Robert Speight: pioneer in Canty geology

Press, 1 April 1989, Page 22

Robert Speight: pioneer in Canty geology

Robert Speight was one of that interesting generation which, though English-born, became indisputably New Zealanders. He was born in Stockton in England in 1867, but came to Canterbury as a young boy with his family. His father was a schoolmaster at Tai Tapu and St Albans in the 1880 s and 1890 s.

Robert Speight won a scholarship to Christchurch Boys’ High School — to take advantage of which he walked daily into town from Tai Tapu. He entered Canterbury College in 1885 as one of the College’s first 100 students. He gained his B.A. in 1888 and his M.A. in 1889, in mathematics.

After graduating, while teaching at his old school, he continued his studies in geology under Captain F. W. Hutton, then Professor of Biology at Canterbury College. Speight gained his B.Sc. in 1891 and his M.Sc. in 1910.

He remained a master at Boys’ High until 1910, but from 1903 on he was also lecturing in geology at the college. In 1910 he resigned from Boys’ High after being appointed Assistant Curator of the Canterbury Museum. In 1914 he became operator of the museum, a position he held until 1935. He was appointed Professor of Geology at the college in 1921, but resigned from the college staff in 1930 to devote more time to his museum work.

In 1899 Speight married Ruth May Seager (thus becoming an uncle by marriage to Ngaio Marsh, whose mentions of “Unk” in her writings give some of the few personal glimpses now available of a shy, retiring man). The Speights had a family of two sons

and a daughter. It was a happy marriage and one of the Speights’ shared interests was the large garden and orchard which surrounded their home on Hackthorne Road. Ruth Speight died in the 19205. Robert lived on until September 1949 when he died in St George’s Hospital at the age of 81 years. For all his working life, Speight was employed by the Canterbury College Council, which then had jurisdiction over Boys’ High School and the museum as well as the college itself. He was a teacher, researcher and administrator.

As a teacher, he taught geology at Canterbury College from 1903 until 1930. For much of that time he was the only teacher of geology at the college. The chair of geology had been discontinued when Sir Julius von Haast died in 1887 and was not reinstated until 1921 when Speight was raised from the rank of lecturer.

In Speight’s time, geology was

a “poor relation” in the academic world of the college, in demand mainly as an elementary course for engineering students.

Speight lacked the intellectual stimulation of colleagues in his own department and even of advanced students at the college. He found it instead in two botanist friends, Leonard Cockayne and Arnold Wall.

With Cockayne, Speight made many trips into the mountains, and they completed major studies together of such areas as the Mount Arrowsmith district and Lake Sumner — Upper Hurunui. Arnold Wall was Professor of English at Canterbury College. He had a keen amateur interest in alpine flora and he and Speight made countless trips into the hills together, Speight geologising and Wall botanising. Later Speight enjoyed the company of advanced students, among them the late George

Jobberns who became Professor of Geography at Canterbury. Jobberns remembers how insistent Speight was that students learn their geology “in the field.” Other former students of Speight also remember the field trips which often involved hoisting bikes laden with camping gear, food and geological equipment into trains to places like Waiau, Mount Somers or Waipara or up the Midland Line, to spend days under canvas in the field examining rocks and landforms. Speight also worked at the Canterbury Musem for more than a quarter of a century. These were years of neglect of the museum by the people of Canterbury and Speight had a struggle to keep it afloat with insufficient funds.

He could not persuade the college authorities to give the museum the resources it needed and it was more than a decade after Speight retired as curator before the Canterbury Museum Trust Board Act of 1947 set the museum on a more healthy course of independence. But Speight did maintain the museum as an institution with a strong base in research, and as an institution for the people of Canterbury. The story is told that once cries of delight from a young visitor to the museum disturbed a meeting of museum staff in Speight’s office. One of Speight’s assistants went to check the child, but Speight restrained him. “Who are we,” he said, “to interrupt the joy of a small child in the wonders of nature?”

But Speight’s most important legacy to Canterbury was not his teaching of geology at the col-

lege nor his running of the museum, but rather his contribution to knowledge of the province’s geology.

■ Of more than 100 scientific papers which he published, only a handful dealt with topics outside Canterbury. Within the province’s boundaries, he turned his attention to an enormous range of topics, covering the mountains, hill country, plains, coastline and Banks Peninsula. In an editorial in “The Press” in 1935, on the occasion of Speight’s retirement as Curator of the Museum, it was said “no scientific man, with the possible exception his friend and contemporary Arnold Wall, has such a close personal knowledge of Canterbury from Akaroa to the Main Divide and from the Hurunui to the Waitaki.” The same editorial linked Speight’s name with those of his two predecessors, the well known von Haast and the less well known F. W. Hutton. All three men taught geology at Canterbury College, were curators of the museum, and dominated geological studies in Canterbury — Haast from the 1860 s to the 1880 s, Hutton from the 1880 s to the 1900 s and Speight from 1900 to 1935.

Speight worked in three particular areas of geological investigation: the volcanic history of Banks Peninsula, glaciation in the Canterbury mountains, and the younger sedimentary rocks found in places like Castle Hill, Weka Pass and Mount Somers — the limestone country familiar to many who live in Canterbury today. In all three areas, understandably, advances have been made

on Speight’s work. But he provided a firm foundation on which later geologists built. Banks Peninsula was probably his major interest as a geologist and he admitted in one of his last papers on a peninsula topic that its volcanic history was probably more complicated than he had been able to establish.

Close behind the peninsula as a geological interest were the glacier-shaped landscapes of the Southern Alps. He also did much work on younger sedimentary rocks in Canterbury, helping to establish that the pockets which remained were the remnants of a once more-or-less continuous sheet of Cretaceous and Tertiary deposits, most of which had been stripped away by subsequent erosion to uncover older rocks beneath.

Although Speight was a scientist doing detailed and complex research, he also found time to popularise his scientific knowledge. He was an editor of and major contributor to the 1927 book on the “Natural History of Canterbury.” He wrote geological chapters for popular books on Banks Peninsula and contributed a section to the first handbook of the Arthur’s Pass National Park, published in 1935.

He is remembered, too, as enthralling young people with his descriptions of how the landscapes around them had been shaped. But sadly he never wrote a new "Geology of Canterbury,” to succeed Haast’s 1879 "Geology of Canterbury and Westland,” although no-one was better equipped than he to attempt the task.

Outside college and museum, Speight played an active part in the affairs of the New Zealand Institute. In 1934, while Speight was its president, it became the Royal Society of New Zealand.

He was a member of the first Arthur’s Pass National Park Board, set up in 1929, and was a committee member of the Canterbury Mountaineering Club, the founding of which he had actively encouraged. Speight was not a mountain climber himself, but he loved the mountains and tramped almost all of Canterbury’s alpine valleys in the course of his geological investigations. He was physically strong and, reversing the usualexperience of tramapers, usually carried a heavier pack out of the mountains than into them. He once carried a swag of 120 pounds down the Rakaia Valley, his pack laden with geological samples. His love for the outdoors persisted into old age. He was over 70 when, while investigating an interesting outcrop in a remote part of Banks Peninsula, he tripped in a rabbit hole some distance from his camp and lay for several hours with a broken leg before he was discovered. “I have often told you,” he said ruefully to a visitor, "that nearly all accidents occur on the way home. Now you can see that it is true!”

He was a shy, diffident man, although within the circle of his family, and on field trips in the outdoors, he was more relaxed and open with the people around him.

He was also humble and unassuming. When the takahe

was rediscovered alive in Fiordland towards the end of Speight’s life, he remarked to a friend “Yes, it is correct. I saw one there 30 years ago.” When asked why he had made no report of the discovery which would have brought him publicity and scientific fame, Speight merely observed, "I was alone and the bird was alone when I saw it.”

One reason why Speight is not well remembered in Canterbury today is probably his own reluctance to push himself forward into any public limelight. Although he sank into relative obscurity after his death, he was not entirely forgotten. A mountain at the head of the Waimakariri River had been named after him in 1930 by some members of the Canterbury Mountaineering Club. Later, Maxwell Gage, studying glaciation in the Waimakariri Valley, called a large lake which had existed in the valley at the time of the retreat of the glaciers of the Otira Glaciation “Glacial Lake Speight” in recognition of his predecessor’s work in the area.

In 1971, “The Press” carried a short article on Speight written by a member of the staff of the Canterbury Museum. Now with the Speight-Carring-ton memorial articles appearing regularly in the “Canterbury Mountaineer,” Speight has a better chance of being remembered alongside Haast, Hutton, Cockayne, Wall and others as one of the earlier generation of Canterbury scientists on whose diligent work is based much of our knowledge of the province’s natural history.