Frank Milner of Waitaki: the Nelson beginnings

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 14, Issue 2, 1 October 1981, Page 83

Frank Milner of Waitaki: the Nelson beginnings

IAN MILNER

At its monthly meeting on 1 August 1906, the Council of Governors of Nelson College considered a letter from Mr Milner intimating his appointment as Rector of Waitaki High School, and his consequent resignation of his post in the Boys’ College; also asking that he be permitted to leave at the end of September. It was resolved that he be informed that his resignation is accepted with much regret; that he be congratulated on his new appointment; and advised that in consideration of his long and valuable services the Governors will permit him to leave when he desires, should he not be able to arrange otherwise. . . 4

For thirty-eight years he remained headmaster of Waitaki Boys’ High School until his death at a farewell ceremony in December 1944. It was said by the biographer of Dr Arnold of Rugby that what distinguished the school came not ‘from the genius of the place, but from the genius of the man . . . the one image that we have before us is not Rugby, but ARNOLD.’ 2 Mutatis mutandis for more than three decades Waitaki in large measure was Frank Milner. Upon his performance there his reputation as headmaster, educational reformer and public personality rests.

There was, however, a prelude. He was appointed Rector when still in his thirtieth year: an exceptional recognition of youthful merit. I wish to enquire into the nature and manifestations of that merit. Some, though not all, of the ideas and educational values that he so characteristically sponsored in a more developed and confident manner at Waitaki were derived from his experiences as a resident master and eventually First Assistant at Nelson College from 1897 to 1906. These experiences were shaped too by his family situation, by Nelson’s natural environment and certain features of its historical and cultural development, and by friends and teachers with whom he was associated as a boy at Nelson College, a student at Canterbury College and above all a master at Nelson. The prelude to Waitaki was the more important given the nature of the man. Ardent, filled with moral enthusiasm drawn from favourite Victorian and Romantic springs—Wordsworth, Tennyson,

George Eliot, Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold —emotionally and imaginatively sensitive, quick to respond to and quick to inspire young minds, his early manhood at Nelson was both seed-bed and testing-ground for the rectorial years to come. He was born at Nelson on 7 November 1875. His father William was classified in the Nelson Trade and Professional Directory for 1866 as ‘importer and merchant’: proprietor of a cloth-importing and drapery shop in Trafalgar Street. He was descended from William Milner of Belper, Derbyshire, a farmer. When Frank was eight years old, his father died. His mother, Ann Dodson Milner, nee Swanson, of St Mary’s parish, Nottingham, whose father was a tailor, was left to bring up six sons and a daughter in the family house Sunnybank at the east end of Nile Street close to the old foot bridge over the Maitai river.

After a full primary education at the Bridge Street school, where his reports were consistently excellent, he entered Nelson College in 1889, aged 14, by winning an Education Board scholarship. In the competitive examination he was placed first for Nelson and Marlborough. He won several coveted College prizes for Latin and English and after four years of secondary school gained a Junior National Scholarship which enabled him, amidst some maternal misgivings prompted by the matriarchal responsibilities thrust upon her, to proceed to Canterbury College in 1893. He had enjoyed his school years both in and out of the classroom. Conscientious, with a passion for learning, he worked harder than most at his books. But he was not bookish by temperament. From boyhood he gladly shared in the love of tramping inspired by Nelson’s wooded hills and nearby mountain ranges. Swimming, his favourite sport apart from tennis later, could not be had better than at Tahunanui or up the Maitai valley. In his final year he won the College swimming championship. From these early days a pride in physical fitness became an essential part of his outlook. One of his Nelson College masters, later a friend and colleague, was that remarkable man, Frederick Giles Gibbs, who after three years’ secondary teaching became headmaster of Nelson’s largest primary school, the Central School, for almost thirty years. 3 Nine years Milner’s senior, he was both a Junior National and Senior Scholar at Canterbury College, where he graduated with first class honours in Latin and English. More than any other person of his day Gibbs embodied and in enduring ways promoted that impulse towards educational and intellectual enlightenment dating from early settlement days, linked with the practical achievements of Alfred Domett, so intimately identified with Nelson, and the high hopes of Thomas Arnold the younger for the founding of that ‘broad and liberal’ college in Nelson which, as Professor James

Bertram’s book has so finely shown, 4 was to have brought sweetness and light to the whole of Polynesia, and beyond. Gibbs was a moving force in the Philosophical Society and the Nelson Institute and later in the Cawthron Institute, which he had a large hand in establishing. A skilled botanist, with wide scientific interests, and a tireless and adventurous tramper, he would take pupils and friends on walking trips up the Maitai, the Dun Mountain track and the Tasmans, commenting vividly on plant and bird life on the way. As educationalist he sympathised with new and more humanly stimulating methods: his disapproval of formal grammar teaching won him the title at the Central School of‘No grammar Gibbs’. 5 The example of Gibbs —as scholar and teacher, as promoter of good cultural causes, and as lover of Nature and of Nelson’s flora and fauna —was in the forefront of young Frank

Milner’s impressionable mind. He found there a ‘model’ of scholarly, civic and personal worth that invited emulation. There was another such model. In his first year at Nelson College he came to know, despite a four year age gap, Ernest Rutherford, then completing his scholastic triumphs by becoming dux and going off on a scholarship to take his double first at Canterbury College. A friendly association formed that continued until Rutherford’s death. The first step he took on the day of his arrival at Canterbury College, after having been met by a boyhood friend, Joe Craig, was to visit Rutherford. As he wrote to his mother: After having lunch (one of 3 good courses) Joe & I went to Rutherford’s lodgings (not so good as ours but he pays more) 6 & had a long talk with him. He is now 8.A., has won a Senior Scholarship in Maths. & is going in for double Ist class honours this year. We went to the University & they took me all over it, introducing me to a lot of students, B.A.’s M.A.’s etc. by the score. 7

He continued to see Rutherford while an undergraduate and benefited from the latter’s experience and good counsel. In the first weeks of university life a further letter to his mother reveals how he took Rutherford’s example to heart: Prof. Cook, Rutherford & others down here think that N must have got 3rd class honours, & they all look down on such a thing. M.A.’s are nothing here; we turn ’em out, First Class, Second, & 3rd Class by the dozens every year; & Rutherford at the end of this year will be an M. A. with Double First Class Honours & also a B.Sc. . . . You are thought nothing of here if you get 3rd class honours in the M.A., or even second-class for the matter of that, though they are all better than plain M.A. 8

In later years, while the master in charge of the Nelson College magazine, the Nelsonian, he carefully chronicled Rutherford’s career and achievements in the Old Boys column. When Rutherford gave his celebrated lecture on radium in relation to the earth’s internal heat before the Royal Society in London in May 1904, the Nelsonian, dissatisfied with what it termed a mere ‘curt telegraphic announcement’ in the New Zealand press, came out with a five-page detailed survey, pieced together from English and local sources by Milner’s guiding if non-scientific hand. The friendly link between them was well illustrated by Rutherford’s acceptance in 1925, despite a crowded itinerary, of an invitation to address the boys at Waitaki. I recall the evident mutual liking and respect —and the bonhomie of their relations. Rutherford gave assembled Waitakians a taste of mirth when he recalled that at Nelson College he had once had occasion to ‘correct’ the Rector when he was just ‘a little lad’. In 1929, when Waitaki’s Rector had his first and only visit to England, Rutherford welcomed him at

Cambridge and personally conducted him over the Cavendish laboratories. After Rutherford’s death Milner was asked to write the foreword to C. M. Focken’s memorial booklet, Lord Rutherford of Nelson. 9 He stresses the two essential lessons to be learnt by later generations of New Zealanders: that the great scientist was ‘just an awkward country boy from a rustic hamlet’ and that ‘he climbed to his acknowledged scientific supremacy of the world by whole-hearted and tireless devotion to work’. Amongst the notes made for the foreword, tucked away in one of the many notebooks and diaries held by the Turnbull Library, 10 is a quotation significantly from Matthew Arnold’s elegiac tribute to his father, ‘Rugby Chapel’:

O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain! Somewhere, surely, afar, In the sounding labour-house vast Of being, is practised that strength, Zealous, beneficent, firm!

So the ‘divinely gifted man,/Whose life in low estate began’ 11 —the ‘country lad’ of Brightwater and Havelock school —is seen in the line of moral descent from the great Arnold of Rugby. It is a revealing instance of how strongly Frank Milner was influenced by the Arnoldian ethic, both per se and in a form adapted to a colonial society in which men of humble origin like Ernest Rutherford (and Frank Milner) might by intellectual merit and hard work rise to eminence.

His university career if anything improved upon the scholastic successes at secondary school. He completed his B.A. in 1895, gaining a Senior Scholarship (University of New Zealand) in Latin. The following year he took his M.A. with first class honours in Languages and Literature (Latin and English) and had the rare distinction of being placed first for the Colony in all papers in both subjects. He found time and energy nonetheless to pass the first section of the LL.B., and completed the second part a few years later. This early interest in law (his elder brother William became a competent and respected Nelson solicitor) subsequently nearly won him away from the teaching profession. One of his contemporaries at Canterbury, and a lasting friend, was Sir James Hight. The following recollections attributed to Hight by an unsigned interviewer are to my knowledge authentic and help to vivify the image of the young man at university: Possessed of an iron character and will. As a student Frank Milner was very good looking—a Spartan where physical fitness was concerned —he used to plunge in

the Avon before breakfast each morning summer and winter. . . . Although very shy he had to force himself as he realised that without push he would get nowhere. Despite his modesty and shyness he could become fiery as instanced by his joining [in] public demonstrations [with] the radical Independent M.P. T. E. ‘Tommy’ Taylor who was an idealistic reformer. Carry[ing] flourishing torch flares they held meetings in favour of prohibition . . , 12

At such meetings, often stormy, the young Milner began to discover, and extend, his powers of oratory, which in later years won him fame on foreign as well as native public platforms. His crusade against drinking was continued with unrelenting vigour while a master at Nelson College and headmaster of Waitaki. Characteristically, in his valedictory speech to the assembled boys of Nelson College after his appointment to Waitaki, he declared that he would like to say something helpful. . . For many years there was a subject that was very dear to him . . . He was speaking to boys whose tastes were as yet unformed, for whom life was just opening to success or otherwise. The highest medical authority had proved conclusively that alcohol in any form is [sic] a rank poison . . . He was not voicing the opinion of one whom some termed a fanatic, but was giving the verdict of the greatest doctors in England and America . . . 13

To many it would seem a somewhat strange choice of a farewell theme. But it bespeaks the man: idealist and unremitting zealot in the service of the Puritan ethic as he saw it. The greatest single influence upon him while at university was Professor John Macmillan Brown whose lectures on English literature and political economy he enthusiastically attended. Brown’s colourful eloquence and force of personality in conveying his imaginative response to literature, especially that in the Romantic vein, his stress on the moral aspect of aesthetic appreciation, his talent for projecting ideal visions and idealised values: all this accorded well with the Ruskinian and Wordsworthian bent of Frank Milner’s mind at the time. The fluency and highly-wrought rhetoric of Brown’s lengthy performances at lectures were a strong stimulus towards cultivating his own talent for public speaking. A personal liking and regard grew up between professor and student that matured in after years, as correspondence between them shows. 14 During his apprentice years as a Nelson College master he would write to his professor indicating inter alia how faithfully he was putting into practice approved principles for the teaching of English literature. And the cachet of recognition was gladly conferred: That was the finest, manliest, most enthusiastic letter I have received for many a day. Quite apart from its fine enthusiasm, it has great literary merit ... I hope some day to see you hold an English literature chair or the editorial chair of some

journal . . .You are doing evidently a great work among your boys ... a born teacher, as I can see you are. 15 At Canterbury his achievement as a Latin scholar placed him momentarily in a quandary. His professor of classics, F. W. Haslam, wrote later to the Nelson College Council of Governors: I considered him as being one of the three best Latin scholars I had had during the sixteen years during which I had been Professor ofClassics ... I wished Mr Milner to go Home because I felt certain he would make his mark at the University or else pass high for the Indian Civil Service . . , 16

The vistas opened up to his fervent mind were dazzling indeed. The lure of Arnold’s Oxford or Milton’s Cambridge then was absolute. And the vision of serving the cause in India, the brightest jewel in the Imperial Crown, fired his already forming idealistic faith in an Empire based on common bonds of kinship and the redeeming altruism of good works. At first opportunity he broke the great news to his mother, whose fourteen years of widowhood had sharpened the sense of responsibility in bringing up a family of seven. That Frank, her brilliantly clever and perhaps favourite son, should go off across the seas (Christchurch was remote enough) and assume the proconsular mantle somewhere in the wilds of Uttar Pradesh was beyond conception. His alert moral sense heeded the voice of family realism. But Haslam’s offer, made to him when just 21, aroused feelings and aspirations that lingered on and were transformed into other shapes. More and more conscious of the Imperial framework within which he as a New Zealander lived, he sought to identify himself with the wider world of the United Kingdom and the Empire, both at Nelson College in embryonic ways and then at Waitaki, where that impressive and swelling beadroll of distinguished English and Imperial visitors, including representatives of the Royal Family, indicated the ardour of his faith and span of his ambition.

He began his nine years’ career at Nelson College as a junior master in 1897. After five years he was appointed second assistant and classical master from 1 January 1902. 17 His classroom teaching was from then on primarily English and Latin. Outside normal hours he voluntarily, and with signal success, coached senior pupils, as regulations then allowed, for ‘terms’ at university level and for B.A. in Latin, English, French, History and Political Economy, and for the first and second sections of the LL.B. in Jurisprudence, Constitutional History, Roman Law, Conflict of Laws and International Law. Quite apart from varied and time-consuming out-of-classroom activities as house-master and first assistant (in his last three years), such range of tuition points to

a constant characteristic: his extraordinary mental energy and appetite for work. His style as a teacher is best revealed in a testimonial from the headmaster, William S. Littlejohn, supporting appreciatively his application—at the age of 27—for the headship of Nelson College following Littlejohn’s appointment in September 1903 as principal of Scotch College, Melbourne: He possesses the indefinable characteristic of authority, based on a forceful personality, embodying a look that reproves the ignorant, a word that chides the careless, and a moral character that youth approves without being able to analyse it . . , 18

Perhaps the gravitas of rectorial office was added to the natural habit of authority evident in his early years; otherwise those who knew him as ‘The Man’ at Waitaki will assent to the aptness of the words. Littlejohn went on: The best gift that Mr Milner gives his pupils is enthusiasm. He loves work and he loves boys, and he makes them love work and compels their love. The quality is magnetic and makes his influence powerful in awakening and stimulating the mind . . , 19

The assessment, based on close knowledge, reveals the essence of his classroom style, both early and late. By temperament, by the idealistic cast of his intellect, by his values drawn from Romantic and 19th century humanistic sources, Milner early on adopted as if to the manner born an ‘inspirational’ and revelatory mode of teaching. Education, above all in the humanities, should not be reduced to book learning or Gradgrindist compliance with examinational prescriptions. Literature teaching must rest upon the appreciative response to original texts. That response he believed depended largely upon the teacher’s ability to appeal to the feelings and imaginative sympathies of his pupils. Among the papers from his Nelson College teaching days is a series of extracts, suitably underlined, from Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, which include: ‘Enter into their hearts —their powers of emotion (sensation) are wider as they are nobler . . . the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation ... ’ 2O Those who heard his sixth form and other performances in English literature at Waitaki could confirm that the basic approach had neither changed nor lost its magnetic power. 21 The man appointed to succeed Littlejohn as principal was H. L. Fowler, aged 42, Rector of Invercargill High School, with an apparent fetish for annotated editions of the classics, Latin or English, and comparative charts of scholarship examination results. After the sense of shared purpose and personal affinity experienced with Littlejohn, Milner found the newcomer something of a

formalistic pedant. It was consolation perhaps to be informed by certain deputed members of the College Council of Governors that only his comparative youth—he was then 27—and bachelor status had stood in the way of his appointment.

W. S. Littlejohn was to remain for him, more intimately and persuasively than more remote figures like Arnold of Rugby and Sanderson of Oundle, the exemplar of a fine headmaster. His biographer said of Littlejohn:

He dedicates his life to the boys whom he teaches, whose characters he endeavours to mould ... to educate for life, but not to educate merely for making a living . . . In short, schoolmastering to him is much more than a job to be performed from a specified time to a specified time for a specified sum of money; it is a calling which makes ceaseless demands on time and talents, regardless of the personal comfort of the individual. 22

From Littlejohn’s own testimony, in his letters supporting Milner’s applications for both Nelson College and Waitaki headships, 23 it is clear that he had good reason to believe that what he called his ‘right hand man for five years’ shared unequivocally his own fundamental conviction concerning the educative process as self-dedication to a ‘calling’. Above all, they shared—or the young assistant was a ready disciple—the view that, especially at a boarding school, activities, athletic, social, recreational, outside the classroom were indispens-

able if the school was to fulfil its true end of training the whole human personality. Thus at Nelson College, athletics apart, they initiated and developed between them, with widespread pupil response, a debating society and literary club, an entertainment committee (Milner as chairman) for organising Saturday night concerts, ‘socials’, and dances (boys partnering boys in the pioneering days). 24 In these and other ways under Littlejohn there grew perceptibly a more conscious sense of collegiate identity and pride, an esprit de corps that the young Frank Milner, now first assistant, greatly esteemed. One of the entries in a diary of this time, used largely for notes and quotations, is:

The eminence, the nobleness of a College depends on the capability of each of its generations of being stirred by the memories of a great past, and of a striving for spiritual ends. ... It is this living force of sentiment in common that makes a collegiate consciousness. 25 More than anything else, Nelson College under Littlejohn persuaded him that even in a young New Zealand school such a ‘collegiate consciousness’ could be created and fostered. When he went to Waitaki this was perhaps the supreme lesson, and experience, he carried with him. One activity at Nelson, the building up of the magazine the Nelsonian into what Littlejohn judged (generously, after three years at Scotch College) ‘the best school magazine in Australasia’, 26 was inspired solely and distinctively by his own initiative and talent. Within five years its circulation increased from less than 300 to more than 900. Issued each term —a remarkable undertaking—it filled ninety pages, with many illustrations. The magazine was edited by a committee of senior boys, together with the ‘Business Manager and Treasurer’, Mr Milner. Without the latter’s prolific hand, stylistically observable if not formally proclaimed throughout many pages of each issue, the Nelsonian could scarcely have attained its range of interest and quality of presentation. Under the heading ‘Managerial (Notes by the Business Manager)’, which became a regular and expanding feature, he admits that

the bulkiness of the magazine places a big strain on our exchequer. But with an editorial staff fertile in voluminous copy, and a Business Manager also at times afflicted with the cacoethes scribendi, we find it difficult to restrain this exuberant tendency. 27 The ‘temptation’ to accept ‘the allurements of would-be advertisers’, though ‘enticing’, is rejected on principle: ‘we feel that the traditions of the Nelsonian would be lowered by our admission into

its pages of these incongruous and extraneous puffs.’ 28 Apart from a comprehensive survey of school activities, and an occasional article on national affairs or a literary essay (the dearth of such contributions is ‘managerially’ deplored), special and ample attention is paid to Old Boys news. Milner was, until the Waitaki appointment, an energetic secretary of the Old Boys Association. The chronicling of the activities and achievements of former pupils, especially of honours and distinctions gained, was to him a vital contribution towards fostering a sense of identity, prestige and tradition that was to him, even in these early years, the supreme need of a school worthy of its name in a young colonial society. Significantly, one of the first things done by the newly appointed Rector of Waitaki in 1906 was to establish a school magazine, the Waitakian, very much at the outset along the lines of the Nelsonian, and to reorganise and put life into the Old Boys Association. There was criticism, sometimes, as mentioned in the ‘Managerial Notes’, from ‘influential quarters’:

We are accused of degenerating editorially into a pernicious latinised style of literary composition. We must say that we hardly expected to have a projectile of this quality hurled at us. But this is an age of irresponsible criticism, and we must strive to survive the blow and meekly learn. We recognise that there are mental digestions inured to milksop Anglo-Saxon diet which are upset by the sonorous virility of a few polysyllabics. Still we can’t promise to pare our expression down to jejune aridity to accommodate the mangelwurzelish mental standard of each and every clamant bucolic. But we must in all contrition of soul keep a watchful eye on this misguided tendency of ours towards polysyllabic ponderosity, and consider the tender susceptibilities of our critics. 29 The ‘tendency’, and the bantering tone of the shrug-off relying upon verbal display, was characteristic: variations on the theme continued to amuse Waitakians at morning assembly and Old Waitakians at countless dinners and social functions.

In view of its consequences, and of the insight it offers into the Business Manager’s nature, one must put on record briefly the great gymnastics controversy. Nelson College and Wellington College had athletic engagements, including football, dating back to 1875. Gymnastics were added later, and on 19-20 December 1904 the second contest was held in Wellington. The judges, one from Wellington Training School and the other an Army instructor from Wellington, awarded the victory to the Wellington team by a narrow margin: 1247V£ points to Nelson’s 12281/2. The detailed report, unsigned, in the Nelsonian sets out reasons or viewpoints, based on a running analysis of the comparative qualities of the teams in the various disciplines, for the uncompromising conclusion: We must refuse, and do in most emphatic measure refuse, to acknowledge a defeat. This experience has made us think that judges connected in any way with the

Wellington Training School will not allow a team coached by a professional to be beaten by an amateur squad. 30 The report is followed by a commentary, signed ‘F. Milner’, on ‘The Gymnastic Contest’. The point of real issue, as he saw it, is again stressed: The conclusion is forced home upon one that an amateur squad cannot be allowed to score a victory in the sacrosanct pale of professionalism. Our own squad were practically self-trained, as our College possesses no gymnastic coach. 31

No coach other than Frank Milner: the amateur leading the amateurs! And then outraged pride and a strong sense of conviction swept away any discretionary restraints: The judges cannot explain the situation by reference to any finesse of execution on the part of the Wellington boys in the face of the craggy contour of their legs and up-turned toes. What fine points their squad collectively possessed were of such a refined and attenuated character as to be invisible to the grosser gaze. The result is a convincing demonstration of the utter futility of such competitions where practically everything depends not on the individual efforts of the competitor, but on the arbitrary and adjustable standards of the judge. 32

The aftermath was serious. Wellington College suspended sine die all athletic relations with Nelson. The annual football matches were not resumed until 1925 (the war years 1914—18 made a natural gap). The editorial pages of the Nelsonian later offered a kind of apology, without recanting as to principle: The Principal of Wellington College failing to obtain what he considers an adequate apology for our comments on the recent gymnastic contest has broken off all connections with us. We are very sorry that he has taken this step. We do not think that the remarks in question afford any justification for taking up this attitude. We regret we cannot accept the judges’ verdict on that occasion as an unbiassed valuation of the work of the two squads. 33

And in the spirit of Hotspur, which in moral rather than martial terms ran in his blood, he threw down his gauntlet: In view of the facts of this case we must say that it would be a hard thing to reconcile a meek acquiescence in the verdict with one’s duty to the gymnastic squad and the school it represents. In the eyes of the headmaster, Mr Fowler, his first assistant was rashly adding fuel to the flames. Moreover, for him the management of the Nelsonian had become in other ways all too independent. In a letter to the Council of Governors dated 18 July 1906 Fowler remarks:

Having occasion recently to find fault with the tone of certain passages in the last number, I was surprised to learn that, though a member of my staff, he claimed the right of criticising any school institution, and of commenting on any point in my management of the College, whether his views were in agreement with mine or not, and regardless of any implied reflection upon the Governing Body or myself. . . . He appears, in fact, to take up the position that the Nelsonian is a public print, edited (if not owned) by an independent outsider, and exercising a benevolent supervision over the affairs of the College. 34

Behind the pointed irony here lay an immediate background of both personal and professional disharmony. Milner had been a close contestant for the headship and doubtless as Littlejohn’s ‘right-hand man’ did desire to maintain in any way open to him the admired letter and spirit of the latter’s regime. Fowler’s letter continued: He added, it is true, that he would use his discretion in such matters (i.e. ‘editorially’), but seeing that his intemperate criticism, in a recent number, of the judges’ decision in our last gymnastic competition with Wellington College had led directly to the cessation of all matches between Wellington and ourselves, I am not inclined to rely absolutely upon his judgment or good taste.

And the moral in a worldly-wise man’s manner is pointed up: Had he in the proper way reserved his objections for me, I could have discussed the appointment ofjudges with Mr Firth, and no doubt have made some arrangement satisfactory to both parties.

Firth was the Principal of Wellington College. Fowler ends by asking approval of certain ‘principles’ that would have ensured his right of control of the College magazine’s policy and contents. The Council of Governors, aware that Milner had just been appointed as Waitaki’s rector and tendered his resignation, did not

commit itself: ‘A letter from Mr Fowler was read, with reference to the conduct of the Nelsonian. It was resolved that it stand over meantime.’ 35 The gymnastics affair allows revealing insight into the mind and style of performance of Waitaki’s Rector-to-be. The idealistic principle in his nature was at the time paramount and given free rein. He acted in the spirit of Milton’s Areopagitica , one of his permanent sources of inspiration and quotation. He never tired in his Waitaki days of citing: ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.’ In the pursuit of Truth, as he saw it, consideration of possible consequences was not relevant. Even after the event he continued to take his stand on principle. The border-line between standing on principle and autocratic judgement is not always discernible to those adversely affected by the consequences. In later rectorial years there were occasions when both Board of Governors and his staff suspected that ‘Truth’ was what Milner wanted. But by then he had learnt something of the world’s need to temper the wind. The causes on which he chose to take an absolute stand were usually carefully selected and justifiable, or at least arguable, in terms of enhancing the school’s well-being and prestige. Above all, his proven success as headmaster from the outset enabled him to play his hand firmly. In short, the years somewhat mellowed but did not change the Miltonic fervour of his mind.

Many of the innovations that the new Rector of Waitaki High School made immediately after appointment were drawn from Nelson College experiences. Inauguration of a school magazine, a prefectorial system, debating and literary society, Saturday night entertainment and concerts are some instances. Similarly, to arouse a sense of pride and facilitate the forming of tradition, an Honours Board, both athletic and academic, was installed as at Nelson and steps were taken to make Old Boys’ organisations a permanent and vigorous adjunct to the school’s life. Changed circumstances and needs brought new responses. And the larger characteristic aspects of his mature performance at Waitaki were yet to emerge in full shape: the Imperial theme (at Nelson College there had been signs and tokens, particularly his absorbed interest in the British Navy, in Lord Nelson, and in Joseph Chamberlain as latter-day architect of Empire); educational reform in the widest sense (the stress on multilateral courses and vocational selectivity, advocacy and establishment of the junior high (intermediate) school at Waitaki, early setting up of a course in agriculture); and the intense interest in international affairs and plea for international understanding based

in the first instance on Anglo-American cooperation. Working along these lines and making use of his unbounded resources of mental energy and force of personality, supported by a very able and loyal staff, ‘The Man’ in his great years was able to create a Waitaki identity, pride and sense of tradition which from early Nelson days had seemed to him a school’s finest quality. The move to Waitaki did not diminish his feeling for Nelson as his family seat, place of rare and beloved natural beauty and warm boyhood associations, centre of rich historical and cultural associations, home of Nelson College. Summer after summer the holidays were spent there with his wife and children. And then under Nelson skies he was at his most genial and most human. He

relished every moment of the long summer days. He would take me and my brothers tramping up his favourite Maitai valley or swimming and sunbathing at Tahunanui beach. Sometimes he would strike out for the Dun Mountain track, which he had walked hundreds of times as boy and young man, and tdl stories of tramping exploits with ‘Fred’ Gibbs and others. He would visit the Cawthron Institute and look up his friend Dr Tillyard, the entomologist. Over the family dinner table on Sundays when the whole Milner clan traditionally assembled, there would be reminiscences and banter with his brothers. Of an afternoon he would join with zest in a game of rounders on the lawn below Sunnybank. Remember Robert Browning’s confession of ultimate sympathies: Open my heart and you will see Graved inside of it, ‘ltaly’.

If you opened Frank Milner’s, you would see ‘Nelson’ rather than ‘Oamaru’. ‘Waitaki’ is another matter. And another story.

Text, revised and expanded, of a lecture given to the Friends of the Turnbull Library on 7 May 1980.

REFERENCES I would like to express my gratitude to the Alexander Turnbull Library Research Endowment Fund and to the Chief Librarian, Mr J. E. Traue, for their encouragement and generous assistance in my research project of preparing a biography of my father, Frank Milner. I appreciate the ready help and advice of the staff of the Alexander Turnbull Library. The Manuscripts Librarian, Dr M. E. Hoare, has been of special assistance. My thanks are due also to the National Librarian, Miss Mary Ronnie, for information and advice in the early stages of my work. Through her kind offices I received the calendar of Milner Papers which first indicated to me the extent (102 folders, including lengthy notebooks and diaries) of biographical material held in the Turnbull Library. The Milner Papers are catalogued as MS Papers 51. References to the Papers cite the relevant folder. 1 Minute Book of the Council of Governors, Nelson College, 1906, p. 37 (my thanks are due to the Secretary of the Council for access). 2 A. P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. (London, 1844) p. 62. 3 See S. C. M. Mann, F. G. Gibbs; His Influence on the Social History of Nelson, 1890-1950 (Nelson, 1977). 4 James Bertram (ed.), New Zealand Letters of Thomas Arnold the Younger (Wellington and London, 1966) Introduction, and pp. 54, 81-84. Arnold wrote to Clough of‘an institution, which like lona in the Middle Ages, might one day spread the light of Religion and Letters over these barbarous colonies and throughout the great archipelago of the Pacific . . .’ (p. 84). 5 S. C. M. Mann, op. cit. 6 F. M. was at pains to explain to his mother that the one pound he would pay for lodgings was ‘the regular price’, though he knew that to her it would seem exorbitant. 7 Letter to Mrs W. Milner of 24 March 1893. I am grateful to Shirley Finlayson,

nee Milner, and her daughter Shirley Mahony for making this and other family letters available. 8 Letter to Mrs W. Milner, undated, probably April 1893. 9 Charles M. Focken, Lord Rutherford of Nelson; A Tribute to New Zealand’s Greatest Scientist (Dunedin, 1938). 10 MS Papers 51:27. 11 Foreword to C. M. Focken, op. cit. 12 MS Papers 51:23. 13 The Nelsonian XXI, no. 2 (September 1906) 105. 14 E.g. letters from Frank Milner to J. Macmillan Brown during the years 1902-1914, one of which, dated 7.1.14, consists 0f23 pp. (small format). I am indebted to the Chief Reference Librarian ofthe University of Canterbury, Mr Robert Erwin, for access to J. M. Brown’s correspondence prior to definitive cataloguing.

15 MS Papers 51:68 (letter of 11 May 1905). 16 MS Papers 51:68 (letter of 25 June 1901). 17 Minute Book of the Council of Governors, Nelson College, 1901, p. 293. 18 MS Papers 51:68 (letter of 14 October 1903). 19 Ibid. 20 MS Papers 51:48. 21 Apart from personal experience, let me refer e.g. to the late D. S. Loder, himself a seasoned secondary school teacher and Old Waitakian: ‘His technique of expressing in himself the feeling and the imagination of the poets and the authors being studied from the meaning and the music of their words as read or quoted by him opened up for the pupils a new dimension in the English language . . . Mr Milner’s teaching came from his heart... In this new world of literature we travelled far and wide under his guidance in the realms of gold and we too felt “like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken” as Mr Milner gave us the desire to go on for the rest of our lives exploring and discovering in greater measure its unlimited treasures and secrets’ (letter to the author of 8 October 1978). Cf. James Bertram, ‘Charles Brasch’, Islands 2, no. 3 (Spring 1973) 234—236; Charles Brasch, Indirections; A Memoir 1909-1947 (Wellington and Oxford, 1980) pp. 66-68, 83. 22 A. E. Pratt, Dr W. S. Littlejohn; The Story of a Great Headmaster (Melbourne and Sydney, 1934) p. 153.

23 MS Papers 51:68. 24 Cf. Littlejohn: .. he (F. M.) has organised and carried through with marked success a series of Saturday evening debates and entertainments’. MS Papers 51:68 (letter of 14 October 1903). 25 MS Papers 51:77 (diary 1903). 26 MS Papers 51:68 (letter of 29 June 1906). 27 The Nelsonian XVIII, no. 3 (1903) 127. 28 Ibid., XXI, no. 1 (1906) 8. 29 Ibid., 128. 30 The Nelsonian XIX, no. 3 (1904) 201. 31 Ibid., 202. 32 Ibid. 33 The Nelsonian XX, no. 2 (1905) 59-60. 34 I am indebted to Mr H. F. Allan, member of Nelson College staff 1926-1960 and one-time editor ofthe Old Boys’ Register, for drawing my attention to this letter and for providing other useful material. My thanks are due to the present Headmaster, Mr E. J. Brewster, for facilitating access to such material and making available complete volumes of the Nelsonian. 35 Minute Book of the Council of Governors, Nelson College, 1906, p. 39.