James, Colin Interview

Today is 16th November 2023. I’m privileged to be speaking with Colin James in his stunning home at Jervoistown in Napier. Welcome, Colin.

Thank you very much.

This is an interesting journey; we’ve had a discussion, so let’s start right back … so who were your forebears that [who] first come [came] to Napier?

Sarah Bell-Clifton; she and her sister were daughters of jewellery designers in London. They got out of London because they hated the way the aristocracy were treating them as designers; they would make them jewellery for all sorts of occasions, and they wouldn’t pay [be paid] for them. So they just thought, ‘This is not the life for us’, and they convinced their husbands, “Let’s go somewhere else.” Their first choice was America; they went there for two years, then they went back to England. They weren’t sure about America then, and went back to America and stayed there another five years. And then in 1874 [clock strikes eleven] they both came to Napier with their husbands.

Now Sarah had three children; she was married to a Charles Clifton, and years and years later after I’d researched her life story I found that he’d actually deserted her and left her behind. She met my great-grandfather, George Robson, in Napier. He’d come to Napier after his wife had been put in an asylum for the bewildered. So he and Sarah lived together ‘til 1902 when they got married, but in between they’d had eight children.

So if we go back a step, what did they come to? What was it like here?

I know they were one of Napier’s first two hundred settler families, and they came to not very much. They lived on Enfield Road, and the house … I’ve got a photograph of it … very small. How they got eight children in there I have no idea. But I also have his journal where he recorded every penny he spent. And it was just amazing – when he did an extension to the house, it was two and thruppence [2/3d or 23 cents] for this, and sixpence [6d or 5 cents] for that, and so much for twenty nails; and so it went on. But it was fascinating.

What was the land like … was it riverbed? Was it forest?

Well, they lived on the hill in Napier, so it wasn’t ‘til my grandfather, their third son, came to live at Jervoistown that we became an established area of Jervoistonians, I suppose. He and my grandfather and his two brothers both came to live in Jervoistown. One grew flowers and was a florist, and he had an absolutely – even by today’s standard – enormous plant raising … he sold annuals. And he grew lots of crops [like] tomatoes commercially, and that was an enormous place; even by today’s standard it would be considered large.

So there is some conjecture with the name, Jervoistown … can you explain that?

Yeah. Well prior to 1931 it was named Jervoiston … t-o-n … the final spelling. Henry Tiffen bought this land in 1852, and he registered two names. He bought two pockets of land; one he named Greenmeadows, and the other Jervoiston after one of the previous Governors-General of New Zealand. He was a Lieutenant-Colonel, I think; I don’t know what his Christian name was. But there was some muddle-up because a lot of records were lost during the earthquake and somehow a ‘w’ appeared, much to the ire of my grandfather, who refused to write it on his mail. [Chuckles]

How do you call it now?

I still call it Jervoiston – I refuse to call it Jervoistown. [Chuckles] It sounds ridiculous, it’s not a town; there is [are] no shops, no nothing here. Apparently it was to be Napier’s first suburb, and there was a railway line planned – I’ve seen a map with a railway line to come out here. But there was a flood in 1881, I think it was, and they assumed the ground was low-lying and so they wouldn’t expand in this direction. Instead they chose to go to Taradale.

So your forebears that [who] were on the Napier Hill had eight children; what did the other eight do?

Well it was amazing because, you know, they were all city kids. The three boys all became farmers, which I thought was just amazing – and very, very good farmers at that, you know, they won a lot of awards for different things that they entered, and things like that. The girls … one, my favourite, Auntie Lottie, was a dressmaker. Now her mother, Sarah, was a dressmaker, and Sarah had a little sign in the Napier paper of the time, and all it said was, ‘Sarah Clifton Makes Dresses’. And so you had to find where she was. [Chuckle] And her second daughter became a dressmaker, and she married … what was his name? Just can’t think what her first husband’s name was, but he died in the epidemic of … was it 1930? He was a dentist, and he went up to Wairoa to help with the sick, and he caught … was it typhoid? What was that epidemic they had? I think so; and he died. He was only about thirty at the time. But then she remarried and she farmed just above Lake Tutira.

So your forebears, what did they want to do here?

Well one was the curator of the Acclimatisation [Society] Game Farm, so he bred trout and all sorts of game birds.

That’s recently gone, hasn’t it?

Well, it’s just not what it was. I can remember on one occasion he had a report in from people out at Awatoto that there was a lot of dead trout being washed up on the beach. How would that happen? So they’d just released them; well he found out that the men that [who] worked for him had just tipped them over the bridge, and they’d all died of concussion. So the next morning those two guys didn’t have a job, because they were [that was] three years of work to get them to the size.

And there’s a connection with kiwis in there, as well?

Yes. Yes, he bred the first kiwi raised in captivity in New Zealand, and got into hot water with the powers-that-be because he said that the male bird sat on the egg. And it was pooh-poohed, and [they] told him he was being stupid and it was ridiculous, and it wouldn’t happen. And he said, “Well I actually was here, and I watched.” [Chuckles]

His son was the one who started Marineland in Napier … Frank. He caught the first dolphins that were kept there, so the whole family have been very sort of involved with wildlife.

In those days how many families were living in Jervoiston?

Seven.

Seven families?

Mmm. I can remember Kate Morrissey lived on the corner, and she had two boys; and she took in washing. She was an Irish widow. Well the two boys went off to the Second World War and they both got killed on the ‘Achilles’, and so after that – I don’t know whether it was a law in England, but the law in New Zealand was changed so that two brothers were not allowed to be on the same boat. And my mother said it was just devastating for the whole area, because Kate had raised these boys when her husband died, and washed for goodness knows how many people. She said her clothes lines were always full of washing.

Any other families you remember?

There were Carrolls that lived up here – I don’t know what they did, though, got no idea what work they did. I can remember that name.

So in those days, everybody knew each other?

Yes, they did. And we would have wonderful Guy Fawkes nights … [the] community. My cousins and I would get our draught horse and we’d put the dray on the back, and we’d load the thing up with wood and drive him out into the paddock, and we’d all have a communal Guy Fawkes night. And they’d gather at Christmas times, and everybody helped everybody. It really was … you could go to town and leave the house wide open, leave keys everywhere, leave the key in the car … nothing ever happened. Now you wouldn’t dream of it; that’s how much society’s changed.

So your family’s had quite an influence on Napier, and the growth?

Well Grandfather was on the Taradale Town Board for a number of years. I don’t know what areas he was responsible for on the Town Board, but I’ve seen a record of it. He sent my mother, the only girl in the family, and her cousin – they farmed up north of Taupo, somewhere in the backblocks – off to France to go to finishing school; they didn’t want them to finish up rough and tumble. [Chuckle]

So were you born and bred here in Jervoiston?

I was born at Otatara in Taradale.

What’s your earliest memory of playing?

Well my best friend was Alison Craigie – they were a Scottish family.

Today we have children that know nothing other than computers, so how did you keep yourself amused?

Well I had a pony, and she was a bitch. [Laughter] She would lay [lie] down and throw me off, especially if you could get near one of the creeks; [chuckles] she’d just go down like this [chuckles] … dump me off. I’d belt her to make her run faster [chuckles] so she’d … but no. So we had a stand up fight most days.

What would I do? I played a lot of marbles, I loved marbles. My great passion was … if I was given the opportunity I would be asked, “Do you want to go to the bush, or do you want to go out to the beach?” I always said, “The bush”, because if I could get in a stream and lift up stones and look at the moss, I was in heaven. [Chuckle] I loved it. So … “Oh, you and your bloody bush!” [Chuckles] But that was really from quite a young age. And then I had a shop – a pretend shop – in one of the sheds on the farm, and I collected cigarette packets, and bottles, and God knows what – it was all in my shop; I was a shopkeeper. There was a Mr Griffin had a general store down in Greenmeadows, and I used to go there and buy sixpence [6d or 5 cents] worth of broken biscuits; and you got an enormous bag, and sometimes there were even bits of chocolate biscuits in it. [Chuckles]

So what school did you go to?

I started at Taradale School, then when we shifted here I went to Greenmeadows [School]. And incidentally, speaking of Greenmeadows, I hate them – they’ve torn down our original motto, which was ‘Honour is our Guide’, and put something ridiculous up there that’s meaningless. And I think, ‘How dare you?’ [Chuckles] I can remember one day at that school one of the kids, who we found out later, went across to the dairy on the corner which is where … what is it? The op-shop stands now … Salvation Army op-shop; well that was a little tiny grocery store and they had their fireworks in the window. Well, he put his magnifying glass to the window and set off all the fireworks in the window, and they set the house across the road on fire. [Chuckles] Burnt all the front of the house; it was terrible.

And high school, where did you go?

Napier Boys’ … five years of hell; hated it. [Chuckle] Hated every minute of it. My only salvation was my art teacher, Inky Scott, who was just marvellous. And at Intermediate I had an art teacher by the name of Mr McPherson, and I’ve always regretted I’ve never been able to go and thank either of them – never had the opportunity – because they pointed me in a direction of the heart and creativity.

When did you yourself move here to Jervoiston?

1963, we built this house.

So you now have a beautiful quarter-acre section …

No, it’s a half-acre, then there’s another acre on the other side which I started planting in native bush in 1981 ….

It’s magnificent …

… and became called Friends Bush, mostly because my mother and I thought, ‘We’ll plant a couple of kauri’, so we went down in the evening after work and planted them in the corner by the well. And a friend came and said, “What’re you doing? I want to plant one too.” And that’s how Friends bush was born, and now there are seven hundred and twenty-two people from fifty-one countries have planted trees out there.

And people come to do weddings here, and celebrations?

They have weddings here, funeral services, name days for children, fundraising events; it’s just … I like to think it’s being made use of and it’s not just sitting there. But the great joy of it for me is that for the first time it has brought bellbirds, tuis and moreporks. It’s brought the native birds to the area, and I have a very supportive lot of neighbours who put feed out for those birds to keep them here.

You have a passion for gardening, so where has that come from?

My mother. And her father was a keen gardener; her mother not so much. She liked to boss, and say, “Do this, do that, and put it here and put it there”, but she didn’t want to do any of it.

What’s your philosophy on gardening?

Well I couldn’t tell you a lot of the botanical names of anything, it doesn’t interest me. I like form, shape, colour, and that’s what I base it on. But I was trained as a designer, so you know, you can design anything. I’ve designed anything from wedding dresses to furniture, so God knows … shop interiors. You know, to me design is design, so if you can design one thing you can design anything else. Never used a computer once to come up with a design. When I was training in New York I was told, “Sitting drawing is wasting our money, so you’ve got to carry it in your head and be able to give it physical form straight away.”

When you first come [came] here it wasn’t the beauty it is now; what was it like?

It was a series of sand dunes. It was on the corner of Gordon Street and Jervois Road. It was the one section on the farm which my grandfather said to my mother, “You’ve chosen the worst section on the farm.” She said, “I will make it the most beautiful.” But by saying “I”, she meant, “My son will. [Chuckles] He’ll be the one out with the wheelbarrow.” [Chuckles] But she was a great gardener herself, but in old age she used to walk out into the garden, wave her walking stick and say, “That needs doing.” And I said, “Well away you go”, [chuckles] and she’d just walk inside. [Chuckles]

So every plant has a story?

Well, when we first came here it was just an open paddock, and one of Mum’s great friends, Arthur Miller, who was the mayor of Taradale at the time, came down and he said, “It’s going to take thousands of plants to fill this garden up.” So away he went, and the next day he came back with his tractor and a trailer on board, and it was packed full of plants that he’d dug up, and gave to us.

It’s amazing. I think to finish this session off, you got a civic award; was that a surprise to you?

Yes it was. It was accepted ungraciously. [Chuckle] I felt embarrassed, to be perfectly honest; I did not feel I was worthy of such an honour, but then most people say the same thing – it’s an embarrassment, because you do what you do because you love it, not because you’re going to get some reward for it.

And that was because of your service to the community?

Yes. I’ve done a lot of fundraising for a lot of different organisations. I did the design and built the set for the Royal Ball when Princess Alexandra came out here in 1971; I raised a lot of money for Taradale High School; for the Lions Clubs; for Jaycees; Women’s Leagues – I just enjoy that sort of thing, it stimulates my brain. And I have a brain that never goes to sleep; it keeps me awake at night when I’m always plotting and scheming about something. So it’s a release.

And I think it’s an acknowledgement from the community on what you’ve done, but also who you are.

Well you don’t … well I don’t do these things to be acknowledged; it’s just nothing, doesn’t enter my head. I do it ‘cause I like it.

But the community wanted to acknowledge that to you …

Yes …

… which is wonderful.

… which was just overwhelming, really.

Excellent. And it’s a tribute to you and your journey, and your family; your family has played a huge part [for] Napier, hasn’t it?

Mmm.

So you’ve seen a lot of changes in your time. Is there anything that stands out … the big change in Hawke’s Bay?

Well the thing that stands out to me mostly about Jervoistown, is the amount of snobs we have that now live here. [Chuckle] Very conceited people who think they’re superior, and it’s changed completely to the wonderful community it was when I first came here.

It’s a shame, isn’t it?

It just astounds me that people can, you know … and I think you can only feel superior if we let them, so … but I never do. I don’t admire them at all; I just think they’re just an ordinary person, and you know, never think you’re superior to me or anybody else. Everybody has a value.

I totally agree. But look, thank you, Colin.

You’re welcome.

It’s been an absolute pleasure.

I’ve got a photo of the ballroom, I’ll show you.

Thank you.