Hundreds of former Otago Boys’ High School boarders, Richie McCaw among them, are reliving hostel life in Dunedin this weekend
“Them and us” is alive and well at Otago Boys’ High School in Dunedin, which this weekend stages the 150th reunion of its boarding hostel.
It’s an occasion Covid nearly put paid to and its on-again, off-again build-up means one of the hoped-for big-name attendees, Olympic rowing gold medallist Hamish Bond, won’t be making it.
Organising committee chair Des Smith says although it’s disappointing Bond can’t attend, about 360 old boys - called “rectorians” because their original hostel was also the rector’s residence - are expected.
One started at the school in 1947 and some are coming from Australia and the UK.
Apart from planned sporting clashes on Saturday between sides made up of ex-boarders and ex-day boys, the event is strictly for former hostel dwellers.
Otago Boys’ rector Richard Hall says the school unashamedly fosters them-and-us rivalry in academic and sporting achievement between boarders and day boys.
“Boys are naturally competitive and ‘them and us’ helps develop a healthy sense of identity.”
If that sounds politically incorrect, Hall, a former day boy from the late 1980s and the 14th rector, is unapologetic.
From the inception of boarding at the school in 1871 under third rector Stuart Hawthorne, the hostel-dwellers were considered a breed apart.
He saw as them as “the best boys of the school” who would influence the rest of the pupils.
Today, Otago Boys' website hedges its bets slightly in declaring boarders are “often considered to be the heart and soul” of the school.
Hall describes them as a tight brotherhood.
“They live together for five years so they form strong bonds.”
That may be so but Bond, now based in the US, says although he has good memories of hostel life, he didn’t buy the boarders-as-the-soul-of-the-school spiel.
Country kids
The hostel’s main hunting ground for boys is rural Otago and Southland and a family tie to the school will help an applicant get a place.
The number of boarders is typically about 140 and Vai Mahutariki, the director of boarding, says he thinks of them like his own sons.
If Mahutariki was to compare them with day boys, he would say they stand apart for their independence and resourcefulness, the products perhaps of early life on a farm.
Hall says boarders are not selected on the basis of sporting prowess.
“Lack of interest in sport won’t disqualify a student from being accepted as a boarder.”
However, a ruler is run over applicants’ academic and social skills and a compulsory part of hostel life is participation in an extracurricular activity, but not necessarily a sport.
Richie McCaw, an Otago Boys’ boarder from 1994 to 1998, ticked the rural-background box, coming off a farm in the Hakataramea Valley. And he overdelivered on the extracurricular front.
Quite apart from his unbeatable rugby record, he also made the cricket first 11. He distinguished himself away from sport as well.
When in 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Lincoln University, where he studied agricultural science before dropping out to focus on rugby, some eyebrows were raised.
But not a former school mate’s whose post in an online forum said, “Just got to say I went to school with Richie (not a friend by the way) and he was annoyingly good at everything including academic studies.”
McCaw was an exceptional student, making head boy in his last year, getting runner-up to dux and winning an accounting scholarship.
In The Real McCaw, his 2012 autobiography, he writes: “When Mum and Dad dropped me off at Otago Boys’, they’d told me to make sure I made the most of the opportunity, to get stuck in, don't waste this chance.”
The dutiful son took their advice to heart to what he admits was an "almost ridiculous" degree, signing up for orienteering, the drums, rowing and tennis.
“I got a bit carried away, but some things stuck.
“I was a waste of everyone’s time on the drums, but at the end of my first year we had a hostel Christmas dinner and another third former got up and played the bagpipes and I thought, ‘Oh jeez, that’s cool. Right, I’m going to do that'.
The pair of them ended up learning the bagpipes twice a week at lunchtime. But unlike on the rugby field, McCaw’s piping aspirations were modest.
“I just wanted to be able to pull them out on special occasions and bust out three or four tunes.”
Hall says McCaw’s academic strengths and ambitions were well known. In his book, the former All Blacks captain notes that although he missed out on being dux, he outdid the top prize winner in the 7th form external exams.
Toast master
For Bond, hostel life began the year after McCaw left for Lincoln. He followed in the footsteps of his father and older brother.
He told Newsroom he had intended being at the 150th and would have liked to have caught up with others from the hostel’s 1999 intake.
“I haven't seen many of them in the 20 years since I finished school so that would have been nice. I was keen to catch up and hear people’s stories.”
His own story is more than a match for McCaw’s in accumulated sporting honours: he has three Olympic rowing gold medals and eight world-championship rowing golds.
Bond doubts he would have any of them but for his time at Otago Boys’.
“It’s fair to say that had I not been a boarder I would never have found the sport of rowing. I had no association with the sport before and being a boarder was the sole reason for my introduction to the sport.”
He enjoyed the camaraderie as he and his fellow boarders went through their formative years and recalls such teenage “survival hacks” as wrapping every meal in bread to make it more filling.
Although he was single-minded about rowing, he says there was more to his time in the hostel.
“It is a lesser-known fact that I spent a couple of years earning $6 a morning toasting 15 loaves of bread with a conveyor belt and two four-slice toasters and got to read the morning paper as I did it.
“Most kids complained if it was burnt and hostel manager Warren Lees complained if it was too white. Ultimately I couldn't win but I prided myself on a consistent level of toastiness.”
Not everything about Otago Boys’ was sweetness and light, as Bond records in The Kiwi Pair, his and Eric Murray’s account of their fruitful rowing pairs partnership.
“I learned pretty quickly that there was a definite hierarchy in play and that getting a hard time from the seniors was just part of the experience. It is, after all, the ancient right of boys to pick on those smaller and younger than them.”
Camaraderie aside, being part of a brotherhood of boarders, as rectors past and present have attempted to foster, wasn’t for Bond.
“The boarders were a school within the school … we were expected to be the soul of the place, the school's unofficial spirit animals, pep squad and all-round participants.
“I never felt that was a responsibility I could take that seriously and, as such, subconsciously spent a lot more of my time with day-student friends.”
Even so Bond, like McCaw, became head boy.
“I must have been doing something right.”
Fun and games
Smith, a former deputy rector of the school and Otago rugby administrator - his bid to convince McCaw to make Dunedin his rugby home was in vain but he “completely understood” the player’s decision to head to Christchurch - says the reunion organisers are thrilled the event is going ahead.
“We began planning in 2018 as we expected to hold the reunion in 2021, 150 years since the hostel was first opened.
“However, with Covid we have had to postpone the event three times. The support the committee has received from the old boys not to cancel the celebrations has been quite incredible.”
McCaw is one of those returning to Dunedin for the occasion.
Day boys participating in the reunion’s scheduled T20 cricket and tennis matches better beware: they’ll be up against McCaw and several former Otago representative players.
