Norman William Golding Vale

The New Zealand fire service and the Puhoi Heritage Museum lost a champion with the death of 95-year-old Norman Golding on May 20. Golding was a firefighter for more than 40 years, retiring as an Auckland divisional officer in 1988, and was the museum’s patron.

Born in Christchurch, he was the son of a railway worker. The family moved from depot to depot including Helensville, Tauramanui and Hastings, but after his father was killed in a railway accident in Wairoa, they settled in Auckland. The story goes that in Helensville, the train firemen used to drop coal to Norman when they saw him near the tracks with his trolley; coal that was used on the home fire. He was a butcher’s delivery boy while still at school and then started as a plumber’s apprentice. However, during World War

II he put his age up to 16 and joined the NZ Air Force. He was in Darwin when it was bombed and also spent time aerial mapping the islands of the South Pacific. But it soon emerged that his real passion was the fire service and he joined the then Auckland Metropolitan Fire Board in 1947. In an interview given a few years ago, he said, “There was nothing better than hearing the alarm bells screaming, jumping out of bed and into my protective clothes, then sliding down a wooden pole and into a fire truck.”

In 1963, when he was on duty at the Central Fire Station, a fire broke out in the Farmers Trading Company in Hobson Street. While extinguishing the massive flames, he fell four storeys. He was rushed to hospital and took a long time to recover from his injuries. The fire took 20 hours to extinguish and 32