A PPET I SER
The Comforts of Home The comforts and compromises of settler life are captured in this sketch of the Ōmata home of George and Eliza Curtis. The Curtis family arrived in 1850 and Māori built this house for them using wīwī (rushes). A trunk marked “Geo Curtis New Plymouth New Zealand 30” is used for storage, while the imported mahogany table and rosewood dining chairs lift the tone a little. Full length curtains, floral arrangements, paintings and a snoozing cat complete the cosy setting. The Curtis family built a bigger house on this site in the late 1850s which was destroyed during the Taranaki Wars. The article “Risking it all: The Journey of the Plymouth Company Settlers” on page 38, written by Andew Moffat and supplied by Puke Ariki, gives a glimpse into the sea voyage and arrival of the Plymouth Company settlers to New Plymouth in the 1840s.
1 Joseph Merrett, Untitled (Interior of George Curtis’ House, Omata] (1851-52), collection of Puke Ariki, New Plymouth (A92.158)
E D I TO R I A L
Dear Readers, Who recalls the popular radio documentary series Spectrum? Broadcaster Alwyn Owen, a founding member of the Spectrum team in 1972, remembers hauling equipment around the country during his early years on the job; the reel-to-reel tape recorder only allowed fifteen minutes of recording time per tape in those days. The result is a valuable oral footage now held at Sound and Film Archives. Alwyn has chosen to reflect on a few unforgettable interviews in our leading article illustrated by some legendary photographs. A World War Two Bombardier relates her account of serving on Motutapu Island. As the title indicates, Hilda at age nineteen was “ready for service” and found herself assigned to top-secret work on the island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf. Learning the Morse code alphabet and the Semaphore Signal language in the Girl Guides held Hilda in good stead for this wartime role. She is still proficient in both skills. Settlers to New Zealand are featured in two of our main articles. Plymouth Company ships arrived in the 1850s and the challenges of shipboard exploits, and conditions once ashore in Taranaki, are highlighted in an excellent article by Andrew Moffat. A rat tally gives an indication of one such challenge. One hundred years later, young Enda McBride arrived from Dublin and tells a very different story. Enda’s skinned knees in his endearing photograph reminds me of my childhood when my brother and I always had skinned knees from climbing trees and riding trolleys. Holiday jobs listed by Malcolm Smith (all nine of them) set me thinking about how my pocket money was earned before starting full-time employment. I recall collecting bottles, which were exchanged for a penny, and delivering grocery store flyers and the local newspaper. Then I elevated myself to working at Yates in Auckland City during school holidays… with perks in the form of bulbs and seeds. The poignant poem Battle of the Somme on page 48 serves to mark the 100th Anniversary of the end of The Great War. A fitting tribute thank you Bill. Lest we forget.
Wendy Rhodes, Editor
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Editor Wendy Rhodes Graphic Design Icon Design 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 $59.00 for Australia Add $79.00 for Rest of the World Contributors Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ Barrington, Norman Campbell, J. Central Hawke’s Bay Museum Conroy, Bill Dannevirke Museum Devantier, Neil Dillon, Miles Field, Hilda Roe Gisborne City Vintage Rail Society Gore Historical Society Hay-Smith, Wynne Hill, David Mantle, C. McBride, Enda Meadows, Gavin Meechang, Mags Meechang, Maurie Mihaljevich, George Newsham, John Noordanus, Wilhelmus Owen, Alwyn Reynolds, R. Sinclair, George Smith, Malcolm Stewart, Graham Stone, Clive Tairawhiti Museum - Te Whare Taonga o te Tairawhiti Thomas, Nathan James Tiller, Mrs E. Tonner, Jim Wilton, Peter Wyndham and District Historical Museum Opinions: Expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of New Zealand Memories. 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.
Contents Spectrum Days
CONT EN TS
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Alwyn Owen recalls the popular radio series.
Town and Country
10
David Hill grew up on Napier Hill.
Ready for Duty
14
Memories of a Bombardier contributed by Hilda Roe Field.
Waipawa Charlatan
20
A haunting story from the Central Hawke’s Bay Museum.
A Ten-year-old’s Journey
Enda McBride arrived from Ireland in 1952.
22
Some Corner of a Foreign Field
26
From the Regions: Gisborne / Eastland
28
Centrefold: Sheer Magnificence
36
Risking it all
38
Centennial Exhibition Building Fire
44
An Unforgettable Victory
47
The Battle of the Somme
48
Holiday Jobs
50
Beating the Recession
55
Milk Can Memories
56
Reader’s Response
58
From the Regions: Southland
59
New Zealand POW graves in Poland: by Nathan James Thomas.
Tasman Glacier photographed by Robert Reynolds in 1957. The Journey of the Plymouth Company Settlers - Puke Ariki. An event never forgotten by Christopher Moor.
Jim and Jan Tonner watched the Fourth Test at Eden Park, 1956. A reflective poem by Bill Conroy. Malcolm Smith describes his nine holiday jobs in the 1940s. Depression hints from the Dannevirke Museum archives. A project comes to fulfillment for Ian Spellerberg. Miles Dillon researches Parnell’s Union Bakery.
Mailbox
66
Birth of Anchor Butter
68
Index and Genealogy List
70
Editor’s Choice: Picture Perfect
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Cover image: supplied by George Sinclair with the simple caption “It’s Over! First World War: Armistice signed at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918 (100th Anniversary). Second World War: VJ-day 11 a.m. on 15 August 1945 (73rd Anniversary). ISSN 1173-4159 October/November 2018
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F E AT UR E
Spectrum Days Alwyn Owen
I
n late 1971, I was given a brief by my boss in the NZBC (now RNZ) for a run of thirteen weekly documentaries that would “contrast with Insight, (a current affairs series I’d started a couple of years earlier) be strongly human-interest in content, and reflect the New Zealand way of life,” – a brief that was entirely to my liking. Jack Perkins, whom I hadn’t formerly met, was assigned from some back-room admin job to work with me, and we immediately clicked. Jack had been itching to get to the coal-face of radio, and although of course he’d need training in documentary techniques, we shared common views on ‘reflecting the New Zealand way of life’ in radio terms. A lot of people in those days drifted through radio for a year or two before moving on, which I found almost incomprehensible, and I suspect Jack felt much the same. Radio had grabbed hold of us both, and we were in it for the long term. That run of thirteen programmes began in February 1972, but when six of them had gone to air I was told, “Just keep it going”. So we did. For forty-three years, between us. A third producer, Peter Kingston, was trained, and somebody suggested Spectrum as a generic name for the series; it seemed a good metaphor for a programme designed to show the colours of New Zealand life, and we settled down to work as a permanent unit. Spectrum producers from left: Jerome Cvitanovich, Jack Perkins and Alwyn Owen.
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F EAT U R E
Alwyn Owen with David Bellamy on Auckland’s Rangitoto Island.
That first year established a style that would continue for the next four decades: an eclectic mix that mirrored the social scene of the times, took outwardly ordinary Kiwis aside to tell their often extraordinary stories; and looked back over our shoulder at seminal events involving New Zealanders, as well as the smaller troughs and bumps that marked our passage through the 20th Century – all of that through the words of people who were there. We poked our noses into small towns to see what made them tick, brought old diaries to life, recorded in cities and in remote valleys, and occasionally visited Australia for cultural selfimprovement. In between we found a little time for fun, laughing at Kiwi life, and sometimes at ourselves. That was Spectrum. You couldn’t record that kind of material sitting in front of a studio microphone, so a good deal of our working life was spent ‘in the field’, and in the earlier years that entailed carrying a reel-to-reel tape recorder that allowed fifteen minutes of recording time per tape, together with a couple of microphones, and a bag containing spare batteries and a supply of tapes. It also meant knowing the technical tricks of the trade: when and how to include the local ambience; how to control wind noise, how to balance voices… Over the years we were able to refine those recording
skills, and devise new techniques that became standard throughout the NZBC. And then there were the human considerations. Interviewing for Spectrum involved rather more than question and answer, and placed the interviewer in a position of trust. People had to feel comfortable with us and know that we wouldn’t distort or sensationalise their words; that we had a genuine interest in their stories and weren’t merely predatory journalists. Once that trust was established, they opened their lives to us with quite extraordinary candour, and most of the time that state seemed to come naturally and easily. But there were exceptions. In 1977, thirty-four years after the event, Jack Perkins set out to build a cohesive account of the Stan Graham murders. Graham was a farmer at Kowhitirangi on the West Coast; he’d been under tension and was behaving threateningly and irrationally before he killed seven men, including a Police party of four. The man-hunt that followed the initial shootings was the longest in New Zealand history. When Jack went to Kowhitirangi he was greeted with closed doors and a torrent of abuse. Journalists were not welcome. The press had often sensationalised details; some accounts had made Graham almost a folk hero, a Ned Kelly figure, and that had infuriated a 5
F E AT UR E
Jessica Weddell, a morning radio personality at the time, made a convincing Queen Victoria.
cohesive little community who had lost men to a coldly efficient killer. Memories were long in Kowhitirangi. But then in nearby Hokitika, Jack visited a retired Police Sergeant who had been a member of the Police team during the hunt for Graham, and who was respected and trusted by the Kowhitirangi people. He also happened to be a Spectrum listener. “Leave it with me for a couple of days,” he said. Jack did so, and at the end of that time doors were suddenly opened, and people were willing to talk freely. In the programme that resulted, the Graham story was told in full, with accounts by the people who were there, in some cases containing material not previously brought to light. Reverse the lens, and there were the lighter programmes. I remember one I called Spectrum’s Guide to Kinky Sex which detailed the unusual reproductive habits of some of our native fauna and flora. Ranger 6
Ken Francis described kiwi mating (“the first thing the female does is give the male a thundering good hiding”) and David Bellamy - enthusiastically but with due propriety - described what some of our native plants were getting up to. The programme was broadcast and duly issued in cassette form by Replay Radio. It was purchased by one listener who then promptly returned it, together with a disgruntled letter demanding his money back. Apparently it was not the type of kinky sex he’d had in mind. Then there was the ‘diary’ I supposedly found in the Alexander Turnbull Library. Written by no less a person than Queen Victoria, and embargoed for a hundred years, it described her incognito visit to New Zealand. Accompanied by her faithful ghillie John Brown, and disguised as a kilted Scottish gentleman, Victoria - complete with umbrella, a slim volume of Mr Tennyson’s poems, and bagpipes
F EAT U R E
“Who could not be moved by the story of a young Lotte Weiss, who miraculously survived the horrors of Auschwitz…” strapped to her back – had defused an awkward Mãori situation in the Urewera, defeated a leading taiaha exponent with her umbrella, and adroitly avoided marriage to a Mãori maiden before returning home, her real identity unknown by all save the Governor. Jessica Weddell, then our morning personality, hooted her way through the script and made a wonderfully regal Victoria. It was all a bit of fun, but for three weeks after its broadcast I was tormented by a listener who refused to believe that the ‘diary’ was imaginary, and repeatedly demanded access to it. As we moved through the ‘70s and into the ‘80s, Peter Kingston left us, to be replaced by Steve Riley and Jerome Cvitanovich in turn; each fitted comfortably into the Spectrum mould, and all three produced work of first-class quality and left their stamp on the series. Spectrum itself changed slightly, and we found ourselves producing more documentaries of an oral history nature. A programme that is essentially a thirty or forty minute interview might seem to make dull radio, but not so when there’s a wonderful tale to be told; when the teller has character in the voice, and doesn’t so much tell the story as relive it. Who could not be moved by the story of a young Lotte Weiss, who miraculously survived the horrors of Auschwitz, the only member of her family to do so; by the candour and detail of Marjorie Lee’s account of life in Edwardian upper-class Wellington; or by a seaman’s classic story of endurance and survival following the wreck of the barque Dundonald on the Auckland Islands. In recording stories like these, we became in effect professional listeners, guiding the interview as subtly as possible, and intruding with questions only when absolutely necessary. And we gave people time. You couldn’t tell stories like these in five-minute sound-bites, and well before the recorder was switched on, time was also necessary to establish rapport with the informant. Too much time it seemed, one day back in 1978, that had me both fascinated and frustrated. I’d been recording in Whangarei, and somebody happened to mention that Whina Cooper was encamped at Ngunguru, a coastal settlement 24 kilometres north. I’d briefly met and photographed Whina a few years previously, and while she’d become a public figure during the famous hikoi of 1975, the details of her life were not widely known. The possibility of recording them was irresistible, so I drove out to Ngunguru and found her living in a caravan beside a large and immaculate vegetable garden. She claimed a right to the surrounding land, and had ‘lit her fire’ on it, but that was one battle she was destined to lose. Whina was then aged 83, virtually bed-ridden, and tended by grand-nephew Eddie Kawiti, who made her meals and did the general housework. We chatted, and after a suitable interval I asked if I might interview her some time during the next couple
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WA R
II
Ready for Duty Hilda Roe Field (nee Elliott) I was born on 13 May 1923 and lived in Te Kuiti where, as a teenager, I attended Girl Guides. During this time I learned Morse Code and Flag Semaphore - today I can still recite the Morse Code alphabet and can demonstrate the Semaphore Signal language. I have written an account of my life as a Bombardier in the 60th Battery. My story begins in 1942.
D
uring the war years, residents of Te Kuiti used to billet the English Merchant Seamen when their boats came to Auckland. Some of the sailors asked to stay on farms and would repay their hosts with their ration coupons, tea, butter, sugar and petrol. We would always take them to visit the Waitomo Caves – I have autographs from three of our billets during this time. The Chaplin at the Missions to Seamen headquarters sent a letter (on the official stationery) to each family thanking them for the wonderful hospitality extended to the visitors. A letter addressed to my family is now at the Te Kuiti Museum. In 1939 Te Kuiti formed the Home Guard and WWSA (World War II). During the evenings and weekends we would group together at the local Council Rooms to make camouflage nets with khaki twine. As a 19-year-old, when I joined the Army, all recruits were sent to Hamilton to register and to have medical and dental examinations. I think back to these medical examinations, the women were asked to undress and march before two male doctors; they were checking our body shapes to make sure we were women. (No women doctors there 75 years ago!) Having passed the test, we were sent on to Papakura Army Camp and then taken to a tailor in Auckland’s Symonds Street to be measured for our serge uniforms, a tailored jacket and skirt.
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WORL D
WAR
I I
The six weeks of training consisted of physical drill (press-ups, route marches) as physical fitness was an important aspect of the course. A lasting memory was enduring freezing cold showers every morning! The entire environment had to be kept clean and tidy and, to our amusement, both then and now, was the ‘Emu Parade’. Each recruit was given a 4ft long pole with a nail at one end and a rubbish bag. We formed a line and paraded around the grounds poking at the rubbish on the ground and slipping it off the nail into the rubbish bag. Of course it was natural to bob your head as you did your duty… hence the tag ‘emu’. The recreation hall was huge; plenty of space to play table tennis. One evening, while waiting for a table, a soldier asked me where I was from. I replied “Te Kuiti”. “Oh,” he said “that was the town we went through where we had a six hour delay.” He went on to tell a story of the Te Kuiti township putting on a dance with a magnificent supper where all the soldiers were partnered. I could tell the soldier that it was my farewell party when I left to join the Army. The evening was hosted by the WWSA (Women’s War Service Auxiliary). My friends organised the function and my sister Gladys played the piano. My sister was a magnificent pianist. When the troop trains stopped at Te Kuiti at 6:00 p.m. for an hour’s stop (to take on water and coal for the steam engine to climb the Raurimu Spiral), the RSA men delivered a piano to the Railway Station so that Gladys could play all the lovely war songs. The Mãori Battalion all sang along. It was always a sad event when our local boys joined the train at Te Kuiti to travel to Auckland to go overseas. As the train pulled away from the station, the soldiers would throw little notes with their names on out the window. Years later, I attended a Girl Guide Reunion and reconnected with a friend called Gwen Ferris; in chatting to her I said, “the last time we met, you took an address from a soldier as the train left Te Kuiti”. Gwen told me that she wrote to ‘her soldier’ for over three years, he was a prisoner-of-war. When he returned to New Zealand, Gwen and ‘her soldier’ were married and lived in Hamilton. The huge canteen at the camp served the three battalions and trainees before they travelled overseas. Thousands and thousands of personnel went through Papakura Army Camp. Dinner was served at 5:00 p.m. sharp but by early evening we were hungry again and would go to the canteen to buy barley sugars or Maderia cake. Consequently we all put on weight and when we returned to the tailor for a second uniform fitting we were
60th Battery Motutapu Island during World War II
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Sheer Magnificence
36
This spectacular photograph, dated 9 March 1957, depicts Tasman Glacier in all its glory. The only person identified amongst the Group Travel tour group is Robert Reynolds who is crouching in the front with the Brownie camera around his neck. Courtesy: R. Reynolds
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F E AT UR E
Holiday Jobs Malcolm Smith
D
iscussions about the ‘education system’ are usually in reference to primary and secondary school education. Should it be more correctly called the ‘schooling system’? We certainly are educated in schools, but most of our learning actually takes place outside of the classroom. For example, the majority of New Zealand five-year-olds can speak the complex English language well before starting school. By working out the number of hours in a year and the annual hours a student spends at school, pupils are only in class for little more than ten percent of the year. My school holiday jobs - all nine of them - were a valuable source of my education outside of the classroom.
Chicory weeding
As an 11-year-old, my first job was weeding chicory. In the thirties and forties, coffee was, seemingly, unavailable in New Zealand. You just didn’t see it. Instead we had Essence of Coffee and Chicory in the square-shaped bottles. For many decades, close to the south-east corner of the intersection of Lincoln Road and Lyttelton Street, Christchurch, stood a narrow cream-coloured weatherboard building, three or four storeys high. It was quite a landmark. This was the drying kiln of the Canterbury Chicory Works, owned by a Mr Roberts whose son Keith was in my Standard Five class at Spreydon School. It was in 1940 that Keith asked about five of us if we would like a job. We would climb onto the back of Mr Roberts’s flat deck truck and be driven 10 kilometres to a paddock of chicory at Prebbleton. ‘Weeding’ was not quite the right word as our main task was to thin the very young plants. (Chicory plants are rather like small parsnips.) We did the work on our hands and knees using a home-made knife made out of a 7-inch length of hoop iron, bent and with a handle made of a bit of thick rubber hose; in those days there was no plastic, except perhaps hard Bakelite. With a scooping motion we cut a 3-inch gap in the thickly sown seedlings to give the remaining plants more room to grow. I learnt about individual differences amongst the weeders as we each had our own row and the variations in style and speed of work was very obvious. In the next paddock was a horse that produced methane, both noisily and frequently, an unexpected source of mirth to hard-case ‘townie’ boys.
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F EAT U R E
On a poultry farm
My second holiday job, an after school as well as holiday job, was at Mac Craig’s poultry farm opposite West Spreydon School. ‘Uncle’ Mac had been an army cook in France in the Great War. He could certainly cook porterhouse steak, which he did on an enamel plate in his Moffat electric oven. Electric ovens were still quite uncommon in 1941. He was a bachelor and I had the run of his house. I tried to play the harmonium in his front room. I got as far as playing God Save The King with one finger and two mistakes. Mac was a keen racegoer and had copies of the Turf Register. I was a good reader and pored over sections of the book. I was interested in words and was fascinated by the names of the racehorses of the time such as Indianapolis, Roi l’Or (invariably pronounced “Royal Law”), Harold Logan, Bronze Eagle, Peggoty (a trotter) and Certissimus. We got to the point where I would pick, from The Christchurch Press, winners for the eight races at the Addington Races and pit these against the eight Mac picked. I would quite often win the threepence we contested. I learnt the routines of a poultry farm - collecting eggs from under both docile and aggressive hens, scattering wheat over the yellow wheat straw in the many fowl houses, filling the troughs with mash, supplying oyster grit to the hens, topping up the hoppers, shredding silver beet using an old manual chaff cutter (a two-man job), and putting fresh straw in the henhouses. I cleaned eggs. I learnt to snap the necks of culled hens, and to pluck them. I saw the miracle of chicks coming out of their shells in the warm dark incubator shed. I remember being impressed with the strength and technique of the men who carried, on their backs, huge sacks of wheat and pollard from their flat-deck trucks to the bins. And I learnt about mice. Mac grew many rows of silver beet fertilised by liberal amounts of chook manure. This produced lots of stinging nettle in and between the rows. When weeding these rows I learnt that if I boldly grabbed bunches of nettles I got fewer stings than if I cautiously moved my hands among those feared weeds. Is there an allegory there? I was paid little, a paltry sum you might say, especially compared with a couple of friends who delivered, from the wire baskets above the front wheels of their bikes, the city’s afternoon newspaper, The Christchurch Star. But I was helping out my cash-strapped family with eggs and dressed poultry. I had my first close experience with dogs. Mac had a couple of very friendly wire-haired terriers. I would take them, from time to time, across the grounds of the school opposite for them to have a swim in the Heathcote River. One afternoon I was running back with them when I tripped over and landed heavily on Bonnie, who bit me rather savagely on my shoulder. I had the scar for many years. So, I also learnt a bit about dogs. The team is the First XV, 1946, of the Christchurch West High School. Christchurch Technical College was later merged with CWHS to become Hagley College, on the CWHS site. Inset: The author Malcolm Smith aged 18.
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CHOICE
Picture Perfect Kairakau Beach is photographed from the cliffs on the opposite side of the river overlooking the beach. Although the exact year is unknown, the Central Hawke’s Bay Settlers Museum estimate a date prior to 1920 judging by the construction on this pretty beach, just 30 minutes drive east of Waipawa. The man on the cliff edge surrounded by four or five dogs - if you look very closely - is believed to be Mr Limbrick. Central Hawke’s Bay Settlers Museum Ref: BE104
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