Told by Harry Macklin-Shaw

to his son-in-law, Peter Armstrong

Most of the teachers I had known at Thebarton were still teaching there when I returned as a teacher myself in 1930. There were also quite a few additions. One was Clarrie Martin who had responsibility for overseeing the implementation of the Dalton Plan within the school. When I had been in fourth year, in 1927, the new system of education – the Dalton Plan – was put into effect. It was left to Alec Paull as headmaster to lead the team into the development of the Dalton Plan. It didn’t work particularly well because of the number of assignments required to be completed. A number of boys reached the end of fourth year without having completed the required number of assignments and either left without completing their schooling, or were forced into repeating the year.

I was put in charge of an English class. I had a classroom of about 30 students, with me trying to discipline them. It was room 8, which was the farthest place away from the central headmaster’s office. I think this was deliberately done to keep the noise of the students away from the headmaster. My efforts to instil a degree of discipline around the place were not particularly successful, especially in the first six months of teaching. One day I was teaching some poetry and it involved a quotation referring to a woman’s breasts. I didn’t quite know how to handle that one! We got to that part of the poem and one fellow started to play the fool. I stuck it for half the lesson but after that I just did my charley, went down the aisle of the class, picked him up by the shoulders, lifted him completely out of the desk – I must have had decent strength in those days – opened the door and slammed him across the other side of the passageway. He fell in a heap. I came back, slammed the door and said, ‘The same goes for the next fella.’ And from then on I had no trouble in keeping discipline, no matter where I was. It was one very difficult method of gaining discipline.

The next morning I was summoned to the office. I went in and Alec said to me, ‘Listen Harry. I’ve got a complaint here from a mother. You obviously got into a bit of bother.’ I said that was so and told him the circumstances involved. He said, ‘Oh, just leave it to me,’ and added ‘His mother is just outside there. I don’t want you to make too many comments. Just sit on the side there and wait for me to ask you a question. We can cover this without too much bother.’

I thought it was a pretty shrewd move. He called her in. She had a shirt ripped at the top. Alec listened to her plea, and that she wanted all sorts of things done to me. It wasn’t long before Alec sensed what the situation was and he handled it, I thought, very well. He finally got her around to the point of seeing that her son wasn’t the goodie-goodie that she thought he was. She said that she was sorry that she had come to school to lay a complaint. She would have a yarn with him. He gave no trouble in the school after that day.

When I was first appointed one of my jobs was to go out to the pug hole behind the school where the Brickworks Market is now. It used to be full of rubbish and tins and god knows what. Trouble was, when the kids were down there, they could see you coming over the top. You didn’t have a chance to win. This was generally around two o’clock or thereabouts, when the classes were supposed to be held, and there’d be no sign of them at all. Instead of doing their assignments, they used to all congregate down in the pug hole in the morning and stay there until lunch time, because nobody checked on them until the classes were formed in the afternoon. There’d be an assembly and then a great gradation with some who had finished their assignments, some who were one subject off, and so on because they were working at their own pace with their assignments under the Dalton Plan. Subjects were all handled in this way. There were, at this time, only about 250 students in the whole school.

In Grains of Mustard Seed, Colin Thiele wrote of the same period

‘… it was the enlightened approach that particularly marked Thebarton – individual assignments, enrichment material, and student freedom in the manner of the Dalton Plan – together with a range of study options varying from French or German to sheetmetal work. Descriptions of the school programme were even given at the 1930 Australian Science Congress and published by the Australian Council for Educational Research.’

At the time when Alec Paull was appointed an inspector of primary schools, he being a secondary headmaster, there seemed to be some concern amongst the teachers that the man who was basically responsible for the development of Thebarton Tech should give it away to go to a primary school inspector’s job. I did not enter into the arguments one way or the other. I was a very junior person: it had nothing to do with me but I was a bit surprised. Obviously he wanted to get on in the world. Well he did get on, he finally became the Superintendent of Primary Schools with the effluxion of time.

I was transferred to Mount Gambier High School in 1933. There was also a Mount Gambier Adult Education Centre, which eventually provided the foundations for the establishment of Mount Gambier Technical High School (now Grant High School). The Adult Education Centre occupied leased premises in the King’s Theatre. Part of the reason for my appointment to Mount Gambier was to introduce art courses to the school, a subject which had not previously been taught. I taught at the high school two and a half days a week and, the remainder of the time, I taught art and craft classes at the Adult Education Centre. (This included Saturday mornings, so I used to get a day off during the week.) Some years later the Mount Gambier Primary School moved into new premises and the Adult Education Centre moved into what had been the primary school. This then became the Technical School in the years between 1945 and 1950. Agricultural classes were introduced and there were areas set up, outside the town, where specialised classes were held.

About four months into 1934 I was transferred to Croydon Boys Central School. There was a vacancy when Bert Lacey resigned. The position wasn’t advertised. I think the person involved in getting me there was G. S. McDonald who had been a missionary in Papua New Guinea and was by then the inspector of technical schools. He knew me from Thebarton days. He was the one responsible for getting me appointed to Mount Gambier in the first instance. One day I got a phone call at work telling me to report to Croydon as chief metalwork instructor on the following Monday.

I arrived back in Adelaide on a Saturday morning. I thought I had better report to the office first and find out what it was all about. I can remember walking along Flinders Street towards the Education Department building. As I was going down Flinders Street I ran into a fellow called Prior. He was a manual training instructor like myself. He said, ‘God, talk about luck!’ I asked what he was talking about.

He said, ‘You’re appointed to Croydon.’

I said, ‘How do you know?’

He said, ‘I’ve just come from the office. I went up to see Gilbert McDonald to see if I could be appointed to Croydon. You beat me to it!’ I told him that I didn’t beat anyone to it. I had been just appointed and told to report to Croydon on Monday morning. When I got up to the office I said to Gilbert McDonald, ‘What’s the score?’

‘I want you to take over Bert Lacey’s place. He’s just retired and gone home to England. He’s left us in the lurch. You’ve got all the qualifications that we need for the job.’

I said, ‘I’m delighted to know that but I’ve got to go and find a boarding house now.’ In those days my mother and father used to come down to the city reasonably regularly and, like all country visitors, they used to come up from the railway station to West’s Coffee Palace, so West’s Coffee Palace became the venue for my first move back into the city area. The receptionist there was Cassie Broderick who eventually, some years later, became my sister-in-law. She booked me in for a week while I found somewhere more suitable to live.

I reported to Croydon on the Monday morning and found that a cobber of mine, Cliff Pearce, had been appointed head of the Croydon Central School and that I’d be working under him. The school was still located on the Croydon Primary School grounds. There was a woodwork shop, a metalwork shop and an art room. The woodwork teacher was Arthur Hill, the art teacher Clive Sauer. We formed the nucleus of the technical school. Kurt Hundertmark was the science teacher. The head of the primary school was a Mr Mundy who was quite interested in technical work but had no idea what it was really.

At this stage the technical school was maintained as its own entity within the primary school grounds. The move out from there occurred about 1952 or 1953 with the purchase by the department of an area called Shillabeer’s Paddock for the future development of the Croydon Technical Schools. The first building erected on that site was a woodwork shop. Why they built just the woodwork shop instead of a woodwork and metalwork shop I don’t know. By this time the Girls Technical School was also occupying buildings on the Croydon Primary School site, offering courses which were needed in industry such as shorthand, typing, home science and art. They proved to be very popular and quite a number of girls, who would never have stayed on at school, stayed on to take the new technical school syllabuses. The science side of it was covered by biology and botany replacing mathematics and science.

The number of students at Croydon, when I was first appointed, was somewhere in the order of 40 to 55. This was just first and second years. Third year came in a few years later and fourth year a good number of years later. I had to teach sixth and seventh grade, first year, second year and later third year. Woodwork was taught to grade 6 and grade 7 – that was the area for primary school in those days. They didn’t handle the metalwork side at all.

At the same time that Croydon was developing, other areas were being developed, in some cases before Croydon and to a greater extent. Goodwood in particular and Le Fevre were the stalwarts. Of course they were feeding from areas where there were plenty of children, whereas Croydon did not have quite the same population. Nailsworth came into the picture pretty solidly too.

In the early 1940s Bill Richards was appointed to Croydon to take over from Cliff Pearce. Bill was quite famous as a lawn bowler and as an expert in red roses. His office was set up in the new woodwork centre and he developed the gardens around there. I mentioned earlier that Sid Harvey, the first headmaster of Nailsworth Boys, had been a teacher at Thebarton. Sid had suffered from some sort of disease which left him looking unwell a lot of the time. I had a soft spot for Sid Harvey. He had originally come from Booleroo. His parents were farmers, so he used to know how to milk cows and tend sheep. He took a liking to me on several occasions when I was head prefect at Thebarton. He invited me to stay the weekend at his place out at Linden Park. I think because Sid and his wife were both country people they took pity on poor old lonesome Harry down from Tailem Bend.

I stayed at Croydon until I joined the Air Force in 1940. I came back from the war in 1945 and I was appointed to Goodwood Boys Tech under Paul Hilbig. Paul had been a teacher at Cowandilla in my Teachers College days and I had met him during my teaching practice sessions. I don’t think he was all that keen when I was appointed to Goodwood. Quite early in the piece I was on yard duty one day and I got the feeling I was being followed. It was Paul. Eventually I stopped and said, ‘Look, are you checking up on me to see if I’m doing my yard duty properly?’ Of course he said he wasn’t but later he apologised for giving that impression.

Goodwood had two Commonwealth-funded buildings and was already known as one of the leading schools of its kind in South Australia, if not in Australia. I hadn’t been at Goodwood all that long when there was a position advertised as an inspector of boys’ craft. I decided to apply, even though I had not been back in teaching all that long. Anyway, I won the position and one of my first tasks as an inspector was to go back to Goodwood to inspect the craft facilities. I had some quite long meetings with the craft teachers and, while I thought that things were going pretty well, I had a few ideas how things could be done a lot better.

On the last day of the inspection, I had a meeting with Paul Hilbig and I made some suggestions for improvement in the craft curriculum. He was actually very angry and suggested that no one was going to tell him how to run his school. I left him to it for a while, then I came back and said that although I wasn’t telling him how to run his school, the fact was that I had been appointed an inspector and therefore was in the position to lay down the law if necessary. He was quite reasonable about it and I think realised that the suggestions I was making were quite suitable.

Our paths crossed again about four or five years later. Among the technical schools, by about 1950, Paul was the senior headmaster. In the early 1950s he was sent down to Mount Gambier to advise on the development of the Mount Gambier Technical School. We had to get someone to take this responsibility and the department appointed Paul Hilbig as an acting inspector. He had to travel down to Mount Gambier with me and we also shared accommodation. A different relationship altogether was developed and from then on we had no troubles at all.

Postscript. My father-in-law retired from the Technical and Further Education Department as the Assistant Superintendent of Trade and Technical Education.

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