Teacher was still doing the hula hoop at 100
Winifred Hoy (nee Briggs), teacher: b January 22, 1909, London; m Frederick Hoy; 1s; d Wellington, February 2, 2018, aged 109.
Winifred Hoy was doing the hula hoop at 100. That fact will come as no surprise to the pupils she educated over her long career as a teacher in Wellington’s eastern suburbs.
Her energy and enthusiasm over 40 years of teaching is embedded into those who were on the receiving end of her tutelage.
Her hula-hooping stunt was recorded in The Dominion Post as she celebrated the centenary of Lyall Bay Primary School, where she taught on and off for almost two decades.
Winifred Hoy was born in London in the winter of 1909. She and her older sister Maude lived with her mother, a seamstress, and father, a cabinet maker, in Hampstead Heath.
Her father died of tuberculosis when she was 3, and times were tough for the family. With no widow’s allowance, they were very poor and struggled to make ends meet.
Her mother later married her husband’s best friend, but the happiness of this union was to be shortlived. En route home for a weeks’ leave during World War I, his train was bombed and he was killed.
Hoy recalled vividly life during World War I, when the German military used zeppelins in bombing raids over Britain.
‘‘I woke up to watch the first zeppelin being shot down. There were red bits falling everywhere,’’ she told The Wellingtonian on her 100th birthday.
‘‘[During the air raids] we were supposed to hide in the Tube but we got sick of that so we just hid under the bed. My mother used to go out and watch the air fights!’’
In 1921 Hoy and her mother came out to New Zealand, following sister Maude, who had made the move to Wellington 18 months earlier.
Settling in the eastern suburbs, where she would live for the rest of her long life, she and her mother shared a house with seven others.
After leaving Wellington Girls’ College, she opted for a career as a teacher. She spent her first year of probation at Lyall Bay Primary School before spending two years at teachers’ training college.
Having to teach a class of 70 children in her probation year was ‘‘dreadful’’, she once said. While her rolls would eventually shrink, she never had any fewer than 45 pupils in a class.
She completed her training, but it was the Depression, and work was hard to come by, she recalled in a 2009 interview.
Teachers’ colleges were closing down and children were starting school at 6, rather than 5. She managed to teach two out of three terms in a year as a ration teacher, earning £45 that first year – barely enough for her and her mother to scrape by on.
Eventually, she got a job teaching at Miramar Central School, but continued her studies at Victoria University, later graduating in 1933 with an arts degree – one of only 100 in her year, with just a few of those graduates women. Earning a whopping £72 a year, ‘‘we could actually eat,’’ she said in an oral history of her life in 2002.
A stint at Mt Cook Primary School followed. It was a tough school, and Hoy recalled being bailed up by one of the bigger, more troublesome kids and held against a wall on a number of occasions. The strap was used regularly and brutally, she recalled.
Outside her work, she took up dancing and it was at a community folk dancing evening in 1938 that she met Frederick Hoy. They were married in 1940 and had one son, Roderick.
She had resigned after having her son but, after a five-year break, she was offered a week’s relieving at Lyall Bay Primary School.
‘‘I went back because I wanted enough to buy a winter coat, but I loved it,’’ she later said.
Her longest association was with Lyall Bay Primary. She first taught there in 1928, and again between 1947 and 1961. The school was originally built in the middle of sand dunes and was part of the urban spread away from Newtown, which was bursting at the seams.
Former pupil Carol Stevens, who was taught by Hoy right through primary school, said she was a memorable teacher.
She wrote and directed operettas, involving the whole school in the productions, and many of her ex-pupils went on to become well known in musical circles.
Stevens came across Hoy many years later, through her work supporting the elderly in their homes.
Hoy had been able to care for herself till she was well over 100, but a broken hip six years ago meant she needed home assistance.
When her old pupil turned up, she remembered her well and the two became friends, though Stevens would always refer to her as Mrs Hoy rather than Wini, never fully able to shake off the teacher-pupil relationship.
Hoy spent 40 years teaching hundreds of children at schools around Wellington, including Seatoun Primary School, where she was principal for a decade.
After her school teaching years, she went on to tutor as an English literature specialist for the Primary Teachers’ Diploma course based (at the then) Wellington Primary Teachers’ Training College in Karori.
She is survived by her son.