Batten House: colour green and mascot Kermit the Frog
Freyberg House: colour red and mascot Elmo
Mansfield House: colour yellow and mascot Big Bird
Rutherford House: colour blue and mascot Cookie Monster
are the four Houses of Tauranga Girls College.
All students are assigned to one of these vertical houses, named for prominent New Zealanders with characteristics that girls can aspire to.
The presence of two male and two female role models are both for balance and also acknowledging the link to Hillsdene, the coeducational college from which both Tauranga Boys’ College and Tauranga Girls’ College were founded in 1958.
Competition between the Houses is fierce, for the House Shield, and students gain points from sporting and cultural participation that decide the order of the Houses for any given year.
Jean Batten HINE-O-TE-RANGI: DAUGHTER OF THE SKIES
She was the manifestation of triumph and hope against the odds through the dark days of the
depression. In 1934 she smashed by six days Amy Johnson’s flight time between England and Australia. The following year she was the first woman to make the return flight. In 1936 she made the first ever direct flight between England and New Zealand and then the fastest ever trans-Tasman flight. Jean Batten was the ‘Garbo of the Skies’. She stood for adventure, daring, exploration and glamour. In her time Jean Batten was one of the most famous people in the world.
Principal Achievements: Flights
1933 De Havilland Gipsy Moth Biplane G-AALG* England - India.
1934 De Havilland Gipsy Moth Biplane G-AARB England - Australia (women's record) 10,500 miles in 14 days 22 hours 30 minutes.
1935 De Havilland Gipsy Moth G-AARB Australia - England in 17 days 15 hours. First woman to make return flight.
Percival Gull Monoplane G-ADPR England - Brazil: 5000 miles in 61 hours 15 minutes elapsed time. World record for any type of aeroplane. Also fastest crossing South Atlantic Ocean, 13 1/4 hours, and first woman to make England - South America flight.
1936 Percival Gull Monoplane G-ADPR England - New Zealand. World record for any type. 14,224 miles in 11 days 45 minutes total elapsed time, including 21/2 days in Sydney.
Also first direct flight from England to Auckland. Also world record for fastest flight between Australia and New Zealand (101/2 hours). Established on same flight: England - Australia solo record, 10,500 miles in 5 days 21 hours total elapsed time.
1937 Percival Gull Monoplane G-ADPR Australia - England solo record, 5 days 18 hours 15 minutes. First person to hold both England - Australia and Australia - England solo records at the same time.
Katherine Mansfield
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a prominent modernist
writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.
Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered ModernistWriters such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf with whom she became close friends. Her stories often focus on moments of disruption and frequently open rather abruptly.
Katherine Mansfield stares out of her photographs with a direct gaze that challenges the observer. Courageous, contradictory, self-willed, single-minded, argumentative, elusive, in both her life and her work, she has always defied the attempts of posterity to pin down the qualities that fascinated her contemporaries.
Among her most well known stories are "The Garden Party," "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," and "The Fly." Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including "Miss Brill", "Prelude", "The Garden Party", "The Doll's House", and later works such as "The Fly", are frequently collected in short story anthologies.
During the First World War Mansfield contracted extra pulmonary tuberculosis which rendered any return or visit to New Zealand impossible and led to her death at the age of 34.
Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekov and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing.
Bernard Freyberg, 1st Baron Freyberg
Lieutenant-General Bernard Cyril Freyberg, 1st Baron Freyberg
VC, GCMG, KCB, KBE, DSO & Three Bars (21 March 1889 – 4 July 1963), was a British-born New Zealand Victoria Cross recipient and
soldier who later served as the seventh Governor-General of New Zealand.
A veteran of the Mexican Revolution, he became an officer in the British Army during the First World War. Freyberg was the first soldier on the beach during the Gallipoli Campaign and the youngest general in the British Army during the First World War, later serving on the Western Front where he was decorated with the Victoria Cross. He liked to be in the thick of action—Churchill called him "the Salamander" due to his love of fire.
During the Second World War, he commanded the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in the Battle of Crete, the North African Campaign and the Italian Campaign. Freyberg was involved in defeat in the Battle of Greece, defeated again as the Allied commander in the Battle of Crete and performed successfully commanding the New Zealand division in the North African, including the Battle of El Alamein.
In Italy, he was defeated again at the Second Battle of Cassino as a corps commander, but later relieved Padua and Venice, and was first to enter Trieste, where he successfully confronted Tito's partisans. By the end of the Second World War, Freyberg had spent ten and a half years fighting the Germans.[16] Following the war Freyberg was invited to be New Zealand's Governor-General. A popular choice for the post, he was our first Governor-General with a New Zealand upbringing. He left London on 3 May 1946, bringing with him material to assist in New Zealand government in its compilation of an official war history. He maintained a strong interest in the project during his term, which was extended from five to six years in light of an impending royal visit and other issues. He left New Zealand on 15 August 1952. On his return to England Freyberg frequently sat in the House of Lords, having been raised to the peerage in 1951. From 1953 until his death he acted as Deputy Constable and Lieutenant Governor in charge of Windsor Castle. He died at Windsor on 4 July 1963 following the rupture of one of his war wounds.
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson
OM, FRS (30 August 1871–19 October 1937) was a British-New Zealand chemist and physicist who
became known as the father of
nuclear physics. In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half life, proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 "for his Investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the
chemistry of radioactive substances". Rutherford performed his most famous work after he received this prize. In 1911, he postulated that atoms have their positive charge concentrated in a very small nucleus,[3] and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model, or planetary, model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering in his gold foil experiment.
He is widely credited with first splitting the atom in 1917, and leading the first experiment to "split the nucleus" in a controlled manner by two students under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton in 1932.
Ernest Rutherford was knighted in the New Year's Honours List for 1914. This was in time for a visit to Australasia where the British Association for the Advancement of Science was to hold its annual conference that year.
He became a Member of the Order of Merit (Civil Badge) in the New Year's Honour's List for 1925. At that time the order was restricted to 24 living persons. The Order of Merit was the unfettered and personal gift of the Sovereign to such persons, being subjects of Our Crown, as may have rendered meritorious service in Our Army and Our Navy or towards the advancement of Art, Literature and Science.
Ernest Rutherford was raised to the peerage in the New Year's Honours list of 1931, a week after his daughter Eileen had died. At the time May Rutherford was in New Zealand visiting her mother. She thought it would be appropriate if he chose as his territorial designation a New Zealand name. Christchurch and Nelson were too English sounding so she suggested Lord Rutherford of Havelock, where he had got his educational start. He had already selected Lord Rutherford of Nelson, in honour of my birthplace and home of my grandfather.
