Chair but with two part-time lecturers, Dobson the 71-year-old civil engineer, and Scott, a locomotive designer, who at 26 was already general manager of the Addington Railway Workshops. Robert Julian Scott was a giant of a man in every sense of the word. The book reproduces his portrait in black and white, but to sense his full power it is worth going to view the original which hangs above the School’s main stairway. There is no Scott Memorial Lecture, there is no Scott Building, even his grave has been concreted over for cheapness; the modern staff still show a little unease about his memory, for his regime was the antithesis of the freedom they now enjoy. There is a need for a history of the frustrations wrought upon the College by small-minded men who became lay administrators. However, the accounts of their deliberations in this book and in the “History of the University of Canterbury” suggest that no lesser man than Scott could have got the School off the ground and so raised its standing that by 1907 it became the second only institution in the British Empire to be accorded recognition by the Institution of Civil Engineers. The son of an admiral, Scott brooked no interference from outside, nor did he tolerate independence in his staff. Once one, who dared raise a point on organisation, was told “I never discuss such matters with anyone below the rank of professor.” Yet a true Chair of Engineering eluded him; Professor in charge yes, Director of the School of Engineering yes, but the academic snobbery of Canterbury ensured that the Chair advocated by Dobson never eventuated. Not until he retired because of chronic ill health in 1923 did Scott achieve true professorial rank when the Board appointed him a Professor Emeritus. Denied the dignity of a Chair, Scott achieved his ends and those of the School (they were selflessly the same) by other means. As the only senior engineer in academia he became. a member of the all-powerful Senate of the University of New Zealand; unlike his professional colleagues he had direct access to the Board of Governors; but in achieving greatness and freedom for his School he set it apart from the College. Indeed, as early as 1903, he was able to remind the Board that “The School of Engineering, although advantageously associated with the College proper, (is) practically a separate institution, of which the Professor in charge is, under the Board of Governors, the sole head and administrator.” For the rest of the College they

were means to a less than admirable end and in the achievement Scott crushed whatever initiative his senior staff might have developed.

The tale of the interregnum between 1923 and 1950 is of indecision, of staff who had neither the means nor the personality to achieve the political clout Scott had wielded. Mediocrity became compounded by depression, then war, until the future of the School was as gloomy and cramped as the old buildings depicted on the body of the book’s dust jacket. V' y, : Already a preview has drawn a graduate to protest that the criticism of this period, is unwarranted. That the staff were devoted is undisputed, for they gave of their best under increasingly awful circumstances, but in reality the School continued to turn out good graduates in spite of itself. The generations who trod across the clanging plate set in the narrow entrance to the South Quad were seldom conscious of the problems that were besetting their School. .

Diana Neutze has worked through the dusty boxes of reports, perused the grimy bundles of old letters, and so immersed herself in the ways of the protagonists (and antagonists) that she has brought an uncannily accurate insight to them all. Here they are recalled, complete with warts, set in a clear perspective which catches their motives, their ambitions, their pettinesses, their kindnesses, their strengths, their inadequacies; some were a little larger than life, some were appreciably less.

The shade of Scott was never properly exorcised until the School removed to the pristine buildings of Ham in 1961. Symbolically the Ham mushroom overlies the front of the dust jacket; perhaps, also symbolically, the photograph is obsolete. New buildings have already risen, more will rise. The third part of the book, “A Terrible Beauty,” tells how the journey to Ham came about and how prestige was won anew. The author had no need to flesh out rattling skeletons or illumine characters grown shadowy with time. This is a chronicle of today’s vibrant academics playing a full role in the service of both their School and their University, and it is appropriate that the telling has been entrusted to Eric Beardsley, the University’s information officer. Admittedly, as Eric reminds us, the site, the buildings, and their contents were not achieved without foresight, insight, and infighting, plus an extraordinary forbearance by the staff as they coped with the post-war influx amid the inadequacies bf Scott’s old rabbit warren. ' .. Nor would the excellence have been achieved so fast had it not been for the second man to bring greatness to the School, Henry James .Hopkins, who was appointed Professor of Civil Engineering in 1951. After 28 years of wistful hoping, the School at last gained a senior academic with a brilliance, a drive, and a presence to propel it out of the doldrums. Although Harry was only Dean for one period (1955-58), the Hopkins excellence; plus his demand for excellence, so.-begot excellence in the School that a modem generation of

staff and students may wonder that it was ever otherwise.

For them, this book will be as timely as it will be welcome to all who love the University of Canterbury. For the generations of engineers whose nostalgia for their student haunts is beset by dimming memories overlaid a little by euphoria, Diana has lit the shadows with a brilliance no engineering historian could have achieved.

In their preface the authors deprecate their book’s place as an . “official history.” Maybe, but nevertheless it is a fully referenced ’ excellent history, replete with photographs of most that all remember: lists of graduate numbers to give perspective to the growth, lists of staff ,to recall years of service, lists of deans to mark the eras, an index which only failed this reviewer a couple of times; and most remarkable of all, three plans which enable one to at last make sense of the maze that was Scott’s empire. As the School enters its second century and as the University staff warm to this exposition of their School’s achievements, they would do well to note certain small details in the “History.”

The School was bom with minimal birth pangs because the threat of Otago acted as a midwife. It failed to warm to Otago’s orphaned Department of Mineral Technology, Auckland made it welcome. It believed that the growth of Auckland could be stemmed by obstruction, but Auckland has grown to offer more courses. Auckland already has a viable Applied Research office to promote . the marketing of staff expertise. It failed to heed the setting up of one or two quasi-engineering courses at Massey, they blossomed into a professional engineering department. Against this, it is disturbing to find that the book fails to list the enrolments in Agricultural Engineering. The profession believes and the prospectus states that Agricultural Engineering is one of the School’s five divisions. It is not a wise omission in the face of Lincoln College’s bid for autonomy.