WELLINGTON COLLEGE

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 94, 22 April 1933, Page 13

WELLINGTON COLLEGE

GROUNDSMAN TO RETIRE

THE EARLY DAYS

After being groundsman at Wellington College for twenty-seven years, Mr. J. ("Jimmy") Muirhead will retire at tho beginning of next term. Mr. Muirhead is well known to many thousands of old boys of Wellington College, and he relates with pleasure how many of them came up to him on Old Boys' Day and shook hands. He states that he will attend Old Boys' Days in the future so as to renew old friendships. When Mr. Muirhead came to the college' there was a gully with trees and shrubs where the top ground is now, and boys used to secrete themselves in the trees when they wanted a quiet "smoke" out of the sight of their masters. Tho soil for filling in tho gully came from the site whci-u Firth.House, the college boarding establishment, now stands, and from the hill below where the East Girls' College has since been built. Tho West School had just then been opened. Mr. Muirhead has assisted in the construction of a new ground to tho east of Firth House, and will see it opened before he leaves, so he has* seen the Wellington College playing fields increased from two to four. Where the newest playing field has been built there used to bo a small lake, and in it ther_e were eels and frogs, and the frogs used to sing lustily. Some of the frogs would find their way into the swimming baths, but it is thought that they were brought in by tho boys. Tho rifle range, now a miniature range but formerly full-sized, used to bo up the gully, s instcad of across it. The observatory was on a high knob near where tho East Girls' College now stands. When the observatory was transferred to its present position south of Firth House, Mr. A. C. Gifford, who was in charge of the observatory, organised a chain of; boys, who marched up the hill with a brick in each hand. It took only three turns of tho chain before ■ all tho bricks required had been placed on the new site. The answer of "Punch" to the saying, "Things are not as they used to be," was "They never were," and when ex-pupils of a college complain that boys are getting'smaller at their old school, the reply is that as the expupil grows, his ideas as to what should be the size of pupils grow with him. But Mr. Muirhead believes that the Wellington College pupils are not as big as they used to be. The reason he gives is that in' the. old days there used to be. many boarders from the Wairarapa 'at Wellington College, and they were big boys from farms who used to stay at college until thoy were nineteen or twenty, but Wairarapa Boys' High School now absorbs the ■country boys. ' Mr. Muirhead states that Mr. T. Brodie is the only master now at Wellington College who was there when he first cam© to work on tho grounds.