by Peter Graham
On his return to England in 1945, Hulme was promoted to director of operational research at the Admiralty. He did not return to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and soon resigned as secretary to the Royal Astronomical Society. The electromagnetic radiation of the spectra of stars had lost its fascination. The chief assistant to the Astronomer Royal was now a nuclear weapons scientist, known in the corridors of Whitehall as a leading expert on the military use of atomic energy. In 1946 he accepted a new appointment as scientific adviser to the Air Ministry on an annual salary of two thousand pounds, in charge of a staff of around eighty, including sixty-five scientists.
After the short-lived euphoria of victory, London was a sad, dispirited place. There were shortages of everything: rationing would be a disagreeable feature of life until June 1954. Driving daily between Greenwich and Parliament Square in Whitehall, Henry Hulme was better placed than anyone to survey the damage the city had suffered. His route through Rotherhithe, Bermondsey, the Borough, and across the river to the City of Westminster was an almost unrelieved picture of ruin and rubble. At his desk in Whitehall he was required to ponder the future development and deployment of atomic weapons that would have a destructive capability a thousand times greater than anything that had caused the devastation he witnessed daily. It was not a pleasant prospect.
On May 30, 1947 an advertisement appeared in leading newspapers in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa: “Applications are invited for the position of full-time rector. Salary £2000 per annum (New Zealand currency). Schedule of duties, etc obtained from any University or University College or from the undersigned. Applications close in London on 15th September, 1947.” It was signed “C.C. Kemp, Registrar, Canterbury University College.”
Higher education in New Zealand was provided by the University of New Zealand, an amorphous body of six colleges, one of which was Canterbury College, located in the southern city of Christchurch. Settled by English immigrants from the 1850s onwards, Christchurch was thought of as New Zealand’s most English city. The college was housed in a collection of grey stone buildings in neo-Gothic style: there were cloisters, turrets, crockets, mullioned windows, emerald-green quadrangles, and a clock tower. It was easily the finest complex of Victorian architecture in New Zealand.
Canterbury University College had gone into decline during the war years, but by 1944 “rehab students”—ex-servicemen—had begun to arrive in large numbers. It was apparent that Canterbury, like all the university colleges, was in for a time of unprecedented growth.
Since 1921, when the position of rector was established, it had been held by one of the senior professors as an addition to his everyday teaching responsibilities. In practice, the college was run by the chairman of the council in cahoots with the registrar. A professorial board existed but it was consulted only on matters that were strictly academic.
The rector was little more than a figurehead, trotted out for ceremonial occasions.
In November 1945 a proposal was revived that each of the colleges of the University of New Zealand should have a full-time rector, who would not only be the academic head of the college, but would sit as a member of the council, chair the professorial board, and collaborate in the work of the university as a member of the senate. Such a person would have to be an outstanding academic with administrative skills and experience. Qualities of vision, leadership, diplomacy and some social graces would be a distinct advantage. In January 1946 the senate gave its approval, and after approaches to the minister of education and the prime minister the necessary funding was secured. The Universities Bureau of the British Empire in London was appointed to vet the applications and make recommendations.
Dr Henry Hulme was a strong candidate for the Canterbury College post. There could be no doubt about his academic credentials —indeed there was surprise that a man of his calibre was interested. His work had been described as one of the great successes of the scientific war and he was praised for his “outstanding contributionto the theory of convoy protection”. And he certainly seemed to have the necessary experience in high-level administration. J.H. Barnes, permanent under-secretary to the Air Ministry, testified to his considerable organising ability, his manner—“pleasant, yet not lacking in force when force was required”—and his lucidity in oral and written communications. And of course, as a former director of operational research at the Admiralty, he would be well used to smoothing out personnel difficulties. Everybody knew how difficult scientists were to manage.
The five-man selection committee sitting in London comprised a former governor general of New Zealand, two principals of United Kingdom universities, and two Cambridge dons. They were informed in confidence that Dr Hulme had modestly toned down his part in winning the Battle of the Atlantic. The fact he bore no honours for his great service was simply because neither he nor his chief, Professor Patrick Blackett, were of the type to accept the honours that had been offered to them. (Blackett overcame any aversion he may have had to honours, accepting the American Medal for Merit in 1946, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1948, the Companion of Honour in 1965, the Order of Merit in 1967, and a life peerage in 1969, while Hulme remained unaccountably unhonoured.)
Lest the selection committee was left wondering why this exceptionally able man would wish to take up an appointment at a not especially distinguished university college on the other side of the world, they were informed that he was keen to go to New Zealand partly for domestic reasons connected with the health of his children. His friend L.M. Comrie, a New Zealander, explained that Dr Hulme “had always wanted to go to New Zealand” and often questioned him and borrowed books about New Zealand.
Hulme was recommended highly to Canterbury University College. The secretary of the Universities Bureau of the British Empire reported on his “good presence”, mentioning that he was a polished speaker with a direct but not abrupt manner. The college’s staff appointments subcommittee swiftly concurred with the recommendation from London and on November 25, 1947 the senate of the University of New Zealand, sitting in Wellington, approved his appointment. On December 22 Hulme replied with a cablegram: “Confirm acceptance—expect to sail late June—Hulme.”
On January 30, 1948 the New Zealand Department of Labour and Employment was requested to grant priority passages for Dr and Mrs Hulme and their two children—wartime red tape yet to be eradicated. A sum of two hundred pounds was telegraphed to the New Zealand Shipping Company in London to cover the passages, but a delay ensued. It was finally reported that Dr and Mrs Hulme and their two children had embarked on the Ruahine and sailed for New Zealand on September 2.
The Ruahine docked in Auckland on October 13. Whatever Canterbury College, the University of New Zealand—or, for that matter, the Department of Labour and Employment—might have believed, the Hulme’s daughter Juliet was not on board.
Things had gone badly for Juliet since the birth of her brother in March 1944. She had contracted life-threatening pneumonia and bronchitis. She had been evacuated from London to live with strangers, possibly some of the time in Barbados, and had barely seen her parents for long stretches of time. Finally, in the middle of 1947, she had been despatched to live with friends of her parents in the Bahamas. She was then eight years old. After several months she was moved once more, this time to the Bay of Islands in the north of New Zealand. If poor health were the reason, the cure was extreme, prolonged and cruel.
Hilda Hulme later gave a brief resumé of this period. “When we arrived [in New Zealand] Juliet was already here. She had come on ahead. Because of Juliet’s health my husband and I had been apart from her for thirteen months. Juliet had been staying with friends in the Bahamas and later the Bay of Islands in New Zealand. … She was in the Bahamas for seven or eight months and the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, for six to seven months.”
Juliet had been apart from her parents for well over a year before the family was reunited in October 1948.
The names
of the friends, or foster parents, in the Bahamas have never been mentioned, but from Hilda’s account they must have taken Juliet to New Zealand some time between February and April 1948—several months after Henry was offered the position at Canterbury University College. Most parents of a young child sent abroad for health reasons would want to be reunited with her as soon as circumstances permitted, but the Hulmes remained in England for nearly a year and appear to have made no move to have Juliet rejoin them.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion they were in no hurry to re-gather Juliet to their bosom. Was Juliet’s health even the real reason for her being dispatched to the Bahamas? A doctor had advised them their daughter should not live in England during winter 1947, but why was she sent abroad in high summer, July or August, or at the latest in September? And why did she not return to England in the spring—say April 1948—instead of going to New Zealand? It seems that Hilda and Henry Hulme were happy to forego for as long as they could the company of their daughter, whose “defects in temperament and personality” made her difficult and troublesome to handle.
CHAPTER 7
Cathedral City
A visitor to Christchurch in the spring of 1851 noticed that the expectations raised by the Canterbury Association, the body set up in England to promote settlement in the colony, had “caused a higher and somewhat different class of persons to emigrate than is usually found in an infant colony”. There was a shortage of labourers and tradesmen.
Another early observer recorded that Canterbury was regarded by New Zealand’s other provinces as “a very aristocratic settlement”. The prospect of making fortunes growing wool had attracted an invasion of gentlemanly adventurers. They were public-school men: younger sons of landed families; offspring of admirals, baronets and bishops; Oxford scholars; retired army officers. Some, fortunately, brought with them wives and daughters.
In 1879 a Miss C.L. Innes, who had arrived as a girl in 1850, noted that strangers often remarked, “Canterbury is so English.” This she attributed to “those early days when we all did our best to keep up the standard of morality and manners and to create pure types of English homes”. Her remark showed how deeply the values of the founding father, John Robert Godley, had been imbibed. To Godley, a product of Harrow and Oxford, Englishness equalled civilisation. To lose one’s Englishness—to become colonial—was to become coarse and degenerate.
The Englishness of Christchurch and Canterbury was both an article of faith and a source of pride for many who lived there. When Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh visited in January 1954, a local newspaper boasted that in Christchurch they found “a city more like an English one than any other they would see in their six months away from home”. When the young couple alighted from their train at the railway station, they were met by the “greatest crowd of welcome to line any route in the whole royal tour, surpassing even those of Auckland and Wellington”. Some of these loyal subjects had waited for more than ten hours.
When two Australian journalists, Tom Gurr and Harold Cox, with other representatives of the world’s press, arrived in Christchurch in August 1954 to report on the trial of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme for the murder of Honora Mary Parker, the city moved them to flights of lyricism: “In the spring,” they wrote under their shared byline, “crowds of daffodils dance on the green banks of a winding little river called, inevitably, the Avon, a river so English you suspect it of being an art director’s creation. … under the oaks, the willows, the planes and the beeches, the roses riot. You will see houses and shops similar to those of New Zealand’s Christchurch in many an English provincial city, and when you are walking along the flat, tree-lined streets in the twilight, with the starlings twittering sleepily in the branches, you will experience the peace which you have felt in cities like Salisbury and Cambridge and Exeter.”
In Cathedral Square they observed the descendants of the well-bred gentlemen who had cut Canterbury into huge sheep-grazing properties in the 1850s; they were prospering after the 1951 wool boom driven by the Korean War.
“English cars,” Gurr and Cox noted, “are parked neatly in the square, across which falls the pointed shadow of the soaring spire of the cathedral. From the cars step red-faced hearty men wearing tweed trout-fisherman’s hats and expensive but sagging suits of hairy-looking tweed. They hand out their ladies, who wear cashmere jumpers and tweed skirts and sensible shoes, and they walk into the hotels, the United Service and Warner’s, talking together in accents so entirely English that no county in all England can rival them for English purity.”
It was, of course, a caricature: the inhabitants of Christchurch were no more typified by rich, jolly, anglified sheep farmers than Londoners were by Beefeaters and duchesses in tiaras. The United Service Hotel was a lively place to stay for show week in November, but the red-faced hearty men were most likely heading to the Christchurch Club for a sherry before lunch while their wives shopped at Ballantynes.
Even the famously English appearance of Christchurch was not without qualification. While in expensive suburbs, such as Fendalton and Cashmere, large Arts and Crafts-style houses sat among wide lawns and spreading trees, in the humbler parts of town—Linwood, say, or Richmond, or Phillipstown, or any of the sprawling post-war suburbs—it took a good deal of wishful thinking to see anything much of old England. Nevertheless, the more prosperous and attractive parts of Christchurch were certainly agreeable places to live, and until the late 1950s the city was New Zealand’s cultural capital, a magnet for artists, poets, writers and musicians.
On Saturday, October 16, 1948, when the new rector of Canterbury University College and his family—including his young daughter, who had finally rejoined her parents in Auckland—arrived by DC3 at Harewood Aerodrome to be whisked to a garden party in their honour, Christchurch was looking its best. Spring flowers—daffodils, wisteria, lilac, clematis, camellias and rhododendrons—were in their glory. The air was full of the delectable scent of freshly mown lawns.
The garden party, hosted by Sir Joseph Ward, third baronet and chairman of the college council, at his house in Merivale Lane was remarkably civilised, the Hulmes thought. In a city with a population of 186,000 there were bound to be a few people with whom they had things in common. Although Juliet was being extremely trying, it was something she would get over. Henry had a challenging new job ahead of him, one he was looking forward to immensely. He was certain they could all be happy in Christchurch. Why should they not be?
Henry and Hilda Hulme cut something of a dash in Christchurch.
As rector of the university, Henry was a prominent figure in the community, and Hilda dressed smartly, if often with a flamboyance some thought unsuitable. They made many friends, were in demand for dinner parties, dances and cocktail parties, and entertained regularly, both privately and officially.
Henry Hulme was considered dry and a bit of an odd fish, but his detractors were mainly those who disliked his handling of university affairs and came to despise his shortcomings as rector. With Hilda it was more complicated. More than a few found her cool demeanour off-putting. Her studied lack of enthusiasm smacked of superiority.
A number of college wives objected to the way she queened it over them, and certainly she made no secret of her impatience with the provincialism of most New Zealanders who crossed her path. She was inclined to compare almost everything in New Zealand unfavourably with England. Her closest friends tended to be English, educated in England, or well-travelled New Zealanders whose artistic inclinations or liberal views on sexual matters acquitted them of the crime of small-mindedness.
The family leased a house in Hackthorne Road in Cashmere and in November 1948 Juliet, then aged ten, was enrolled as a day-girl at St Margaret’s College Junior School in Papanui Road. St Margaret’s had been founded by an order of Anglican nuns, and was favoured for educating the daughters of Christchurch’s professional men and well-heeled Canterbury sheep farmers—nice girls. It was quite close to the university: Henry
could drive her in each morning and she could take the tram home after school. Juliet would remain at the school until the end of 1949. A beautiful little girl, she was remembered by a fellow pupil for her lanky legs and enviable blonde plaits, as well as her aloofness. Perhaps the latter was not surprising: by Juliet’s own reckoning, St Margaret’s was the tenth school she had attended.
While living in Cashmere, Hilda became friendly with a woman called Nancy Sutherland, who lived nearby. Nancy’s husband, Ivan Sutherland, held the chair of philosophy at the university; during the war years he had been in the awkward position of being head of department to Karl Popper, an outstandingly brilliant Vienna-born philosopher, whose inspirational lectures drew crowds of students and staff. While Henry Hulme got on well with Sutherland, notwithstanding his colleague’s strong left-wing views, Hilda and Nancy became extremely close friends and confidantes. It was a surprising friendship—the two women were not at all alike—but they had no secrets from each other. Hilda would remember Nancy with heartsick fondness years later, after things had gone so badly wrong.
Nancy had grown up on a remote farm in Marlborough, at the top of the South Island. She was athletic, sporty, a great swimmer. Loud, with a deep, booming voice, she was warm, motherly and generous, giving much of her time to good causes, especially to do with early childcare and the welfare of mothers and infants. She was also, a friend would recall, “frightfully frank talking about sex”. It was one thing she and Hilda had in common.
