NZ Memories 133

A PPET I SER

Faces Look Familiar ?

So they should to anyone who watched television in the 1970s and ’80s. Claire Duncan traces the highs and lows of popular television personalities in the article on page 38.

A feature on Peter Hudson and David Halls appeared in the 8 o’clock newspaper on 2 July 1976. A quote from the article reads, “And, in a country where the word star is tossed around as freely as their Caesar salads after the second bottle of cooking sherry, Hudson and Halls are as refreshing as an avocado and crayfish entrée when they talk of their instant fame”. Stuff/Auckland Star Collection

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Dear Readers, The feature on Uncle Tom and the Friendly Road Choirs in the last issue resulted in a flurry of correspondence and phone calls from readers who were either in the choirs or avid listeners of the radio sessions. In this technological age, those less complicated times seem a world away and it is hard to imagine children and young teens flocking to choirs with such enthusiasm today.

Entertainment broadcast by another medium, that of television, emerges a decade or so later and with it the popular New Zealand cooking series Hudson & Halls. Claire Duncan profiles a duo who preferred the label of entertainer rather than chef. A wise choice; while their recipes and methods were somewhat dubious the on-screen presence of Peter Hudson and David Halls was unforgettable.

This issue’s cover of a soldier washing clothes in the Middle East desert, photographed by Bob Lealand in 1943 during the Second World War, introduces our leading article. Geoff Lealand examines a confrontation back on New Zealand soil, one that affected his father and many other men who loyally served King and Country.

Tales of Otago University introduce some dry humour to Issue 133. Paul Aubin is welcomed back with his memories of “varsity” in the 1950s. Flatting, Friday night hops and “the great age of the coffee shop”… somewhere lectures, study and exams were crammed between the rigours of student life. And Capping celebrations – both the ceremonies and the high jinks – were comprehensive.

Photographs from personal collections are always a pleasure to print and of note in this issue, apart from the fine cover, are the spectacular Cape Foulwind cave, motorcycles on a newly formed Lewis Pass, and Cynthia Christie’s Wairarapa students with the question, “Are you in the photograph?” It’s surprising how many readers open up the magazine and spot a family member.

Almost springtime, my favourite season.

Wendy Rhodes, Editor

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CONT EN TS

Editor Wendy Rhodes

Contents

Graphic Design Icon Design

Mutiny in the Ranks: The Ruapehu Affair

Administration David Rhodes Distributed by Gordon and Gotch Subscriptions & Enquiries Phone tollfree: 0800 696 366 Mail: Freepost 91641, PO Box 17288, Green Lane, Auckland 1546 email: admin@memories.co.nz www.memories.co.nz Annual Subscription $79 for six issues (Price includes postage within NZ) For overseas postage: Add $49.00 for Australia Add $69.00 for Rest of the World Contributors Aotearoa New Zealand Centre, Christchurch City Libraries Atkins, Rae Aubin, Paul Averi, Peter Balneaves, John Bishop, John Blow, Bevis Botes, Costa Christie, Cynthia Clarke, Bruce M. Dargaville Museum Duncan, Claire Hill, David Hough Family Idienns Family Latham, Olly Lealand, Geoff McCleary, Tom McKinnon, John McPhail, Bruce McPherson, Stuart Moloney, Dan Nye, Enid Pennington, Wayne Selwyn Library Sills, Raewyn Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland City Libraries Stewart, Graham STUFF, Auckland Star Collection Whittall, Mike

Opinions: Expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of New Zealand Memories.

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Geoff Lealand documents a wartime confrontation on home turf.

Those Were the Days

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Early motoring with Olly Latham.

The Land of Lost Content

Paul Aubin recalls student days at Otago University.

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A Man for All Seasons

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David Hill pays tribute to a “splendid man”.

The Unknown Wedding

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Family photographs tell a story - a contribution from Rae Atkins.

From the Regions: Canterbury

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Centrefold: Age No Barrier

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Hudson & Halls: Certainly Merry

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Clara’s Fairytale

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Uninvited Guests at Mangawhare Hotel

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The Jimmy Allen Flying Club

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From the Regions: Wellington / Wairarapa

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Raurimu during the main trunk railway construction.

Claire Duncan profiles popular television entertainers and chefs.

Mike Whittall relates the story of a mysterious disappearance.

Contributed by Raewyn Sills, Dargaville Museum.

Bruce Clarke’s cousin was a keen club member.

Mailbox

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Index and Genealogy List

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Editor’s Choice: Nature’s Glory

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Cape Foulwind photography.

Cover image: A New Zealand soldier doing his washing in the Middle East desert, 1943.

Photographed by Bob Lealand (edited by Costa Botes).

Accuracy: While every effort has been made to present accurate information, the publishers take no responsibility for errors or omissions.

Copyright: All material as presented in New Zealand Memories is copyright to the publishers or the individual contributors as credited.

ISSN 1173-4159 August/September 2018

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A New Zealand soldier doing his washing. Middle East desert 1943. Photo by Ron Lealand (edited by Costa Botes).

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Mutiny in the Ranks: The Ruapehu Affair Geoff Lealand

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aylene Preston’s wonderful 1995 film War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us is about the silences and absences in the experiences of New Zealand women in World War II. Her more recent film Home By Christmas (2010) shifted her attention to male memories of war, through the guarded stories her father had told her.

Both films draw on the reminiscences of her respective parents but also demanded a good deal of guesswork and supposition, and speculations about the meaning of events and connections. So it is with my father, Wilfred Ronald (Ron) Lealand, who died in 1964 when I was 17 years old and yearning to explore a wider world beyond the small South Taranaki town of Hawera. It seems to be a common complaint amongst friends and acquaintances of mine, as we grow older, that we hadn’t asked important questions of our parents nor take sufficient notice of the events that shaped their lives. But probing questions or insistent curiosity was not encouraged in New Zealand families in decades past, or were waved away with a “I don’t want to talk about that”.

Men who fought in places such as Greece, Italy and North Africa were particularly disinclined to talk about their experiences once they resettled in peacetime New Zealand. There was much they wanted to forget. But there is a war story to be told about my father and it is long overdue. He enlisted in the Second Echelon of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF), shipped out to the Middle East in 1941 and employed as an engineer (sapper) building railways across the desert, to transport troops and supplies to the war zones of Egypt and Syria. He was one of 194,000 New Zealand men who served in the forces in World War II; an astounding 67 per cent of the male population of fighting age.

After many months of desert sand, continuous toil and danger, he joined his comrades on a long sea voyage back to New Zealand in July 1943, in the first furlough (leave) draft brought home for a break, once the tide of war was turning in favour of the Allies in the Middle East.

But this leave also had unanticipated consequences for my father, for several months later he became a leading figure in the so-called Ruapehu Affair. Historian Nan Taylor provides the following explanation: Men were attested into the forces for the duration, and went overseas expecting to serve while they remained fit. In July 1943 the Ruapehu furlough draft, 6000 men from the first three volunteer echelons, who had been three or three and a half years overseas, returned. They found New Zealand comfortable, very far from the war, full of Americans, with thousands of fit men in the home forces or held in industry, some on high wages. Feeling was strong that they had done enough, that no man should go to the war twice before all had gone once.1 Hundreds of these soldiers refused to return to duty but numbers were whittled down, to defuse the situation, with married men with children, those aged 41 years or older, and all Mãori soldiers in the furlough being granted exemption. Others were granted medical exemption. The leave period was extended to five months but on January 12, 1944 some 700 men from the furlough boarded a ship returning to the Middle East.

Other soldiers who stayed behind had been dismissed from the army and re-assigned to food production and other essential industries. But a core group of 55 ‘rebels’ (the ‘Trentham Men’) remained in camp, refusing all orders.

It is my understanding that my father was one of these, all of whom were subsequently found guilty of desertion and sentenced to 90 days detention. But a legal appeal resulted in the Court of Appeal quashing the charge of desertion, even though the Court noted that the men could be tried for insubordination or even mutiny. If it had been World War I, they would most probably have faced a firing squad.

1 Nan Taylor (1989), ‘Human Rights in World War II in New Zealand’, New Zealand Journal of History 23.2, 110.

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Letter of dismissal from the NZ Army to my father and (right) the letter from the Echelon ‘rebels’.

In the end, the confrontation ended quietly but led to an overall dismissal of 432 furlough men from the army, which also included the stopping of wages and other privileges. There were a number of factors contributing to the end of the crisis: 1944 was an election year and the ruling Labour Government under Prime Minister Peter Fraser wanted to avoid a looming scandal; the furlough soldiers had been given conflicting messages regarding the conditions of their leave; there was disquiet amongst many locals about the social impact of American troops stationed in New Zealand (‘over-paid, over-sexed and over here’); the patriotic fervour of the early days of the war had diminished, especially as the threat of a Japanese invasion receded; there was a likelihood of escalation of the problem, with the imminent arrival of a second furlough of soldiers; and, most importantly, public support for the furlough soldiers was growing, despite the imposition of official censorship.

Street marches, a support-gathering train trip from Wellington to Auckland, and other direct appeals to the public spread the word. Amongst my father’s possessions I have a faded, handwritten letter, a declaration and a call for public support, from these 55 rebels. I am not sure who wrote this letter as it is unsigned and undated but it could well have been penned at the Hamilton meeting of December 29, 1943, declaring their intentions to report without equipment and refusal to proceed to camp.

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The letter reads, This is a message from the men of the Echelons.

We have refused to go back to camp. But do you know why? We are not cowards or shirkers. Our forgotten records will prove that.

We are fighters. We have fought for your rights. Now we are fighting for ours. You supported us then, support us now.

We left here as youths, now we are men, some of us are nearing middle age, yet we are denied the privileges of men.

Four years of soldiering is enough. Now give us our civil rights, while we face death & the hard rigours of war, our fellow New Zealanders have taken our places in industry.

Let us have our turn to guard the home front.

The single grade one men should go now & do their share, all are capable of their places as they are fit to take ours.

We are carpenters, engineers, draughtsmen, farmers & labourers.

They can be fighters with a little training. Perhaps your son or brother is in the ranks of essential workers.

Then remember we, too, are women’s sons and brothers. We are together again after along separation. Shall we be made to go back to forfeit our ambitions, hopes & perhaps our lives for a regime that has shown no appreciation for our past services, Why are we losing our rights as volunteers. We are not asking this for ourselves alone.

We are demanding the freedom & the right which we fought for all our comrades & fellow veterans We need public support & approval Your support – your approval.

This was the request of the men that marched in Auckland.

I believe that this was the letter that was handed to an officer, at the end of public march in Auckland on January 4, 1944. It was first reported in the New Zealand Herald on August 20, 1945 once war-time press

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The Land of Lost Content Student days at Otago University: 1954 – 1958 Paul Aubin

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Swotting for finals: Paul, haggard and haunted.

F EAT U R E

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n present times, media accounts of hectic student life at Otago University attract wide-eyed attention from - particularly - older citizens from all parts of the country, but during the so-called boring ’50s we students in Dunedin certainly had our fun too. As students do now, we enjoyed pushing the boundaries, and if the prevailing social and moral fences were indeed higher and more enclosing in our salad days, then our tentative efforts to challenge any such 1950s conventions were accompanied by a heightened exhilaration and prestige (or quite possibly, as in my case, by an intensified apprehension!)

Where, then, did the students live? The situation then could scarcely be more different from what it is today.

The area surrounding the university was dominated by much fairly humble working-class housing: there was no extensive ‘campus’ - this American term and concept were unknown here. Most ‘outside’ students lived in the main hostels - Selwyn, Knox, St Margaret’s, Arana, Aquinas and Carrington Hall. Carrington alone accepted males and females and was inhabited mostly

by Training College students. Many male students stayed in boarding houses, which were numerous in those days. There were a number of flats but ‘mixed’ flats were forbidden, and unknown. There were a few very well known and established ‘party flats’- the ‘Shambles’; the ‘Jam Factory Flat’; the ‘Chocolate Flat’ and so on. And perhaps I need to emphasise that a student ‘flat’ meant a complete house - for which a group of students paid rent for the whole place (£4 £6 per week was about average) rather than the present practice whereby landlords charge, presumably more profitably, rent for individual rooms. Most local students simply lived at home. This was, of course, very disadvantageous in a social sense because Dunedin students missed out on the collegial, communal and more independent lifestyles of the hostel inhabitants.

I was frankly envious. Perhaps I should add though that the hostels did enjoin exceedingly strict rules and, in the girls’ hostels particularly, discouragingly early curfews were imposed by a series of hard-bitten matrons. Happily, there were sometimes opportunities to evade these very inhibiting rules and regulations, and wardens.

Our tuition fees at the university were paid by the government but to have any money on which to live, most of us had to work in the holidays, in my case before Christmas, maybe (depending on Compulsory Military Training demands) in January and February,

and certainly again in May and August. The girls tended to go fruit picking ‘up Central’ or to go nurse aiding, perhaps to tourist spot hospitals. My student girl friend worked over Christmas in hospitals at Picton and Hanmer.

Pretty near all of the male students sought employment in the more highly paid seasonal work of the freezing works, woolstores or sea-gulling on the wharves. (I, actually, did none of these but looked for rather more interesting jobs: scouring Dunedin’s suburbs seeking up-to-date information for Wise’s Street Directory; helping to print LP record covers for Coulls, Somerville, Wilkie printing works; as a storeman at Wren’s Paints despatching cans of their iconic ‘Railway Red’ to NZR establishments and railway sheds throughout New Zealand, and so on. Finances required this unremitting holiday time labour!

The eternal problem for all students, of course, is the matter of getting down to serious study. In 1955 I had a particular problem in trying to swot for the upcoming Finals. Over the road, at 45 Royal Terrace, lived a Dutchman who bred Alsatians - 15 of them - and they howled and growled and yelped all day and night. So, one year, just before ‘Finals’, I found any attempts to study quite impossible. Desperate, I asked Miss Theomin next door for help and she generously offered me an Olveston maid’s room, an attic room, blessedly devoid of windows. Complete silence reigned and I swotted. All this coincided with an electrical blackout in Dunedin - they turned all the lights out at 10 p.m. to save power (and at this hour to encourage folk to go to bed - and maybe that worked too: there were a lot of babies born nine months or so later). So I would go into Olveston and collect on my way a candle and candlestick, and at 10.00 light up so I could continue studying.

Despite this application, I struggled with most of my subjects, except the Political Sciences, especially when the crucial end-of-year Finals loomed and I tended to panic. I would have done much better with the current system of a significant mark allocation going into internal tests and assignments, as I was a reliable and attentive performer in all aspects of within-term work.

But Finals usually sent me into a mental tailspin.

As teachers, many of the lecturers and professors were a pretty grim lot. I remember attending one of the lectures given by an inoffensive but spectacularly nervous long-term member of the English Department

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Age No Barrier English railway workers erect timber and canvas shelters at Raurimu, south-east of Taumarunui, during the construction of the main trunk railway line. Alfred George Tibbutt photographed the group, ranging from young boys to older men, at the bush camp in about 1906. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Ref: PA1-q-244-06.

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Hudson & Halls: Certainly Merry Claire Duncan

“If you’re confused, so are we. Don’t worry.”

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he year is 1982. Having just told his partner in both work and in life to “toss his own crepes” on primetime network television, Peter Hudson promptly throws his own onto the floor in a petulant flurry. His companion David Halls, a portly blonde baring a near constant toothy grin, snorts and smirks at the camera as the programme breaks for advertisement.

Thus ends a segment of Hudson & Halls.

The incident was one of many spontaneous outbursts that took place on the television cooking show, which aired for more than a decade on TVNZ before shifting to the BBC in the late 1980s.

Hudson & Halls charmed and delighted viewers around the country (and beyond) with their live-to-air cooking show, featuring aspirational recipes (along with a strong dose of kitchen domestics) for an audience more used to “meat-and-three-veg”.

The pair brought spontaneity, humour and bucketloads of British camp to our screens long before any kind of reality television shows existed. Hudson and Halls were known for their on and off-screen dynamism - including on-screen arguments that followed them to the dressing room where the audience could still hear them. With much flair and innuendo the pair bickered and drank their way through each programme, often throwing things together in the final seconds of each segment, with one eye on the clock and producers flapping their arms in the wings. But their spats were always short-lived, and their ability to work together both tenacious and heart-warming.

Not only embracing but generating interruptions on live television, the pair’s spontaneity and lack of film convention saw them acknowledging the farce of television while whipping together meal after meal, a glass of wine never far from hand. But they were far from hapless clowns, challenging the audience to “come over here and do better”. 1 Back then, no one could have guessed the tragedy that would beset the smiling couple just a decade later, when Peter Hudson would fall victim to an aggressive prostate cancer and David Halls would take his own life. And yet it is for their cheery, cheeky television presence and as both devoted, generous friends and entertainers that Peter Hudson and David Halls are best remembered.

BEGINNINGS

Stuff/Auckland Star Collection

Business partners and entrepreneurs well before they were television stars, both Peter Hudson and David Halls possessed an adventurous spirit. As young men, both travelled south to New Zealand within just a few years of each other, from London (Halls) and Melbourne (Hudson) respectively.

Twenty-four year old David Halls (b.1935) landed in Auckland from the UK in 1959, having completed his studies in foot anatomy and tiring of his job managing a shoe store. Growing up in Epping, Essex, in a working class family, David left school aged 15 to work at a local co-op. By aged 21 he was working in management at a shoe store but was restless and wished to travel. Following his sister’s wedding, in 1959, David said bon voyage to the UK and paid his way to New Zealand.

Seeking to better himself financially, David obtained work as a shoe 1 Hudson & Halls, Episode Seven, 1982, dir. Ernie Leonard, accessed at https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/hudson-and-halls-1982/overview

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CHOICE

Spectacularly framed by the cave on Cape Foulwind Beach, these unnamed persons were photographed by Mr Daniel Lawrence Moloney. Dan Moloney, the photographer’s grandson and namesake, describes his grandfather as “an amateur photographer and local historian. He was born at Addison’s Flat, the youngest of six children, where his father was a gold miner and he lived all his life in the Buller region. D.L Moloney died in 1948 at the age of 73 and his photographs remain a lasting legacy of a bygone era.”

The full-length dresses, laced boots and elaborate broadbrimmed hats worn by the women indicate an early 1910 date. For the menfolk, blazers and bow ties were popular during the late Edwardian period prior to the onset of World War One.

Nature’s Glory

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