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

by David Cohen

  As one resident of the time later put it to Ben Schrader, the author of a recently published history of state housing in New Zealand, it was as if the people of Epuni in the 1940s and 1950s somehow ‘saw themselves as more refined than those of Naenae and Taita. I think it was to some extent due to the fact that it was an earlier development than those further north in the valley and … in close proximity to privately owned and occupied dwellings. This effectively minimised the “ghetto effect” and stigma of being state tenants.’

  Another local history, published as relatively recently as 1990, makes no mention at all of the suburb’s past importance to Maori, much less the thousands of mainly Maori youth who lived at its namesake institution, opting instead to recall a bygone era when Epuni served as a bustling centre of colonial commerce. Here gentlemen of great means and prestige strolled the streets, silhouetted against the blaze of the empire’s sun. Here grateful tradesmen delivered their goods by horse-drawn carts, and an occasional Chinese greengrocer, complete with pigtails, was seen with his baskets balanced on a pole across his shoulders. Here the children knew where all the birds’ nests were, who grew the tastiest tomatoes, walnuts and fruit, and, the writer marvelled, ‘the settlers were good hearted and industrious citizens’.

  Elsewhere in the Hutt Valley intimations of something altogether darker flourished in the mid-1950s, even as the population of the region had nearly doubled to around 8000 in the previous seven years. The problems began on June 20, 1954 when, shortly after her mother and stepfather had reported her as missing, a 15-year-old girl turned up at the Petone police station to file a historic report. Unhappy at home with her stepfather, she told the cops, she had hooked up with a ‘milk bar gang’, whose members met ‘mostly’ for sex purposes at Elbe’s Milk Bar in Lower Hutt’s High Street — jukin’, as the Americans first called it, that rather socially ominous word denoting not only the piece of machinery in which records of the era were played very loudly, but the Gullah dialect of the American South in which juke means both ‘wicked’ (in the same sense as jazz) and ‘sexual intercourse’.

  All of this was naturally viewed with great alarm by a parental generation that had freaked out about every Kiwi manifestation of black American culture since the jitterbug. But now this young girl had become tired of the jukin’, too, worried about the lipstick traces it was leaving; she wanted the police to intercede, and how.

  THE AUTHORITIES OBLIGED. PARTICULARLY ENERGISED was one Senior Sergeant Frank Le Fort. A report published at the time in Truth had ‘sources close’ to the crusading cop vowing that there ‘would be no end to the investigation’ of the immoral behaviour radiating out of the Hutt Valley. Eventually, some 65 teenagers involved in sexual misconduct were identified and 107 charges laid. Virtually all of the prosecutions involved consenting individuals, with many relating to trivial offences, such as the case of the young man who was charged after admitting to touching his girlfriend’s breast. The country was scandalised.

  As Le Fort told The New Zealand Herald: ‘These incidents revealed a shocking degree of immoral conduct which spread into sexual orgies perpetuated in private homes during the absence of parents, and in several second-rate Hutt Valley theatres where familiarity between the youths and girls was rife and commonplace.’ Among the revelations were stories of teenage girls wearing make-up, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, even reading comics.

  Down in Canterbury, a saga with purportedly similar overtones involving a couple of teenagers, Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, unfolded only a couple of days after the ‘Petone incident’. Hulme and Parker, who were arrested and charged with the murder of Parker’s mother, had bashed the older woman to death with a half-brick, each of the girls having taken turns at holding her down by the neck while the other swung the makeshift weapon — 45 times in all.

  Worse, almost, the assailants were — in the terminology of the time — abnormally homosexual in their relationship, a fact that seemed to gather some kind of relevance given that neither of the teenaged offenders expressed any remorse for their crime. Never mind that this was a peculiar crime committed in faraway Christchurch. The moral menace already emanating out of Wellington’s satellite city was spreading, or so tabloid wisdom had it when holding forth on the ‘killer instinct’ — a term originally coined to describe the boxer Jack Dempsey in his prime — apparently taking hold of the young.

  Then along came Oswald Mazengarb. The residential movement existed well before the conservative barrister’s arrival on the scene, but his work hastened its progress. His Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents, better known as the Mazengarb Report, investigated the ‘conditions and influences that tend to undermine the sexual morality of children and adolescents’.

  Much the same general ground had been covered 10 years earlier in a similar inquiry hatched by the Wanganui Education Board, and indeed the Hutt Valley had already been the subject of a couple of smaller surveys looking at juvenile ‘immorality’ in 1951 and 1953. But the changing cultural times meant the last of these inquiries attracted greater funding and commanded far more national attention; certainly, it was constituted with greater urgency on the ultimate watch of Prime Minister Sid Holland, whose government appointed the seven-member committee on July 23, 1954. Holland, who believed that delinquency had become a grave national problem requiring immediate investigation, said he wanted action.

  The group got to work just four days later. In all, evidence was heard from 145 witnesses and 120 written submissions were received. The subsequent 69-page report, served up with rich sauces of indignation and very high in conservative political cholesterol, offered 27 conclusions and around 20 recommendations. So important was the offering deemed to be that copies of the 185-gram document were delivered to each of New Zealand’s 300,000 families. Posties grumbled about the physical weight. The country groaned under the document’s moral weight, a load made all the heavier by the daily stream of reports and pronouncements about juvenile delinquency that appeared during the hearings.

  Some of what Mazengarb had to say wasn’t so objectionable. His report despaired over the growth of materialism, the loss of moral absolutes, and what he saw as a faddish devotion to indulging children in notions of uninhibited self-expression. He was hardly the first person to suggest that this was a state of affairs that had ironically been made possible by the nation’s growing economic bounty. The report pointed out that suburbs in places such as the Hutt Valley, which had been centrally planned and quickly settled, tended to lack anything of a community spirit (associations, church groups, sports clubs, parks) and this had been exacerbated by the exclusion of wealthy people from the socialist paradise. These were the kinds of citizens who might be benevolently inclined to help their neighbourhoods evolve. Young people in such places, he argued, were always going to be a bit more aimless than their counterparts in more organically established townships.

  But the Mazengarb Report was never intended as a sociological study. Yes, it acknowledged, getting to the main subject at hand, juvenile delinquency was a worldwide problem, and probably always had been. Yet what was ‘entirely new’ in New Zealand was a young generation collectively convinced that ‘they are not doing anything wrong’. So what was to be done?

  Here the committee joined some interesting dots. Among the trends it noted was that, during this recent period of moral decline, the number of children in residential state care had been falling. Were these two facts related? Mazengarb seemed to think so. Among his recommendations: a radical strengthening of child welfare work and the powers of the children’s court, especially in respect of finding new ways to protect other children from the nefarious influence of young delinquents.

  This would be significant, because while the report may not have achieved its immediate political goal of highlighting public morals as a possible election issue, it did, as popular historian Redmer Yska notes, cast the shadow of juvenile delinquency over the remaining portion of the
decade. Despite having only played a minor role in the morals hearings, the Child Welfare Division thereby found its hand unexpectedly strengthened like never before, and Lower Hutt was the obvious geographical candidate to open a significant new chapter in its residential work.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  A PLACE CALLED HOME

  Maurice John Howe. Maurie. Everybody called him Maurie; it was in fact a sign of great ignorance to call him Maurice, though he was not informal by nature, he did not exude a familiar air and he did not grant intimacy easily, if at all. Always the boss, always in charge. For a time he was known as the ‘manager’ of Epuni, but Maurie preferred principal, for that is what he was, a point he was only too happy to make in his finger-wagging memos reminding the overlords at the local Child Welfare Office who was in educational control. Although Maurie, a note-perfect civil servant, would never actually change his occupational description on the Electoral Roll until after the title became official.

  As far as Maurie was concerned, Epuni was an educational service to the wider community first and a correctional facility last. Nevertheless, his initial success in founding Epuni on both fronts was impressive. More than that, though, for the thousands of boys and hundreds of staff who would experience life on his watch, Maurie Howe was Epuni, not only in the sense of how the institution was practically run and the policies it enforced but also in the very spirit of 441 Riverside Drive.

  For him, Epuni was not only a place of work but also a living philosophy, church, club, sport, extended family; it was the place where he and his wife Margaret raised their two kids, a son and daughter, and where the couple had some of their profoundest personal challenges. Whatever good things Epuni achieved over the quarter-century he ran the show were thanks to his tireless efforts; whatever the problems, and there would be many, they never fatally undermined his claim to being a well-motivated, honourable public servant working as best he knew how to make the country a better place.

  Comes the man, comes the time. It was the year of the microchip, the birth-control pill and the space race, the year Pop art, indie films and ‘sick comics’ arose. Yet Wellington itself seemed a pretty quiet sort of place at the start of 1959. Among the major items from the city’s afternoon newspaper: a prediction from one Admiral J. Dufek, the commanding officer of Operation Deep Freeze, that population pressures in the northern hemisphere would soon force millions to ‘spill over from the equator’ into countries such as New Zealand, possibly accompanied by creatures borne on UFOs. ‘I don’t think we can discount flying saucers,’ the old admiral averred.

  Another report served local notice that the Post Office would shortly be testing equipment that automatically answered incoming telephone calls and recorded messages. ‘Once the recording mechanism starts,’ the paper’s technology correspondent marvelled, ‘the machine continues to record until there is a silence lasting for at least eight seconds. If the caller does not speak during this period, it shuts down with a closing announcement to that effect. The subscriber can play back messages left for him by turning a knob and he can erase the tape in a similar way.’

  This was not to say that the perennial delinquency theme had entirely dropped from sight. In the United States, a former ward of a boys’ correctional facility in upstate New York named Floyd Patterson was commanding media time with his ineluctable march to becoming the first boxer ever to regain the world title. Patterson, a likeable young man with a hard-scrabble past, seemed to suggest the potential his chosen sport had for turning around troubled lives. Meditating on Patterson’s career trend (‘boxing is a sport that has allowed the coloured man to rise above his day-to-day living conditions’), one local sports writer wondered whether boxing could yet become instrumental in the official effort to combat the youth crime his colleagues were pulling out the stops to report on.

  Certainly, one can’t help but be impressed by the volume of news pages turned over to the problem: young men fined for using obscene language, shoplifters apparently without number, the ‘wanton’ case of a teenager who pleaded guilty to stealing a copy of a magazine, and children everywhere making pests of themselves by ringing doorbells and vanishing before the owner of the house appeared. Here again, though, the official data told a different story than the newspapers. The year recorded just 83 court appearances by children and young people per 10,000 population, or 3904 appearances overall. Forty years on, by comparison, the number of prosecuted cases involving young people, excluding minor traffic offences, stood at 6044; the prosecution rate per 10,000 population was 313, according to Ministry of Justice figures.

  But perception was reality. The government needed to act. Tucked away in the NZ Gazette of March 19, 1959 was part of its response, a small notice announcing that, pursuant to Section 7 of the Child Welfare Act 1925, the Minister of Education was duly notifying the country that the premises located at 441 Riverside Drive North, Lower Hutt, had been established as an institution within the meaning of that Act and would henceforth be known as the Boys’ Home, Lower Hutt. The institution had in fact been operating for nearly two months by this point.

  What to call the new residence had been a matter of debate at the Hutt Valley district office of the Child Welfare Division. ‘Beck House’ had been suggested — and rejected — in honour of the old Scottish visionary remembered for helping frame the 1925 child welfare legislation. (That name would eventually go to a small residence near Napier that the department purchased 12 years later.) Somebody put forward an apparently serious proposal for the Lower Hutt operation to be known as the Anderson Shelters, named for the division’s portentous, dark-suited national director and future superintendent. But not even the lure of a positive mark in the successful officer’s personal file yielded a better suggestion. Soon enough people started referring to the new facility as Epuni, and from 1969 this would be its official name, too.

  Epuni brought to five the number of short-term training centres for boys, the smallest being in Dunedin and accommodating 16 boys; the largest, in Auckland, housing 42 inmates. It was modelled after another existing residence in Hamilton. None of these residences, the national superintendent, Charlie Peek, promised, would provide for ‘the more seriously disturbed or delinquent children and adolescents who require long-term training’.

  That would continue to be the province of a couple of national centres, as they were known, the major one being the Boys’ Training Centre at Weraroa, later known as Kohitere, located a few kilometres southwest of Levin and covering 5 hectares of property along with a 110-hectare farm that was also operated by the department. Kohitere accommodated up to 36 boys, and its emphasis, as the 1958 Field Officers’ Manual put it, was to encourage positive methods of self-discipline and control, and for inmates to organise much of their own time, even their meals, as part of an overriding philosophy to allow each individual ‘to work out his own salvation’. At least that’s how it remained until one Christmas Eve when some of the wards ordered in liquor, the effects of which provoked a brawl inside what had until that point been described as the department’s most modern institution.

  Things were slightly more peaceful 8 kilometres down the road from Kohitere, at Hokio Beach School, a smaller unit housing up to 34 younger boys in just the one dormitory (with extras sometimes put in the dining room) for anything up to two years. Even by the elastic standards of the time Hokio was something of an embarrassment for the department. It was later acknowledged that the institution had been all but ‘uninhabitable’ since opening in 1941; its buildings, which had been thrown up in an ad hoc manner over the years, set amid rolling sandhills and rough scrub, were dilapidated and the wind-swept exterior looked as if it hadn’t seen a lick of paint in the decades since it began life in the 1920s as a retreat for staff at the Weraroa Training Farm, back in the days when staff used to bring the occasional boy down for a weekend. Theirs was a busy workload. At this point the Child Welfare Division, which oversaw these boys’ residences, operated 22 district office
s staffed by just 181 officers and a similar number of clerical workers to process admissions.

  Hinting at what was to come, Peek wrote of the ‘disturbingly high’ delinquency rates, especially among Maori boys, sugesting as he did that Epuni might yet play some part in arresting a problem he believed had been spiralling since he assumed his position in 1948. By the definition of the day, which had a Maori person as one of ‘half Maori blood’, the country had just 1660 Maori boys who had attained the age of 16 in the previous year; of these, 319 boys — 19 per cent of the total — had made at least one court appearance for a ‘serious offence’ (the term was never quite defined) during their lives.

  Maori boys living in rural and small-town areas did no better than their urban counterparts, Peek noted, adding that among delinquent Maori youth there had been ‘a much higher incidence of unsatisfactory living conditions, evidenced by overcrowding and broken and disturbed homes than among non-Maoris’. And while lack of good schooling did not tend to characterise young Pakeha delinquents, he wrote, the same couldn’t be said of the Maori youngsters; unlike their non-Maori counterparts, ‘educational retardation’ was all too common among the Maori boys now coming before the courts.

  ‘Such facts,’ the superintendent concluded in his annual report for the year, ‘are a challenge to all who deal with Maori boys … to try to understand the special strains and temptations to which many of them are subjected, and to give them the greatest possible measure of personal help.’

  In light of these perceptions, and the Maori character that Epuni and its four sister institutions would quickly acquire, one might naturally suppose a high degree of outside Maori involvement from the start. According to one popular version of the official record, the new institution long enjoyed strong links with local Maoridom. As this narrative has it, Epuni from the start benefited from the input of respected Maori figures and the ongoing presence of supporters drawn from the local Waiwhetu Marae. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography celebrates the late Ralph Love, a Te Ati Awa leader and a prominent public servant of the time, as one of a number who ‘helped establish’ the institution.