The amazing class of '69

By TIM WATKIN

Don't bother trying to pick a famous face in this photo - you're unlikely to know who they are or what they've gone on to do. But at a time when we're constantly exhorted to find role models beyond the movie theatre and sports field, they're a band worthy of attention.

They were members of U61 at Auckland Grammar, the top class in the upper sixth; what we now know as the seventh form. Together they studied, argued, chased girls and misbehaved. They were mates. Still are.

As Keith Hunter wrote in the end-of-year Grammar newspaper Chronicle:

Varied were they of this band,

each different and sublime

all have made impressions grand,

footprints in the sands of time.

Over the 32 years since they were written, the work of these men has proved the words prophetic. As men, this group has achieved remarkable success, mostly in academic fields. For a bunch of guys from just one class, their achievements have been extraordinary, leaving footprints grander than they probably dared imagine as 17-year-olds.

These men, now all 50 or thereabouts, shrug a little shyly at their accomplishment. What's most remarkable, they say, is that they have remained such firm friends.

Let's meet them, through the main picture, taken at the Manukau Heads in late '69 shortly after they had left school.

* In the second row, wearing the Che Guevara T-shirt and gesturing with his fingers, is David Simcock a senior partner of law firm Bell Gully in Auckland and a taxation specialist.

* Dressed as death is Professor Pete Brothers, dean of engineering at Auckland University.

* In the centre, holding binoculars, is Simon Kemp, associate professor of psychology at Canterbury University.

* Behind, with an imperious look and a sling, is Keith Worsley, a professor of mathematics at McGill University in Toronto, Canada.

* Wearing the deerhunter's hat and jacket is Professor Mark Warner, who has just been awarded a personal chair in physics at Cambridge, England.

* Hunter is a professor of chemistry at Otago University and is New Zealand's leading marine chemist.

* The bearded guy sitting with a beer glass in his mouth is Evan Rogerson, who has held the most senior non-political job at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva.

* Holding the sign is Geoff Joyce, who owns and runs a successful building business in Auckland.

* Finally, with arms crossed, is Kip Haszard, who ran a successful footwear business until he was 40, then became an English teacher at Mt Roskill Grammar.

Not in this picture, but very much part of the gang, were John Sutherland and Vaughan Jones.

* Sutherland became an obstetrician, but was murdered in Pakistan in the early 90s.

* Jones is professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a Fields medal winner, regarded by many as the world's pre-eminent mathematician.

So why has this bunch of boys achieved such success? And, to borrow a question from Hunter's newspaper poem in 1969, "O muse, whence came this group? How did evolve this faithful troop?"

Ken Trembath, U61's form master and English teacher in 1969, now teaching at Senior College, still has a pewter tankard that was an end-of-year gift from the class. It's inscribed with a quote from Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer:

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain,

With grammar, and nonsense, and learning,

Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,

Gives genius a better discerning.

He remembers well the "serious and sensitive young men" who gave it to him.

"They were a very special bunch. They went on to university and spread all round the globe and have done marvellous things. Back then you could feel the melting pot. Every so often you get a class that rises to an academic challenge and they were excellent."

The core of the group came together in third form, although Worsley arrived from Britain part way through the year, Warner from Tauranga at the start of the fourth form and Kemp from Australia in the fifth form.

"We grew up together," says Hunter. "We learned to drive together, drink together, we lost our virginity together ... Well, not literally together. They were good times."

The group, he says, came from mixed backgrounds and were not the products of privilege you might suppose. His father was a timber worker. Other fathers were teachers, ministers, accountants, university lecturers.

Yes, they were bright, and in some ways selected at intermediate school to go into the top stream. They shared a love of learning.

"I can remember when Keith Worsley was introduced to our class," recalls Haszard, known as the raconteur of the group. "We adopted him because we recognised the degree of intelligence and intellectual striving."

It was this intellectual striving, both competitive and collaborative, that marked them. They flew through their junior years, then conquered the senior school. Several of them passed scholarship in the sixth form and so had no need to return for another year. The lure of university flashed before them.

"I remember that being a long and agonising decision, whether to go to university or to go back to school," says Hunter. "I know I didn't want to be the only one who didn't go back. It was a good decision, we matured that year."

That year was Auckland Grammar's centenary and much of the first term was taken up with centenary activities, especially for Warner, who was head prefect. Trembath says Warner had many responsibilities; organising, representing and speaking for the students.

"But he was a superb scholar. After it was all over at the beginning of the second term - it was a three-year term then - Mark announced casually to the class that right, he was going to win a scholarship this year.

"The rest of the class went 'oh yeah' because he was heavily into sport as well. But gradually, as the year progressed, they began to see that he really did mean this."

Warner, who arrived home for Christmas this week, was awarded a personal chair in physics at Cambridge University in October, following in the footsteps of Sir Ernest Rutherford. He also won the German Humbold science prize last year.

A theoretical physicist, his goal is "to try to predict mathematically new phenomena and effects in the world around us. I typically sit at a desk and try to think and write down mathematical models." For example, he stretched a rubber material that changes colour, shone a light on it and found it produced a laser. "It was never thought elasticity and colour and lasering belonged together," he says.

Warner remembers being "captured" by maths in the fifth form, coming home from school one day "feeling I had been shown something tremendous. We were exposed to sophisticated ideas at a very early age. For the group of us it fashioned what we were to do for the remainder of our careers."

Trembath, he says, was a hugely formative figure for his cocky, close-knit gang.

"We used to argue tremendously with Trembath in class. He used to egg us on. He encouraged us to express opinions then mercilessly pressed us to defend them. And we had absolutely inspirational maths and physics teaching. I still use the material [we learned then] every day and I've used it every day for the last 30 years."

Each of the group contributed some distinctive gift or interest. For example, Worsley says the rest of the group was a little in awe of the breadth of Hunter and Joyce's reading. Warner remembers nights at Kemp's house where he would regale them with the latest philosophy he had read. Everyone remembers Hunter bringing along the first Jimi Hendrix album.

But if there was a leader of this band, it was Warner.

"Everybody aspired to be Mark in some way," says Haszard. "He had that lively charisma. He's a very controlled person. And everyone tried to drink a beer like Mark did. He'd be sitting in a pub, under-age, would have a sip and a sly look and say, 'Don't look now but the police have just come in'."

Trembath says when Warner announced his scholarship plans, the others followed. "I could feel the class come round behind him and at the end of the year a substantial number of them got scholarships."

Simcock and Haszard were the only ones who didn't. Hunter got the top scholarship marks in New Zealand, with Kemp and Warner both in the national top four. Which suggests they were a bunch of swots.

"You would never ever describe them as nerds," Trembath says with a chuckle. "Every one of them was a colourful figure."

Ah yes, colourful. Intellect didn't make these boys any different from other teenagers. They still had plenty to learn about life.

Some are reluctant to share the old yarns. Simcock says, "They're not the sort of stories you tell your kids", adding "we had a pretty healthy regard for irreverence".

Haszard the raconteur is more specific. There were skinny dips in the school pool, being thrown out of restaurants for arguing, hanging out in the Kiwi Tavern under-age.

"It wasn't a very dangerous world and we were lucky. We probably got away with a few scrapes," he muses.

The intellectualism did creep into the socialising, however. Brothers recalls playing the drinking game Bottles, in which you count round in a circle. Every time you come to a number that includes a seven or is divisible by seven, you say bottles and change direction. These boys changed the rule from sevens to prime numbers.

Hunter tells of the little, disused farmhouse at the Manukau Heads they leased for $50 a year.

"We used to take out crates of beer, play music, shoot possums, talk about the woes of the world."

But what made them special? Why has this small group achieved so much?

The school, of course, gets credit from the boys. Here was an environment, for this top stream at least, that urged them to seek and succeed.

The teachers, too, win praise. Not all were good, but those who were inspired and excited them by introducing them to world-shaping discoveries and big ideas.

Warner says he also puts a lot down to "the fact there was a critical group, not just two or three". As Kemp puts it, their solidarity made it okay to be intellectual and inquisitive.

That mood of exploration was also encouraged by the emergent pop culture of the 60s. "It was a time of big ideas going around the world," says Worsley. There were the Paris riots in 1968, bold new music and space flight.

"There was Sputnik and all that and science seemed like a big deal to us," Hunter says. "Commerce was regarded as the last resort of the dim-witted."

The boys agree they were insulated from politics at that time - that came later, at university - but Warner says "one was aware that it was a turbulent time, a time of change. You could sense it coming."

Then there were the families. Each boy knew the others' parents, who were involved and supportive. Education was valued in each home. Haszard says they were children of the war generation; their parents had all built some security and knew their own minds.

"We had the great, great luxury of being the first ones out of that [generation], but also in the shadow of it. They knew what they wanted but they also required that we sought what we wanted," he says.

"If there's a commonality [among the parents], they were very astute; educated people in the broader sense. It's this inquiry thing."

"This inquiry thing" is perhaps the closest you'll get to capturing the secret of their success. There is a dynamic, a magic, in the story of any group's success, that is, as Haszard puts it, "just the chemistry of certain people coming together at a certain time".

But what can be substantiated is that all these factors - school, home, culture - nurtured a desire to learn, a hunger for ideas that has characterised their careers.

"Everything was done with real intellectual endeavour. We used to have some wonderful arguments, discussions and absurdities chasing the logic of things," Haszard says.

"We were fascinated by what we were learning," says Worsley. "We were debating a lot of these issues, often over several beers, I might add."

Hunter says their debating was constant, as they weighed and polished what they learned with their talk. They weren't just swotting for exams.

"In a way I think we were pretty lucky. We got together in an environment that pushed us a bit and encouraged us not to worry too much about horizons. We got a great deal out of that."

It's interesting to note - and perhaps a lesson for those who shape the education sector - that these boys all left school with definite interests but only the vaguest of plans. Words such as career path were foreign to them.

Teaching today's students, as most of them do, they regret the vocational pressure young people now face. How much harder it is to fall in love with learning as a teenager when faced with the worries of unemployment, potential income and loans. How much the education system has changed in a mere generation.

For all this lack of planning, they still had hopes - and hopes are powerful things. And in among those hopes, and in that same poem to U61, Hunter had the wit and confidence to predict great things for himself and his mates and, though he doubtless didn't understand the poignancy, tug his forelock before the glory of youth.

But heed, for in sometime anew

when they return into your view

marching through the halls of fame

remember whence first tribute came,

remember them in all their splendour

reciting all their hopes with candour ...