No children returned to lessons through the war memorial arch at High Street Primary School this year.
The archway gate, built for those who would never return from war, now stands at the edge of an empty playground, after the school was closed last year.
While there is a chance the school may see further service as home to a kura kaupapa, the long-term future of the war memorial arch must remain uncertain. It is not alone in this.
Many such school memorials were built following World War 1, archways being a popular form. Some stand still, some are gone.
Erected in 1927, the High Street school memorial was one of the simpler structures chosen as appropriate for many schools.
Possibly it was also among the cheaper ones, as it was constructed mostly from Oamaru stone salvaged from the recently closed NZ and South Seas International Exhibition of 1925-26. Evidence of former use of the stone is still apparent.
Other memorials built about the same time have not survived.
The Mornington Primary School arch - complete with its war trophy - in this case a captured German trench mortar - was demolished in 1971 when, after a fire at the school, the buildings and entrance were redesigned.
The memorial was deemed "out of keeping" with the revolutionary new classroom and school entrance design. A similar fate befell the rather attractive Maori Hill school memorial - a drinking fountain in this case - when in 1975 despite some protest from former pupils it too was demolished to make way for a new grassy area as part of a reorganisation of the school grounds.
Some schools were lucky to keep what reminders of their memorials they were allowed. A directive from the Ministry of Works in 1965 drew the attention of governing boards to monuments considered unsafe. Northeast Valley school found itself with a very large bill for reconstruction work and initially little interest in paying for it. Replacement of the arch with a simple cairn was considered before the arch was finally saved - but not the soldier on top, who was placed in storage until re-emerging in 2007. Kaikorai Primary School was not so fortunate and a kind of decapitation was carried out of its memorial entrance, with its double stairway and two archways, which must have satisfied safety requirements.
Unfortunately it robbed the city of the most elegant and original of all the archway memorials.
There is little evidence that raising money for these memorials presented a problem in the years immediately after the end of the war. Possibly this was because fundraising had become something of an art form during the war. Primary schools were then central to a community, as many pupils attended for the whole of their education or at least until the age of 12. In Northeast Valley the memorial was spoken of as "a memorial for the valley" and it certainly appears the local citizenry felt that way about it in the photo of its dedication, in 1921.
In the valley fundraising was so successful more money than required was raised to cover the combined costs of the archway, the services of an architect and importing a statue from Italy. Caversham and Andersons Bay memorials were constructed rather later in 1927 and 1928 following construction of new school buildings at each site.
At Andersons Bay a more Moderne (Art Deco) style of arch was used by architect McDowell Smith - not unlike the demolished Mornington one - made of reinforced concrete stained to the colour of sandstone with panels of polished Bluff granite.
Being a little way down a slope below the school, no particular effort was made to relate this structure to the school proper but that was not the case in the most distinguished of all the surviving memorial arches - that belonging to Caversham school. This was the work of a well-known Dunedin architect Edmund Anscombe.
Anscombe ran an architectural practice in Dunedin and successfully tendered for the design of the 1925-26 South Seas Exhibition as well as many notable educational buildings including extensions to the university at its Leith St site, the Lindo Ferguson block of the School of Medicine and Otago Girls High school. He had attended Caversham school as a pupil.
Anscombe's design is a masterpiece and far less emphatic than his earlier work in Dunedin. Two large pylons flank a double arch. The surfaces at the front and sides have been broken up by shallow stepbacks which create shadows and break up the bulk of the monument into smaller units.
The use of concrete for ornament and the dedication panel is surprisingly subtle, notably where the main arch relieves some of the weight of so much brick. Although constructed nine years after the end of the war it is a tribute to the popularity of this kind of memorial.
Originally the arch had become fashionable because of its prominence - as opposed to, for example, the broken column used at Green Island school - and also the space it allows for display of a large number of names of war dead. Frequently a memorial arch was complemented by a board of memory inside the school with names of all former boys who had served sometimes displayed prominently in a corridor or hall. Names might also appear on a local church or lodge memorial or on a plaque at a former place of work - for example outside Hillside workshops. These were places where volunteers or those conscripted might have returned following the conflict had they lived.
But this is hardly true of the primary school they had attended.
It is difficult to resist the idea that there was a strong propaganda purpose in some people's minds behind these archways and their location - a kind of indoctrination that today might be regarded as offensive.
Evidence for this is not hard to find. Many primary schools before the war had naval and school cadet shooting teams, uniformed and taught about warfare as an after-school activity. At the opening of the Northeast Valley memorial they were alluded to when a speaker said their training "had not a little to do with the keenness and fitness of their response to fight in the war". References were also made to the pride a memorial would generate as a bulwark against the mood of pacifism beginning to make itself felt after the war.
It was perhaps what British author Henry Williamson described as the "righteous and bellicose attitudes among those elderly men and women that had stayed at home".
Could it be that these memorials were an attempt to attach a particular spin to memory, namely that manly patriotic duties had been required of boys in the past and might possibly be demanded from them again?
It is certainly true that once the idea of a school memorial had been mooted at, say, a school reunion, discussion usually progressed from a plaque to an arch.
Occasionally there were attempts to break away from the arch with a memorial drinking fountain, a peace memorial, or commemorative trees. One such memorial still exists in the grounds of the now vanished school at Upper Junction on the old main road above Northeast Valley. The battered remains of 17 trees commemorate each boy who died and beneath each is a small concrete plaque.
Interestingly there was a change in the kind of rhetoric used on or about memorials as the decade progressed.
Originally "The Empire's Call" was typical of inscriptions above the archway and in speeches references were made to the enemy's greed, treachery and lust for power and how sadness and pride should be swallowed up by victory. By 1928 at Andersons Bay the simple word "remembrance" appeared on the arch, no names appear on the outside and at the opening the speaker emphasised the memorial was not about the defeat of Germany but to commemorate boys who had done their duty. Oddly, no memorial contains any reference to New Zealand - instead king, country and empire are the norm.
Another possible reason why the arch became so popular is the "war to end all wars" theory.
Briefly stated it suggests that like the recently finished war, any memorial would be the last of its kind. The many who had died had made a sacrifice of their lives so those coming after them wouldn't need to be worried by war ever again. This idea of sacrifice co-opted Christian imagery - ignoring the fact that most of the enemy in the recent war were Christians themselves.
Sacrifice was seen as necessary, desirable and eventually glorious, and as having something to do with Jesus and heroic figures of the empire such as Captain Robert Falcon Scott, whose last journal entry was enthusiastically wheeled out by one speaker at the dedication of the valley memorial. Sacrificing oneself for a friend was a very handy fiction to absolve an older generation from the fact that after 1916 many of the names commemorate young men who were conscripted, went reluctantly and would have been surprised that running towards a machine gun or being shot for desertion could one day be so translated.
Indeed, many returned soldiers opposed war memorials, school or local, as inappropriate and in some cases then had to watch while they were wished on the community in the teeth of their opposition.
In the same way, many resolutely refused to reminisce, wear medals and decorations or even discuss the war.
Any kind of public archway to do with war carries a certain amount of historical baggage, some of it vaguely celebratory - especially bearing in mind the triumphal tradition of such arches - which must have seemed out of place when the effects of war were still all around. As Frank Sargeson described, "former soldiers in a state of mutilation, without arms, without legs, blinded by gas with prosthetic limbs unable to do a full day's work".
• Rodney Hamel is a Dunedin painter and historian.
