Auckland, New Zealand 1950
The Games in Auckland saw a number of firsts with the introduction of the Games Village, air travel and chaperones.
Auckland was noteworthy for the first Games Village. Ardmore, 23 miles out, had been an Air Force camp and later a Teachers’ Training College. The women had individual cubicles, the men doubled up. The Village was too far out, but it achieved the ideal of fellowship as never before.
The airplane made an entrance into Scottish travel modes. Seventeen of the team left Southampton on December 16 1949, aboard the Shaw and Savill liner, Tamaroa, in which the English party also sailed. Alan Paterson (High Jump) and Andrew Forbes (3 & 6 miles) could not make the ship, for good reasons. The two Victoria Park athletes flew out from Prestwick on 23rd January – two days after the main party had docked at Auckland. The fliers were the forerunners of future travel, so that Auckland became the last of the great sea voyages.
It saw the first (honorary) chaperones, too. Col Usher had brought his wife along at his own expense. So had Mr W G Todd, of Paisley, paying his own way as swimming officials. Mrs Todd chaperoned the English girl swimmers, too. At Auckland, Hugh Morrison, weightlifter and resident in New Zealand, met up with his team mates. The seafarers brought in the New Year in Panama, on the Pacific side of the Canal and the beginning of a new time zone. The Scots hoped for some relaxation of the strict bedtime rules. The English were not easy to persuade, but agreed to a midnight curfew. By bringing New Year in, before putting the clock back, the Scots enjoyed an extra hour of celebration.
Heading into the Pacific, the ceremony of ‘Crossing the Line’ broke the monotony. For 21 days, until they made landfall at Auckland, the passengers saw nothing but the sea.
Great piles of accumulated mail were brought abroad when they did tie up. “There were masses of invitations to Burns suppers from Scottish societies,” said Peter Heatly. “If we care, we could have eaten haggis from Auckland, up near the top of North Island, to Invercargil at the bottom of South Island.
Peter Heatly won his first gold for tower diving, a silver in springboard diving. Had he not suffered an interruption to the last dive, he might have had a second gold. Helen O Gordon won her gold in the breaststroke, beating the Games 200-yard record in 3 minutes 1.7 seconds.
James Hamilton, the cyclist, broke a leg in a race at Dunedin. Although the Scots were not involved, water polo featured in Games history for the first and last time, as part of Aquatics. One or two of the men in the team had given up jobs to travel and at least one, hammer gold medallist, Duncan Clark stayed on in New Zealand, where he stills lives. After the Games, the Scottish, English, Welsh and Canadian contingents were taken on a tour of New Zealand, lasting three weeks. They stayed in private homes. The Scots reached Southampton again on April 8. They had been away for 113 days.
Fencing, Weightlifting and Water Polo competitions were added to the usual roster for the Auckland Games but Scots did not feature as medallists in these sports. On the whole, the Scottish party really did well in winning a total of 5 Gold, 3 Silver and 2 Bronze medals. Scotland, after all, had only won five Gold medals at the 1934 Games in London when a much larger team had been entered. Peter Heatly’s contribution, at the 1950 Games, of Gold and Silver medals in the Diving events was particularly noteworthy.