Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home

by David Cohen

  The piece concluded on a hopeful note. While many of the inmates ‘felt a sense of shame’ at their predicament, some of them yet ‘seemed to have tremendous initiative and drive and if channelled into voluntary community work it would probably help them while helping others’.

  JONATHAN FOOTE, A BOY FROM NAENAE WHO would be placed in the centre four times between 1968 and 1974, was the type of kid Thomas probably had in mind when she filed her piece. A boy of 10 when he first arrived, he was, by his own recollection, as innocent as a rabbit. Not that Jonathan’s life experience up to that point had been a hop in the park. One of the youngest of 11 kids, he had little abiding memory of being part of a regular family. His father, Ernie, a returned serviceman, was an alcoholic, sluicing his nights away at the Taita pub; his mother eventually took off with someone else. That’s when the welfare people took charge.

  If only the war hadn’t happened things might have been different for Ernie, whose real battlefield ought to have been inside the squared circle. Boxing ran in the Foote family, after all, most notably in the case of Ernie’s brother Harold, a two-time national champion in the featherweight division and by all accounts a fleet-footed terror in the ring with a formidable long left delivered from a crouching position straight out of the extended shoulder. Ernie might not have been quite in his brother’s league but he boxed ‘splendidly’ when the spirit moved, as one reporter from the Evening Post put it in 1938. Later, he tried to instil some of the same enthusiasm in his boys, even setting up a makeshift ring in the backyard of the Naenae family home and putting his offspring through the fistic paces.

  The seed found fertile ground. Chuckling, Jonathan recalled his years at elementary school in Naenae, where a schoolyard game involved imitating the great heavyweight boxing bouts of the era, in particular the first of the Ali-Frazier encounters, in 1971, an event so drenched in hype that even pre-bout prayers were florid beyond belief. ‘God, let me survive this night!’ Frazier, down on bended knees in his dressing room, loudly beseeched the heavens. ‘God, let me protect my family! God grant me strength. And God … allow me to kick the shit out of this motherfucker.’

  And verily, the Lord attended unto Frazier’s supplication. ‘Nothing beat that fight,’ Jonathan believes. ‘I mean, there you had Ali coming back, trying to win the fight. And there’s Frazier, this huge gorilla, the title-holder. Even long after the fight, we used to re-enact it all in the playground, you know, imitating the fifteenth round where Ali goes down, hits the canvas and gets back up again. It was that big in our psyche.’

  As the son went through the imaginary paces, the father battled his own mental demons; he was running low on money and drinking away what little spare cash he had. Reflecting on the old man many years afterwards, Jonathan finally came to see that he probably was experiencing some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder related to his military service in the Solomon Islands. At the same time, he was clinging to the hope that boxing could yet provide the kind of lifestyle for his young family that working as a painter, labourer and freezing worker hadn’t.

  ‘Actually, he did a whole lot of other things for work as well early on — none of them for very long,’ Jonathan said with a boyish grin. ‘But my father was someone who always had a fighting spirit. You know, not letting anyone beat him, that’s for sure.’ But life beat him, right? ‘Unfortunately, yeah, with the war, alcoholism, psychological problems and all sorts of things going on, it was hard — he couldn’t keep his children anyway.’ Plainly Jonathan still retains affection for the old man, a photograph of whom, in a bare-knuckled boxing pose, enjoys pride of place in the hallway of the Manawatu home where he invited a visitor to share his reveries.

  ‘I remember how he used to come to visit me during my time there,’ he said, leaning back in his chair as he recounted the old days with undisguised enthusiasm. ‘He never had a driver’s licence so he used to bike down to the home, in various degrees of intoxication. And they’d go, in a familiar voice, “Mr Foote is here!” and in he’d come, unshaven and worse for wear, carrying confectionery and comics and things. It was nice of him. I mean, to bike down in that stage of intoxication, to come and visit me for two hours and then go all the way back home again, that was something. Don’t you think? I mean, some kids didn’t get any visits at all.’

  Some of the people who did arrive — ‘all sorts of siblings, bogus relatives, furtive girlfriends, old Uncle Tom Cobblers and all’, as one memo testily characterised them — were more problematic. On one occasion a couple of flabbergasted staff members chanced on a local teenager attempting to break in to Epuni; it was for the experience, the boy explained as he was led away — presumably with some sense of gratitude — to spend a night in the cellblock.

  Another memorable occasion involved a ‘special technical tour’ of the residence arranged for 19 tourists from the Japanese city of Nagoya. They descended on Riverside Drive on the morning of Monday, September 14, 1970, with the Japanese wife of a local New Zealander in tow as the group’s spokeswoman and interpreter. She barely got to do any work. Several party members detached themselves from the conducted tour and wandered back to their waiting transport; most of the others showed little or no interest in the brave experiment they had been invited to behold. Eventually the Japanese guests shuffled off, leaving the travel agency that had arranged the ill-starred tour to fire off a letter apologising profusely for the ‘peculiar’ behaviour of its charges.

  As far as visitors dropping by the institution went, however, it was neither his old man nor any other occasional oddball that Jonathan remembered most clearly — or even in later years a slightly earnest young television presenter from the nearby Avalon studios named Bob Parker, who had an obvious passion for inspiring youngsters. Rather, it was a surprising musical moment in the week leading up to Christmas in 1968.

  These were the formative days of 2ZM, a local AM radio station that was looking to distinguish itself from the middle-of-the-road format of its precursor station, 2YD. Stewart Macpherson, recently returned from Britain and working as a morning jock, had been charged with coming up with ideas on how this might best be achieved. A newsworthy event was especially needed during the festive season, when the rival ZB network made a big deal out of associating itself with some establishment charity. ‘Because we were attracting young people,’ Macpherson explained, ‘we had determined that we would do a live breakfast session with live musical elements to it put on by someone who could perform.’

  The challenge was to match the right act with the right venue in such a way as not to drag the event down to the level of cheap parody that is often typical of such charity initiatives. Eventually he hit on the idea of a young up-and-coming band from the Hutt Valley turning in a surprise performance at Epuni. The group he approached quickly agreed to the gig. A short while later, along with a technician, they loaded up an old Cortina van, headed for Lower Hutt and, by the dawn’s early light, presented themselves to Maurice Howe.

  The boys had no idea how their morning routine was to be disrupted. The morning had passed typically enough up until this point. The usual tasks and lineups, the filing in for breakfast — scrambled eggs all hot and milky — had all been attended to in the usual monastic silence. Halfway through the meal, however, the boys were told to face the concertina sliding doors that separated the dining room from the recreation lounge. Worried looks were exchanged. What could this mean?

  Soon enough they had their answer. The doors clattered opened to reveal the host of Macphersonland seated behind a mixing desk next to a group of youngish performers decked out in frilly shirts and poised with their instruments. As the drummer counted four, the band swung into a sweet and anxious version of ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’, the Motown track popularised a couple of years earlier by the Four Tops. The worried looks dissolved into unalloyed pleasure. You could feel the small joy sweeping the room. Awriiight! The band took a deserved bow. Thus began the loveliest of breakfast meetings with the soon-to-be-famous The F
ourmyula.

  ‘I don’t think the boys believed what they were seeing,’ Macpherson reflected 40 years later, ‘but it was at least as much a buzz for us too. I mean, it was crude, in the nicest sense, but it worked. And we were doing something different, something special, something with a bit of risk involved.’ In the end the band performed three 20-minute sets. A snapshot from the emotion-filled performance shows the kids looking on in obvious rapture, riding the music for everything it was worth.

  ‘I guess it was unusual for everyone,’ added band-leader Wayne Mason, reflecting on one of the more unusual performing turns his group took before parlaying its natural youth and verve shortly afterwards into the plangent psychedelic melodies of the evergreen hit ‘Nature’. Most dramatic of all was the set’s showstopper, the climax to a climax, an unapologetically raucous rendition of ‘Born to be Wild’ delivered without apparent irony and eagerly lapped up by a pipsqueak crowd now shucking and jiving to the era’s on-the-road anthem.

  The Fourmyula were of course bound for greater things; some decades later, for one, ‘Nature’ would be selected as the ‘best’ New Zealand pop tune of all time, and scarcely a month now passes without some kind of tribute to the group’s pioneering work. Yet it’s probably safe to say no performance ever given by the group aroused quite such a heroic response as its Christmas 1968 appearance at 441 Riverside Drive. Nobody appreciated it more than Jonathan Foote, a runny-nosed 10-year-old at the time, who many decades later has a framed photograph of the band in pride of place on the wall of his study in Palmerston North. ‘We were in heaven,’ he said.

  Or something close to it. Studying other photographs from the period, as much as the old newspaper clippings, one is struck by the other-worldliness of the era. How can one not be impressed? Here we see what at the time passed for very troubled boys from half the country impeccably decked out in grey shirts and shorts, crisply ironed (possibly even starched), a uniform worthy of an English comprehensive school. Every kid appears well groomed, hair cut short back and sides. No exceptions. Not a piercing or a tattoo in sight.

  Away from the premises, at the Christmas camp held each year in the bush out near Paraparaumu, a similar picture emerges. The security is non-existent; indeed, as Aussie Malcolm noted approvingly, the conditions are probably in breach of every imaginable government requirement, but again, the boys are visibly relaxed, friendly, almost affectionate to each other … and happy.

  ‘What strikes me is that the change, in the course of one generation, has been immense,’ Malcolm reflected in a late-night email drawing comparisons between the delinquents of that earlier time and the early 2010s. ‘So immense that it deserves terms like “faultline” or “sea change” or “cataclysmic”. Such terms, and the extent of change that lies behind them implies that, whatever the change was, it was not just gradual.

  ‘It was not creeping. Some thing, or some small combination of things, out of all that has happened socially in the last 50 years, has turned young New Zealand males from friendly, compliant, vulnerable little chaps who sometimes made mistakes, but loved and responded to love, into angry, violent, unattractive, self-destructive deviants that are extraordinarily hard to rescue.’

  Whatever the ultimate answer to that question, Epuni Boys’ Home was positioning itself to reflect the changing times.

  JERUSALEM

  The early 1960s were productive years for Epuni Boys’ Home; it was like a rocket taking off, nothing but official praise, interesting new staff members, good times. But with success came new challenges. Among the few persistent problems were schooling and teachers. Not surprisingly for an operation administered by the Department of Education, Epuni’s mission had long been freighted with euphoric talk about creating new academic opportunities for the disadvantaged. But that was easier said than done.

  At the start Epuni made do with enrolling half the wards at any one time with one of the local schools, either the nearby primary school on Waiwhetu Road, one or other of three intermediates, or Naenae and Taita colleges. Having a variety of institutions to draw on was the key. It meant there wouldn’t be a crew of Epuni wards in just the one place, an arrangement that Maurie saw had the potential to spook the regular pupils and lend itself to all kinds of mischief-making on the part of the wards. So that was the original plan, and for a time it worked.

  At Taita College the principal used to draw the boys aside on their first day and tell them in so many words: ‘You and I are the only two at this school who know what you’ve been up to before you came here. Now, if you keep your mouths closed as far as that’s concerned you’ll go through school and nobody will know the difference.’ Such gestures were appreciated. Yet in practice many of the kids would find that even with the most determination in the world they simply couldn’t keep up with the regular pupils. Soon they would drift, ineluctably, towards the lower end of the spectrum.

  Reading ability probably rated as the biggest factor. Rare was the ward whose literacy was not retarded by anything up to seven years. Another issue was what later came to be known as ‘churn’, kids being transferred, sometimes quite abruptly, from one institution to another, an arrangement that would obviously have disastrous consequences for a boy’s education. Making any headway in a conventional class was therefore a long shot at best.

  Perhaps remedial instruction might have helped at Epuni, but really, where was the perpetually cash-strapped institution going to find the money? Yes, the boys could always be enrolled in a ‘special’ class at one or other of the schools. But that would mean others labelling them as slow learners, which was guaranteed to exacerbate problems. Another nettlesome issue was the growing number of school-age boys who remained in the institution for several weeks, sometimes months, without receiving instruction at any local school. As the rationale had it, the ‘home boys’ needed additional time to settle down before receiving any schooling, but this was hokum and everyone knew it. More to the point, it also left Epuni Boys’ Home in the position of breaking the laws its own parent, the Department of Education, existed to uphold.

  ‘I felt that introducing a school into the Home was the best thing we could have done,’ Howe explained many years later. ‘It sort of removed that attitude that physically a boy might have to prove that he was a big tough or whatever. It meant he could settle down and get on with it without any pressure.’ That was at the heart of it. And Howe’s reasonable argument convinced the department.

  As Brian Fitzgerald, a supervising child welfare officer, admitted in a memo, the situation of a boy being resident in the institution for many months without receiving schooling was unconscionable in light of the department’s role in zealously prosecuting parents for allowing the same situation at home. ‘This seems to me to be a contradiction in terms and an injustice to those parents concerned,’ he admitted. So the educational die was cast. The three-teacher unit Fitzgerald agreed to establish would eventually cater for up to 30 inmates, with the yearly class-size total sometimes exceeding 150 pupils, virtually all of them academic under-achievers at best and usually complete dropouts. But founding the new unit presented terminological challenges. Strictly speaking, initially at least, what it would offer was ‘activities and assessment’ rather than education in the legal sense. Nor, oddly, were the instructional spaces to be referred to as classrooms, despite the intention that they be occupied on a daily basis for the purposes of learning.

  This regrettable situation was not unique to Epuni. With the exception of the Otekaike Special School, in North Otago — a residential institution for ‘feeble-minded’ boys that opened in 1908 and remained under the supervision of the Department of Education even after Social Welfare assumed control of the other residences in 1972 — every recognised school associated with a youth correctional facility technically operated under the control of a district or school board and was administratively separate from the management of the institution; the ‘headmaster’ of the school therefore did not report to the ‘principal’ of the i
nstitution.

  (In the case of Otekaike, the principal, who was employed by the Child Welfare Division of the Department of Education, was simply in charge of everything and he reported directly and internally to whichever departmental officer had the task of approving recommendations from outside organisations. This line of authority allowed the school to have its own sewerage system, gym, indoor pool, music rooms, movie theatre, central heating, and an old house in which the principal had his office retrofitted at some considerable cost. This he achieved by the simple expedient of firing off a memo to the Department of Education every time it issued new guidelines and demanding that the department maintain its standards in respect of one of its more troubled institutions.)

  For all these bureaucratic distinctions, the intention was always to run the Epuni Boys’ Home school along similar lines to institutions of elementary learning on the outside. Even in the best of circumstances this would be no easy matter. Clearly the flexibility and tolerance required by a teacher would need to be manifestly superior to that in any normal classroom. Even a model pupil, assuming such types ever entered Epuni, would be grappling with a raft of procedures they were unfamiliar with, including medical exams, interviews with police and social workers, court attendances, the strict institutional procedures and the general pressures of any residential life.

  And the wards at Epuni needed basic life skills such as budgeting, food selection and basic hygiene pointers, and some kind of system by which they might measure their improvement. How else would the institution make good on its ostensible task of returning a child to a normal setting in the outside world?

  The search began for a suitable candidate to take up the position of Epuni’s inaugural schoolmaster. Fortunately, or so it appeared, it wasn’t necessary to look far. Vincent Calcinai seemed to offer just the mix of qualities that Howe had in mind. Calcinai, who was born in July 1941, hailed from a well-regarded establishment family; he had worked at Epuni once before as a housemaster and had since won the testimonial blessing of the place he switched to, Khandallah School, where his teaching skills and ability to enthuse youngsters with a love of outdoor pursuits were held in sufficient regard that his lack of any formal qualifications other than School Certificate didn’t seem a problem. The Department of Education signed off on the appointment with the same enthusiasm with which Howe had once welcomed Calcinai as a housemaster.