Kendrick Smithyman draft of poem Calling the roll

Smithyman was born at Te Kopuru, Northland, and later moved with his family to Auckland. After primary schooling, he attended Seddon Memorial Technical College and then trained at Auckland Teachers’ Training College in 1940-1941. For the remainder of 1941 until 1945, he served in the Second World War with the New Zealand Army and Royal New Zealand Air Force. After the war, he taught at primary and intermediate schools around Auckland, and was particularly interested in children with learning difficulties. He also pursued some study at Auckland University College which did not result in a degree, but led, in 1963, to a senior tutor position in the English Department. In 1946, Kendrick Smithyman married schoolteacher and poet, Mary Isobel Stanley, After the birth of their first son, Stanley developed rheumatoid arthritis which increased in severity until her death in 1980. Margaret Edgcumbe, a colleague of Smithyman’s in the English Department at the University of Auckland, became his second wife in 1981. He retired from the University in 1987, and died in 1995. Highlights of Kendrick Smithyman’s career were time spent as a Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Literature at the University of Leeds in 1969, and receiving the awards of Doctor of Literature in 1986 from the University of Auckland and the Order of the British Empire in 1990.