‘Force of nature’ Life Education pioneer Trevor Grice made ‘enormous contribution’ to Kiwi kids – obituary

He told RNZ in 2012 that he admitted at his interview he “might have had a bit of a drinking problem”. An admiral asked if he was an alcoholic and, if so, what was he doing about it. Grice said he hadn’t had a drink for a couple of years and was going to recovery meetings.

“I found out a year later that the admiral said, ‘he’s just the man we need. If he stays off it, he’ll be able to handle two and a half thousand men, the ones that get into problems, and if he gets on it, we can fire him. Simple.”

Grice remained sober and the US Navy recognised his passion for helping others to recover from addiction and put him through specialist training programmes at Long Beach, California.

He also established a long-running meeting for alcoholics, called Dry Dock, at the Deep Freeze base. His office door was always open to still-suffering or newly sober alcoholics.

Grice’s affinity for helping people from the abyss of addiction became well-known.

Leon Grice recalled how his father was summoned to the Army base at Burnham where a soldier had “gone berserk’’ and barricaded himself in a hut, armed with a gun which he was threatening to fire.

Grice got in behind an armed cordon and began talking with the man, whose voice he instantly recognised as his childhood friend from Woolston. “He yelled, ‘.... you bugger, it’s Trevor, I’m coming over’.’’ He took the gun off him, and after ascertaining he was an alcoholic, took him to a recovery fellowship meeting. The friend remained sober and enjoyed a good life.

Tony* said Grice, his recovery “sponsor” for over 40 years, had “a charisma about him. Once he started talking about alcoholism, he was like a magnet. You just had to listen. He had a tremendous gift for transmitting the programme and such a passionate belief in it.”

Grice could forge a connection with top business people but also with “people in the gutter’’ and had “12th-stepped priests, lawyers, doctors, judges and politicians and US Navy personnel on the ice [at Antarctica]. His influence in that area was just extraordinary. I know of nobody like him”.

Grice once talked a doctor suffering from addiction down from the tower of the Christchurch Cathedral and brought him to stay at the Grice family home, Tony said. Like many of Grice’s “sponsees’’, that doctor later went on to help countless others to achieve recovery.

Peter*, a recovered alcoholic who later became a registered nurse specialising in addiction treatment, spoke at the memorial service of Grice’s “rare distinction of being an addiction and toxic states expert’’ and his innate skill at “facilitating the change of inner direction that enables recovery’’.

He told how he had “the good fortune to receive one of Trevor’s impromptu interventions’’ in 1976.

Peter had been rescued from Arthur’s Pass. He entered “full blown delirium tremens” and was admitted to Sunnyside psychiatric hospital where doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia and prescribed powerful anti-psychotic medication.

Enter Trevor Grice, who, Peter said, had the intuition to “see that some addiction sufferers were misdiagnosed and that, in certain cases, anti-psychotics could produce suicide-driving effects.

Grice had earlier “spirited’’ another doctor out of a psych ward at Sunnyside, “which greatly upset the health authorities’’.

When the psychiatrists heard Grice had been to see Peter, they pronounced him “a zealot’’. They offered to issue a trespass order to protect Peter “from his dangerous influence’’ and prescribed stronger drugs.

Undeterred and, with Peter’s parents on side, Grice helped him leave hospital and guided him through giving up the “cessation rebound’’ from giving up the anti-psychotic drugs. He took him to recovery meetings and began to guide him through the 12 Steps.

“Trevor helped many through the sedation rebound after coming off heavy psychiatric sedation and was the only safe source of knowledge for many like me with drug residues leaching out for months.”

“Within weeks, I had a job and was so profoundly improved that those who had known me as a medicated cripple could hardly recognise me,’’ said Peter, who now has “a wife of 32 years and five children and have just celebrated my 48th anniversary of sobriety, thanks to the kindness of strangers”.

Grice was still happily running Deep Freeze’s operations in 1987 when he was head-hunted by a group of Canterbury business people who had heard about Life Education, a programme in Australia aimed at educating school children about the risks of alcohol and drug use.

They sent Grice to Sydney to meet the Australian programme’s founder Ted Noff, only to find that he was in hospital after a stroke.

But Noff’s wife, Margaret, met Grice at Wayside Chapel in King’s Cross, Sydney and left him to read through Noff’s writings.

Grice returned home where his wife Judith Garlick-Grice recalled him being enraptured by “the whole idea of education being the key to prevention’’.

The Life Education pioneer’s timing was lousy. New Zealand, and the rest of the world, had plunged into recession after the 1987 stock market crash.

But the indefatigable Grice, who always said he and his supporters had “a dream and a wheelbarrow’’, would go anywhere to champion Life Education and elicit donations, often speaking to a handful of farmers’ wives in draughty rural halls.

Judith told the memorial service how she was painting the kitchen at their farmhouse one night when Trevor returned elated at getting support from a backblocks meeting. They danced a celebratory waltz in the kitchen, knocking over a tin of paint.

Grice had the knack of getting movers and shakers behind the Life Education cause. Former Assistant Police Commissioner Ian Holyoake spoke at the service, saying: “If Trevor Grice is the father of Harold the Giraffe, then I’m one of his uncles’’. He was recruited to the Life Education board when two men, “one a reformed alcoholic and the other an opera singer (the late Chris Doig) came to his office at the Christchurch CIB. (Actually, there were two singers – Grice’s daughter, Jacinta, said her dad had been a tenor at the Royal Christchurch Music Society).

The Life Education team, led by Grice, quickly raised enough money to fund two mobile classrooms, imported from Australia, for lessons to begin in Auckland and Christchurch in 1988. A qualified teacher accompanied each bus.

The Life Education teams educated children about alcohol and drug risks as well as advice about nutrition and relationships.

Grice seized on Harold the Giraffe as a mascot and teaching tool because he always said “kids look up rather than down at his shoelaces’’.

Within 10 years, there were more than 30 regional Life Education trusts in Aotearoa and more than $30 million had been raised.

Today, Life Education, which has never asked for Government funding, has a fleet of buses visiting schools from Northland to Southland.

Grice, who relocated to Wellington to run the national organisation, was often on the road, fund raising and public speaking. He was in so many places at meaningful moments and had a story to tell of each that the trust’s former chief executive John O’Connell called Grice “Life Education’s Forrest Gump”.

On a visit to Te Tairawhiti to drum up support, Grice attended a marae meeting with Ngāti Porou. “It was not going well, so [Dad] decided to tell the story of his childhood friend … Immediately, the mood in the room changed,” Leon Grice said. “They stopped the meeting and asked Dad to go away and come back at 5pm. When they returned to the marae they were given a full pōwhiri. [Trevor’s friend] was from that marae … Life Education immediately had Ngāti Porou support.”

Tom Scott told the memorial gathering how he drew a cartoon in 1993 knocking the Education Department’s approach to cannabis education in schools. He said the bureaucrats were “locked into the vice-like grip of a bankrupt philosophy known as harm reduction” and had produced a resource booklet for schools “that advised how to use marijuana safely’’.

The cartoon prompted then Health Minister Jenny Shipley to order her officials to "immediately pulp all copies” of the booklet.

“It’s the single most effective political cartoon I’ve ever drawn,” said Scott, who quipped “if only climate change, the Ukraine and war in the Middle East were that easy to solve’’.

The cartoon caught Grice’s eye, and Scott soon met “a human equivalent of a small, sub-atomic particle called Neutrino, a bundle of pure energy capable of travelling at the speed of light and nearly impossible to deflect from his chosen path and capable of penetrating all matter and all substances”.

Grice, who had consulted with many experts, including noted neuroscientist Sir Richard Faull, turned up at Scott’s door armed with chocolate muffins and date scones and a slew of scientific papers, and asked him to help write an article on the dangers of drug and alcohol use for adolescents.

Then the project became a book, “which Trevor promised would only take six months tops’’, but eventually took several years after many late phone calls from Grice, who Scott described, as “someone who could talk under wet concrete’’.

The result was The Great Brain Robbery, which became a best-seller in New Zealand and overseas with school students and their parents.

It was “all worthwhile”, however, when teachers and principals “told us it was the most stolen book in their library’’. Twice, Scott was stopped on planes by “fathers whispering to me that the book helped rescue one of their children from drug abuse’’.

Grice remained in a full-time Life Education Trust role until 2014 when he stepped down, aged 82.

Long-time Life Education staffer Michelle Dow, who brought Harold the Giraffe to the memorial gathering, noted that “Trevor always said in every class there is one child that is hurting, and we can make a difference to”.

Another former Life Education colleague spoke about how Grice “each morning asked God to help do some good or do something beautiful in the world in his name, and when he was [challenged] he had to surrender to that higher power, and allow it to work through him”.

Aside from his public persona, Grice was a much-loved family man.

He had five children, Jacinta, Christine, Leon, Stephen and Jonathan from his first marriage, and two, Rafaella and Gabriel from his second marriage to Judith.

“Trevor was a passionate and devoted husband, father and grandfather,’’ Judith said. “Every Christmas-time he would organise a weekend lunch for the extended family which often saw several dozen or more happy, hungry children and parents converging on our home and talking, playing, eating and drinking throughout the appointed day. This continued well into his now documented retirement due to onset dementia. And then he became a great-grandfather and met all three [to date] great grandchildren.”

He is survived by wife Judith, his seven children, and sister Judy.

Judith spoke at the service of the family’s gratitude to former Trust chief executives John O’Connell, Peter Cox and Tim Rogerson and their partners for their support of Trevor in latter years and “lots of hilarity’’ at their coffee dates.

While Trevor Grice has gone, his legacy will live on. The Life Education Trust says his philosophy – “Every being is unique. Every body is magnificent. Every person deserves respect” – continues to guide its work today.

Sources: Life Education Trust, Post archives, RNZ, Trevor Grice Memorial Service livestream contributions from Leon Grice, Tom Scott, Ian Holyoake, John O’Connell, Judith Garlick-Grice and Michelle Dow; tributes from Peter* and Tony* from a 12th step recovery fellowship. (*Last names omitted to respect that fellowship’s anonymity principle)

– Tony Smith, The Post