Auckland City Mission and the Poor in Auckland

by Peter Lineham*

Auckland City Mission celebrates its centenary in June 2020. The Standing Committee of the Anglican Diocese approved a proposal for the establishment of the Mission earlier that year and it commenced with services in the Princess Theatre in Queen Street on 6 June 1920. At first the Mission was an Anglican attempt to recapture the lost working class, but by early 1921 an office was opened in Queens’ Buildings at 48 Wellesley Street that soon became the resort of anyone who needed an emergency financial grant. Soon an opportunity shop was opened on the corner of Wellesley and Albert Streets, and a mission representative attended court hearings, and reached out to those in need. The rapid increase in poverty, occurring before the recognised dates for the Depression, impelled the mission into running a food kitchen and a doss house, catering for hundreds of people every day.

In writing the centenary history of the mission I am conscious of the need to write about the poor, not just about agencies set up to help the poor. The impact of the Depression in particular was huge in Auckland. While the 1930s were the heroic years of the Mission, there were a number of other phases in its history, partially reflecting the changing character of poverty in the city, as Maori, Pasifika, other migrants crowded in. For a while the central city was derelict, and the Mission was on the point of moving, but the existence of youth homelessness, general homelessness and the lack of community drew the Mission to stay in the city. In recent years poverty has changed again as refugees have become a significant feature of the city landscape.

A 1950s pamphlet for the Auckland City Mission. Downloaded from Te Ara https://teara.govt.nz/en/ephemera/27686/auckland-city-mission-1950s and copyright to the Auckland Anglican Diocesan Archives.

 It is also important to see the Mission alongside other agencies, usually in a collaborative role, although Jasper Calder faced fierce competition from the Methodist Social Service Mission established in 1927 and run initilally by Colin Scrimgeour , as the smaller agency gained public attention through radio broadcasts, theatre services and publicity stunts much more colourful than those of the Anglican missioner, Jasper Calder. Although there has been no history of the City Mission in the past, similar agencies in Wellington and Christchurch have had histories, and other denominational agencies have been recorded, and there are important connections with bodies like the Red Cross, St John’s hospitals, and the like. The book Past Judgement ed. Bronwyn Dalley and Margaret Tennant (2004) has established the rich dialogue between the government and private and public agencies in the care of the poor. Auckland City Mission like other church agencies struggled to maintain its own integrity, but also sought to meet the changing needs of the poor.

The Mission could only survive by promoting interest in poverty relief, and selling itself as an agency for social stability and change. There is a fascinating story of the ways in which they made these needs known. There is another story of financial donations from Trusts and the role of the Mission’s opportunity shops in funding its ministry. Some of these donors are very important figures in the history of Auckland, including Sir Robert Kerridge, John Courts Ltd and the Bob Davis-Molly Carr Trust. While others were generous donors to just the Mission, such as Mrs Whitney who gave a house on the North Shore. In later years the ASB Trust was very generous and corporate sponsors gave to building projects. Donors and their reasons for donations are important in the story. So is government and community support. The Mission was never as beholden to the state as some agencies, since its primary work was direct assistance to the poor, but many of its specific ventures, notably the Detox unit, the Aids House, youth work and chaplaincies received substantial government assistance.

The institutional history of the Mission illustrates its inevitable ups and downs. City missioners often were very public figures in the city, particularly Jasper Calder (1920-1946) and Dame Diane Robertson (1997-2015). There were frequent struggles with the diocese, which considered that the mission belonged to it, yet gave it little financial support. There were clashes with other agencies, and there was a long-running tension with the old people’s villages founded by the Mission, and then in 1966 separated from it and formed into the hugely successful Selwyn Foundation. Each side considered itself the loser in the financial settlement that resulted. There were also struggles between the executive committee and some of the missioners, and at least one dramatic resignation was hushed up.

The religious history of the mission is in contrast to the religiosity of most of the churches. Jasper Calder was an Anglican Modernist, far more liberal in his Anglicanism than almost all his fellow clergy, and he alienated many from his ability to scoff at the church, defy regulations, hold services in theatres and on beaches, promote the role of women and scoff at traditional Protestant revivalism. From 1945 until 1990 the Mission came into the hands of High Anglicans who were much given to ceremony and ritual. They were sold the house at 100 Greys Avenue that had been built for the Order of the Good Shepherd, Anglican nuns, and inherited some of this ministry. The Mission was in 1969 handed over to the Anglican Franciscans by Bishop Gowing, without the involvement of the Mission’s executive committee, and for ten years there was a strong Franciscan presence in it, and then Don Cowan, who was a Franciscan in all but name. In this context the chapel and the Eucharist were highly important for the missioner and the mission helpers. In more recent years the Mission at all levels except the Board has virtually no sense of its religious origins.

The Doss House, Drifter, 4 February1928, 2.

 So what did the Mission do, and how has it changed over the years? In the early days it was a soup kitchen, and a source of small grants to help people facing financial crises. Gradually it accumulated a range of separate aspects of its work. It was never an orphanage like the first Auckland City Mission founded in the nineteenth century. The Anglican Church already had St Mary’s Homes. It lent support to a number of other agencies, for example Friendship House in South Auckland, and this meant that it did not operate directly in that part of the city. It worked with several other churches to operate James Liston House, the successor to the old doss house, which had been its main agency in the Depression era. It operated a house for teenage delinquents for a while, and later converted it to a house for AIDS victims. It operated a family therapy centre, a non-medical detoxification centre, a home for abused girls and above all opportunity shops in various parts of the city. It is important not to exaggerate the scale of this work, for like all city charities it found opportunities and used them, but its ongoing work was the distribution of money, food parcels clothing and other necessities to the poor who came to its headquarters in the central city.

The Clothes Stall, Drifter, 28 January 1928, 3.

The topic of the Mission is highly relevant to a series of historical themes concerning Auckland City, because the Mission so deliberately responded to social crises. It sought to mobilise other people in the city, not just church people but often business houses to respond to pressing social need.

I am writing a book on the history of the Mission for its centenary in June 2020.

Here is a timeline of the Mission:

* Peter Lineham is Emeritus Professor of History at Massey University, from which he retired in 2019. He has written a range of books and many articles on aspects of New Zealand’s religious history, looking at denominations as diverse as Brethren, Anglicans, Mormons and Methodists, movements as diverse as Pacifism, Fundamentalism and social agencies, Bible translations, Maori and missionaries to Maori, and New Zealand missionaries to other parts of the world. His most recent book was Sunday Best (Massey University Press, 2017).