Sir Sam Neill says 'generation of inbreeding' at elite Christchurch school

Thursday, 23 March 2023

Here are some things you probably never knew about New Zealand actor Sir Sam Neill, including what he thought of his time at two of Christchurch’s most elite schools. Philip Matthews reports.

He is an architecture nut with a detailed memory of every house he ever lived in. He has met everyone from Princess Diana to Pope John Paul II to Marilyn Manson​. He has named cows after Helen Bonham-Carter​ and Michael Caine’s wife, Shakira​.

He could tell you the name of the legendary British actor who once described Elizabeth Taylor​ as a C-word. He knew former National Party MP Tim Groser​ when Groser was a hippie, and he has a photo to prove it.

These facts and others are relayed in Neill’s friendly conversational style in his new memoir ‘Did I Ever Tell You This?’

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When the book appeared this week, coverage was dominated by news that Neill had been diagnosed with stage three blood cancer, which he has apparently beaten thanks to an experimental treatment.

The worldwide outpouring of sympathy shows how Neill is loved, even among those who only know him as Dr Alan Grant​ from the Jurassic Park movies (a role Harrison Ford​ turned down). He is one of New Zealand’s favourite sons.

But there is much more to the book than cancer, and Neill himself has said he generally hates cancer books.

It is an entertaining retelling of a charmed life, in which the constantly self-deprecating Neill seems to be endlessly surprised by his good fortune.

He offers some nice anecdotes about the making of his better movies, reminding us of how many good ones he has made. For example: Dead Calm; the cult horror Possession, which he calls “a flawed masterpiece”; Evil Angels, with the brilliant Meryl Streep​ as Lindy Chamberlain​; The Piano, obviously; Hunt for the Wilderpeople; Dean Spanley​, in which he played a priest who thinks he’s a dog.

He has generally positive things to say about his co-stars and other celebrities, which only makes the rare ones he dislikes stand out more. In the interests of gossip, then, we can confirm that former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke​ was rude, actor Harvey Keitel​ was truculent and hostile, actor William Hurt​ was angry, and he overheard actress Judy Davis​ telling herself “Think of the money, think of the money”.

You could also say he is discreet, perhaps too discreet, about his ex-wives and other romantic partners. He is holding something back from us. An interior dimension is missing.

But there is another dimension that interests us as New Zealanders. It is what he thinks of the country that produced him and where he still lives some of the time, growing organic wine outside Queenstown and farming animals affectionately named after friends and celebrities.

In particular, what does he make of his years in Dunedin and Christchurch?

While he was born in Northern Ireland, Dunedin was home. But the gloss wore off as he aged, and he found it small and claustrophobic. He writes that the best thing about the city was the Main Road north, and he still feels a sense of exhilaration and freedom whenever he drives away.

“One anecdote about my hometown might tell you why,” he writes. “In 1964, at the very height of Beatlemania, the Dunedin Town Hall was only three-quarters full when they played there. The one place in the world they didn’t sell out. ‘Provincial’ doesn’t cover it.”

Ouch. Sorry, Dunedin. But Dunedin was mostly just a place where he spent school holidays. He was educated further north.

In classic Christchurch fashion, we can ask what schools he went to, and he provides the answer. He was at Cashmere Primary briefly, then Medbury School and Christ’s College, before going on to university.

Cashmere Primary was presumably the school with “a pretty rough playground”, where a kid named Nigel – he adopted the name Sam later – with a plummy accent was asking for trouble.

Worse was in store at Medbury. He recalls that the Old Boys’ Association, headed by “poor Richard Ballantyne”​, would ask him for this or that, and he would reply as follows.

“Richard, you must know I absolutely hated my time at Medbury, and I have no good memories of it. I know you mean well but, please, do not ask me for anything again.”

He admits he might have over-egged the “hate” aspect.

What was so awful about Medbury?

“There was bad food, there was bullying, there were prefects, there was an insufferable seniority system, boys brutalising other boys and, last but not least, there was corporal punishment,” he writes. “Of course. The whole British nine yards.”

Neill was alert to the psychological cost, as he saw it.

“I don’t remember anyone actually being happy there, and one of the saddest things I can think of is the junior dorm, where the little boys were. Boys of six or seven would cry themselves to sleep every single night, desperately missing home.”

After that, Christ’s College was more of the same, only bigger. He recalls it as a school full of thick future farmers. A brutal PE teacher named Hec Mackay​ was just one of the ex-military officers and war veterans who terrorised boys at that and other schools.

Worse still, the day boys got to go home to their mothers but boarders like Neill had made “a twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week commitment to hell”.

”School House was pretty easy to remember, and spell, and just as well, because many of the boys there were the product of generations of inbreeding. Canterbury farming families, for some reason, like to marry among their own. The gene pool is very small. You would think that a cursory examination of how they bred their Corriedale sheep would’ve been helpful in this regard. Sadly, no.”

Neill recalls Jacobs House* had a “disproportionate number of very thick boys”.

“Quite a few of my friends, therefore, were in Jacobs. The truly eccentric boys were in Flower’s House. My old pal Gus Watson was one of these. Inspired by The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen, Gus dug an escape tunnel. Like many things that Gus has done over the years, it wasn’t fully thought out. When he emerged, the tunnel exit was only a few metres away from the headmaster’s office. Gus’s sense of direction had failed him underground.”

Neill was in Richards, a house “full of the boys that no one else wanted”.

What about the school’s reputation? Overrated, he thought.

“College thought of itself as an elite school, the elite school, and the fees reflected that” he writes. “There was an entrance exam, but I never heard of anyone failing. There were boys there who could barely work out how to close a gate, let alone remember the names of English kings. There are still people in Canterbury today who consider it a mark of distinction that they were there. This is completely delusional; they just had four or five years of mutual mediocrity, I’m afraid.”

Christchurch wasn’t all bad, though. There was this memory: “I had my first dance with an actual living breathing girl, Julia Hall​, to I Saw Her Standing There in her family’s sitting room, by the Avon in Fendalton.”

That was a Beatles song. Another gripe is that Christ’s College wouldn’t let the boys see The Beatles when they played Christchurch.

Christchurch is also where Neill first became interested in acting, under the tutelage of the legendary Dame Ngaio Marsh​, remembered as “a grand dame of a very old school, and slightly scary”.

He played Theseus​ in her production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he knows it got a good review in The Press (the paper praised his “fine voice”). He also recalls Marsh storming backstage and accusing him of “a sissy performance”.

Neill got on better with Mervyn Thompson​, a true original of New Zealand theatre, nicknamed “Proc”, whose career was derailed when he was publicly accused of rape by feminists in Auckland in the 1980s.

His last meeting with Thompson offers a nice conclusion to the Christchurch years.

“Years later, I found Proc in Christchurch, living in a small, dark flat off Bealey Avenue,” he writes. “Proc was in seclusion. He’d been subject to a scandal not long before: he’d been chained to a tree by some women activists in revenge for an alleged transgression in the past. As to the truth of those claims, I have no idea.

“He was also suffering from a terminal cancer of the face, and he was hideously and cruelly disfigured. I felt desperately sorry for him, isolated and facing imminent death. I was able, though, to thank him for the change he had made to my life, and indeed to theatre in New Zealand.”

That short, melancholy scene says many good things about Neill, who emerges from the book as a decent, funny, empathetic and only slightly fogeyish figure, a man with a gift for friendship and a love of family. His portrait of Robin Williams​ is even sweeter than his picture of Proc.

And it was Proc who introduced Neill to Wellington, when he played Downstage Theatre in a touring production of Marat/Sade. Wellington! Here finally was a place that cared about culture.

“It never occurred to me that Wellington might be somewhere of interest. But here it was, the capital. And culture. It was alive. In Dunedin or Christchurch, art, drama or any kind of the arts seemed to happen in spite of the place. Oddities. But here these things were part of the fabric of the city.”

The weather is terrible in Wellington, but the geography is beautiful.

“And it’s also like a basin, with the city centre at the bottom. And all the energy, all the creativity of the place, drains into the city itself. This is a very good thing.”

By the way, the British actor who said that thing about Elizabeth Taylor was the great Peter O’Toole​.

DID I EVER TELL YOU THIS? A MEMOIR, by Sam Neill. Text Publishing, $55 in hardback.

• CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said Sam Neill was in Jacobs House at Christ’s College. He was in fact in Richards House. (2.50pm, March 25, 2023)