‘Lucky’ life owed more to tenacity
language teacher b May 12 May 1924 d February 12, 2019
Norma Norrish didn’t meet many gadgets she didn’t take a shine to. In later years, this fascination with technology was to fill her small room at the Te Hopai rest home in Newtown with computers, a TV, portable DVD and CD players, and various talking timepieces.
In her professional life, it was to put her at the forefront of technology-based language teaching as the founder and longtime director of Victoria University of Wellington’s language laboratory (now the Language Learning Centre or LLC).
She always said she was lucky in life. But her success against the odds was as much about her talent and tenacity as good fortune.
She was born Norma Crozier in 1924 in Sunderland, northeast England, into a poor, working-class family. After the death of her mother when she was 5, her father moved away to find work and she was raised by her grandparents.
The house had no running water or electricity. Her grandfather’s benefit (he never worked again after returning from the Great War) was supplemented by money earned by her uncles – ‘‘the lads’’ – in the Sunderland shipyards.
Her first break came when she won a scholarship to attend Bede Collegiate, a girls’ secondary school in Sunderland. Her family could not afford the tram fare and she walked the five kilometres to school and back each day, in all weather. She excelled at Bede, finishing as head girl and captain of the hockey and tennis teams.
After she decided to become the first in her family to attend university, she received another helping hand. A kindly teacher at Bede paid the fees at Durham University that, again, would have been too much for her family.
War broke out and the shipyards were a Luftwaffe target. One day at Durham she heard from a friend that her house had taken a direct hit. After rushing back to Sunderland, she learned that her grandparents had survived in their backyard shelter. A neighbour also told her that her grandmother was returning every day to sweep the front steps leading to a house that no longer existed.
At Durham she was active in student politics and sport (again captaining the women’s hockey team) and graduated with a degree in English and French. Around this time, she took elocution lessons to ‘‘iron out’’ the northern accent which in those days could be an impediment to a professional career. However, her attachment to ‘‘Mackem’’, the Sunderland dialect, never left her. Until the end, she would farewell family and friends with ‘‘Gan canny’’.
French had become her focus and in 1946 she was in Paris, working as an assistant teacher in a lycee and studying art history at the Sorbonne. It was there she met a tall, dark Englishman named Peter Norrish, who was in Paris to improve his French before entering Cambridge.
They got along famously. Two years later, when she was living and working at a university in Algiers, she received a telegram from him containing a marriage proposal. They wed in Cambridge in 1950.
It was at Keele University, where he had a lectureship, that Peter Norrish applied for the chair in modern languages at Victoria University. He got the job. The family – by now there were two young daughters, Dilys and Rolla – moved to Wellington in 1961.
Norma loved life in her adopted city. She devoted herself to her family, and taught French part-time at Samuel Marsden Collegiate and as part of the Continuing Education Programme at Victoria.
She and her husband became the city’s French-teaching power couple when she took up a fulltime position at the French department at Victoria. Soon after, in 1967, she set up the language laboratory. It was the start of a two-decade stewardship that began in a wooden house on Kelburn Parade and finished in the current purpose-built facility in the university’s Von Zedlitz building.
She moulded the language lab into an exciting, technologically advanced (though user-friendly) place of learning. She would keep up with the best overseas practice, visiting similar facilities in the United States and elsewhere whenever she had the opportunity.
‘‘Several of our current practices can be traced back to Norma’s directorship,’’ says current LLC head Balint Koller. ‘‘For example, in 1971, the LLC opened its doors to members of the general public for the first time, a scheme that still exists today. Norma’s legacy is dear to many people’s hearts – and the LLC is committed to staying true to and building on this legacy for many years to come, instilling a love of languages in new generations of learners.’’
She was equally impressive in the classroom, where she built a formidable reputation as a teacher of linguistics, as well as French.
Her teaching career did not end with her retirement. She continued at Victoria on a contract basis and for many years took students with learning difficulties for one-on-one sessions in her Wadestown home. Her six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren also benefitted from her paedogogical talents and warmth. –
Sources: Rolla Norrish, Dilys Norrish, Hansgerd Delbru¨ ck, Balint Koller.