First State House Anniversary: A Personal Touch

 The first state house, 1937 | NZHistory, New Zealand history online

 

Today marks the 83rd Anniversary of the iconic First State House opening (in Miramar, 18 Sep 1937), when Mickey Savage, Semple, Lee & various other leading Labour Cabinet Ministers famously delivered decidedly cumbersome-looking furniture through a cheering crowd into the newly-built State House at 12 Fife Lane.

It's probably widely assumed that no-one who attended the official opening ceremony all those years ago is still alive today, certainly the crowd was composed almost entirely of adults, with very few kids or teens there to witness the historic occassion.

However, my Mother (then 7, now 90) and surviving Aunty (then 5, now 88) certainly attended the opening & are still alive & kicking - they may very well be the last of the attendees still around. Over the last week or so, they've both been speculating on this possibility and reminiscing on the event itself & its surrounding context. 
 
 
Broader Context
 
My Grandmother was a guest at the opening and brought the 4 youngest of her 6 children by tram to attend the event.

By the late 1930s, she had already become a fairly prominent Labour Party activist at the Wellington Regional level (active in the Party from the early 1920s to the mid 1960s) and knew most of the First Labour Cabinet, being particularly close to Finance Minister Walter Nash (she later became a Labour Wellington City Councillor & Hospital Board member through the mid-1940s to mid-1960s).

Most importantly, she had become centrally involved in the evolution of State House Kitchen design over the previous 2 years before the opening. As a prominent Party activist & office-holder, and as a long-time advocate of State Housing, with a young family of 6 kids, struggling on a low income & living in a very small, cramped, poorly-built house in Ngaio, she had quite a few clear ideas on the features she felt the new State Houses should have & shared these with leading Labour politicians, including Nash.

My Mother & Aunty remember that in the previous year (1936) something of a sensation was caused in their Ngaio street when 2 large black Ministerial cars turned up at their house, one containing Housing Construction Minister John A Lee (who my grandmother knew reasonably well) along with a prominent Architect involved in State House design & a number of Govt officials. (A few years later, incidentally, my Grandmother was part of the minority at the 1940 Labour Conference to vote against expelling Lee from the Party, following his falling out with Savage & the latter's subsequent untimely death).

It was possibly Nash who arranged for Lee & the others to visit their home to see the poor housing & living conditions of a large lower income family and to hear in a more detailed way my grandmother's ideas for future State House kitchen facilities. She put forward a series of ideas on things like filtered kitchen-pantry cupboards to keep things like meat & milk cool (most people at the time, including my Mother's family, still relied on outdoor tin safes placed under shady trees for this - it was, after all, the pre-Refrigerator days for all but the most affluent NZers). She also pushed for electric washing machines in every State Home, although this was ultimately rejected due to budgetary constraints. Lee & officials were impressed with the various detailed House plans she'd carefully drawn up and submitted over previous weeks & at the same time were sympathetic to the family's plight.


1937 Opening

The family travelled to Miramar by tram & my Grandmother placed the 4 kids on a grassy mound (probably leftover soil from the subdivision's on-going earthworks) so they could see over the heads of the large crowd of adults. And they watched the iconic moment as Savage, Semple, Lee and others carried the cumbersome furniture in to loud cheering from the crowd.

Lee & a couple of officials gave my Grandmother a quick tour of the new State house, showing her the kitchen features she'd played a central role in promoting. After about 20 mins she emerged from the House with a large plate of cream cakes for both the kids and others to share. It was quite a memorable occasion for the children.

The following year (1938), Walter Nash invited her & the kids to his Ministerial Office in Parliament to catch up & have a further informal discussion on State House developments. She took my Mother & surviving Aunt with her and Nash provided them with a large three-tier cake-stand of fancy butterfly cakes & trianguar sandwiches (this was something of a treat for kids from a lower income family in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression). They remember Nash came over to ask: "Have you two young ladies finished ?" at which point my Mother (age 8) & Aunty (age 6) looked at the 2 remaining cream cakes, looked at each other and spontaneously blurted out a very definite "No" at precisely the same time. Nash was greatly amused, while their Mother was a little embarrassed.
 
 
Other Firsts
 
My Grandmother was prominent in a range of activist causes through the 1920s to 1960s, including the Public Service Equal Pay Campaign, Jury Service for Women, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, opposition to Springbok Tours, establishing the forerunner of the IHC, revitalising the Howard League for Penal Reform & Anti-Death Penalty campaigns amongst others.

And both she and her kids were involved in a number of other firsts that have always intrigued those of us in the "younger" generation.
 
My grandmother was certainly one of the earliest women involved in Surf lifesaving & competitive swimming. She & her sister & brothers grew up in the largely working-class south Wellington suburb of Berhampore and as kids in the period immediately before the First World War they would regularly head down to nearby Island Bay to swim & play at the beach. By 1920, she was a leading woman lifesaver & was strong enough as a swimmer to take part in the inaugural Annette Kellerman Cup ... an arduous swim-race for Wellington's top women swimmers with the course going from Queens Wharf to Matiu/Somes Island. She also represented the Wellington region at the National Women's Hockey Championships.

We believe that the kids may have been the first children in New Zealand to receive an IQ test. My grandmother was active in the NZ School Committees Association & Secretary of the Wellington Region branch of the Assn, she had firm progressive views on education & was close to leading educationalist Clarence Beeby. Beeby gave all of her six kids IQ tests in the late 1930s in the run-up to its formal introduction into the education system.

She was also centrally involved in setting up one of the first Drop-in Crèches in New Zealand - at Wellington Railway Station in 1937, catering to mothers coming into the central city to shop, the service cost just 3d per hour (around $1.25 today) and was available to anyone with a train ticket.

In 1946, my Grandmother became the first woman in New Zealand to sit on a Jury (Court officials made a big celebration of the occasion and she featured in an Evening Post article with portrait photo) ... not that being first was important to her, she always said it was the cause that mattered (and would almost certainly have been a little embarrassed by my focus on her personal contribution here).

In the mid-1960s, my Mother had the opportunity to match her Mother by becoming the first Jury Forewoman ... she was the only one of the Jury with previous jury experience & the other members encouraged her to take the position but, being a little shy at the time, she declined.

My Mother also participated in what we believe may have been the first ever Te Reo class offered at a formal educational institution. It was a Night Class at Gilbys Business College in central Wellington in 1949, this inaugural Maori language course was run by Pirimi Tahiwi and attracted around 20 students - both Maori & Pakeha - of which my Mother was one.

Not long after, my grandmother was a member of a committee at the 1952 Labour Party Annual Conference which recommended Te Reo be compulsory at Primary School. It was a policy way ahead of its time & the wider Conference inevitably voted it down, but it was an early pointer of things to come.

Another first, my Mother took my brother and I (as young kids ... I was still a baby) on the first big Anti-Vietnam War march in Wellington (and one of the earliest in NZ)  in 1965 ... around 1500 people crammed into Wellington Town Hall to hear speeches from leading peace activists, including luminaries like James K Baxter & more than 1000 of them marched down the Golden Mile to Parliament (whereas I rode in a pushchair, enjoying the decided advantage of nappies in the event of an unexpected accident) ... again, this was well before the cause became popular with the younger generation in New Zealand.

 Two last items of interest ... seeing I'm obviously intent on heading down this narcissistic road of forebear hero-worship ... social historians & the Literati may be interested to know that my grandmother was a longtime friend of Poet/Novelist/Journalist Iris Wilkinson (aka Robin Hyde) & my Mother has one or two very early memories of Iris ... my grandmother was also the cousin of Phyllis Symons, murdered in 1931, buried near Mt Victoria Tunnel & frequently discussed in the media over recent years in the context of the tooting tradition. Really interesting - and quite poignant - details & social history surrounding this story that are known only to the family ... something I intend to write on in the near future.