Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home by David Cohen Page B

had been ‘quite a scramble’ completing the move, the inaugural entry scribbled in the new institution’s logbook noted: ‘Boys excited but settled reasonably well. Supper and lights out at 9.30 pm.’ More of the same followed the next day. Elsewhere in the records,kids are referred to by their first names, the talk is of movie outings, trips to the local baths and softball games, a sweet and light record that dovetails nicely with the recollections of others of the institution’s initially relaxed environment.
    ‘My management style was mostly the necessities,’ Howe later recalled. ‘I wanted to provide for the kids who came into Epuni, have them better dressed or at least to have footwear, and to look better for being with us. It was partly based in my schooldays, when the poor little beggars there used to have bare feet or sandals most of the time, particularly in winter. They were all so very poorly looked after. And that sort of clouded my position at Epuni, made me want to do things differently. My kids would be well dressed. My kids would be well looked after.’
    Howe’s emphasis on ‘the necessities’, obliquely reflecting the economic collapse of the 1930s, is telling, because it’s easy to forget that we are now much further removed in time from the world that shaped him. Howe was raised amid the realities of the Great Depression. The Depression had been unforgiving, it caused many a young life to totter; it wiped out his father’s business, too. Maurie’s old man used to paint vehicles, spring carts they called them, a fancy name for horsecarts, which he would delicately decorate along the shafts. Afterwards he did whatever he could to scratch and save. One of Maurie’s brothers went into accountancy; the other became a chemist. Maurie wanted something with a degree of security — but also the opportunity to offer security to others.
    Meanwhile the new operation, which was designed and built to similar specifications as the facility in Hamilton, was taking shape. Among the new principal’s first duties was convincing the neighbours that the project posed no threat to life, limb or, especially, local property values. This was all the more pressing since the plan was to purchase more adjacent land to build staff housing and extend the capacity, first to 28 and ultimately to 42,along with a new gym. The neighbours weren’t an easy sell. Some of them thought Howe was a liberal do-gooder.
    This wasn’t entirely incorrect. He was liberal by the standards of the time, or at the very least a man of many parts, and many of the staff he worked with in the early years saw themselves in a similar light. ‘You have to keep in mind that, yes, the Child Welfare Division and some of its employees, by today’s standards, might be seen as awfully conservative, schoolmarmish or whatever, but in the day they were terribly progressive, or that’s how we saw ourselves,’ one of his early colleagues recalled.
    For proof of how relatively liberal the residential crew in Wellington was, one only needed to consider how wards were attended to at a similar ‘receiving home’ in nearby Palmerston North, where the regional office kept an imposingly large leather-bound book in which the various punishments meted out to kids in care were duly recorded: John Doe; date; such-and-such an offence; punishment: six strokes on bare breech or, alternatively, ‘covered rearquarters’.
    Among those charged with administering the corporal punishment, at least until he moved to Auckland in the mid-1950s, was H. Lucas Hunt, JP, as he invariably introduced himself. The father of future Labour Party MP Jonathan Hunt, Hunt Snr was a portly man with a stentorian voice who took his work seriously. He used a pushbike to get around town — a cane clipped on the crossbar — and dispensed his corporal duties with a swinging arm likened by one person who knew him to a roast of lamb. This was certainly not the kind of Dickensian style