House competitions

House music and dance 2021 – Cochrane were the overall winners of the competition, and also won ‘Best Own Choice’ song. This year Cochrane House was the winner of the Stark House Cup and Lily collected the Anna Tingey Award for the prefect of the winning house.

HOUSE

COMPETITIONS

House competition has been part of Diocesan culture for over a century. In the June 2021 issue of Dio Today we reported on the keenly contested sports house competitions that took place in the first months of the year. Since then, in July, the perennially popular house music and dance competition was held but unfortunately the service competition, introduced last year, did not happen due to the prolonged COVID lockdown.

Archivist Evan Lewis explains the somewhat convoluted origins of our present eight school houses.

ON THE ORIGINS OF HOUSE COMPETITION

In the very earliest years of the School, our boarders lived in School House and for purposes of school organisation were collectively known by the name of the building in which they lived.

In 1908 the Misses Mary and Millicent Heywood opened Selwyn House, a large purpose-built bungalow in Mt St John Ave, which operated independently but exclusively for our senior boarders.

Prior to 1909, the School was small and young, and any contests took place between forms. Once Selwyn House was in business it was only natural that some kind of competitive spirit should emerge. In fact, the first recorded evidence of interhouse competition can be spotted in the Chronicle of May 1909 in which the School House notes remark that: “Selwyn House challenged us at tennis on 20 April. Each house sent three representatives, who played singles and doubles. The results were as follows: Selwyn House 12 games to School House 7. E Rose beat K Lott with 6 to 2. L Clifford and T Rose beat K Knight and P Arden with 6 to 5. The games were very exciting, especially the double, as it was touch and go whether Selwyn or School House would win.”

On 14 March 1911, a tennis rematch was held once again between Selwyn House and School House. The older girls of Selwyn House proved victorious and again the following day when they beat School House at cricket 58 to 27.

In the 1912 Chronicles we find house prefects not only for School House and Selwyn House, but for Old Bishopscourt too. This was the beginning of Cowie House. Unlike many of her successors, Miss Pulling never lived on site. Instead, she lived in the servants’ quarters of what we now think of as the Bishop’s official residence in Parnell. In 1911 however, Bishop Neligan and his family moved into the impressive brick house next door, leaving much of Bishop Selwyn’s house vacant. Miss Pulling used this opportunity to open a residence for the younger boarders who would take the tram up to Diocesan every morning. This house, eventually named Cowie House, moved around for a few years, and inhabited a number of Remuera and Epsom addresses before finally moving onto the campus in 1920.

Meanwhile in the house notes published in The Chronicle of June 1914, Auckland House makes its first appearance. The author of the Auckland House report explains that in 1913, there had been some talk of the ‘day girls’ entering the various competitions for the inter-house cups. Accordingly in early 1914, in so far as house competition went, all the day girls became ‘Auckland House’ and so once again the house name was taken from where its members were living. Shortly thereafter, Auckland House entered the fray and competed for the Cricket Challenge Cup, although sadly they lost to both School and Selwyn Houses. In the house notes for the June 1914 Chronicle, the House Prefects report: “This year we are no longer called Day, but now called Auckland Girls … now we really feel that the School is ours and that boarders are only intruders, which is only right, as Miss Pulling said it (the School) was originally founded for the girls of Auckland. In future woe betide anyone who deprives us of our rights.”

We don’t have an Auckland House at Diocesan today, although, as we shall see, we do have its descendants. And preserved in the Archive is a wooden painted rendering of the arms of the City of Auckland, which used to hang in the Hall as a rallying point for the day girls’ house.

Faced with the growing multitude of the day girls, by 1917 the three residential houses tended to compete under the one banner of School House. While six years later in the first term of 1923, Miss Pulling, decided that Auckland House, now 100 strong, was becoming too big and that its subdivision into three new houses would allow the day girls to ‘cultivate more house spirit’.

House music and dance 2021– Cowie house won ‘Best hymn’ and finished fourth overall.

The girls were clearly not keen on this idea and it took a whole term before they were willing to make the change. Thus, three new houses were established in August 1923. They were named for founding Bishop Moore Richard Neligan, founding School Council/ Board Chairman Sir Edwin Mitchelson, and Richard Steven Cochrane, who as Secretary of the Diocese of Auckland, helped the School get underway as a financial enterprise, and who served on the School Council from 1906 until his death in 1914. These three new houses would go on to form the backbone of the house system here at Diocesan, and each has been in continuous existence for almost a century, since August 1923.

Throughout most of the 1920s the School Chronicle continued to report the news and achievements of School House, Selwyn House and Cowie House (the boarders by residence), and Cochrane, Mitchelson and Neligan for the day girls in their purely imagined houses. Often the three houses of the day girls were also subdivided into senior and junior contingents – so Junior Mitchelson, Junior Cochrane and Junior Neligan Houses often competed among themselves, sometimes with Cowie House thrown in to represent the junior boarders – just to add to the confusion.

In 1927 Miss Mary Heywood, matron of Selwyn House retired after nearly 20 years of devoted service. In 1928 the residence formerly occupied by the Selwyn House girls became accommodation for some of the resident teachers and the Selwyn House girls re-joined School House. Junior boarders, having moved into a

House music and dance 2021 – Roberton house leader Bella Landon-Lane. Roberton was placed second overall.

purpose-built residence on campus in 1920, continued as Cowie House for many years. Just like the Selwyn House boarders, the Cowie House girls usually teamed up with the older boarders to compete under the School House banner.

So, in the late twenties, boarders lived in either School House or Cowie House, and from 1929, also in the New House (shortly after renamed Patteson House), a large villa just a little way down the hill from the now closed Selwyn House. But as far as house competition was concerned, all the boarders competed as School House while the day girls continued in the competitive houses established in 1923. This pattern continued for many years.

In the 1956 Chronicle, the attentive reader can discover the creation of a clear division between competitive houses and boarding residences. Though no explanation was offered, it was clearly a move to sort out the confusion between the two once and for all.

House prefects in the competitive houses were renamed House Captains, while the School Prefects remained as they were. School House ceased to function as a competitive house, while the new competitive house established in its place was named in memory of founding headmistress Miss Pulling. The first girls to form up as Mary Pulling House tended to be those who had formerly been members of School House – although girls were allowed to join other houses if their mothers or grandmothers had belonged to them.

The name of this new house is also of note. In some ways it was very appropriate, as founder Miss Pulling had died in March 1951 – just five years earlier. However, Miss Pulling was not fond of her family name and in one of her letters preserved in the Archive referred to it as ‘the hated patronymic’

and commented that she was very glad to abandon it when she became an anchoress. When asked whether the School could name a house after her, her response was that if a house had to be named for her at all, she would like it to be called ‘Mother Foundress House’. As a house name this might have made sense to the girls who knew our first headmistress, but perhaps would not work so well in this present generation.

From 1956 onwards into the 1990s this situation continued. Boarders lived in School House, Cowie House and in Patteson House, but whenever inter-house competition was at stake the girls, boarding or day girls alike, competed as Cochrane, Mitchelson, Neligan and Mary Pulling.

In 1993 the School had grown even larger and the houses were again becoming unwieldy. Numbers in each house meant that there were not enough large spaces for house meetings, consequently each of the four houses was divided and each of the new houses was paired up with its precursor. So, half of Cochrane House became the new Cowie House and the two remained as sister houses while the new house became more self-confident. The same was true of Roberton House emerging from the ranks of Mitchelson, Selwyn from Neligan House, and Eliza Edwards from Mary Pulling House.

Thankfully by this time, all the boarders were living over the road at Innes House otherwise the return of competitive houses named for Bishop Selwyn and Bishop Cowie might have once again led to a degree of confusion. Thank goodness by the time Cowie House reappeared, the eponymous building was generally known only as C-Block!

The other two new house names were totally in keeping with those that preceded them. Eliza Edwards House takes its name from Miss Edwards, our third headmistress who led the School through the difficult years of the Depression and the Second World War, while Roberton House officially commemorates founding School Councillor Ernest Roberton, and more recently his niece Elizabeth Sullivan (Roberton), a past head prefect and headmistress from 1966-72.

So now the complex tangle of residential house names and competitive house names should be resolved to the satisfaction of all. Since 1993 all students have competed in one of eight houses without fear of confusion with the boarding establishment, but if we need to create more houses going forward, there remain any number of bishops, headmistresses and School Board members whose names could be adopted.