The interior of the Great Hall at Canterbury College, lavishly set for a dinner function.
Kicking up their Heels
20 November 2023
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Another way in which the relationship between ‘town and gown’ was fostered was through the concerts and festivities that were held at Canterbury College. Such occasions gave the public the opportunity to experience life inside the College buildings.
Aside from public lectures and conversaziones, balls and concerts were frequently held in the College Great Hall. Programmes in the University Library’s collection attest to the range of subjects this encompassed, including music, art, literature and drama.
Sometimes concerts featured performers drawn from College staff and students, while increasingly throughout the 19th Century they were headlined by visiting academics and performers. Eventually the College initiated a programme of annual sponsored talks on specific subjects, such as the Macmillan Brown lecture, the Rutherford Memorial Lecture and the Erskine Memorial Lecture.
Concerts were not limited to an adult audience. For instance the Music Department under Frederick Page utilized their fancy gramophone in 1934 to start weekly midday recitals in the College Hall for school children. Nor were these interactions restricted to College grounds.
The interior of the Great Hall at Canterbury College, lavishly set for a dinner function.
Geography student John Macaulay recalled of 1947 “… there remained a strong sense of ‘friendly community’ … And this community extended beyond the College into ‘the town’ and schools when we went to Geography Society meetings, held at that time in Hay’s Lounge upstairs off Colombo Street. After the lecture, often given by an overseas visitor or a New Zealand ex-patriate, there would be a ‘cup of tea and biscuits’ with Jobbie [Jobberns] moving around puffing on his pipe…”
