Tokirima History

Mrs Dorothy Blanchard

A talk given in 1983 by a former teacher at Tokirima School and long time resident.

Recorded by Rosemary Corbett

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“I came into Tokirima in 1938, 45 years ago. I was on a tramping trip around Bank’ Peninsula when I received a telegram appointing me to the Tokirima School. I immediately returned to Christchurch and looked Tokirima up in the Post Office directory. It said ‘Twelve miles by road from Ohura’, so I went to the Railways booking office and asked for a ticket to Ohura. The clerk said ‘Going to Ohura, eh?’ And I said ‘No, to Tokirima’ and he asked me why I didn’t buy a ticket to Tokirima. I said that I didn’t think that it was on the railway line. He said that of course it was that he had been pay clerk when the line went through. And so I came to Tokirima late one Saturday night at the end of January, from Stratford, on the slow train in the timetable called ‘mixed goods with car attached’. If only one ‘mixed goods’ had a car attached just once a week or a month today it would solve problems from many who have relatives and friends in Taranaki, and who can’t drive, or have no car. It is a bit like living on one side of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps an excursion train will be put on once a year or even three times a year. It would help some people a lot, and be a good outing for many others, as the last few passenger trains demonstrated.

At the school I taught in a small portable classroom beside the singe classroom, which had been built on the present site in 1937. The single classroom is still there, but unrecognisable, as it has been added on to so often. Only the markings on the floorboards reveal the size of the original room, and that is now covered with carpet! Different from the weekly oiling it used to get in 1938! There were 38 children on the roll and 17 of them were in my small room. As well as nine double desks there was just enough room for a small table for me, and a hot dogge stove. We burned wood and coal in it, and the committee was very good at keeping us supplied. As soon as the fire was lit on cold mornings a half kerosene tin, cut lengthwise, was put o the stove to warm water, for children to warm their hands after their long trip to school in a cab on the back of Mr Blank’s cream lorry. Sometimes it provided their first wash of the day, because in those days so many water supplies were frozen until the fog lifted much later.

When the second classroom was built the small room was taken to Te Whakarae, and the school itself has been added to many times. The roll went down to 17 in 1940 and I was transferred to Tahora School, some 26 miles by road from here (Tokirima) but according to train tickets bought later for weekends back in Tokirima, 14 miles and eight chains (and seven tunnels) by rail. This happened during the aftermath of the great 1940 flood, when the line and tunnels were so blocked and washed out that trains did not go right through for six months. I went by car via Aria, PioPio, New Plymouth and Stratford – 200 miles. All those children I taught in that room I remember with affection, and some of them are my very good friends still.

When my own children went to the Tokirima School, 1950 -1962, the roll rose even to 78 but has since dropped back to about the original number, when I first came. I still live opposite the school and enjoy school life from the outside, and right now I am waiting for the cricket season to start in the school playground.”

(Mrs Blanchard left Tokirima in 1986 moving to Marton to be closer to family. Thus ending fifty three years of Blanchard involvement in Tokirima. )

Typed by Lyn Neeson Feb 2004

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