Hastings Rotary Club Members Interview

It is the 19th June 2018. I’m interviewing three current members of the Hastings Rotary Club about the life and times of that club. It has been in existence now for ninety-four, coming up to ninety-five years. Now the three members – I have David Davidson, obstetrician; I have Brian James, stock and station agent; Graeme Richardson, pharmacy [pharmacist].  Would you like to start off, David, by telling us something about your impressions of …

David: Thank you, Frank. I came to Hastings in 1970, and in 1971 our neighbour, Hugh Mills, invited me to join Rotary, which was a complete mystery to me, I’d never seen or heard very much of Rotary at all, before then. And it was fairly overwhelming joining a group of a hundred and fifteen, including all the senior members of Hawke’s Bay such as Sir James [Wattie] and … I won’t repeat those names, but it was very, very overwhelming to join that group. But from a personal viewpoint it was very satisfying in that I was invited to speak to the wives – because in those days we were entirely male – and that little talk about what I could offer to the community went down very well. And as a result of that I started chatting to many other women’s groups in the community; so I’ve got to thank Rotary for actually giving me an introduction to the community. [Chuckle]

And you know, I was quite delighted a few years later, or very soon afterwards, to be asked to become Chairman of the Community Services Club, which was, I think, pretty common – they got the newbies to chair committees to get integrated into the club. And in that role I had the pleasure of helping to plant the redwood grove, down to the right of the gates to Te Mata Park. And this arose because the Redwood Rotary Club of California had sent seeds out, and Wilson [Wilson’s Nurseries] had propagated them in his nurseries on Pakowhai Road. He could have sold them many, many, many times over, but no – they were a gift to the Rotary Club, and they were all planted. And going down there now and seeing how huge they are, and searching for the plaque that commemorates that day, is really a great pleasure. They’ve been thinned out many, many times, so only a fraction of the number we planted are still there.  We planted them … we knew that they liked wet feet. You know, you didn’t have to get very far up the bank at all before they just didn’t thrive, and quite a few of them on the margins just died – they didn’t get enough rain.

When did you join approximately?

I joined in 1971; I was invited very quickly after I joined.

Another thing which comes back to my mind is that forty-five years ago approximately, we founded the first Probus Club in Hastings, to which I now belong. Unfortunately the Probus name has been copyrighted by a group in Australia who now charge exorbitant fees, so we’ve had to change the name to Rebus.

Other clubs were founded before I joined, such as Havelock North and Waipukurau and Stortford Lodge; but I think it was John McCormick who founded the Karamu Club, and he got very involved in that, but then he quite suddenly dropped out of the Rotary.

Just as a footnote, we founded the Waipukurau Club which then founded the Waipawa Club, and when I was president I was in the sad position of going to their last meeting when they folded. For several years at conference they’d won the prize for highest attendance, because out of their nine members, about eight would attend every conference. They always walked off with the prize [chuckle] for best attendance.

Just going back – I think it was 1962 – your club through Val Velvin and the District Governor, at the time from Wairoa … can’t remember his name … they founded our club in Havelock, and we celebrated fifty years plus, so we were only young.

So since then of course, our club has declined in numbers; luncheon clubs have become less popular; service clubs have become less popular. And probably my biggest disappointment in Rotary is the failure of my effort to try and get a breakfast session going in the Hastings area. I’ve seen them succeed in Napier, Hamilton and up at Rotorua, but … I went about it in the wrong way or didn’t do something right, but we just got no traction at all. But it’s still a little dream at the back of my mind that we will get a breakfast club going in Hawke’s Bay [??] at some stage.

I think it’s a sign of the times in a lot of way[s] – the whole fabric of society has changed. See, this is the unusual thing, here’s four very intelligent men sitting here, and not one of us is holding a cell phone and texting … [Chuckle]

Brian: David’s comment about Probus – there’s no doubt that that’s been the major effect in the reduction of the number of Rotarians. If it had been there earlier, all those names that we mentioned when we were young in Rotary, would’ve been off Probus – there’s no doubt about that, and it’s a bit unfortunate; nothing we can do about it. One or two do both Probus and Rotary, but in the main, the group that we lost … so many of them were simply happy to just have Probus.

Graeme: ‘Cause there’s no commitment; no … no guarantee.

David: And I must admit I find that difference quite glaring, and …

Brian: Yes.

David: … to put it bluntly, Probus is selfish; Rotary should not be selfish.

I think, you know, it’s interesting the way things developed in Rotary; we took away some of the disciplines that were the very thing[s] that drove it, and that was – you had to attend; you had to take part. And the whole thing was a wonderful concept, but it was built out of … you know, business people who met to further business.

I think the original concept of four disparate businessmen meeting and cross pollinating from different aspects, was very, very good. What has happened now, more and more people have got very, very involved in their own particular trade or profession – which I did, but not to the exclusion of the local community. But so many of these people just, as I said, work seven days a week; and the demands of family have changed. The idea of the breadwinner, usually the man, having time to do these things because the household chores were looked after by the other partner, usually the woman, has gone. People are expected to spend a lot more time at home, and that diminishes the availability for service clubs.

Brian, you were going to …

Brian: Well, I was just going to pick on that. There’s no doubt that Rotary, when we were a club of eighty to a hundred, were a major source of information for the city. Reporters were always at our meetings, and quite big headlines would appear in the paper next day from things extracted from the group of eighty-odd business people. It was very important. And when we had guest speakers … yeah, we always had guest speakers … and the media would pick up what they were saying too, and sometimes it was quite contentious. But Rotary was one of the major sources of local information.

And we were representative of the community.

Yes. Totally.

David: Could I tell a wee anecdote about the reporters? Kel Tremain was our guest speaker, and he forgot to turn up; so the Chairman invited speakers from the floor. And can you remember the South Malaccan crisis? Was it whether there were riots in Holland of the Malaccan immigrants?

Together: No.

Anyway, what happened is, we had two speakers; Len Hoogerbrug was the second, and the caterer from the Farmers, Jack van Bohemen was the first speaker. Jack van Bohemen was in the Dutch army and was responsible for helping repatriate the South Malaccans who’d been displaced by the Japanese in the war; and he helped get them on the ships to Holland. And Len Hoogerbrug was an architect student in Holland, and he was a volunteer to help get them off and get them resettled in Holland. So we had within our club, two people who were really involved in the major news item of the day, but because it wasn’t Kel Tremain, the reporters went home – and missed probably the best story of the year. It was still stuck in my mind as probably the best speaking we’d ever had – right off the cuff, but really gutsy stuff.

I credit Jack, rightly or wrongly, with the fact that we have what are locally known as meatballs, throughout the community. I’m sure they started off as Dutch croquettes in his Farmers’ tearoom.

Brian: Yeah, they were beautiful.

David: And they have become standard fare in Hawke’s Bay – you won’t find them anywhere else in New Zealand … [in] fact you can’t even find them in Napier, I don’t think.

‘Cause that brings another part of the story, too, that the Rotary Club met in the Blue Room for some time in the Hawke’s Bay Farmers Building, and Jack van Bohemen – a member – was the caterer.

Graeme: My memory of Rotary is when I first started … when I was first invited … and it was so formal. From memory we were meeting in the Masonic Rooms or something, down in St Aubyn Street, and it was such a formal occasion; the seats were all set out; the president sat in the middle of the head table; all the committee sat beside them [him]. Right in the front of the president sat Ron Giorgi, van Asch, Wilkie – there was about four of them, and you [chuckles] daren’t ever take their seats. And they just sat there, and the poor old president … And it was such a formal occasion, and everybody was dressed in their suits and their ties, and it was just an amazing occasion. And I was sort of gob-smacked by this, it was sort of not my scene to start with; but there was sort of eighty-odd members at the time, and they were all important people round Hastings. That was my sort of memory of starting in Rotary; I was introduced by Gary Pike; I accepted and I was lucky. Most pharmacists couldn’t get out of their businesses at lunch-time – I had a pharmacist working with me so I was able to get out at lunch time. It was a difficult situation for pharmacists to do that. Everybody took their lunch hours – accountants, school teachers or headmasters – everybody took their lunch hour.

The formality was one of the strengths. It was organised to a point that the formality was easy, because it just happened. You never ever thought of going there without a tie on, because the sergeant-at-arms would ping you for [chuckles] being half-dressed.

Brian: It was amazing that in those earlier days you were introduced as a pharmacist, and you’d be the only pharmacist in the club – they couldn’t duplicate the field you were in.

Graeme: They had some groups …

Brian: It was so very, very different.

David: When I joined we had – in medicine – we had Syd Young as a surgeon, Ian MacPherson as a physician, Graham Clarke as a general practitioner, and then I came in as weird obstetrician/gynaecologist.

Brian: So you covered everything. [Chuckle]

David: And there were quite a few lawyers – there was a conveyancing lawyer, and … but going back to the formality; the formality was actually not my dominant memory, ‘cause probably I had a bit of a background in formality. My memory is more of the repartee and the wit that carried on in this superficially very formal environment. Ron Giorgi and one or two of [them] kept on poking the borax at each other mercilessly. [Chuckle] It was very, very funny.

Yeah.  But starting off in the Blue Room was wonderful, and then we went down to the Masonic, where Tremain’s now stands.

Brian: As Graeme said, even when I was president I can remember those four fellows, Giorgi, van Asch, Wilkie and … Hans Christian Andersen.

Graeme: Oh yeah – yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian: They were the four in front; and if you made a mistake, even as president, they would tell you in no uncertain manner, And there were sixty others, or eighty others, but these four in front dictated. [Chuckles] And as you say, the formality of it all … Roger Bate introduced me to the club; I had been a Rotarian in Dunedin, but [a] long time before. He was very kind in his introduction to that big club, which is what Hastings was then.

I had met them earlier – and this is coming … a bit left field – I at the time in the mid 1970s, was president of the Hastings Chamber of Commerce, and we were initiating the thought that the two cities should merge. And that’s where it all started, in the mid-late 1970s; and we were working with the Napier Chamber of Commerce who supported the concept. And I spoke to Hastings Rotary about what we were doing, and got the support of Hastings Rotary, which was announced at some point – that Hastings Rotary supported Hastings Chamber of Commerce in its attempt to bring [about] the merger of the two cities. And that was my first contact with Hastings Rotary, which Roger Bate brought up when he introduced me to the club a few years later.

David: Out of curiosity, did the Napier Rotary club support the concept?

Brian: Yes. So much so in the Chamber of Commerce, that the Napier Chamber said, “Look, if we’re going to support this, we should be a united Chamber.” And that’s when the Hawke’s Bay Chamber of Commerce came into being – the catalyst being the support of merging the two cities. It pushed towards a vote if you’ll recall, in the early eighties, which was tossed out by Napier;  and then what, ten years later they tried again; and the same thing happened again, except that the latter time embraced Wairoa and Waipuk [Waipukurau] and …

Graeme: Yeah, that was crazy, wasn’t it?

Brian: Yeah, it was crazy – that ruined it really. It was purely the two cities in the late 1970s.

Just looking back, the club would’ve been going at the time of the ‘31 earthquake?

David: Yes. It was 1924 when …

No one ever took any photos of places being rebuilt; it just all happened. There was [were] plenty of photos of the wreckage.

Have you spoken to Bryce Jones about it?

No, no.

Because Bryce has got quite a lot of stuff … photos of the rebuilding of that end of town.

I probably have all those photos from Richard, his brother.

Oh, sorry – Richard. Sorry, I meant to say Richard.

So major projects, besides founding other Rotary clubs in the area – what projects come to mind?

Again, before I was there, there was a pirate ship in Windsor Park. One of the major ones led by Charlie Trask, was the building of a house in Flaxmere, and then on-selling it to raise funds for our charity; got records of that?

No, you haven’t mentioned that.

So that was probably at the end of the late 1970s.

Brian: [Reads] ‘On February 3rd 1931, came the earthquake. All members were affected, and some suffered severely in business. The Roach drapery building largely collapsed, and there were deaths of staff and customers. Don Gill, a club director for several years and a particularly active member, lost his life attempting to rescue members of his staff. Club activity as such completely stopped; the Rotary conference planned for Dunedin in February was cancelled, and clubs in other centres hastened to do what they could to render general assistance.’ Quite a bit in here.

And that’s in the 50 years …

Page 20.

Yes, that’s attached as part of the history. That’s good. It was a happy place, Rotary, wasn’t it? As we spoke about, there was some formality but there was always lots of smiles – it was always a …

David: Oh yes.

… happy place to be part of. It was never that convenient to be there because you always seemed to be busy, but we all made it on time. You enjoyed it, and you planned your day that you were always coming back to Havelock.  [Frank Cooper was a member of Havelock North Rotary] ‘Cause we were farm contractors at the time, so I always made sure I had a job close to Havelock later on Monday afternoon. It was something you wanted to go to, and enjoyed.

Brian: And there did not appear to be too much of a problem of our club being a luncheon club. In those days the business people would obviously have more time.

David: It’s also a matter of organisation; I mean, I was on call twenty-four/seven, but I made it absolutely plain to my receptionist – two rules (and she only had two rules as far as I was concerned) – one: that I got away to Rotary on Tuesday, so she never overbooked me on a Tuesday morning. The only other rule that she had was that she never threw out a cup of coffee, no matter how cold it was. [Chuckles] She did it once and brewed me a nice fresh one an hour later, which I …

And burnt [chuckles] … burnt yourself. [Chuckles]

But Rotary was that important to me. Well it was the only time in the week I met blokes, so from a personal, selfish viewpoint, I loved it. When women were introduced to Rotary, I felt that I was the only member of the club that had a legitimate reason for opposing it because I liked my hour a week with blokes. I didn’t oppose it, but I thought I was the only one with a legitimate reason for so doing.

Graeme: Funny that you’d say that, because that was a similar thing to me – most of my customers were woman [women] because they were ones that wandered round town during the day, and it was an opportunity to be with a group of men.

David: And also, the breadth of the community you were dealing with was wonderful. Again, my role was entirely … very, very narrow; you didn’t have much time to talk to women about their businesses or their husbands’ businesses …

No, that’s right.

… so I didn’t know from my work much about the community.

It’s interesting, because we had a doctor too who didn’t want ladies to join Rotary because he felt this was an opportunity to meet with the men. And I know myself, if I hadn’t’ve joined Rotary I would never have ever been part of the Havelock community.

Graeme: You were just in your own little world out there.

That’s right.

Brian: We haven’t touched yet much about the physical things we did as a club for the community. And one that always brings [springs] to mind was we used to get from Carter Oji, the ends of logs. Now it had a name which I can’t remember, but I guess it was slicing the log to the right length. And we would go out with a truck and we would get these rounds – hundreds of them – and we would bring them in and we would have a working bee where we would split them into logs, put ‘em into trailers and take them to the elderly of Hastings. [Chuckle] And then the fun we used to have delivering these trailer loads of split – I wish I could remember the name that Carter Oji had for the end of the logs – but you know exactly what I mean.

They were offcuts, weren’t they?

I suppose they were offcuts, but they had a technical name. And [chuckle] yeah, for some years we did that, chopping them up and delivering them round. You know, that was one of the things that we did, but there were so many other things – you talked about planting your trees a way back.

David: One of the other memorable ones was raising money for the first ultrasound machine in Hawke’s Bay.

Graeme: Yes!

David: At that stage, if we needed an ultrasound we had to send the patient down to Palmerston North. And Frank Crist, myself and Jim Vaughan who was a radiologist – we got involved, and I’m not quite … somebody conned us into doing this … we started selling fish in the Mayfair precinct by what was then the Mayfair supermarket. So we were selling sole [chuckle] … ‘Buy a sole to Save a soul’, that was our sort of motto, and we basically did most of the funding for the first ultrasound machine in Hawke’s Bay …

Selling soles.

… by selling fish. And there were lots of these little projects.  I can remember planting … I’ve got photographs of planting trees in Windsor Park, and I’ve got my boys with me, so I know it was me. [Chuckle] I can’t remember the background to it.

Because when you think, over ninety-four years there must’ve been lots and lots of very successful projects.

We built a garden at the hospital in the middle of what’s now the maternity unit, but it was basically for patients to sit outside under protection … maternity patients mainly … and it was a very nice little garden. It was overwhelmed by circumstances.

Graeme: Course the other big project was the pathways – yeah, that was huge. We did fund it quite a bit, but it was a collaboration of funders that did it; but the committee that was involved with it was Rotary.

David: Well they were known for a long time as the Rotary pathways.

Graeme: Rotary pathways.

Brian: Yeah, they’re still barely indicated on those pathways.

Graeme: And then we did a project where we put seats on some of them.

David and Brian: Yes …

Brian: That’s right. [Chuckle]

Graeme: Ron Walker was the guy that …

That’s the sign of an aging club, isn’t it, when you have to start putting seats around your projects.

Brian: Seats around your pathways. [Chuckle] We lost them for a while, we wondered where the seats had gone. [Chuckles]

David: You mentioned Ron Walker …

Graeme: Yes.

David: … and I think this was a combination of social service and fun; he did these dinners … themed dinners, for what – eight, nine years?

Graeme: Oh yes – to raise money.

David: To raise money; they were fund-raising dinners, but he did them magnificently, and Ron really worked hard for the club.

Brian: He did.

Brian: He got hold of – I don’t know how – quite precious things that we auctioned at those functions …

Graeme and David: Yep.

Brian: … and made a lot of money.

One thing I know that your club was involved in – that was student exchange; Outward Bound; various other …

Science School.

The one that used to be run at Cambridge School …

David: We’ve dropped everything virtually except for the summer … the academic ones, haven’t we?

Brian: It’s something that our older club – I mean, we can’t go chopping wood any longer, we’re mainly over eighty. But sending schoolgirls or boys … sixth formers … to Science School, which is an exceptionally good programme in Auckland University, and then they come back and talk to us and we realise that there’s something we’ve done that’s of considerable worth not only for that girl, but for science generally. And I’m very proud of how our Hastings club year after year sponsors … because they’re quite expensive sponsorship[s] … and the response we get from the participants.

Group Study Exchange – I’m sure that members of your club went away …

Graeme: Craig [?] won …

David: I’m trying to remember the name of the Swiss student who stayed with Craig – student exchange – whom I met a few years ago. I made a point of meeting him in Basel. These contacts stay, and we had some very, very good exchange students.

Brian: But we also had the adult Rotary teams that came out; what did they call them?

Graeme: Group Study …

Group Study Exchange, yes.

And they all stayed with us.

Brian: Yes, they did stay with us; I remember the last one we hosted were the Canadians, from way up – Saskatchewan I think – well, the province that’s got this oil shale. And the girl that stayed with us was quite a senior boss in this massive oil shale … And she was a very petite thing, and according to her mates, she drove the biggest V10 [chuckles] pickup truck that you could lay your hands on. But that association was always interesting.

And social functions – we were very good at running social functions, although I found in Rotary they always had trouble to balance the books. There was always the cost overrun …

Graeme: Yes. Now we don’t worry ‘bout that.

Brian: We haven’t really got a leader to bully us into those things like old Ron Walker did.

Graeme: No. Yeah, Ron Walker – he was a good guy.

Brian: It’s sad that … you know, our club with so much history is now a small club having difficulty getting professional people to come at lunch time. And young people come and have a look at our average age of bloody nearly eighty, [quiet chuckle] if not over it, and say, “No, it’s not for us.” And it’s very difficult to find an answer to that. David more than anyone, tried to set up a breakfast club; spent a lot of time on it …

Graeme: We just don’t get any response to that at all, do we?

Brian: Couldn’t generate enough …

David: I thought I’d got some response, and then at the last minute the response just disappeared.

But I think this is a pattern; our club dropped … when I was president in the eighties, we had eighty-five members. We got down to twenty-something, and tried breakfast clubs … all sorts … and it didn’t gel. But slowly it’s picking up again. Younger members, but … younger members, they’re still in their fifties and sixties, but they are young [chuckle] – younger than us.

Graeme: Higher standards.

Now you three have all been past presidents, haven’t you, of the club?

David and Graeme: Yeah.

Val Velvin was a district governor; who else had been district governors over the years?

Graeme: The only one in the – Whitlock – in here it’s got Bill Whitlock; Velvin; and that’s the only … yeah, only two.

Fred Beattie was the one I was thinking of, from Wairoa. He was the DG and helped set our club up.

Brian: Yeah. The club sent me up to Taupo to be interviewed some years ago, but they decided I wasn’t good enough and got someone from Cambridge, I think.

Graeme: Weren’t you lucky? [Chuckles]

Yes.  We have … Grant Spackman has put his name forward to be a …

Yes – and he’s been accepted, hasn’t he?

Yes, he has, yes.

It’s two or three years ahead, but …

So you can rest back on your laurels and say you set up clubs that actually choose district governors, or provide them.

That’s quite a process, isn’t it? Because it’s not just next year or the year after – it’s the year after that.

Brian: You see, this reminds us; it’s all past history to us now, but there was a club Service committee; there was an international Service committee; there was a community Service committee; and there was a vocational Service committee. And you know, we were big enough not all that many years ago, that we had those four committees, and there were six or seven or eight or ten in each committee. They used to meet in the Chair of the committee’s home.

Graeme: They called them fireside meetings.

Brian: Yeah, yeah.

David: The trouble with those meetings, it ended up a competition for people’s spouses to provide the biggest supper.

Graeme: Oh, that’s right.

Brian: [Chuckles] Oh yeah.

The unique thing about Rotary – the fact that you only had to be on a committee, in a job, for a year. You were not committed for ten years, although some people quite enjoyed being …

Graeme: Wanted to do it.

But in the main, that made it very easy to give it heaps for twelve months, and step back.

You know, even presidents – that was just a twelve-month term; vice-president …

David: I think that’s one of the strengths of it.

Brian: Just looking at the back of this book – they’ve grouped the senior Rotarians, and you’ve got W A Whitlock, who was paper [newspaper], past district governor … Whitlock was;  Piet van Asch with his photography [Aerial Mapping]; Sir James Wattie; H E Phillips – now what was he?

Davies …

Graeme: Architect.

… Phillips & Chapman.

Brian: Okay – right, I couldn’t remember. E T Gifford … his widow is still down the road; and Giorgi – that was the group then. [Chuckle] We’d have to put virtually all our club members [chuckle] as seniors …

David: Would that Gifford though, be the widow of the same Gifford, or is that the next generation?

Brian: Oh, no, no, no.

She’s ninety …

Over ninety.

Ninety-six or ninety-seven.

And he was president in ‘39. Yeah – no that would be Di’s husband.

Yes, it was – definitely.

You know, if … your people when they work through this whole thing, so much is in that first fifty years.

David: He was president eighty years ago. Was his wife, then – did he marry her very, very late in life? I think it must be a second generation.

Harold Phillips was her father, and Peter Gifford was her husband.

Brian: David must be right – it can’t be Di’s husband.

Graeme: It must be Peter’s father.

David and Brian: Yeah.

Brian: Yes, it must be – you’re quite right. E T Gifford must be Peter Gifford’s …

Graeme: Father.

Brian: 1939, he was …

I wasn’t around then. [Chuckles]

David: Well I was, but I wasn’t out of the cot.

Brian: I was – I’d been around for five years when he was made president. And was that Gifford & Devine in those days?

David: It became Gifford, Devine & Watson at one stage, wasn’t it?

Out of those Rotary contacts, friendships became you know … alliance[s] … always remember I used to go sailing with a gynaecologist, in Napier, through my association with David in Rotary, and locally. The friendships extend.

Yep. And actually, for Beth, a stranger not only to Hawke’s Bay but also to New Zealand; who had loved Auckland where she was more anonymous in the community, to come here and be the wife of this novelty was rather a daunting prospect. And her two sources of socialising were other mothers, which was the most common way of … young mothers; and actually making friends with neighbours and Rotary wives – not a lot, but a few, you know?

Brian: You talk about sailing with him – we arrived up here, Jane pregnant with number four, and the Professor of Gynaecology at Dunedin, a great friend of ours, said, “David Davidson – he’ll look after you; you can be assured of that.” So we arrived, and David was very unhappy because number four daughter arrived on the second day of duck shooting.

David: [Chuckle] Which was most unreasonable! [Chuckles]

You were a duck shooter?

Well, I shot a gun in the general direction of ducks, [chuckles] … but not many ducks suffered as a result of it.

A group in Hawke’s Bay have a pheasant shoot, and I said, “If you ever have any pheasants, I wouldn’t mind a couple.” Well they turned up a week ago with eleven pheasants.  [Chuckle] And of course those days you used to be able to pluck them out in the cowshed or the farm; but try to do it in town …

[Break – discussion resumes before recorder switched on]

Can you remember much about it?

Graeme: Well the current trust – and I was unaware that …

David: Well it was just morphed into the new one, you know.

Graeme: Yeah. And it currently has a reasonable amount of money, fifty-odd thousand dollars; and we don’t add to it now, but we used to add to it. We had the ability to add … one stage we had donations to it to build it up, and then we could either withdraw it or take it out. So it’s really great to have, because when we get an application from somebody like the Science School, we can pay for it; we can do it. We don’t have to take it out of club funds. Our club funds just run pretty much level all the time, don’t they? But we’ve got this ability. Just recently a young lady we sent to the Science School this year, she’s been granted a place in a Science School in Europe, so we helped sponsor her to that from the trust.

Brian: Our latest contribution was to the Rural Support group. We had their leader speaking to us, and we donated; and it was all built around this bloody cow problem. And you know, in doing so we were showing that we represent rural as much as we do the city. And I was very keen that we contributed to that fund, and it was appreciated very much by the coordinator of the Rural Trust in Hawke’s Bay which is under real pressure now, with the concerns … and two suicides.

David: Yeah. At the other end of the spectrum of course, our help to the local low decile schools in Hastings. As with many other Rotary clubs, we got very involved with the Dictionaries in Schools thing, and that was wonderful because for many of those kids, it was the only book they had in the house. And they were treasured. But with the devices, dictionaries have suddenly become old hat. So last year we got Ngaire Shand to talk to us, and we’re now supporting the same schools but with their music, teaching …

Brian: Their violins.

David: They teach their eight-year-olds group lessons to learn the violin or the cello. And we missed out on their only concert, and I think … this is when you feel it’s worthwhile being a Rotarian;  we missed out on the concert for a whole lot of reasons, but they’d invited us to a special rehearsal they had, and these kids were really involved.  And to swell the numbers they’d asked the next year’s kids to come along to be the audience, and they threw themselves into it with enormous enthusiasm, didn’t they? I was speaking to the Principal – it was at Ebbett Park – and she said, “You’ve got no idea how much this has changed these kids’ behaviour.” The concert itself was amazing, because the parents were blown away; they applauded, and for some of those kids that was the first time that they’d ever been praised by the parents for anything. And on the other side, probably the first time parents had ever been proud of their kids, so it changes their whole behaviour. She said their academic improvement was just …

And of course music is the international language, isn’t it?

Together: Yeah.

Brian: That is also a lesson – that you don’t want to become an encyclopaedia salesman.

Graeme: No – not now.

David: [Laugh]

Brian: It’s just a thing of the past, and – I mean, we used to have them knocking on the door with a set of …

Graeme: And we all read them, and now they …

Brian: And now they just sit on their computers and call up whatever they want.

Coming back to the Hastings Rotary Club, the club is unfortunately getting fairly low in members; I guess the future will depend on whether you can encourage some new people to come?

David: Well, a few weeks ago we had a speaker that Graeme had organised, that I thought really deserved a bigger audience, so I asked – with Craig’s permission – which … I never actually got Craig’s permission; we ended up telling him what we were doing.

Brian: [Laugh]

Graeme: We just told Craig.

David: And we got the local Rebus Club to come along as well, and that swelled our numbers. And as a result of that we’ve possibly got one new member who’s coming along today.

Brian: Is that this Richard?

David: Yeah.

Brian: What’s his surname?

David: Rogers. He wrote ‘Oklahoma’ for his third Oscar.

Brian: Yes. I knew him somewhere in the past …

He’s not the wool man?

David: Pass. I’ll let you go – very unusual night.

How old is he?

Yes. [Chuckles]

Thank you. Well answered.

Brian: Seventy?

David: I would think so.

Pretty sure he was a wool buyer.

He was saying that one of his friends tried for years to get him involved in Rotary, but he didn’t say which club it was.

He lives in Havelock?

Yeah.

Yeah, it is Richard – he was part of a world-wide wool buying group – you would know the name of them, it was one of the firms.

Brian: Think it might be why I remember him. But Frank, you bring up that very difficult point that we’ve all got; we know we have a history that we’ve got to protect … a unique history in Hastings that we have to protect by staying alive. But you know, at our age and down to fourteen members – we get down to ten, what do we do? And even things like the money that Graeme was talking about in trust, you know – how do we handle those sort of things if we have to wind up? I mean none of us want to wind up, we want to keep going. We would love to get new members; we’re not having much luck. And I talk to my eighty plus members, and most of them are Probus.  “Oh, yeah – no, we’re a bit too old to take that on now”.  And it’s very hard for us to talk to the young ones ‘cause we haven’t got those contacts.

Graeme: One of the things too, is that … I refer to us now as a social group, but we’re still tied by Rotary rules, which is not too difficult now, but we’ve still got to pay all these fees. So you know, what we’re paying in membership fees now barely covers what we get charged from Rotary, from the magazine and all that sort of thing.

David: No – I find that very frustrating – I get these magazines and I can’t read them – they go straight in the bin.

Graeme: No, I know. And you can’t say, “I don’t want them.”

Brian: Being Australian …

Graeme: Yeah.

Okay – I think probably, unless you can think of some other things you want to talk about, I think we’ve probably pretty well given just a broad brush, and that’s all we can do because the basic history is in the memorabilia and the archives that we’ve covered.

Brian: And Hastings has a membership that …

Graeme: As a member it’s so important.

Brian: … loves Rotary; loves the association that Graeme touched on, between us all – we have a lot of fun together. But our ability to input into the community with thirteen, fourteen people is very different than if we were eighty or a hundred.

David: Can I just add one thing, that … you mentioned Don Paterson earlier?

Brian: Yeah.

David: And Don Paterson was instrumental in having our charity golf tournament, which was very, very successful and a very good fund-raiser, and contributed enormously to our trust fund; until the year that Taradale brought out Tiger Woods’ caddy, Williams, and set up in opposition to us at about the same time. And that basically destroyed it, and that’s always stuck in my craw a wee bit – that another Rotary club actually destroyed our tournament. They didn’t discuss it with us, or … “Could we have a combined …”; you know, I felt there was an opportunity for promoting goodwill. And that’s probably my only real adverse experience in Rotary, and I’ve never quite forgiven [the] Taradale club for that.

Graeme: I often think back to Jaycees; now I had a marvellous time in Jaycees, and we did so many good projects, but Jaycees has just faded. I don’t know whether there’s even one club left in New Zealand.

Brian: You’d say the same with Boys’ Brigade and – almost – Scouts. It’s just a different world, and we’re trying to live in our old world. The young see it totally differently.

Graeme: We had one going there for a little while, they’d formed a committee and everything, and it just fizzled out.

Anyway, I think at this stage I will thank you, David, Graeme and Brian for this input. I hope that everything goes well for your club, and I do enjoy the fellowship of you people, so thank you.

Thank you for the work you do for this group – it’s incredible; must be very busy.

Brian: That’s the first fifty …

David: At the point of … thank you, Frank, for trying to understand our ramblings.

[Chuckle] That’s all right.