SCHOOLBOY IMMIGRANTS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 5, 28 March 1927, Page 6

SCHOOLBOY IMMIGRANTS

ARE THEY WORKERS, * OR GENTLEMEN RANKERS? The writer of this intimate article on the problem of juvenile immigration is an English schoolboy immigrant just I released from a crude apprenticeship to bush-farming in the I north Island. He is only 20 I years of age. His opinions may be immature, but they are his I own, and reveal a point of view I with which Hew Zealand adminI istrative authorities should be familiar. F there is one question which is surely coming to the forefront of practical politics, it is that of immigration. The present tour of the Bishop of London —a modern crusade by a modern Peter the Hermit to win back a drifting Empire to faith in its destiny as a home for Britain’s teeming millions —has turned the attention of the man in the street to the problem by the sheer simplicity of the solution, Dr Ingram has suggested. "CATCH ’EM YOUNG.” It is not, however, with the broader phases of the problem that the writer wishes particularly to deal, hut rather with one of the schemes peculiar to New Zealand, which has always been a pioneer, one gathers, in methods of immigration designed to overcome the difficulties commonly experienced in transplanting the people of one country to another, where the environment may be, and almost invariably is, very different from that to which they were accustomed in their plastic years. This scheme, with which the writer is intimately acquainted as one who has profited personally or, perhaps, lost, by it, and which, as yet, is not very well known to the general public of New Zealand, is the so-called “Public Schoolboy Immigration Scheme.” The peculiarity about it is not so much that it endeavours to catch the immigrant young that is already being done elsewhere, for the Dominions have long learned, like the old recruiting sergeant for the British Army, that it is best to “catch ’em young.” Its object is rather the selection of a certain class of young Briton, with an eye to the special characteristics usually attributed to the English public schoolboy, without regard to the immigrant’s trade or calling, immigrant’s trade or calling. So far, I believe, some 600 boys have been brought out under me scheme. i PROCESS OF SELECTION. These boys are drawn from two sources, and are of two quite distinct types. One comes from the Secondary and High Schools, and the other is taken from the Grammar and Public Schools properly socalled. All are rather misleadingly classified, according to English ideas, as “Public Schoolboys.” The process of selection is as follows; Every boy who applies for a passage is interviewed by a selector, who is an Englishman, and inquiries are made as to his scholastic record, his antecedents, and his agricultural

experience, if any. He is then medically examined, and if passed, is shipped off with a third-class ticket and the blessings of his relations. The minimunj age of selection is 16, the maximum 20, and the average age on sailing is just over 17. We have seen the machinery of the scheme —let us turn to the more intimate and fundamental issue of the character and outlook of the hoys themselves. Let it be understood at once that in this analysis [ am speaking as one of themselves; and though I hold no brief, yet I believe that “our lot” never needed a word said for them more than now. DISPELLING ILLUSIONS. But let a few illusions be dispelled. It is thought in some quarters that in settling the English Public Schoolboy on the land the Dominion is obtaining a clean, healthy, intellectual and welleducated type of lad, who will prove a stiffening influence in the promiscuous tide of immigration. Now I once worked for an old Klondyker, cockying on the gumlands —one of “our fellows” who had seen too much of life—and his comment was: “Lad, the country’s getting the old sort that made it, who may have committed all the sins, and certainly lived most of their life in Hell, but who broke the bush as they would a man—and their sons are the'powers that be.” And he was near the mark; for the public sqhoolboy is no cleaner than most, and the boarding school type is as hard a case as you would wish to see. As to health we are A 1 at Lloyd’s or anywhere; but very few of us can be termed intellectual; and I fancy those few would be found among the Secondary and High School boys; for my experience has been that we are drawing the very pick of that type, eager and lured by a sense of real adventure, and that they are steady fellows, willing to work, not too selfassured, and Very likeable. NEED' OF COMRADESHIP. But in the true public schoolboy, bred to type, you have a -much more difficult character; his' ideas of honour, like his motives, are curiously mixed; he has strict taboos —certain things simply are not done —and corresponding laxities; he tolerates work only as a necessary evil, and is well aware that to marry the farmer’-s daughter is more desirable than bushcutting. And we need this comradeship; we do not know the ropes, we are liable to be regarded as conveniently cheap labour; not one tenth of us will ever receive as much help from Home as would ring-fence 20 acres; certainly not half of us knew what we were coming out to, or what mud was like in the Winterless North; and if ever there was a crying need it is that the strictness of the medical exam, before sailing be doubled and trebled. But I think there is not one of us who would not grin appreciatively at this—for Kipling is our poet: We’re poor little lambs who*ve lost our way, Baa! Baa! Baa! We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray, Baa—aa—aa! Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree, Damned from here to eternity, God ha’ mercy.on such as we. Bah! Yah! Bah! THE BOY.