Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home by David Cohen

Howe wanted to see introduced at the new institution.
    Maurie arranged a number of neighbourhood meetings in the hope of putting paid to the idea that, as he later expressed it, ‘even in this enlightened age, residents in the immediate vicinity consider the Home to be something between a penal institutionand an industrial school’. Fiddlesticks, he argued, appealing as eloquently as he could to any residual local sense of noblesse oblige. This was to be an open institution, he told them, a progressively minded venture dedicated to the care and nurturing of young lives damaged largely through no fault of their own, and even those who had committed offences were hardly in the big league, usually nothing more spectacular than shying some rocks through a window, shoplifting or truancy, in one case even converting a horse . Bad luck in getting caught, some might have said — and some still do.
    Decades later in Britain, a distinguished senior doctor caused a mild controversy after he admitted to the Guardian newspaper that he burgled his school twice at the age of 16, commenting that it did not stop him having a successful medical career — because he was never incarcerated for the offences. The consultant paediatrician, who went on to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, made the confession in light of a familiar controversy in which a youngster from an economically disadvantaged background was denied a place at medical school simply because he admitted committing a burglary as a boy. The doctor said he would not be surprised if others in the medical profession had committed similar crimes — it was simply a matter of good luck in having not gone down the reformatory track, he suggested.
    Yet it’s easy to see why Epuni’s construction in the late 1950s might have been viewed with unease in a neighbourhood that had expended considerable effort over the decades to keep at bay the socialist spectre that had enveloped much of the Hutt Valley. Howe felt no small satisfaction when many of those same individuals agreed to give him the benefit of their very large doubt. But he had also been concerned that ignorance of the institution’s work would be detrimental to the happiness of the kids he hoped to enrol in one or other of the local schools.
    The older boys, too, he wanted to see working at local businesses. So he put up as convincing a case as he could muster (his departmental supervisor later lauded it as a ‘very fine piece of public relations work’) and the locals pronounced themselves moved. Indeed, one of the neighbours who began as a fierce critic of the new venture ended up climbing over his back fence adjoining the grounds and joining in the sporting activities with Howe and his boys.
    To Gary Hermansson, a young residential social worker at the time, Howe came across as a ‘good fellow, somewhat severe at times and authoritative, you know, perhaps a bit over-strong on the kids’. The new manager was ‘slightly aloof, but he had his heart in the right place’. Another of the short-term placements of the time was a young trainee social worker named Aussie Malcolm, who in late 1964 had a brief stint as an acting housemaster at Riverside Drive shortly before heading north to become a welfare officer in Palmerston North. Both positions offered the future government minister a vantage point from which to observe the Howe style.
    ‘Maurie was a product of the YMCA culture, very straight down the line and conservative in his personal life,’ Malcolm said. ‘He saw things in very simple terms, without excess, and he lived by the schedule: shoes are to be cleaned, beds are to be made, and so forth. He must have been passionate, but I don’t remember him showing that passion in any other way than being there day after day after day. He didn’t get angry with any kid. He didn’t get soppy with any kid. He didn’t show any emotion to any kid. He just … was.’
    Years later, as a Cabinet minister