A new start

In August 1965, when I reached Auckland with the children, I had to look for employment quickly to keep the family. I had already secured a job at Rangitoto College for the next year, but there was a term to go. Fortunately, my old French teacher, Henry Cooper, by that time Head of Auckland Grammar, was living near my parents’ home. 

Auckland Grammar School 1916 Building

He contacted me with a problem: one of his senior teachers had left on a temporary Overseas Volunteer Service appointment and could I pick up his timetable? This would involve Fifth Form English, History and two classes of Geography. I demurred, never having studied Geography, nor taught Geo or History. Henry persuaded me to accept, and I started straight after the holidays in mid-September. 

I soon discovered that all the four classes on my timetable were second-year fifth formers, ie, they had failed at the first attempt at the exam in the previous year. Second-year fifths were notoriously hard work, and so it proved to be, not because the boys were difficult, but because I had to swat up four classes of new material each night, ready to teach it the following day! 

The payoff came in mid-November when the boys left to sit their exams, and I was left with no-one to teach. In the event, the students I found worthy of a pass in the exams did in fact pass. So I can’t have been completely at sea! 

The education system was very short of teachers at that stage, and the PPTA was fighting a campaign to have pay rates lifted so that after 10 years or so teachers would be paid an annual salary of 2000 pounds. Henry Cooper told me one day that he had a third excellent teachers, a third average and a third useless. Consequently he was advertising jobs to replace the useless third. 

My next unexpected problem was that my holiday pay stopped in early January, because I had only worked one term of the previous year. So I had to look for a holiday job, and found one, thanks to a family friend, at the Winstones Building Supplies yard in the Wairau Valley. This job, which involved heaving cement bags and concrete blocks around the busy yard, soon improved my fitness ready for the new year at Rangitoto. 

I also met Bill Anderson, the Drivers Union leader, who visited us regularly, and with whom I later worked on the Vietnam Council.