Robert Paton (Class of 1953) from ‘Little Friends’ to New York
Posted on June 12, 2024
Before he retired in 2001, Robert Paton (Class of 1953) worked almost 30 years as a research librarian at Time Inc. in New York’s Manhattan. It was a long way from Vanuatu, then known as the New Hebrides, where Bob was born and where his parents were Presbyterian missionaries.
He and his sister Elisabeth Woolston (nee Paton, 1953) entered “Little Friends”, the then Sandy Bay prep school, in 1942, before boarding between 1944 and 1947. (Elisabeth would later donate her boarders’ suitcase to The Friends’ School archives; inside its cover is the required list of clothing and toiletries.)
Their mother Marion (“Maisie”) was a member of the Reid family, many of whose descendants – including the Andersons, Paynes and Gardners – also attended the school. Bob and Elisabeth spent holidays at the Sandy Bay home of Eliza “Granny” Reid. The Reids’ home “Blairlogie” is now the principal’s residence, Pendle Hill. Maisie had gone to Friends’ herself, with her twin brother. “There’s a story that John came to her assistance one day in 1920, when Errol Flynn had been disrespectful to her,” says Bob. The movie actor attended Friends’ for one year, when he was about 10.
Bob loved boarding. He remembers how “the older boys were really very kind to us, the very smallest boarders”. He remembers the time he snuck up behind and slapped a teacher called Mr Morris, mistaking him for one of the older students. And he remembers “a hush descending over the boarding school upon news of Ernest Unwin’s sudden death” in 1944.
Bob also loved Tasmania. Although he and his sister left Hobart to return to Vanuatu for his parents’ last 18 months there, and although he later finished his education in Launceston and Melbourne, before working in Canberra, London and New York, he and his wife Carolyn bought a home in Hobart’s Sandy Bay in 2002. Now they live in Wilson, a small village on the shore of Lake Ontario, and one of their three sons lives in Sandy Bay with his young family.
