Page:Gillespies Beach Beginnings • Alexander (2010).pdf/55

 After Henry had left Gillespie’s, a Miss M Sullivan (presumably Margaret) also sat the Pupil Teacher examination and was appointed teacher at Gillespie’s at a meeting of the Westland Education Board on 16 November, 1897, when only 42 Pounds was paid for her services in that year, again due to a shrinking roll.

The system of remuneration for teachers at this time was quite unique. For example, the Education Board of the District of Westland advertised, with applications closing 7.1.1882, for teachers for two schools up in the Greymouth area - the salary to consist of a capitation allowance, viz. Three Pounds Fifteen Shillings per annum for each scholar in average attendance computed quarterly. Judging by the fluctuating payments made to the teachers at Gillespie’s as reported in Margaret Hall’s Black Sands, this seems to have been the going rate at the time. In April,1883, the Grey River Argus contained an article about the impecuniosity of the Education Board in a report on the condition of schools in both the north and south of the West Coast.

Henry Williams, once married, would have had to save hard to buy land, and his savings probably never matched those who had access to more profitable yields through gold retrieval or running a pub.

Henry was reported as teaching “with a liberal use of the cane.” Those of us who attended primary school in South Westland much later in the 1930s were “educated” in a similar fashion even though, by that time, our teachers were deemed to have benefited from College training. I quote from an article I wrote for the Christchurch Star in 1981, about the 1930s primary school I attended at Whataroa.

“Our local State primary school was a two-teacher school consisting of a headmaster and a young female assistant. The man was a rugged individualist who meted out rough and ready discipline. If we were caught talking in class he simply took a clothes peg of which he kept a ready supply in the top drawer of his desk, put it