Newspaper Article 1994 – Couple buy former children’s home

Couple buy former children’s home

Former children’s home Beck House is being sold into private ownership, it was confirmed today.

The house and 8.5 hectares of land, beside State Highway 5 at Eskdale, is being bought by Russell and Annette Buchanan for use as their family home.

Residents of Eskdale since 1977, and tenants of another house on the Beck House site for the past year, they plan to renovate the home and start cropping the surrounding land.

The sale comes as part of the carve-up by the Napier Cadet Academy Trust which bought the property from the Department of Social Welfare in November 1989, as a permanent base for its redirection of young at-risk teenagers, a programme begun about a year earlier and based on military-style discipline.

However, the academy programme was wound up two years ago with changes in government policy meaning fewer people were being referred for training.

The trust has since been finding ways out of its debts and is subdividing the property. It is in the last throes of selling seven houses surrounding the central institution.

The house was built following the 1931 earthquake, superseding the destroyed France House which had opened seven years earlier. The Hawke’s Bay Children’s Homes Trust sold the property to Social Welfare in 1973.

However, the department moved away from institutional care of children and put the property on the market in 1987, a few months before it was damaged by Cyclone Bola.

The academy eventually ‘moved in and tidied the property in the year before making its purchase.

Mr Buchanan, community co-ordinator for the Central Regional Health Authority in Napier, said his decision had been well received in the Eskdale area.

While the Buchanans plan to make Beck House a home for themselves and their four children, Mr Buchanan said that “down the track we could use it for another purpose.”

“It’s going to need a lot of work. . . just to get it up to scratch,” he said.

Academy trust chairman Ivan Wilson said the sale of Beck House and the seven other houses was intended to bring the trust back into a profit situation. It was retaining four flats on the site and would not make a decision on their future until it had seen “how things pan out.”

He believed the trust would continue to operate, probably as an organisation funding schemes with the purpose for which the academy was originally established.