Fond memories of Rangiuru School
Rangiuru School celebrates its centenary next month. Former Te Puke policeman Kelvin Blythe attended the school in the 50s and 60s and shares some of his memories of his time as a Rangiuru School pupil.
Mowing grass, warming up the classroom and cleaning out the pool were all part of being a rural school pupil in the 1950s.
Kelvin Blythe started at Rangiuru School in 1954 and was the seventh of 10 siblings.
Their father Vernon was also a Rangiuru School pupil.
The family lived about 1.6 km (1 mile) further along Rangiuru Rd than the school — on a farm first settled by Kelvin’s great grandfather in 1881.
With another 400m of driveway, it was a bit of a walk to get to and from school on what was a narrow, metalled road.
“There wasn’t the traffic we’ve got now — but we had to yell out ‘car coming’ and that sort of thing. Sometimes we had to jump into the blackberries. They didn’t have mowers that would do the verges in those days.”
There was a horse paddock at the school for those who had further to go and whose transport had four legs.
“As little fellas we’d sometimes get doubled on the horses,” says Kelvin.
At the end of the day there was sometimes a race to see who could get to the Blythe farm gate first.
“We had competitions to see if we could run home quicker because [horse riders] had to go and catch the horses and sometimes they didn’t play ball.”
The first job of the day during the winter was to light the pot bellied stove to warm the classroom.
“We used to try and get to school early and get that going. We looked after the grounds and everything on an afternoon once a week. The older boys would be out with push mowers and other kids were picking up leaves, washing windows and keeping the school clean.”
Even having a swim had to be worked for.
“We had a pool down in the gully which was fed by a spring and was absolutely freezing cold.
“We had to walk all the way down the road which was 300-400m, down into the gully. We had to spend the early summer cleaning the pool — it was full of frogs and tadpoles and things like that and we’d give it a good scrub and clean it all out and cut the blackberry back so we could do our swimming training in ice cold water.”
With no more than 27 pupils at the school all the time he was there, the pupils all learned together.
“The first teacher I had was Don Hook — but I only had him for about six months, then he left.”
The next teachers were James M Boyle, Frederick T F Sweeting and Don Rodger.
“We’d have periods at the school where you would be doing maths or English at certain times of the day.
“I can remember we had to learn all the times tables verbatim and that was with Fred Sweeting I think — he had a big chart on the wall and as you learned them and could quote them to him, you got a star beside it and you passed.
“As we progressed through the school, if he was busy with a group, he would ask one of us older ones to give the lesson to the new entrants.”
To be able to create sports teams, Rangiuru combined with Te Ranga School.
“It meant that we were quite often just beaten outright by the bigger schools because they had teams that could train together, but we couldn’t really train together.”
Rugby for boys and basketball (netball) for the girls were the main sports.
One project at the school had a huge impact on Kelvin’s’s later life.
“When I was 10 we had to do a project on what we’d like to do when we grew up. I didn’t have a clue. Somewhere I heard about a royal tour and I thought, ‘I know, the policemen get the best view — they are right down the front’, so I thought I’d do my project on them.” Kelvin ended up joining the police when he left school
“So that was a big influence.” He says the need for pupils to help one another also affected the way he has lived his life. All the Blythe children went on to Te Puke High School — where the roll at the time was around 400 students.
“That was a pretty big step up when you are from a school with 27 [pupils] and then you are at a school where your class is bigger than your whole school was.”
■ Rangiuru School’s centenary celebrations take place on March 1 and 2. Call the school 07 573 7035 or visit eventfinda.co.nz.rangiuru centennial for more information and tickets.