Memorial Gates, Auckland Normal Intermediate School, Epsom

Back in 2004, with my first digicam (3mp, still got it), I took photos of the gates at the end of Poronui Street in  Epsom, just along from the Mt Eden village shops. Yesterday, when asked by Bruce Comfort from down south in Oamaru if I'd take some photos for him (for submission to the war memorials site at nzhistory.net.nz), I said no problems -- then found the old images. So thanks, Bruce, for helping me resurrect them!

"These gates stand in proud memory of teachers of this province who in the hour of national danger took their place in the front line of battle and in the end yielded their lives for the land and people they loved."

The gates and pillars were constructed in 1932, likely designed by the Auckland Education Board's architect at the time, A B Miller. When they were built, this was the Auckland Teacher's Training College grounds (Auckland College of Education), so a memorial to teachers among the war dead of World War I who would have been past students since the college's establishment in 1881 (the Mt Eden/Epsom site was started in 1926) was even more appropriate here. Being erected in 1932, the pillars were said to have been worked by unemployed stone masons, as part of the Depression-era work schemes. Funding for the memorial came primarily from members of the Auckland branch of the NZEI, with assistance from a special government grant.

Auckland Normal Intermediate School opened on the grounds in February 1945, after the government agreed to upgrade the existing primary school facilities on the site to a full intermediate school, linked with the teachers' training college, according to The History of Epsom (2006).