Throwback Thursday: The School Journal in 1942

Did you know The School Journal is the longest-running serial publication for children in the world?

We’re fortunate enough to have been publishing The School Journal for the last four years, and this week we unearthed a few (very!) old copies from our archives.

The School Journal dates back another 35 years before the volumes we found (the first Journal was published in 1907), but they’re a remarkable testament to how far the Journal has come since it started.

It’s nice to know that some things don’t change, though.

Since it began, The School Journal has delivered New Zealand content designed to motivate, excite, and engage students across the curriculum. It’s interesting to note that the content itself has been a constant, with each Journal comprising a variety of short stories (both fiction and non-fiction), poetry, plays, and art. Want an example?

Here’s a story published in the September 1942 School Journal. (Keep an eye out for the choice words that would never make it into schools now!)

The New Zealand School Journal
Vol. XXXVI, No. 8 Part III September 1942

BIDDY’S HARDEST SITTING

If ever there was a good mother, it is our old cochin china hen. Faithful to her task, she sits her solid three weeks through. I would sooner have a dozen like her than a fifty-times-patented incubator.
And who dare go near her when she is on the job? Not Towser, who puts his tail between his legs, when she fluffs up her feathers and strides towards him. Not our old villain of a Tom, who fears that he may lose his only eye if he attempts to cross swords with her. Biddy is equal to anything on two feet or four that comes into the barn-yard.
I take a pride in Biddy. She is my idea of what a mother should be. See her, when a clutch is hatched, calling her chicks to heel. Not even the most restless young rascal of a cockerel-to-be dare disobey her cluck. What would she be, if by some strange chance she turned into a human being? She would be a hospital matron.
As I take a pride in Biddy, I was pleased to lend her to my friend Tom Twills. Tom is both a bird-fancier and a joker. Sometimes his jokes have rubbed thin-skinned people up the wrong way, but no one denies that he knows everything there is to know about feathered tribes from canaries to turkeys.
Tom merely told me that he had a hefty job on hand; the toughest bit of hatching he had ever attempted. Biddy, who was broody, was handed highly indignant over the fence and put to set in a comfortable coop. After clucking in a testy fashion for half an hour, she settled down.
I did not see her again till a week later. Of course, she was still sitting. If the job was hatching lumps of rubber into golf balls, she would do it, or die—I know her so well that I can read her face like a book—she looked both puzzled and annoyed. Even then it did not occur to me to think what that joker Twills might have been up to.
He came and stood by me. “She’s matchless, that old hen of yours, Briggs,” he said. “For twenty minutes after I put her in the coop, she stood looking at the setting, and I thought she might be going ‘down tools,’ because, after all, she’s no call to work for me. But no, eggs are eggs to her, and however put out she felt, she settled down to her duty.”

Beyond being pleased at this praise of a bird who had become the same to me as one of the family, I thought no more of the matter, though it did seem to me that Biddy’s wing-spread, always wide, had had to be made still wider to cover this last sitting.
From then on during the next two weeks, Twills plied me with questions about my hen. Had she good nerves? Did she play favourites? Was she a good mixer? Could she take it? “Take what?” I asked. “A joke,” he replied.
“Twills,” said I, “I defy you to put one of your so-called jokes across that sensible, sober-minded old hen.”
“Do you, Briggs?” he replied, “ well, no doubt you are right.”
With that I let the whole matter go out of my mind. I shouldn’t have. A man, who had worked hard a whole week to get me to mount an ex-circus buck-jumper (“as quiet as a lamb” according to him), was not likely to have any mercy on an honest, respectable fowl.
Towards the end of the sitting-period, Twills’s confounded joke, if it was a joke, began to simmer over. When he praised Biddy, it as with a hand over his mouth or with a giggle he couldn’t hold in. Then he told me that my upright, plain-going, old hen was due for the shock of her life.
I got rather touchy. Twills had taken rises out of me. That was all between friends. But he was not going to impose upon a fowl, who had always done her duty and had been nesting-mother to a gross at least of cockerels and pullets. He hastened to reassure me. He was the last man to hurt a feather of Biddy’s head. There was nothing afoot that a bird of her courage would not stand up to.
When the great day—the hatching-day, I mean—arrived, I was away at a sale of the prize poultry. Twills called to inform me that the hatching had been a huge success, as I would see for myself next morning.
I did. I was up early and, happening to look over into Twills’s yard, I saw Biddy at the head of her new clutch, which consisted of—two ducks, a sea-gull, a gosling, a kittywake, a guinea-chick, a turkey, a bantam, a pea-hen, a pouter pigeon—and, and—I declare I should not have been surprised to see a dodo bringing up the rear!
That ass Twills was at his window with a handkerchief in his mouth, but he had not got the best of Biddy. Here was a call upon her force of character, and she knew it. She marched at the head of her queer brood, clucking sternly, and now and again—I am sure I caught it—throwing a glance of scorn and contempt at the practical joker.
I have no time to tell how Biddy reared that brood, taught the gulls and ducks to swim and made the turkey-chick, which had a weak chest, go to bed early. One thing she will never get over is a down on Twills. He is, if foolish in his love of what he regards as fun, at the bottom a kind-hearted fellow and tries to tempt her with choice grain and chopped lucerne prepared for his carrier-pigeons, but she will not turn her head his way. The clutch, even down to the turkey, safely reared, she is back now on her own side of the dividing fence, and if Twills wants her again, let him come and get her. I value my peace and am not going to be the one to hand over Biddy to that gay and heartless deceiver a second time.

(Author unknown)