An Islander's Values

The first Scot to become Premier of New Zealand, Robert Stout, was passionate about education and fairness in land ownership

- by KENNY MacASKILL

TOURING the Robert Burns Farm at Ellisland, Dumfries, I was shown the visitors book signed by Peter Fraser then Prime Minister of New Zealand in 1941. He was a Scot who had taken time out of his busy wartime schedule to see his Highland roots and make the pilgrimage to the Bard. However he wasn't the first Scot to hold that high office.

That honour goes to Robert Stout, a Shetlander, who doesn't seem to have returned for a visit but financially assisted other islanders to join him.

A radical, liberal and freethinker espousing support for causes as varied as land reform and women's suffrage, he would hold not just great political office but also the highest legal office in his adopted land.

Not bad for a Lerwick merchant's son, who was by no means born with a silver spoon in his mouth. What Stout seems to have been bequeathed by his parents was an enquiring mind, a lifelong veneration of education and a sympathy for the well-being of ordinary people.

The eldest of six, he attended the local parish school and Lerwick Grammar School where he was Dux.

However, he always said the best education he received was the reading material freely available at home, and the open discourse on many subjects.

Leaving school, he qualified as a teacher in science and mathematics, also studying and qualifying as a land surveyor. In October 1863 he set off for New Zealand, not arriving in Dunedin until April the following year, such was the length of the journey in those days. Unable to find work surveying in the goldfields, he took a position as a mathematics teacher at a school in Dunedin.

He became active in wider civic society, helping to found the Otago Schoolmasters Association. This would become the local branch of the New Zealand Educational Institute, now the largest trade union in the sector.