Dingemans, Patrick (Pat) Noel Interview

13th September [2020], and I’m at Patrick Dingemans’ place … very pleased to interview him on behalf of the Knowledge Bank. Patrick, good morning.

Good morning, Jim.

Patrick, I’d like to hear about your life in Hawke’s Bay … what you’ve done; you’ve been a fantastic man for the community, and it’ll be interesting to hear what you have to say this morning.

Well, good morning. My name is Patrick Noel Dingemans … Noel after my grandfather … and I was born on 13th June in 1939, three months before the Second World War started. I was the middle child of five; I had two older brothers and two younger sisters, so I was the classic mug in the middle.

I lived in Steyning in Sussex which is in the United Kingdom; had my primary school education there, and then I went to a prep [preparatory] school called Brighton College, so I was actually at that school for ten years – five years at the prep school and five years at the secondary school. And they’re called public schools in England.

Increasingly as I grew up I was frustrated by the social system in England, although my father was a general practitioner – he was George Albert; and my mother was a nurse – she was Marjorie Irene. They met at the Hove Children’s Hospital in Sussex. So I was educated in England; I decided I wanted to go farming, so I went and worked on farms in Worcestershire and in Sussex before I went to Cirencester, which is the Royal Agricultural College in Gloucestershire. Both Peter and Norman, my older brothers, were in the Royal Navy, and Norman, my second brother, was captain of a submarine which was based in Sydney. Once a year the Royal Navy ships would come over and exercise with the New Zealand Navy, and Norman took HMS [Her Majesty’s Ship] Andrew, the submarine, into Timaru. And as with all these naval characters, they get invited to drinks everywhere; and he met a Mrs Hervey in Timaru, who was one of the sort-of five ships of Canterbury. [Refers to history of Hervey family arrival in Canterbury on one of the first immigrant ships] And he said, not knowing that, that he had a brother in England who was thinking of coming to New Zealand; what’s the story? He said, “Well a friend of mine is Chairman of the New Zealand Meat Producers’ Board, John Ormond – write to him.” So Norman wrote to John Ormond who then wrote back and said, “Well I’m going to be in England in December ’59; tell your brother to write to me there, and I’ll meet him.” So I did that, and the net result was that I met him in December 1959. And then in June 1960, Sir John – he became knighted – and Judy Ormond, his wife, came to England to launch a ship for the Shaw Savill line. And I met them both, and the net result was that I was very kindly invited by Bill Dawes of the New Zealand Shipping Line to be an ex-numerary … I think that’s the right word … member of his ship, the MV [Merchant Vessel] Sussex, which was very auspicious because I grew up in Sussex.

So then I left England on September 6th 1960 to [for] New Zealand, and it took six weeks to get to New Zealand from England. We crossed a dead flat Atlantic, filled up with oil at Curaçao … there’s a Shell refinery there … and then came on to New Zealand, and it took four weeks to cross the Pacific. We were doing four hundred nautical miles a day; and now going to England you can do it in fifteen hours. But we saw one island called Vanavana all the way across during those four weeks.

I arrived in New Zealand, and stayed at Wallingford which is below Waipukurau, for a fortnight. John had written to me in England and said, “What do you want to do when you get here?” And he said, “Sheep farming – great fun, but unless you inherit the land, almost impossible; dairy farming – not quite sure whether you’d fit in there; horticulture seems small, but it’s a good way of getting started with very little money”; which certainly fitted my bill.

So he got me a job at Wilson’s Nurseries which is in Pakowhai Road, and it’s still nurseries but no longer called Wilson’s. So I started there after my first fortnight; but I was hoeing rose trees, and I thought, you know, ‘I really haven’t come twelve thousand miles just to hoe rose trees.’ I met a chap who’d been at Cirencester before, and he was actually about to go back to England; and he’d been herd-testing. So between going up to do the herd testing in the Waikato, I got a job at Birds Eye harvesting peas with a Fordson tractor, driving in what’s called an FMC. [Food Machinery Corporation] Birds Eye used to ship these machines between England and New Zealand each growing season, so the same machines were harvesting in Lincoln and then they’d be put on a ship and brought out to New Zealand and harvest in Hawke’s Bay, and go back and forth. They’ve now got much more sophisticated machines doing that job. But I did that for a couple of months and then I went up to the Waikato to do the herd testing. And when you are herd testing you get an initial training for three months. I was based at Matamata; so the herd tester just goes in, takes samples for the evening milking and the following morning, and then mixes the two together, then separates the fat from the milk; and this information goes to the farmer.

One of the side effects of that was that in my training I visited about sixty different farms, and then I was given an area. And the guy in Hamilton said, “Well where do you want to go?” And I said, “I don’t mind where I go as long as I’m near a squash court.” [Quiet chuckle] So he sent me to Manurewa which was ideal. But as I was saying, one of the side bonuses was that I was the fly on the wall in ninety different marriages, ‘cause the herd tester’s just the herd tester, and so the couples would just behave normally. So it’s the best insight into marriage I’ve ever had in my life, was just to be a fly on the wall in ninety different houses for six months.

When I was herd testing I thought, ‘Well maybe John Ormond’s description of dairy farming isn’t quite what I’m finding myself’, so I decided I wanted to have a look at New Zealand farming and get a job on a dairy farm, which I did, near Te Aroha. I lasted there a month. And when I thought, ‘No, this isn’t the path I want to follow’, I rang John Ormond and said, “Look, I want to come down and have a chat with you.” And he said, “Fine.” So I drove down, had a chat with him; and he said, “Well your father and I had a chat about it when you said you wanted to go dairy farming, and we decided you had to find out for yourself.” Which I did. I know if my father had rung me and said, “John Ormond thinks you’re an idiot to go dairy farming”, I’d still be dairy farming; most probably out of sheer bloody-mindedness, but never mind.

I came back to Hawke’s Bay and I went back to Wilson’s Nurseries. And I then leased a little section which had a glasshouse on it, and another glasshouse with a tin roof; so I got a contract with Wattie’s to grow tomato seedlings in the glasshouse. I didn’t know quite what to do with this other building with the tin roof, so I got a book out of the library on mushroom growing. And this absolutely grabbed my interest. It was a combination of growing but also the scientific side of what you have to do to grow mushrooms; and the net result was that I then rented a building out at Pakipaki which was part of the freezing works – Thomas Borthwick’s had a freezing works at Pakipaki, and it was very severely damaged in 1931 in the earthquake. And the net result of that was that instead of rebuilding Pakipaki, Thomas Borthwick’s came to an arrangement with Hawke’s Bay Farmers Meat Company at Whakatu to have forty percent of their kill.

So not knowing what was going to happen in the future – the links that I’ll tell you later – I established the mushroom farm. My first crop was growing on the ground; there was a large three thousand square foot building. Basically with mushrooms you’re growing mushrooms in a medium of simple sugar, which is created by composting horse manure and straw and chicken manure and things like that. What you’re trying to do is create a simple carbohydrate so the mushroom mycelium can grow through the compost, and then you put what’s called a casing layer on top, which is peat and lime. And if you can give the mycelium a brain that grows into there and thinks, ‘wow, there’s no food here so I’d better fruit.’ So the mycelium is like the apple tree and the mushroom itself is like the apple on an apple tree, but it’s a fungus.

I did that for nine years, during which time I went back to see my sister Jenny’s wedding, or be part of that. I was only there for about seven days, but I went to the Littlehampton Glasshouse Crop Research Institute and got the latest bit of research from them. And like an idiot I tried to convert the whole farm to supplementing the compost with sugar. And the theory there was that the thermophilic bacteria that worked on the compost used up some of the nutrients in the compost to do that work. By adding the sugar you gave a carbohydrate to get the combination of the composting going, but it also developed a thing called fire-fang which is like a sort-of white cloud in the compost, and that was ideal for a mite to grow, americanus pigmaforis, and the net result of that was that my half a ton of mushrooms a week that we were picking, just shrank and shrank and shrank, and in the end we had to put a line under it.

But in the meantime, in December ’67 I met Cherry Noel Reeve. I’d been invited to have drinks with the Reeve family ‘cause they had a guest from Singapore, a cousin of Cherry’s. Cherry’s mother introduced me to Cherry, and we got engaged eight days later. We’d both been looking for a while, and Cherry described it as like putting on an old pair of shoes. So we didn’t get married until August ’68, and the net result was that we had four children, Tristan, Nicholas, Robin and Sophie, so we had our family spread over from 1972 to 1978, and they are now spread all over the world – Tristan in Dunedin, Nick in Singapore, Robin in Stockholm and Sophie in Vienna. Tristan is a barista, Nick’s a lawyer, Robin is a dancer/choreographer, and Sophie is a Feldenkrais practitioner. Some people have a sort-of blank expression when I say that, but it’s basically working with the body, and Sophie’s speciality is children and helping them to learn how to use their muscles; and Sophie largely works with children with cerebral palsy. She works all over Europe, and at the moment she’s still able to move around Europe, but she was shut down for a while. But she and her husband Malcolm are based in Vienna; she’s now able to travel again, now that some of the Covid restrictions have been lifted. So that’s from the family side of things.

And why I came to New Zealand – my father was actually a South African. He was born in Grahamstown, and his father was a Professor of languages, and he and two others were actually the founders of Rhodes University in Grahamstown; you’ve got the Rhodes scholarships that many New Zealanders have gone to Oxford for, over the years.

When I had to put the line under the mushrooms I went to Whakatu and got a job in the freezers. And I found out that I was very lucky to have got that job because it was just the start of the season, and normally there was a queue of people who had been there before, but anyway, I got a job in there. And after about a year my brain was beginning to addle, so I said to the company, I said, “Look, can you give me a job that isn’t going to addle my brain?” Which they did. But during that first year and a bit I was at union meetings, and some of the procedures that were going on there weren’t quite right. So occasionally I would get up and say to Bill Bennett, the chairman, “You can’t do that; you can’t accept an amendment of a motion if it’s a direct opposite.” And I would challenge them, and whenever I got up the tables would thump, and they were all convinced I was a company plant, ‘cause I had an English accent I suppose, I don’t know. And Harry Williams was the vice-president, so if I get up and tell the president that he couldn’t do certain things, he said, “Right – the chair’s been challenged”; and Harry Williams would take over; and it wasn’t, “is the motion an opposite to the motion?’ It was ‘do you vote for Bennett or Dingemans?’ And of course Dingemans never won, but it was good fun … well, not fun as such, but I mean it was [chuckle] very interesting.

The net result was that I gradually worked through things at Whakatu, and I became a superintendent of the by-products. We had six superintendents looking after the plant underneath the plant manager, and so by-products was all the materials that weren’t attached to the carcass when it was sold; so hearts and livers and things like that. And then what you couldn’t sell as hearts and livers etcetera, you then rendered down into meat meal or tallow; and so that’s why it was called the by-product production. And occasionally we’d do a trial; I would choose to do something as a trial and it went completely wrong. In one of them we were trying to make lungs more dense so we could ship them to England, ‘cause they were very fluffy and full of air; and one occasion we had about three feet of lungs all over the floor. I apologised to Tony [?] who was the assistant works manager then, and said, “Look, I’m sorry, we’ve got on top of it but it was a bit of a mess.” He said, “Pat, the person who doesn’t make mistakes isn’t doing anything.” So I’ve used that all my life as a sort-of … when things turn up [go] belly up; but the net result was that I was the superintendent there.

And then Whakatu closed. There was a lot of politics going on in the meat industry, and Whakatu had to buy the Gear Meat Company in Wellington to get a licence for the Takapau Freezing Works. Graeme Lowe jumped up and down and said, “I want to build Oringi, and I shouldn’t have to buy another plant”; so the meat industry was delicensed. So Whakatu bought Gear Meat Company to build Takapau; Graeme Lowe built Oringi – just like that; and the $10 million it cost Whakatu most probably was the seeds of its demise. There had been a swap between Williams & Kettle and Hawke’s Bay Farmers Meat Company of thirty percent of the shares to protect each other from a takeover; but Williams & Kettle then approached Whakatu and said, “Look, we can’t afford to have this amount of money tied up – do you want to buy us out?” And Whakatu said, “No, we can’t.” So they sold their thirty percent share to Wattie’s; and Wattie’s was very involved in the meat industry then, and the net result was that the industry got together and decided to close Whakatu, and the two and a half million sheep and seven hundred and fifty thousand cattle would spread over everybody else.

But at the same time Robert Muldoon reduced the subsidies for sheep to nothing, and so the kill just disappeared practically; and to no effect other than Whakatu was closed. Weddel, the owners of Tomoana, took over Tomoana North as they called it; and they had to do that to satisfy the unions because Whakatu was covered by one union and Tomoana by another, so by calling Whakatu ‘Tomoana North’ the union at Tomoana could work at Whakatu. And so I was kept on with Peter Murton. Peter Murton was the chief engineer and I was the plant supervisor, so of the two thousand people that were at Whakatu, other than the office people Peter and I were the only two that [were] kept on. And progressively over the six years between Whakatu’s closure and Tomoana’s closure, I was doing various jobs; I was the plant supervisor there; I then went to Tomoana to sort out the problem in the stores area. The company was having to pay the head office about $7 million a year on interest of stock, some of which had been sitting there for ten, fifteen years; so they were paying interest on it. So we got rid of all of those, and changed the method of purchasing for various items so that we only drew from stores on the plant when things were needed, and the original supplier owned it until we took it. So when Tomoana went under – an example was the sodium sulphide which is used in the skins; say there was fifty tons of it sitting there, we would draw say, half a ton or a ton a week; and when Tomoana closed the owners of the sodium sulphide were not unsecured creditors – they just came in and took it away again. So it actually worked; and the accountant at Tomoana when I was first given that job said, “Oh, you’ll never do it.” I had to reduce the interest payment to head office from $7 million to $1 million, and I said, “Well I’ll do it in a year.” He said, “No you won’t.” And I said, “Well you’ll take the whole department for lunch at a pub if we do”; and we did it. So he did live up to it and we went to the … oh, I can’t remember what pub it was, but we had a free lunch on Tomoana, and one guy there said, “It’s the first free beer I’ve ever had on Weddel.” But never mind …

Prior to Tomoana closing, I was moved back to Whakatu to be what was called the Agreement manager. A gentleman called Gordon Kinnear who was going to be buying the Whakatu plant. The freezers on the far side of the road had already been sold to a company called Whakatu Cold Stores, and Gordon Kinnear was going to create an industrial park out of the main plant. And so I was the agreement manager to make that happen, and I was the plant manager there whilst it was happening. But then when Tomoana went under the flow of four thousand tons of meat from Tomoana to Hawke’s Bay Industrial Park stopped; and the net result was I was made redundant there. During my time at Whakatu I was actually made redundant four times, but I recovered three times, still working for the new owners each time; but the fourth one got me. That was in 1998, and I then went into real estate – and that’s another story, but the whole process of the meat industry was fascinating.

One of the things we had actually done, we’d used the contract for freezing that Weddel had, and when Tomoana closed there was a whole lot of Weddel meat sitting in the freezers at Whakatu. And the way it worked was that the freezer workers were still employed by Weddel, but the storage was done by Hawke’s Bay Industrial Park, and once a fortnight a cheque was swapped between Hawke’s Bay Industrial Park and Weddel. But the liquidator decided to bounce the cheque paying for the wages of the people at Whakatu; we didn’t bounce the cheque from Weddel; we paid them for the wages, but Weddel wouldn’t pay the storage fees. So Gordon Kinnear said to the liquidator, “Pay up.” And he said, “No, no, you’re an unsecured creditor.” He said, “We’ll just have a look at the storage agreement; if you don’t pay the storage within a fortnight I have the right to take a lien on $15 million of your meat sitting in my freezer.” And after a bit of bluster they paid up; but all we had done was we’d used the Weddel agreement and changed the name from Weddel New Zealand to Hawke’s Bay Industrial Park; so in actual fact the liquidator got caught – he was trying to be a bit too tricky. The net result from that was that I then had a career in the real estate industry for about eighteen years.

Another side of my life has been sport, and in the early sixties before I met Cherry, Jim Newbigin who’s interviewing me now, and a group of others came to an agreement with the Hastings District Council to build a squash club at Anderson Park. And so there was quite a lot of free labour there; to this day I feel guilty about it, but when we were laying the drains Graham Waugh was at the bottom of the trench laying the sewer pipes, and I was kicking the loose earth down on top of him, and I still feel guilty about that. But it was good fun.

I used to play quite a lot of squash there, and Jim Newbigin was a very wily player; but one of the main things was that every Tuesday night I played Johnny Moffett, who’s an orchardist out at Fernhill now. We were just about the same – we’d always go to five games, and he’d win one week and I’d win the next, so it was all good hard stuff. And it was about eight o’clock at night so we had the whole place to ourselves. So I had squash, and then I played tennis; the real estate was fairly hopeless for sport because you had open homes at weekends and things like that, so one of the other things was that I used to play quite a lot of cricket when I was at school, and I had one game in New Zealand but it got in the way of the mushrooms, unfortunately.

But when I met Cherry, her father, Dr Tony Reeve, had started a game in 1958 at Hereworth. He’d said to the headmaster at the time, “It’s most unfair the way that the Second XI never got a special day.” And the net result of that was that Pat somebody-or-other … I can’t remember his surname … said to him, “Well there’s the pitch, there’s the pavilion, you organise a game.” So in 1958 the first Dr Reeve against the Second XI at Hereworth was played; and this year is the sixty-second game on November 15th. I married Cherry in 1968, and I’ve either played or umpired in that game ever since.

One of the memorial things for Cherry, who died unfortunately on November 2nd last year, in 2019, was that we [vehicle noise] planted a double flowering cherry tree by the pavilion in memory of Cherry; and so there’s going to be a brass plaque which we’re unveiling on November 15th. Whilst we’re onto memorials, I saw in the paper that the Te Mata Park was going to plant sixty thousand native trees on [in] the park, so I approached them and said, “Well look, if I can get a minimum of thirty kowhai trees funded, could I plant a grove of kowhai trees in memory of Cherry?” And they said yes. There’s to be no memorial as such, but it will be on the website that this grove is in memory of Cherry. So we’ve actually planted fifty-six kowhai trees in her memory, and they were all contributed by five or six members of the family or friends, and so I got my thirty covered but we actually ended up planting fifty-six, which was great. The person who wrote a book about Cherry’s grandparents, she supported them from England – she lives in Muswell Hill in London – and all the family have contributed, and the friends; so that’s a good memory for Cherry.

Another part of my life has been a connection with the Anglican church. I was at a school in Brighton called Brighton College, and the chapel was right in the middle of the school, and it became an important part of my life. And when I came to New Zealand and I was getting the mushroom farm started, I’d go to St Matthew’s – Pakipaki was in St Matthew’s parish boundary – and I’d go to Evensong there. And some people may remember there used to be a pie cart in Railway Road, so my Sunday evening cooking was pie, potatoes and peas there.

In the fullness of time I was on the vestry at St Matthew’s, and I also became the Synod’s person for St Matthew’s. When we sold the land at Pakipaki and bought Cherry’s parents’ house from them in Havelock, we all moved to St Luke’s Anglican Church, Havelock North; we happened to move just before the annual general meeting at St Luke’s, and although I resigned as a Synods person for St Matthew’s, I was actually elected to be the Synods person for St Luke’s; and St Luke’s is a fairly well-established, reasonably conservative parish. But when you are a Synods person you can say things sometimes – and maybe somebody doesn’t agree with what you say. And so I was Synods person for quite a few years for Havelock; and then I moved a motion challenging the church to update its translation of the gospels, because some of the things claimed in the gospels are quite impossible to actually have any reality in this world. And somebody challenged me, saying I had no right to say that. And I said, “Well, I do actually, because I’m elected as a Synods person, and if you don’t like what I say you can vote me off.” So that person then organised things and I was voted off, so I was blackballed off the vestry and St Luke’s for about five years. But they all moved on, and I got back on in five years; so other than those five years I’ve been involved in vestries since about 1965, so I’m one of the old codgers ever since in the vestry. But there is certainly a need for institutional memory, and that’s one of the things I can provide.

Well that’s about me; it covers my family, my sport and my religion. I think I’m most probably an outsider; Reverend David Dennis invited the vestry to make their statements, and I made various statements that I didn’t believe in the resurrection as such because in actual fact it wasn’t mentioned for about thirty years after Jesus was crucified, and things like that. But there was an American in the congregation that day, and he said to David as we were going out and shaking hands, “Gee – doesn’t believe in the resurrection!” And David Dennis said, “Oh well, we’ve got some outriders in the church.” And that was how he covered me.

But there’s a theologian who was the Bishop of Newark, called Bishop John Spong – my mother’s maiden name was Spong – and John used to tour to New Zealand promoting his books. Cherry and I met him at St James’ one year, and it turns out that seven generations back we’ve got the same grandparents; so Jo McGlashan, who has been involved with the Presbyterian church, when she found that out she just turned to me and said, “That fits.” [Chuckles] So it’s most probably not a very good advertisement for the fundamentalist side of the church, but I think it still has a lot to give to the community.

Well that’s a run-down of me.

Right. Your life as a real estate agent, that was eighteen years?

Yeah.

That’s fantastic, isn’t it?

Mmm. Yes, it was very interesting actually, because Whakatu was two thousand people … I think it was two and a half thousand people. Whakatu used to put £500,000 a week into the community, and Tomoana’s was about £350,000. With my experience at Whakatu and the unions there – I was actually the delegate in the carton freezers for a while, and that had a few people with their eyebrows raised – and my work in the church … you’re working with people all the time, and real estate is people; and so I had my training for real estate actually at Whakatu and in the church.

Whakatu … okay, the unions were particularly strong, and maybe caused some of the problems in the meat industry, but when I found my brain addling when I was in the freezers I asked for a job where I could use my brains. Too often people on the chain … you know, forty-eight lambs a minute would go past one person, and if you do that for two million sheep a year it gets pretty monotonous. And the thought of a break, or ‘one out, all out’ was the attitude of the freezers. It didn’t help there, but I knew from my own experience why some of the actions happened, and I think I had a sort-of grudging empathy with and from the union.

An interesting thing there was that twenty-five years after Whakatu closed I was invited by the union for a celebration of Whakatu, and so we all met on the corner of Station Road and Railway Road. And at that stage it hadn’t been demolished; but on another occasion that we met, the union invited me as the only management representative to help organise the event, and also talk at it. But on another occasion when we were talking about the closure of Whakatu I was able to say, “Well, you know – two o’clock, six o’clock, we would meet in the freezers and load out carcasses to be at the ship by half past seven in Napier.” And now – because both the slaughter boards have been demolished and the biggest cost in demolition is getting rid of stuff – those two buildings are now underneath the container wharf at Napier. So I was able to say, “Well, exports are still going over part of Whakatu.” But I certainly found my time at Whakatu, and in the church, very helpful in my real estate career.

You had the contacts?

Yeah. And also the ability to talk with people, because real estate is people. I mean, yeah, you’re selling houses, but people buy the houses or sell the houses, and unless you can relate to people you may as well forget it.

In 1982 – my father didn’t come for our wedding, but my mother did – and in 1982 when we’d got four kids, we all went home. I was still at Whakatu at that stage and we had nine weeks there. Jo and Alan – Jo’s my youngest sister – lent us a VW [Volkswagen] and we did 3,000 miles in nine weeks, with six of us, three in belts on the back and one in the parcel shelf at the back in the VW.

This was in New Zealand?

No in England, we went back to England in ’82 . My father had never met Cherry. By that time we’d had four children, so that was good.

You finished up in the right part of the world, Hawke’s Bay.

One of the things … a philosophy I’ve always had is that if our children are involved in any particular activity … and to mind is soccer; at one stage all four children were playing soccer … so I was secretary of the Havelock North Junior Soccer Club for six years. And it was quite interesting because I’d played soccer in my prep school, but never played serious soccer after that. Tristan, our eldest son, said to Cherry once, “Dad’s a keen coach but he doesn’t really know a lot about soccer”, which was true. Tristan actually got into the Under-13 Reps for Hawke’s Bay. But it was good to be able to be involved in the children’s games and refereeing; I got my head round the refereeing all right. So I had this philosophy of being involved with things that the children were in if they needed parental help; so the soccer was one example of that.

And the Scout movement – I was a Cub and a Scout at my school, and so when the kids were of the age to be in the Cubs, I was a Cub Master; but I was slightly out of my depth to a certain extent, in trying to think of games to play etcetera. But what fascinated me was that the obsession there was for licensing, and people being interviewed whether you were suitable or not. To a certain extent the Scout movement’s history [there] was a few problems there; but I enjoyed that and I did it for about four years.

My mother, Marjorie, came out in 1968 for our wedding, but my father who was the ship’s doctor on a [an] aircraft carrier during the Second World War, had a bit of a fixation about flying, so he didn’t come for our wedding. And in 1982 when all the children had been born and Sophie was three, I was able to arrange to be actually away from Whakatu for eleven weeks. And we had nine weeks in England with my parents; and we’d go out on trips and then come back. The children were settled, because the house was called ‘Grenafin’ in England, and I’d called the house at Pakipaki when I shifted it ‘Grenafin’ as well. When we moved it I sent a telegram back, as that was the way of communicating: ‘Grenafin New Zealand is’.

But in 1982 my sister and her husband lent us an orange Veedub, [Volkswagen] and the children were small enough to be able to get three across the back seat with belts strapped round the seats, and the fourth one was in the parcel shelf at the back. So we actually did three thousand miles around the UK [United Kingdom] in this VW. Alan, Jo’s husband, couldn’t believe we’d survived that long; but it was great because we were able to visit cousins and we went to them in Dorset. And then we even went up to the Lake District; an aunt of Cherry’s was up there [at] Windermere. So that was great fun driving around there; going up the M1 and the M6 and stopping at these various service centres having breakfast. We actually left about five o’clock in the morning, and we got to Windermere at two o’clock in the afternoon, so it was [the] early days of motorway driving.

Oh, politics, yes – my leaning in politics has been to the right, and not vastly to the right – I’ve always felt that I was a bit of the left wing conscience of the National Party sometimes. But my first introduction to the National Party was in the Pukahu Hall. And Dick Harrison was the Member of Parliament for Hawke’s Bay then and I met him there and Ian McPhail was the Hawke’s Bay chairperson. And I became quite involved in the National Party in both the Hawke’s Bay electorate and the Havelock North electorate. One interesting point was that Robert Muldoon was a fairly … contentious politician might be the phrase to use … and I felt he’d gone completely off the rails. So in 1984 when a possibility of an election was coming up, at that stage I was actually chairperson of the Havelock North National Party; and I said I wouldn’t stand for election for any office this year because the only way the National Party was going to have the guts to get rid of Muldoon was to lose an election. And it went down like a lead balloon as you could imagine, but in actual fact he did lose the 1984 election and Lange came in. But it was the ’72 that he’d lost, and then Rowling won; and Muldoon literally picked up the National Party by its bootstraps and won again in 1975. But he’d become such a megalomaniac by the time we got to ’84 that he was a danger to New Zealand, I felt.

One thing I haven’t covered is when I leased the land at Pakipaki it was owned by a company called Hastings Industrial Park, so I paid rent to them for a couple of years and in the end I was able to buy the shares of Hastings Industrial Park. And there were some very interesting people on that board, so when I made an offer with my accountant, who was a chap called Des Moss, there were some shares in an office block which was on the corner of Avenue Road East and Karamu Road – they were called Dalesford Buildings – so Des Moss organised the day we did the share swap to sell those buildings. And the net result was I was able, with some help from my grandfather, to buy the land. Then when I first went there, there were some rooms at Pakipaki which I turned into my bach.

And I was starting to think progressively, you know, I needed to get a house onto the property, so I went to Southland Road and saw a two-storey house there; and a chap called Alec Royal who was a builder was working quite close. So I said, “Look, can you come up and have a look at this? Would that shift to Pakipaki?” And he said, “Oh, I don’t know; but if you want a get a cheap house, this house over here is the White Brothers”, who built a lot of flats [and] were getting rid of the building. So I actually bought the house which is four thousand square metres, and a double door fridge and an Esse stove for £200; but I had to shift it. So we took all the tiles off; and you can imagine, it was built in 1912 and this was 1967 so there was an awful lot of dust there. And whilst we had the tiles off we had the most incredible thunder storm, and it washed all the rafters clean, but they [it] all went down into the cracks in the ceilings; but at least when we demolished the roof, we were able to be handling clean wood.

I’d been advised by somebody that if I was going to shift the house I needed to get a carpenter who knew what he was doing; and a chap called Ken Crabtree – I can’t remember how I got on to him – but he said, “Well, a rafter was measured from the roof to the middle, and they went down and cut it and took it up”; it was not all the computer cutting now. So he said, “What you need to do is on each change of roofline you put A1-2-3-4-5, B1-2-3-4-5 etcetera, so when you want to put it back up again you put it up in the order that you’ve written on the rafters. And if there’s a rafter that’s got a lot of worm in it or something like that, well we put in a new rafter there of tanalised pine.” So that was very helpful there. But … the combination of the mites that I talked about earlier and the time involved in re-establishing this house, it most probably helped to hasten the demise of the mushroom farm. But it was a very interesting process, and I’d moved into it about two months before I met Cherry, so everything has a plan.

Everything worked in pretty well, didn’t it?

Mmm. Somebody told me … who’s the lady in charge?

Linda?

Linda – yes; that they’ve got a recording of Cherry when she gave a talk on the book that Jocelyn Robson wrote about Cherry’s grandparents, so I actually listened to it a couple of nights ago. So it was great to sort-of hear Cherry’s voice.

What I’d like to talk about is my cultural journey in one sense, within New Zealand. During the time of the mushroom farm I employed quite a few pickers and most of them lived in Pakipaki. This led to my involvement in the Houngarea marae, and that is the only publicly gazetted marae in Pakipaki. There were a total of five marae in Pakipaki – Houngarea, Mihiroa, Taraia … and I can’t remember the names of the other two; but three of them are still functioning as meeting houses.

As an aside of that, Cherry took me on my seventieth birthday to the Chateau [Tongariro] for a night; and then we stopped at Waiouru on the way to Wellington for part of that special weekend, and I spent a couple of hours reading the history of the 1800s. And there’s no doubt about it, that an awful lot of the land in New Zealand was stolen; but that’s another political matter to go on to.

The rest of my involvement with Houngarea was – I was asked to chair the building committee. The dining room was a fairly old building, and the cooking facilities were pots hanging from chains underneath [above] burning fires, and it really was in need of some event. So we tried various fund-raising events to raise money. About three years in a row we had like a garden fête on the marae at Pakipaki; and we had Maori bread … all sorts of things; and throwing the egg to each other – you kept on going back five feet and trying to get the egg as high as possible, and you dropped out once you broke the eggshell. But one of the highlights was we always used to finish off with a lolly scramble, and I managed to persuade somebody from Bridge Pa to fly over for the three years and do a lolly scramble from the air. I mean, OSH [Occupational Safety & Health] wouldn’t even let the plane get off the ground now with that sort of thing; but toffees raining down on kids – they thought it was great fun.

So we generated some funds and we put that into cattle to try and build up the funds, but unfortunately we got into a bit of a tangle there. So the net result was that when we moved to Havelock North in 1981 we didn’t really have a lot of funds to advance it; but after I moved to Havelock North the fund-raising continued, and there’s now a very good facility in the dining room and a very modern kitchen.

When we sold the farm in 1981 we bought Cherry’s family home and her parents modified a flat to be their retirement home; and so my involvement with Pakipaki dropped off. So it’s rather sad now – the only times we seem to go out to Pakipaki is for tangi of people who used to work with me, and that side of my cultural journey is sort of not as strong as it was.

We had a very interesting event. Cherry and I were married on 17th August in 1968, so on 17th August in 2018 we celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary. That was in August, and all the children came home at Christmas; and we managed to borrow houses here, there and everywhere. Everybody was home; what we hadn’t realised was that the kids had been working via emails and all sorts of things, and we were told to be ready to leave at such-and-such a time. And we got in the car and we drove out to Pakipaki and we went to the house that I shifted, which as I mentioned earlier, is a very high class B&B [Bed & Breakfast] called Hawthorne House. And we had a very pleasant afternoon tea there and the hosts there were very generous in the [with their] time; and fortunately we struck a time when there weren’t any other people there, so we had a good nostalgic walk round. And when Cherry died, we had a picture of all the children on the back of the service sheet; and also all the relatives that were there for that day out at Pakipaki at Hawthorne House.

And then we drove down the drive and then turned right, and we arrived at Houngarea marae. We were welcomed onto the marae, and because I think, the weather was a wee bit indifferent, we went into the meeting house and we were welcomed by Alf [?Peatman’s?] son, and Tristan replied in Maori and I claimed the right to reply as well so we had a formal event on the marae and then we went through to the new dining rooms and kitchens and had a very pleasant meal there.

It opened my eyes as a fairly new arrival into New Zealand about the bi-cultural aspects of New Zealand. At one stage I was on the marae committee, and when we were trying to raise these funds I found out that the Mihiroa marae had $37,000 ready for building their dining rooms; and I innocently, stupidly, suggested that they put that $37,000 into the Houngarea Marae and call it the Mihiroa Memorial whatever. I got well and truly told I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about – and I didn’t – and John Koko put me firmly in my place. You learn these things as you go along. So we had that great event there.

Oh, the other one I wanted to highlight was that when the new owners bought it after we sold at Pakipaki, the first people just lived in it. The second lot now have the Hawthorne Coffee; they changed the name of our house from Grenafin, which was the name of my parents’ house in England, to Hawthorne House. And it had very wide verandahs, and in the process of turning the house into an upper class or high-flying B&B they put ensuites in all the bedrooms and they used the wide verandahs for building the ensuites. That called to mind … and I’d completely forgotten about it and Cherry reminded me of it about two or three years ago … Nick, our second son, was having problems with monsters under his bed whenever he went to sleep, and this went on for quite a few weeks. And in the end Nick came out again and said, “There’s a monster under my bed”; so I went in, I had my 12-bore shotgun – not with a cartridge in it at that point – pulled the monster out from underneath the bed, through it through the window, and opened the window and then shot the 12-bore at the monster. I said, “There you are, we’ve killed the monster and we’ll never have any more problems.” And we didn’t, but it was one of those stories that has now become part of the family.

In February 2019, after we’d had our celebrations at Christmas 2018, Cherry was diagnosed to have secondary cancer in her liver, and the primary was established in the right colon. Unfortunately all the chemotherapy etcetera didn’t work in the end; we did have six months from the diagnosis, and Cherry died on 2nd November. All four children came back during June, July and August to see Cherry, and me, from all around the world. Cherry was able to enjoy them when she was still fine, but unfortunately, in the end she died. The kids all came back again in November, and on November 12th we had a funeral service for Cherry at St Luke’s, and there were over seven hundred people there. Cherry had such wide contacts that it boosted the family; all four children gave eulogies which was really inspiring.

Pat, that was in 2018, wasn’t it, when she died?

‘19.

Thank you, Pat.