Hughes, Ivan Charles Interview

Good morning. Today is Thursday 19th November 2020. I’m Lyn Sturm, and I’m about to interview Ivan Hughes, a retired school teacher. Where would you like to start Ivan?

Good morning, Lyn. My name is Ivan Hughes and I was born on 3rd April 1936 in the Tangihanga Station homestead, way up the Whakaangiangi Valley, which is a few miles south of Te Araroa, East Coast. The homestead was on the banks of the Kopuapounamu River. At the time I arrived the river was in flood, so the day before my arrival my father rode his horse and led another horse, and collected the local midwife and brought her home to look after Mum and me. The midwife had to stay for a week until the river went down.

My overseas families, the Hughes, Brown and Mayo families, all came from various places in Britain, and my Kiwi families, the Kawhenas, Tewhatakino and Pahuru families are all connected with the Waiapu Valley and Hicks Bay areas. According to Apirana Ngata who lived at Waiomatatini, we can trace back to the Horouta canoe which peopled the East Coast of the North Island.

My late wife and I wrote various family books. The first book we wrote was called ‘Port to Pasture’, reminiscences and records of Port Awanui, East Coast. We wrote that mainly because, when we used to look at the bookshelves we would find that various people would write books and memories of lots and lots of places, and we thought that Port Awanui, which is just out from Ruatoria on the East Coast, Port Awanui was quite a bustling little community in the early days, and there is absolutely nothing left there at all to remind people that there was something. We also believe that everybody has a tale to tell, a memory to share and a story worth recording.

Port Awanui was a very, very busy place because there were no direct roads … well, not really roads; there were some roads but they were very, very poor roads between Gisborne and the East Coast – very, very muddy in the winter time and very, very corrugated and rocky during the summer time. So the boats – little coastal boats – used to supply all of the necessities of life that these small ports needed. They usually left Auckland laden with all sorts of goods, and plied around the coast to places like Te Araroa, Port Awanui, Tolaga Bay and places like that until they got to Wellington, and then they’d recharge with a lot of stuff that they could deliver on the way back. Things like groceries and everything like that were delivered by the boat, and also things like packs of houses. We think of kitset houses these days but in those days there were kitset houses also, and people would order House No 72 or whatever from a booklet, and the firm in Auckland would put all of the four-by-twos, and the timber needed for the construction of the house, all in a big pile, put it on the boat and send it down to places like Port Awanui. Occasionally when the boat arrived at Port Awanui, the pack of timber or the kitset would have to be floated ashore because the boat couldn’t take it ashore; and sometimes what happened was that the kitset, all bound up, would be washed by the waves and that and would get broken, and so for the next three or four days the people who owned the kitset would have to walk along the beach at high tide and pick up the bits and pieces of their house to take home to be built.

My great-grandparents had a store at Port Awanui, and this was later taken over by my grandparents, Charlie Hughes and his wife, Mabel. They lived in a cottage just across the creek from the pub that was at Port Awanui, and the house was right next door to the shop. My father always used to tell us that he knew it was a two-storey house that he lived in, because when they were kids – and there were always several of them as kids in the house because in the family there were twelve kids all told – he said he knew it was a two-storey house because they’d catch the odd cat and walk it upstairs, pop it out the window and let it drop to the ground; and there was always a kid down there to see whether the cat landed on its feet. Every time, [chuckles] he said, the cat did land on its feet.

Another trick that they played – at the store Grandfather sold long coils of cord, and so now and again to have a bit of fun, they’d pinch one of the long coils of string and catch a … oh, dear me; oh, one of the ones that duck in and out of the sea, a penguin, and tie a string around [chuckle] the poor penguin’s leg and then head it off out into the sea, and see how far it would go before it stopped swimming. And then they’d pull it all the way back again [chuckle] and take the string off, wind the string back up and take it back into the thing, and let the penguin go back underneath the house. So they had a lot of fun up there.

The other books that we wrote – two of them were for my late wife Stephanie’s families; one was to do with the Glanville family, and one was to do with the Morris family. The other books that we wrote – one was to do with [traffic noise] my Hughes family, and the other one was to do with my Brown and Mayo family. The Browns and the Mayos lived in Wairoa, and also the Boyds.

I’ll start with Charles Brown. He was called Cookie, because he was in the 65th Regiment and he came out in the ‘Lancashire Witch’ in 1858. He was called Cookie because he naturally was the cook. After he’d completed his turn he was discharged in 1866, and was given a plot of land, a corner section as far as I can recall, in Wairoa where he and his wife built a house. He met his wife, Caroline Kippen who had come to New Zealand aboard the ‘Avalanche’ boat in 1860. She was a lady companion to Mrs John Gorst who was wife of Sir John Gorst – well, he was later Sir John; he wasn’t Sir John at the time that she worked for him, but he was later made Sir John. He was the New Zealand Commissioner for the Waikato area, and the two of them met when they were in Waikato and Charles was the military guard for the Commissioner’s house. They married five days after he was discharged from the army. After they married they came to Wairoa.

The other Wairoa one was George Mayo. He enrolled in 1864 in Britain for the No 9 Company of the Hawke’s Bay Militia, and he arrived here in 1864. He survived his full term with the No 9 Company and he was granted two bits of land, one was at Marumaru and one piece was at Frasertown. The Frasertown was a small piece so they built a house there, and I don’t know what they did with the Marumaru land but I’m sure that they sold that afterwards. They later moved from Frasertown into Wairoa, and he had a team of six or eight bullocks; his weekly route was from Wairoa to Mahia. On a Sunday afternoon he’d do a route around Wairoa picking up all the goods that had to go out to Mahia, and then on Monday morning he’d set off. It would take him all of Monday, all of Tuesday and half of Wednesday to get to Mahia, and of course he was delivering goods on the way out. He’d deliver a few goods around Mahia, then in the afternoon of Wednesday he’d pick up any stuff that had to go back to Wairoa, and on Thursday morning he’d head off back to Wairoa and get there on Saturday; then of course, he’d be ready to start again on Sunday morning to pick up any goods around Wairoa ready to start again on his weekly journey. His wife, Mary Whur, followed George out a couple of years later with two children; and she came out on board the Shaw Savill Company ‘Berar’ – that was the name of the boat.

The other one of note in Wairoa was Doctor Boyd. Boyd lived just out of Wairoa at what is now called the ‘2ate7 Cafe’, which I guess is two point eight seven k [2.87 kilometres] out of Wairoa. He emigrated to New Zealand in the 1860s. When he arrived in Wairoa he joined the Hawke’s Bay Military Settlers and he was their assistant surgeon, and he received the New Zealand War Medal at the end of the Wars. George Mayo didn’t receive the medal because he wasn’t under fire at any of the battles that they had with the enemy.

Two of the books that I have just mentioned, one on the Brown and Mayo families and the book on the Boyd family … the Boyd family one is called ‘Ancestry and Anecdotes’, and the Brown and Mayo family one is called ‘To Wairoa They Came’, which means that after they had finished their constabulary work and everything like that they went to live in Wairoa. Both of those books have recently been put online at the Hawke’s Bay Knowledge Bank so if you go into the Hawke’s Bay Knowledge Bank and click onto Hughes or something like that, they are easy enough to find in there. They have done an absolutely superb job of putting them online in that you can see the full page; down the side you can read the page; or there are numbers along the bottom where you can click and get a particular page; and you can even print it out; or if you’ve got a complete printer with about a hundred and fifty or a hundred and sixty pages you can print the whole thing out for yourself if you like, and if you’ve got the time.

As I mentioned, I was born up the Whakaangiangi Valley, right at the very, very end. Not long after that, my father – because of the Depression at the time – the farmer decided the he was no longer able to maintain him so Dad was put off, and they moved to a place called Raupunga. Raupunga is a little place very, very close to Lake Waikaremoana, and I think there’s a lake there now that they call Ruapapa. Ruapapa was the farm that Dad was in charge of there. We weren’t there for very long, but one incident that I can remember … Ruapapa homestead was very, very close to the Wairoa River [Waiau River] that passed down through there. I don’t know if I’ve got that name quite correct [see above] but there’s a river that passes down near the Ruapapa homestead; and I can clearly remember one day I was playing outside, and of course Mum and Dad always made sure that we didn’t go near the river or anything like that. Anyway, I saw that underneath the house there was a nice warm place, so I crept underneath the house and found this nice sunny place and went to sleep under there. Well, I woke up some time later and there were people running around all over the place calling out to me and everything like that, and poking sticks in the river and everything. And then someone came up near the place and says, “Where are you? Where are you?” And I called out, “Here I am, under here.” And so I got a good telling off for that, but however … where else do you have a sleep in the sun?

After Ruapapa we moved out to Opoutama, and Dad was in charge of a farm out there. It was leased by Sir Harold Johnson from Wellington; he was a Judge in the Court down in Wellington. It was a lovely flat farm and we lived there for quite some time. I can remember the Judge one Christmas giving my brother and I little saddles to put on our horses to ride to school, because at Opoutama we had to ride to Opoutama School. We were actually a little bit away from Opoutama at Kopuawhara; that was where the railway station was that supplied any goods around there. At that stage the railway line was being constructed from Wairoa through to Gisborne and it wasn’t until two or three years later that that railway line was opened.

From Opoutama we moved through to Nuhaka, and Dad was manager of a thousand acre farm known as Hikatangi. I think they’ve changed the name – in fact I’m sure they have changed the name to Waipiata now – it was called Hikatangi when we were there; and it was a beautiful, beautiful big house. It was the first house where we had a flush toilet, and man oh man! We showed everyone through the place and we always ended up in the bathroom where the flush toilet was. All of the other places that we’d lived at – Tangihanga, Ruapapa, Opoutama and all of those – they had pit toilets, and you had to walk outside and go to the toilet; and the paper that we used … of course there was no toilet paper as we know it these days … there was no toilet paper as such, so everybody used either newspaper or anything like that. So the house at Nuhaka was spectacular because of the … well in my mind … the flush toilet. It was also the first place where we had an electric heated water system and so you could go and have a bath – there were no showers of course, in those days – so you’d go and have a bath; turn on the hot tap and get hot water to either wash your feet if you had dirty feet or anything like that, and let it go. When you pulled the plug out the water of course went to a septic tank.

In one of the places that we were at there was a tin bath – I think that was out at Kopuawhara – we had a tin bath. And to have a bath, Mum would have to light the copper and boil the water up, and then bucket the water into the bath. Well after you’d had the bath of course, you could pull the plug out and you could watch the water disappear out the plug hole. And there was no plumbing connections and of course it was great fun to watch the water just spreading out underneath the house [chuckle] on the ground.

I started school at the Opoutama School, and of course we rode horses to school; and then after we moved from Opoutama to Nuhaka I had a horse of my own, and we used to ride to Nuhaka School. And of course we’d meet up with all the other kids along the way; some from up the river road, some from up the valley road, and a few from a farm nearby. After I finished Nuhaka School … and in those days the schools went up to Standard 6, which in these days would be Form 3 [Form 2] I suppose … I went to Gisborne High School, and boarded at the boarding building there which was called The Rectory. There were about sixty of us there and believe you me, we had a lot of fun there.

After high school I went to training college in Wellington, and then went teaching. My first teaching position was on the West Coast, in a little place called Lake Haupiri School, about fifteen miles due east from Greymouth. It was way back in the foothills of the mountains there, and in the wintertime we had beautiful fine weather; when it rained it rained very heavily, but in fine weather it was beautiful. I was there, single, for two or three years and then Stephanie and I were married and she moved down, and she and I spent a couple of years there together. While we were there we helped publish … well, we put in a couple of chapters in a book that was later published called ‘The Kopara’, by Brian Pearson.

Also while I was there I went to compulsory military training, as most people at our age did; at the age of eighteen you had to go and spend three months in compulsory military training, and then after that you were obliged to spend … I think it was a fortnight a year … at a refresher course. And a few years ago all of the people that were in the compulsory military training were issued with medals. I have given them to my son, and now my grandchildren, if they go to any RSA [Returned and Services Association] meetings or anything like that, they wear them – very proudly, may I say.

After about four years at Lake Haupiri School my wife and I returned to Gisborne where we bought a small lifestyle block just out of Gisborne and lived there for quite a few years; and I taught at Te Hapara School. I taught there for many, many years – I hate to think how many – but retired in about 1985, I think it was. And in retirement, to sort of help the tourism industries, a group of people decided that Heritage Trails would be a good thing to promote; so we joined the Heritage Trail group, and in the time that we were in Gisborne with the committee we wrote three for the Gisborne district, and I think they’re still being produced; one for the Morere area; one for the Wairoa area; and then in 1996 my wife and I moved down to Napier, and we joined the Hawke’s Bay Heritage Trail group. Since being down here we have completed about fourteen pamphlets, and they are available of course at the i-SITE. I suppose I shouldn’t advertise, but they are readily available free of charge, and apparently they are well worthwhile getting because we now and again have to revise and reprint them. With the Heritage Trail pamphlets, the thing that I specialised in mainly was the photos. I’ve always, even as a primary school kid, taken lots and lots of photos; and so now that is my one specialty that I enjoy doing for the Heritage Trails. A lot of people these days don’t have a decent camera, whereas I’ve got very good equipment and that’s why I get landed with the job of taking the photos for the Heritage Trails. The iPhones and things like that that they have these days – the image is not quite up to scratch for publicity photos that are needed for publishing and things.

My school teaching days were spent – apart from the four years that I spent at Lake Haupiri School on the West Coast – the rest of my school teaching days were at Te Hapara School, and I really, really enjoyed my days there. They were just such lovely kids from a lovely area, and the teachers were just so, so pleasant. I ended up being the Assistant Principal at Te Hapara School and I was virtually in charge of the bottom half of the school, overseeing the teachers that there were in that area, and making sure that the children got as good an education as we could possibly give them.

My own family … well, my late wife … we have two children, both boys; one lives in Napier and the other one lives in Dannevirke on a cow farm down there. I get to see them now and again, and they get up to see me now and again. I’ve got six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren; both of those are daughters, and so now and again when I get to see them or they get to see me, they are very, very good to wind up a little bit, and take a few photos of and that type of thing.

Ivan, thank you very much for giving me your time today and allowing me to record your oral interview. You and your late wife Stephanie are leaving a legacy for the generations to come with the books that you have both researched, written and published. From what you have told me, you and Stephanie were the perfect match; two people working together to create books is very special. Thank you once again; I wish you all the very best. Take care.