Scotch College

More about Max Hutton?

Little Max Hutton drowned, aged 10 in 1951. Can you tell us about him? Or provide a photo?

The hundreds of prizes held in the archives are being catalogued by Brian Morris (‘46). This serves several aims. It records donations of prizes to the archives; it records prize-donors; and it lets us trace the patterns of what adults thought boys should read!

When Brian catalogued the ‘Moby Dick’ awarded to Michel Eva (‘63) in 1955, and noted that it was the Kenneth Max Hutton Memorial Prize, we were puzzled. Our knowledge of Max Hutton was meagre. He had entered Scotch in February 1951, aged nine, living at 9 Ellesmere Road, Windsor. But there were none of the usual records about him, and no sign of how long he stayed. The word ‘Memorial’ suggested that he had died.

The Junior School Annual Report for 1952 confirmed that it was indeed a memorial prize, and the year of the report narrowed the period in which the death must have happened. The resourceful Paul Mishura then found the precise date and tracked down the details in the press.

On Boxing Day 1951, Max had drowned at Elwood. ‘Five oxygen flasks were used in the dramatic two-hour fight on the beach to save Hutton’s life’, reported the ‘Argus’ newspaper on 27 December, on its front page. ‘Senior-constable M. J. Purcell of Richmond who was off duty, and Miss Ivy Wykes, of Kew, carried Hutton ashore, and he was placed in Elwood Life-saving Club’s new oxygen resuscitator.

‘Five life-savers, working in relays, applied artificial resuscitation, while three ambulance men and a doctor held the oxygen mask over his face. Appeals for oxygen were answered by Brighton St John Ambulance, Civil Ambulance, and two flasks from Commonwealth Industrial Gases arrived as the boy was taken to the Alfred Hospital …’ There, half an hour later, he was pronounced dead.

The prize was to go to the Dux of Class IIb (to which Max had belonged in 1951 and come second). It seems to have been given for only a few years. Perhaps it ceased through some shift in educational philosophy, or perhaps because the funding had been spent. (Nowadays, prizes’ values are preserved by adding half the income to the capital).

Max’s father was Geoffrey Hutton (Dux, 1926), the journalist. GS