John Cowie Reid papers.

The John Cowie Reid papers were presented to the University of Auckland by his son Gerard Reid in 1988. When John Reid died in office in 1972, his office papers as a professor of English in the University of Auckland were transferred to his family home in Pamure. Together with the papers in the study of his home, the papers were used by his widow Joyce, (nee Burnet) to write a biography of her late husband (see Series 12, item 110). Subsequently the papers were held by his son until they were given to the University Library. From the condition of the papers when they were inventoried it seems unlikely that they had previously been culled to any extent. The papers therefore must be unique as they appear to be the only set of private papers of a university professor of English in New Zealand that, because of his death in office, have survived more or less intact.

The papers cover the period 1932 to 1972, although there is very little to document his life before his appointment to a post in English at Auckland University College in 1948. The papers cover a wide variety of topics illustrating the broad range of interests of a gifted and seemingly hyperactive university teacher; including literature of the Victorian period, English language and communication, theatre, film, the arts, music, publishing, food and wine, radio and television, university administration and education and the Catholic Church. The papers also include the manuscripts of 10 of his 27 published works.

The arrangement of the papers presented some problems since they had been moved several times between John Reid’s death and their transfer to the University Library. They have been packed into large cartons without much semblance of order, together with a number of books and periodicals that have since been transferred to the General Collection of the Library. Some materials were recognisable belonging to well-defined groups according to the places where they were generated – home and University – but many eluded such classification so the papers have been treated as an entity. A large proportion of the material had to be sorted page by page. One group quite clearly originated in the University – his university office papers which, together with Collins publishing correspondence, had been filed in manila folders more or less by subject. The bulk of the papers are the product of John Reid’s activity as a researcher and teacher and take the form of notes of works studied, lecture notes, and manuscripts of his published works. He was so much in demand as a public speaker and this is represented in a smaller group of speech notes.

It was possible to distinguish four types of output by the style of handwriting and the kind of papers. The first category consists of Reid’s early student essays and lecture notebooks which are written in a larger, immature hand. His lecture notes were written on A4 papers, in ink, in his normal legible hand. This contrasts strongly with the almost illegible hand that Reid used for his notes of reference works studied, which were written on A4 or larger paper. His speech notes were made on A5 pieces formed from A4 pages torn in half and are sometimes less legible than those written in the lecture hand.

It should not be assumed that the lecture notes were all prepared for university courses. It has not been possible to distinguish the provenance and date of many of the lectures so that the archivist decided to sort them all in one sequence under literature headings including the few that could be identified as being prepared for extra-mural functions such as seminars, refresher courses, summer schools and the like. Outlines of university courses will be found in Series 5 item 33 ‘Timetables and work allocation schedules 1958-70’ and item 41 ‘Course papers: course outlines and reading lists’ and for extra-mural functions in Series 15, item 132 ‘Circulated papers of lecture courses’.

It is probable that some of the titles listed in Series 12, item 109 ‘Other literary manuscripts’, were written by John Reid for University performance, although ‘Maria Martin or Murder in the Red Barn’ is a Victorian melodrama that, according to Mr J.R. Kelly a university contemporary of John Reid, the English Department staged in the 1940s.