a history of children 's play NEW ZEALAND, 1840-1950 a history of Φ The University of Pennsylvania Press · Philadelphia · 1981 Brian Sutton-Smith children's play New Zealand 1840-1950 Copyright © 1981 by the University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved First published in the United States by the University of Pennsylvania Press First published in New Zealand by New Zealand Council of Educational Research Designed by Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden Photos on pp. 33, 48, 138, 194, and 297 are reproduced courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Frontispiece and line drawings on pp. ii, 1, 149, and 281 are reproduced courtesy of Richard Kennedy. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sutton-Smith, Brian. A history of children's play. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Play—New Zealand—History. I. Title. GV149.S87 790.Γ922Ό9931 81-51140 ISBN 0-8122-7808-9 AACR2 Printed in the United States of America contents Preface vii Introduction xiii 1 THE CONTROL OF CHILDREN AT SCHOOL, 1840-1890 1 Pioneer Children 3 2 On the Way to School 18 3 Inside the Schoolhouse 31 4 The Playground 43 5 A Naive World 62 6 Barbaric Pastimes 75 7 Out of School, Out of Doors 98 8 The Nineteenth Century: An Overview 136 2 THE CONTROL OF CHILDREN'S LEISURE, 1890-1950 9 Setting the Scene 151 10 Adult Recreation 155 11 Picnic and Parlor 163 12 Schoolteacher and Playground 176 13 The Playmasters and the New Philosophy of Play 191 14 An Era of Change in Play 201 15 The Organization of Games 232 16 Modes of Modern Recreation 246 17 The Playground Today (1950): Sophistication and Mechanization 255 18 The Playground Today (1950): Speed, Freedom, and Domestication 272 Vi Contents 3 A PERSONAL EPILOGUE 19 The Control of Children in the Home, 1950-1980 283 Appendix 1: Sources of Information 299 Appendix 2: Reminiscence Sheet 313 Appendix 3: Place Names Cited in Text with Provinces 317 References and Bibliography 319 preface I want to pay special tribute to the many folklorists of games and play who have preceded me, particularly to Dorothy Howard, whom I came to know personally. In my relative isola- tion in New Zealand, I found that their work supported my belief that this kind of study was worthwhile. In some ways my own work parallels theirs, but it has a different orientation. We have all been interested in history. In early folk-game studies, it was thought that history could be arrested before it slipped away (Strutt 1903; Newell 1883), even that the origins of current civilization could be traced through historical folk- game materials (Tylor 1888; Gomme 1894; Bett 1929; Spence 1947). More recently, Peter Opie (1963) has presented the view that the collected games of children reveal the continuity of human nature. He says, "Man himself, as the study of folklore shows, alters little, certainly less than do his surroundings; and Preface I sometimes wonder if the total quantity of traditional lore does not remain fairly constant." The present work deals, by contrast, with the assumption that the historical record is more remarkable for the changes that it exhibits than for its constancies. The apparent differ- ence may lie in Opie's study of a traditional country, England, and in my study of a pioneering one, New Zealand, with little history of European settlement. There is, of course, a longer history of Maori settlement in New Zealand, but that story must be told elsewhere, and my part of it has already been documented (1951:317-30). If one looks to the game and play histories of the United States for some ruling on this contrast between play as a record of continuity and as a record of change, there is both the kind of record that documents tradi- tion (Newell 1883; Brewster 1953) and the kind that empha- sizes modernity and change (Knapp and Knapp 1976). It seems probable, however, that comparative ratios of continuity and discontinuity across historical time cannot be assessed without more systematic records of play and games than those pres- ently available. In contrast to the work of the Opies, however, it is the aim of the present work to provide evidence that in the New Zealand setting the general character of child play and games and leisure habits has changed drastically since the 1840s. Furthermore, this documentation is meant to challenge that kind of adult thinking which assumes that the answers to present dilemmas can be found or ignored with homilies on the idylls of a playful yesterday. My own interest in children's play was prompted in 1948 by the children of standard three at Brooklyn School in Wel- lington.* I had been reading to them from The Book of Wiremu by Stella Morice and discovered their interest in "realistic" details of the New Zealand scene. This led to my own children's stories, Our Street (Wellington: Reed, 1950), Smitty Does a Bunk (Wellington: Price-Milburn, 1961), and The Cobbers (Wellington: Price-Milburn, 1976). More important, having had my own imagination for childhood aroused by this process of •Standards correspond approximately to grades. Grades 1-6 equals stan- dards 1-6. Preface storytelling, I became intensely interested in the imaginative world of childhood other than my own. In the years from 1949 to 1951, facilitated by a New Zealand University doctoral fel- lowship, I traveled around New Zealand, interviewing many aged informants and observing in many schools. The names of those who contributed information during these peregrinations are contained in Appendix 1, along with further information on the sources of information used throughout this work. I interviewed over 250 persons, some of them quite elderly, and received reports from 650 Teachers College and University stu- dents; their comments are introduced into the text with the date and place to which they refer. In addition, I visited 32 schools and received reports from 19 others. While oral reports could take me back only until around 1870,1 relied for earlier material on school jubilee magazines and other written sources, such as the school logbooks kept by the teachers in those days. As a result, there emerged a historical picture of the changes that had occurred in children's play between 1840 and 1950, and this book is the record of those changes. Formal descriptions of the games have been published in The Folkgames of Children (1972) and will not be repeated here. At that time the concern was more with games as texts than with the contexts in which games were played. My earlier book, therefore, was about the games as texts. This one, how- ever, is about the larger context of children's play in New Zealand history. Although the present work was written at the same time as those other records (1950-52), the increased theo- retical interest in context makes its publication now possible. If there is a bias in the sources used in this work it is clearly on behalf of the South Island and the southern part of the North Island, which are overrepresented in the data presented here. This means that Scottish and English influences are max- imized and the impact of the Maoris upon the pakeha (non- Maoris) is minimized. In the early days the Maoris lived almost entirely in the northern part of the North Island. Furthermore, they were largely confined to rural areas and had little influ- ence on most pakeha children. In 1951, about the time this work was completed, only 30 percent of Maoris lived in urban centers. By 1980 that figure was 80 percent, so the effect of the