School that ‘saved’ Lomu backs Laulala
Wesley College marks 175 years and celebrates its 12 All Blacks
As the All Blacks take to the field against England tonight, the school that “saved” Jonah Lomu’s life will be cheering for tighthead prop Nepo Laulala.
Wesley College, near Pukekohe, has produced 12 All Blacks including Lomu, Laulala, Laulala’s brother Casey Laulala and Stephen Donald, who kicked the winning penalty in the 2011 Rugby World Cup final against France.
About 300 ex-students and staff are this weekend celebrating the college’s 175th birthday, making it New Zealand’s oldest surviving secondary school.
Laulala’s older brother Robert Laulala says it has turned around many lives.
“The school takes troubled students every year,” he said.
“They change a lot of lives and get them on the road away from, I suppose, prison, where they might have been heading.
“I saw first-hand how some of those kids changed when I became a senior of the school . . . there was a kid that went on to become dux of the school. He was really, really a troubled kid. I think they still do that well.”
Lomu told Warren Adler in his 2004 autobiography that he “was saved by school sport and Chris Grinter” — then Wesley’s deputy headmaster and first XV coach, now principal of Rotorua Boys’ High School.
“It didn’t take Chris very long to recognise that I had arrived at Wesley with an attitude. He decided I needed to channel my anger and aggression in a more positive way,” Lomu wrote. “The answer was simple. He went out and bought me a punching bag.”
Lomu’s mother Hepi Lomu said she sent Jonah to Wesley in 1989 after an upsurge of gang violence near their Ma¯ngere home.
“There was lots of killing . . . it looked like it was Samoans versus Tongans at that time,” she said.
The family applied twice unsuccessfully before they could get Jonah into Wesley.
Jonah went to Wesley in the third form (Year 9), but his younger brother John didn’t go until sixthform when the family could afford it. John Lomu said the boarding school instilled “family values” and created lifetime friendships.
“I believe Wesley basically grounded me,” he said. “It gave me direction, really, as to where you wanted to be.”
The college was founded by a land grant in Grafton from Governor Robert FitzRoy in October 1844 for what was originally called the Wesleyan Native Institution, 25 years before Auckland Grammar opened to educate European settlers’ sons.
For 175 years it has had a unique place in our educational landscape — charging boarders $7300 a year, but with a roll that is now 98 per cent Ma¯ori and Pacific drawn from lowincome areas giving it the poorest decile-1 rating in the school funding system.
Today 72 per cent of the 366 students are Pasifika, 26 per cent Ma¯ori and 2 per cent European. More than half the roll is Tongan — which long-serving deputy principal Chris Bean says is partly Lomu’s legacy.
“It’s a school that attracted quite an extensive base of different cultures, particularly in the last 20 years, and more so with the success of Jonah and the strong Methodist link through the Pacific, especially in Tonga,” he said.