Leading Aircraftsman John Bethune McCaw (1924–2010) served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force during World War II pursuing a long career as Artist-Technician at Auckland Museum.

Early life and family background

John Bethune McCaw was born on 10 May 1924 to Alexander Oswald McCaw and Catherine (Rena) Elizabeth McCaw (née Bethune). He grew up in Cambridge, Waikato, before the family relocated to a farm in Papatoetoe. He had an older brother, Kenneth, and a younger sister, Helen Frances.

McCaw’s family background tied him to several prominent settler families in Auckland, Waikato, and the Hawke’s Bay. On his father’s side, his grandfather, also named John McCaw, helped transform the Matamata estate into productive farmland after its forfeiture by Josiah Firth, and the family settled near what is now Firth Tower, a regional landmark.¹ His paternal grandmother Frances McCaw (née Buckland) connected him to the Buckland family of Highwic in Epsom, one of Auckland’s most prominent colonial households.² On his mother’s side, the Bethune and Miller families of Hawke’s Bay linked him to Napier, where he later attended Napier Boys’ High School.³ Before enlisting in the Royal New Zealand Air Force during World War II, McCaw worked as a farm hand and was living on Prices Road, Papatoetoe.⁴

Wartime service

McCaw’s wartime service was relatively uneventful. Enlisting in October 1942, he remained in New Zealand throughout the war. He served in the General Duties branch of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, attaining the rank of Leading Aircraftsman until his discharge on 27 September 1945. General Duties personnel were often described as “jack-of-all-trades”—moving between sections as needed, sometimes working as a mechanic, then as a driver, then assisting armourers or stores.⁵ Bases such as Hobsonville, Whenuapai, or Levin were like small towns during the war, with workshops, transport fleets, armouries, stores, and training schools. It was varied but unglamorous work, essential to keeping stations running smoothly and freeing up specialists for frontline tasks.

Though McCaw’s role did not involve overseas deployment or major distinctions, it was nonetheless service—a commitment of time and labour that formed part of the broader war effort. He received the War Medal 1939–45 and the New Zealand War Service Medal, for his time in the Air Force.⁶

Art studies and marriage

After the war, McCaw returned to farming in Papatoetoe and Ōtāhuhu. In 1950 he enrolled at Elam School of Fine Arts, where he undertook preliminary and general courses through to 1952.⁷ During this period, he met and married fellow student Hazel Angela Young, who completed her studies in 1953 and was awarded a Diploma of Fine Arts in 1954.⁸ Ian Thwaites, former Auckland Museum Librarian  noted in his 2015 publication "A Good Place to be" that McCaw enrolled at Auckland Teachers’ College in 1954, though University Archives staff have not been able to verify this in their surviving records.⁹

The School Service and museum education

With support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York in the late 1930s, the Museum’s service expanded under Education Officer Richard A. Scobie, who professionalised and extended its reach. By 1940, the Department of Education had confirmed the programme as a permanent part of the national education system.¹²

Writing in the mid-1940s, W. R. B. Oliver of the Dominion Museum observed that such cases, modelled on American precedents, had become central to museum education across New Zealand, enabling visual and specimen-based teaching well beyond urban centres.^₁₃

Artist-Technician at Auckland Museum

It was on this foundation that McCaw built his career. As the Museum’s Artist-Technician from 1954 to 1984, his main responsibility was the design, construction, and maintenance of travelling diorama cases—self-contained, glass-fronted scenes with painted backdrops and teaching materials, delivered directly to schools across the Auckland region. These dioramas updated the earlier loan kits into more immersive and durable learning tools, sustaining the Museum’s long tradition of taking collections into classrooms. McCaw remained in the role for nearly three decades.¹⁴

Diorama

The case was supported by mounted extracts from works such as Earp’s Handbook to the Southern Settlements (1849), giving students first-hand accounts of settler life. Teachers were supplied with booklets and activity cards that encouraged comparison between the two periods, asking pupils to look closely at roofing materials, garden layouts, and domestic tasks. The diorama was further enriched by overhead transparencies, including architectural drawings from early twentieth-century catalogues such as Laidlaw Leeds, which offered cut-price house plans and hardware.

If you want to learn more about the model-making techniques that underpinned this kind of work, a useful reference is A Guide to Model Making & Taxidermy (1973), written by McCaw’s contemporary Leo Cappel. Cappel was Preparator at Auckland Museum from 1964 until his retirement in 1982, and his manual provides insight into the methods and skills shared among the Museum’s technical staff.¹⁶

By combining models, archival text, and visual teaching aids, the cases ensured that children encountered museum-quality material in their own classrooms, long before widespread digitisation or online access. It was this blend of portability, craftsmanship, and durability that defined his practice and explains why examples of his work have survived in the collection today.

His work was not limited to curriculum based material. Annual Reports from the 1970s show that McCaw also developed dioramas linked to permanent galleries. In 1975, for instance, the Museum noted: “Mr McCaw, the School Service Artist-Technician, has completed a supplementary diorama to complement exhibits in the whaling hall and displays on water birds of the Auckland isthmus and prehistoric Man”.¹⁸

By the mid-1970s, Auckland Museum’s School Service was operating at scale. More than 1,200 requests came in each year, reaching nearly 400 provincial schools, stretching from Te Kao in the north to National Park in the south, alongside city schools across Auckland.¹⁹

A decade after McCaw retired, the picture looked quite different. Rising transport costs and the arrival of other classroom resources meant fewer schools were requesting the old cases, and circulation had dropped to less than half the volume of the 1970s. By the mid-1990s the School Service itself was wound up, replaced by new kinds of programmes: workshops, bilingual resources, and hands-on teaching sessions that spoke to a new generation of learners. In 1995–1996 alone, more than 51,000 students took part in these new approaches.²⁰

Photography and artistic practice

Art remained a constant in John McCaw’s life. Throughout his time at the Museum, he continued sketching, painting, and photographing, building a personal practice that both complemented and extended beyond his museum role.

John McCaw’s photographs and watercolours, now held in the Museum’s Documentary Heritage collection, reflect his close observation of Tāmaki Makaurau’s historic buildings and streetscapes. Works such as Panmure Hotel, built 1890 and Mt Wellington Barracks, demolished about 1968 reveal his attention to architectural detail.

These images sit alongside his documentation of central Auckland landmarks such as St George’s Bay, Parnell Rise, and the Auckland Domain. McCaw’s own whakapapa connections, and his involvement in local history organisations all appear to have shaped his photographic and artistic practice—not just as educational output, but as a personal effort to preserve a city on the cusp of change. Ian Thwaites observed that “[s]everal museum staff treasure a McCaw painting or sketch of an old fence or ramshackle building.”²¹ He also exhibited publicly, including a joint show with Louise Bailey at Hayah’s Gallery, Remuera, in the 1970s.²²

Retirement

John McCaw retired on 9 May 1984, concluding nearly three decades of service. His retirement was acknowledged in the 1984–1985 Annual Report: “John McCaw’s creative work in designing and building display cases, and his efficiency in distributing loan material has been appreciated by teachers and pupils for many years. The Education Service owes much to [his] consistent hard work in developing the Loan Service.”²³ The scale of his contribution was also outlined in Auckland Museum News that year, which noted that almost all of the 1,500 annual loans to schools were his work and described him as “the earliest serving member of the current museum staff.”²⁴ It was an end of an era.

John remained active in the arts throughout retirement, exhibiting regularly alongside his wife Hazel in group shows for the Pakuranga Arts Society and submitting his art to the Iris Fisher Art awards. His solo exhibition, Eighty Years Young, was held at Te Tuhi in Pakuranga from 16 October to 10 November 2004.²⁵ He died in Tauranga on 14 June 2010.

John Bethune McCaw lived a life shaped by art and education. His legacy endures in the dioramas that once carried the Museum into classrooms across Tāmaki Makaurau. Today, the Museum continues this kaupapa, welcoming students onsite, online, and through outreach, sustaining the tradition of object-based learning that defined his career. John is remembered for his generosity and humour and his influence rests not only in the works he created but also in the generations of students whose lives he touched through his mahi.

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