Memory box
I don’t play sport and I don’t believe in exercise, but there is something beguiling about the four immaculate tennis courts behind the Te Rahu Hall on the road between Ohaupo and Te Awamutu. The nets are new and firmly stretched and the asphalt surface is without the cracks and bumps that I recall from country courts of my youth.
Te Rahu is a post-war settlement; the war in question being the Waikato War of 1863-64, after which time Jackson’s and Von Tempsky’s Forest Rangers were evidently given land in the area in payment for their service in the militia.
Te Rahu had a school by 1878 and Archives New Zealand provides digitised copies of class lists from the period 1880 to 1893 on its web site Archway. With a couple of clicks on your mouse you can check on Harriet Burke’s attendance record in 1883 and observe that in the same year James Floyd managed seven subject passes to Harriet’s four. Sewing wasn’t offered at Te Rahu School in 1883, but the senior children took reading, spelling and dictation, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography and history. Before the community built a public hall, the schoolhouse was the venue for social events and Wesleyan church services. The Te Rahu District Hall Society was incorporated in 1905, judging from files held by Archives New Zealand in its Auckland Regional Office. That date would tie in nicely with the general form of the hall, as well as its sash windows and finials atop the gable ends.
There’s just one problem with that attribution; a news item in the NZ Herald on August 24, 1927 reported that a new public hall had recently been opened at the Crossroads in Te Rahu. Given that the Te Rahu Tennis Club was in existence by 1927, it makes me wonder if the 1905 hall got a makeover with the club’s help, rather than being built anew.
The hall was certainly a busy place between the world wars. In February 1931 an inter-club lawn tennis match was played between Methodist and Te Rahu teams, with the latter winning by sixteen sets to eight sets. That made for a total of 212 games.
A leap-year dance held in April 1932 evidently attracted dancers from Hastings and Palmerston North. The music was provided by Patterson’s Syncopators of Te Awamutu. In November 1936 the tennis club held a ‘successful flannel dance’ at the hall. The colour scheme was predominantly blue and orange and the supper committee consisted of Mesdames Bowler and Betts and the Misses Wilson, West, Thompson and Thompson.
Now, having spent an entire afternoon Googling ‘Te Rahu Hall’ with little success, I can at least report that the digital universe knows what a flannel dance is/was. Apparently they were also held in Australia in the 1930s and were likely dances at which formal attire was not required. In a similar fashion, colonial American women wore cotton rather than silk at ‘calico dances’, which were often fundraisers. Whatever the tennis players of Te Rahu are doing these days to raise funds for their club it is certainly paying off. Almost makes me want to play a game. Almost.