The son of a premier; the son of a bootmaker. The third member of the four, Douglas Berry Copland, was a child neither of the urban elite nor the provincial proletariat. He was the offspring of hardy and thriving Scottish pioneers on the Canterbury Plain in New Zealand.

Copland was born on 24 February 1894 to Presbyterian Scottish immigrants, Alex and Annie Copland. Their homestead had 50 draught horses and 16 children. Douglas was the 13th.

His background left its imprint. Throughout his life he boasted he could do most farming jobs. And all his life he was to be a pioneer, sowing and raising in barren land where no one had ventured before. And there remained something ‘Scottish’ about him – nimble and active, conscious of a pound, eager for self-improvement and education.

But his background could be no more than a background, as Copland’s severe asthma was traced to an allergy to horses, and consequently husbandry was disqualified as an occupation. At the same time he felt insufficiently ‘pious’ for the Ministry: solemnity was never characteristic of this man who ‘loved a joke’, especially shaggy dog stories. Perhaps teaching, then? He completed two years at Christchurch Teachers’ Training College before enrolling in Canterbury College, part of the University of New Zealand. There he displayed the desire to occupy centre stage that was to become characteristic of him. He was an active member of the Christian Union; he was on the Student Association Executive; and was recognised as a Life Saver.

Two circumstances pushed him from the still waters of teacher-traineedom into more vigorous currents. Firstly, he came to the notice of Professor (Sir) James Hight (1870-1958), the leading figure of New Zealand academia in the first half of the twentieth century. A scholar, teacher and institution builder, Hight was endowed with remarkable confidence and vision. Born in New Zealand, and only making his first visit to Europe at the age of almost 60, he never assigned himself a junior status, and confidently believed that he was part of an international mission to uphold and cultivate a universal civilisation. ‘It would be only a little fanciful to say that he held Richelieu and Mazarin barely less significant for New Zealand than the Maori seafarers and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’ (NZDB). Encyclopedic in reach, multi-disciplinary in method, he lectured and published on the Maori Wars, law, and geography. He did not neglect economics. He had striven to create a Bachelor of Commerce at the university early in the 1900s. In 1909 he appointed himself to the newly created chair of history and economics. He was an inspiration, model and mentor to Douglas. It was he who insisted – almost compelled – Douglas to switch from mathematics to economics (Copland 1950).

The second circumstance was the world conflagration which ignited in Douglas’s 20th year. Several of his brothers were serving in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and his immediate younger brother, Robert Davie, was killed in action in 1916. Indeed, 42 per cent of men of ‘military age’ served in the NZEF.^[48] Douglas Berry Copland also sought to enrol but was rejected as medically unfit due to a lesion in his heart muscle. This setback ‘greatly unsettled’ him – he was never able to meet his thwarted will with equanimity. He found distraction by busying himself with a Census. But the war’s ramifications would yet seek him out.

On the other side of the Tasman Sea, the war was straining emotions, and this was telling on the University of Tasmania. One Herbert Heaton had been recently appointed Lecturer in History and Economics thanks to the patronage of Albert Mansbridge (the post required lecturing and tutoring WEA classes). In August 1915 Heaton had ‘provoked an outburst in the press and the parliament’ when it was reported he had said that, as both the Allies and the Germans had presumably committed atrocities, a draw would be the best outcome of the war (Davis 1990, p. 70). Although Giblin sided with him, Heaton resigned from his post at the University of Tasmania in late 1916. The University of Tasmania advertised for a successor; the advertisement was pinned up on the noticeboard of Canterbury College.