Welcome to the University of Auckland's Special Collections First World War centenary website. The centrepiece is the Auckland University College Roll of Honour, which was digitised in remembrance of this earlier generation of students and staff. 

Drawing on material from Special Collections and elsewhere, the wartime experiences and lives of some of these Collegians are explored in Collegians at War, the Roll of Honour and Their stories. College Life looks at campus life during the war years while Further Resources caters in particular to researchers interested in locating University-related sources for this subject and period. 

Content was added to the website during the centenary years, 2014-2018.

We welcome enquiries and feedback.

Digitising the Roll of Honour

After consulting the Auckland University Students' Association, the Roll of Honour was photographed in 2013 by A.P. Digital Consultancy to create preservation-quality images of the entire artefact. Each double-page spread was photographed a second time to enable the Roll to be converted into a flip-book, simulating as near as possible the appearance and functionality of the original.

Information in the Roll

The information in the Roll of Honour was compiled by the Auckland University College Student’s Association (AUCSA) and the College between about 1915 and 1920. It was used in various contemporary publications, including in issues of the AUCSA magazine The Kiwi, the College Calendars and in the national roll compiled by the University of New Zealand.

Four of the information fields from the Roll were indexed so that the digitised version could be searched: Name, Military number, Years at A.U.C. and Degree.

Name
First names were added from Auckland War Memorial Museum's Online Cenotaph entries or military service records if they were not already recorded in the Roll.
No.
The Collegian’s military number.
At A.U.C
The years that each person attended Auckland University College (probably from information supplied to the compilers by the College).
Degree
The academic status of each person (probably from information supplied by the College):
G stands for graduates, U for undergraduates and N for non-matriculated students, who were studying towards the equivalent of University Entrance.
Note: Only some entries for graduates include their qualifications. Also, some students may have returned to studies after the War but that information was not captured in the Roll.

Information accuracy

As Leslie Comrie, one of the compilers of the Roll, noted in 1916, ‘The Roll is necessarily imperfect; there are errors and omissions’.1  This is to be expected from a record-keeping document which was pulled together over some six years using information supplied by the College, family and friends and from newspaper reports and official sources. 

When Special Collections came across missing or incorrect names or military numbers during indexing, we added the new or corrected information in brackets on the left-hand page of the digitised Roll. This was done to aid searching.

However, no other information from the Roll was corrected as this is an original record which reflects the circumstances of its creation and the information the compilers had to hand. The military-related fields were not indexed as more authoritative information can be found about most Collegians on their Online Cenotaph entries, to which we provide links. A few Roll entries contained insufficient information for us to confidently identify the Collegians.

Other enhancements

Biographical sketches of 60 Collegians are linked from their Roll of Honour pages and can be found under Their Stories. 

Links are also provided to entries on the New Zealand War Graves website or the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website.