SCHOOL IN THE EARLY DAYS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVI, Issue 1250, 26 May 1914, Page 3

SCHOOL IN THE EARLY DAYS.

In a reminiscent vein at the Wellington Education Board’s meeting on Friday, Mr Robert Lee, the retiring chairman, related some of his experiences of school inspecting in the early days. He said he could remember riding from Woodville to Kopuaranga in a day, in times when they had to go to “the bottom of things”— that is, there were no bridges and few roads, and the rivers had to be forded or swum. He could remember having to swim the Otaki and the Waikanae rivers on his round ot school inspection. Once he was nearly bogged altogether at Omaka, near Wanganm. He had to be dug out and scraped down with a carving knife by a settlers’ wife, and in that pligh} had to examine a school. Mr Lee has had to sleep out under a flax bush with his saddle for a pillow, and in Marlborough On one occasion he lost the track and got fifteen miles out of his way towards Cape Campbell. Then he was shown a short cut across country to the place he wished to go to. The man took him to the top of a bill and gave him a direction line, but he would sooner have gone fifty miles round than those eight or ten miles across country. (Laughter.) They were rough experiences, yet he looked back on those early days with the greatest pleasure even mow.