Lowe, William (Bill) Anthony Interview

Today is 6th November 2023 and I’m privileged to be speaking to Bill Lowe [William Anthony Lowe] in his home in Clive. I’m Judy Shinnick and I’m going to talk to Bill about his experience of Hawke’s Bay, starting with how he came to live in Hawke’s Bay. So Bill …

Okay, well firstly I’ve got to go into my family history on both sides. My father’s side was a Lowe and my mother’s side was a Wall, and those two families I think had a bit of an impact on the setting up of Hastings. My knowledge of the histories of both of them are based on me speaking to people and getting second hand, third hand stories and putting them together, and so I can be faulted on the detail and the names and dates. But this is my understanding, to the best of my recollection, of how it happened.

The Wall side … I’m very sketchy; I know they’re Irish. A whole family of brothers and sisters came to Wellington and then seem to have come up to Hastings … I don’t know why. And this was in around about the 1840s, I understand, and [they] settled in Hastings. One of the sisters moved out to Waimarama where she became a Gillies … she married a Gillies, which is a large family out there. My grandfather’s name was William George [Wall] – I’m named after him – he was a farmer. He married Nellie … I can’t recall her last name. [Jarvis] Anyway, they died in about 1943 within about eighteen months of each other.

The Lowes … their story is not the exciting part of the story in my opinion. My great-grandmother who married the Lowe was from Fenchurch in London. And I’ve only seen letters that she wrote and she seemed to have been a very educated person; she knew how to, you know, write very well. She came over here by sailing boat in the middle of the nineteenth century – on her own as a single woman. I think she was either nineteen or twenty years old, and her family were following her. It seems a very odd thing to do, but anyway, this girl came over on her own and it took her three months to come over. She landed at Lyttelton and as they were unloading the boat all of her possessions were dropped into the sea. So she stepped onto New Zealand with only what she was standing up in. There was a family on the boat with some children and they employed her as a governess, and she worked for them.

And then she met Frank Lowe. Now his family came over from Lincolnshire … Roeburn. His father, went to Tasmania; his father was named John Lowe … John and Sarah Lowe … and there was [were] quite a few brothers – I don’t know how many but there was [were] quite a few of them. The father, John Lowe, committed suicide; there was a newspaper article … he went mad and shot himself. Then the brothers bought [brought] a mob of horses from Tasmania over to Christchurch, and they went out to Tinwald and started a flax farm out there. Then he met Phoebe, his wife, my great-grandmother; and they had a little farm. He used to have to travel quite some distance to get work; I don’t know why. He contracted TB. [Tuberculosis]

Oh, just as an example of this great-grandmother of mine, she had one son, and when he was six years old she was pregnant, and it turned out she was pregnant to [with] twins. And her husband was … God knows where … and she was on her own and the babies started coming, so she sent the kid off to the next farm which was apparently six miles away. By the time he got back with the next door neighbour, she’d delivered the twins on her own, which is … pretty amazing person if you ask me. She must’ve been pretty forward because she signed the petition that went around demanding women’s suffrage; they’ve got the petition in Parliament and her name is on there, listed as a colonist.

Then he got sick with TB, and for some unknown reason they moved to Foxton – by this time she had nine kids, I think. Anyway, they moved to Foxton and they had a flax farm there. Then the flax industry collapsed and her husband was really ill, so they moved to Kimbolton. And they stayed in Kimbolton for quite some time and then they moved up to Waipawa. And my understanding is they followed the railways because she mainly had boys; three daughters, and the rest were boys, and they all worked on the railways as it come [came] into Hawke’s Bay. They were one of the colonial families in Waipawa. So that was in the 1890s, because they apparently came to Hawke’s Bay in around about 1896, which I’m assuming is Waipawa. Then they moved into Hastings, to Pakowhai Road, and they bought a property there. They seemed to’ve owned most of it – they had from Seven Oaks to Morley Road, all the way back to the motorway, so all of that new Percival Road Sports Centre and all that was all in their land. In 1903 the great-grandfather [Francis] died; whatever it was that he had overtook him and he died, and the great-grandmother [Phoebe] and her daughters run [ran] bees; she was an apiarist, she was the first apiarist in Hawke’s Bay.

And whereabouts was that?

Where Seven Oaks is, just at the back of Seven Oaks, in the fields behind there. The house that she lived in is still there – it’s only a little tiny … it’s all been renovated and looks really new but it’s the old, old homestead. It’s still across the road from Pakowhai Road, Frederick Street, just to the side – it’s still there. She died in 1929.

My grandfather had a bit of land across the road from where Pernel Orchard was? Just past Evenden Road there’s a few houses, and then there’s … I think it’s called ‘Three Wise Birds’ now, but for decades it was known as Pernel Orchard; it had a fruit shop and coffee shop and all that. Well he had a farm across the road and he used to sell eggs every morning. I know this because he had a diary where he detailed everything that he did; every day he wrote down in his diary.

And you’ve seen the diary?

Yeah, and it’s a little bit of a controversy in the family. It disappeared across to Australia and it’s headed off into another branch and it’s gone into … as it does. Some female members of the family took it. But anyway, it was a really interesting diary; it was a diary for 1943, and the other one I saw was 1940. He died on 23rd November 1943, but he had this little farm which you know, they used to support themselves and they must’ve been doing okay because he had one of the first cars in Hastings, which I only found out recently.

Where was I going? He went and fought in the Boer War; he was in the 6th Contingent, and to be accepted in that you had to have your own horse and saddle. So he went over there, and he had to leave it there – they wouldn’t bring them back, which I imagine was quite a financial burden on a young fellow those days, to …

[As] well as an emotional one.

Yeah. Well he didn’t go to the First World War, would have nothing to do with it. His name is on the monument outside the Masonic Hotel in Napier, the Boer War monument. He wrote a letter home to his mother about all the people he was serving with, and apparently they had a North Island contingent and a South Island contingent. His family all considered themselves South Islanders, so he felt an affinity for this … mind you he was in the North Island thing. But he talks about everybody in this letter ‘cause they were in this big battle, and all the names that are in his letter are all on the monument; it was quite interesting to read. He talks about this Lieutenant Forsyth whose name’s on the thing: ‘Tell his mother that he died like a man, standing up fighting the Jacko’, [chuckles] which I thought was an amazing thing. Anyway, that was my grandfather.

I consider they must’ve had an impact on the setting up of Hastings because there’s five streets with some connection to both families, the Lowes and the Walls.

Do you know what the name of those streets are?

Yeah. Yep, well there’s Lowe Street in Camberley; the cemetery was all Archie Lowe’s, my grandfather’s brother. He was a councillor [and] that was all his land, so Lowe Street is named after him. On the Wall side, Wall Road was named after Grandfather’s family, and then there was [were the] Jarvises which was my grandmother’s family … his wife’s family. And then McNabs, another connection to the same thing, so all up there was [were] five street names in Hastings that are connected to the family. So that makes me think that there was some impact.

Well there must’ve been.

Yeah – wouldn’t’ve been hard to impact Hastings in those days, but … [Chuckle]

So that’s your grandfather’s generation?

Yeah.

So what about your parents?

Okay. Well my father [Jack Brougham Lowe] was born in Kimbolton, and I don’t know why – that confuses me because by then they’d lived in Hastings for a long, long time. My grandfather [Edmund John Lowe] married a girl from Palmerston North. She was a Brougham, [Emily Maud] and they came here. And then they had their family, yet my father who was their youngest boy and youngest in the family, was born in Kimbolton and has a lot of memories of Kimbolton, but I don’t know why … I can’t figure out why.

My mother [Messina Lowe, née Wall] was born in Sherenden.

From [a] farming background?

Her father had a farm there, and then he seems to have lost that or sold it. Then he came into Hastings, to Charlotte Street, I think it was, and they had a house there. On the day of the earthquake Mum was starting school at Central School [Hastings]. It was her first day at school – she was eleven years old, so they’d just moved – and standing outside the main front doors when the earthquake hit was her memory of that.

In my grandfather’s family there was a whole mob of girls. Probably better to name their married names – there was Nancy … aah, name’s gone completely. She married a horse trainer who’s well known throughout Hastings. Big family too, and I can’t remember their last name.

Eva Burns, they lived in Otane, moved to Waipawa; Hilda Potts, they lived in Pakowhai Road; Mavis Bartlett, and a lot of people from the sixties will remember the Valhalla Night Club; that was established and run by her son, Carlyle Bartlett – he was a bit of a rogue around Hastings.

Then there was my Uncle Harry, and then there was Percy, and then there was my father. Oh sorry, and there was Aunty Emmy [Sandilands].

Okay, I’ve recalled my Aunty Nancy’s married name was Nancy Downey; she married the horse trainer and I think they had about nine children. Most of them have stayed in Hastings, they’re still around.

And then we come down to Uncle Mick, who never married. He had a de facto relationship in the fifties; it lasted about four, five years, which was pretty unique in those days. No children to my knowledge.

Uncle Percy, who got killed driving a car too recklessly on the Waiohiki Bridge, took out the lamppost and died on his twenty-first birthday, April 1939. And uniquely, I don’t know if this means anything but I would have thought a fatal car accident in 1939 in Hastings would’ve been big news. It’s big news today, right? When I was learning about the family I went to the Herald Tribune and went through all their records; they used to have all the archives upstairs? And nothing, not a dicky bird. A death notice, but nothing in the paper.

Have you been on the website ‘Papers Past’?

Yeah, I did. I couldn’t find it. And then I went and had a look at the Napier Daily Telegraph and again, same result, nothing in there. It’s a mystery for me because you couldn’t get away with it not being recorded in some way today, let alone 1939. And I can’t think of anything in April ’39 that would shock it off the front page. But anyway, it’s definitely on his gravesite as dying as the result of an accident in April 1939.

And then it comes down to my father, Jack Brougham Lowe … gets the Brougham from his mother’s maiden name; they were a Palmerston [North] family. Yeah, so he was the youngest, and there was a significant gap between him and the next one [up]. And of course he had all these sisters so he was spoilt to within an inch of his life, which had a massive effect on his later life. Uncle Harry – who was much, much older – and my father apparently were joined at the hip; anything Uncle Harry did my father was there – to his detriment. Uncle Harry was an extremely hard drinker … I mean extremely hard, and as crooked as the day is long. And from what I can gather my father was pretty impressionable. And his sister, Emily … Aunty Emmy Sandilands – Sandilands was her married name – she used to call him ‘son’. That’s how the relationship was; although they were brother and sister she referred to him as ‘son’ right up until his dying days. And … yeah, so I think he was incredibly indulged by them.

Reading … you know, the entertainment in Hastings in the thirties and forties would’ve mainly been, I would imagine, the movie theatres and the pool halls. And my grandfather’s main method of transport was his pushbike, and in his diary it was [there were] constantly stories about ‘Oh, someone stole my push-bike again; the police found it at the back of the State pool hall’; which was these two buggers stealing it and riding it off, you know, stealing the bike off their father. Yeah, so I think they went through life like that. He got a job – they all got jobs – working at the Tomoana Freezing Works as butchers. They were sole butchers in those days, you know – they used to grab the sheep out of the pen and do the whole thing; kill it, right down to skin it, cut it all up, dress it. They did the whole lot in those days, and yeah, that’s what my dad did – they called him a butcher. Yeah. He got called up for the Army and went down to Waiouru, and then to Linton; he was in the military and the War had broken out.

This is where the family starts forming, because Aunty Em had met her soon-to-be husband, Uncle Mick. Now he came from Kimbolton, Mick Sandilands … quite a well-to-do family down there; hooked up with Aunty Em. And his best friend was Joe Wall, and Joe Wall was my mum’s older brother. [Mick] obviously come [came] up here, hooked up with Aunty Em; they’re trying to do a foursome, so Joe says, “Oh, what about my younger sister [Messina Wall] going out with your younger brother?” [Jack Lowe] You know, hooking up, and that’s how Dad met Mum. And yeah, it all went from there; the families hooked up, and …

So the rest was history, as they say?

Yeah, the rest was history, and it was a pretty destructive history. Aunty Em had too much influence on a weak-minded man, and he couldn’t or wouldn’t handle responsibility. They very quickly had five kids; too much responsibility and too much drinking; and too much influence around him to get out and have fun. About 1962 he didn’t come home from work one day. He was gone; that was him.

He came back 1970, ’72. I’d already gone by then, I was in Auckland. And he came back a complete raging alcoholic, and you know, really, really ill. Mum took him back in; she nursed him and he died. And that was him, fifty-two.

That’s your dad?

Yeah.

How did your mum cope with all that?

Mum was … yeah, she tried to tough it out but she was heartbroken, you know, she never ever, ever got over Dad – ever, which I thought was a shame; she didn’t deserve him. But anyway, you throw your dice – that’s what you get.

So you mentioned that they had five children altogether, so you’ve got four siblings?

Five. Mum had a relationship some years after the old man disappeared, and my youngest sister Alison appeared. So my oldest brother is Robert and then there’s Peter. Peter’s claim to fame was he was badly burnt when he was about eight, and they put him aside in the Hastings Hospital to die; I mean, he was cremated … I was standing beside him when he caught fire. And they put him aside in a room to die. And the World War II surgeon who founded plastic surgery?

Manchester?

No, that wasn’t the name. They did a TV documentary on him a couple of years back – McDowell? Anyway, he worked on the RAF [Royal Air Force] pilots during the Battle of Britain and suchlike. And he was doing a tour through the Hastings Hospital, and he said, “Who’s in this room?” And they said, “Oh, some young kid who’s been burnt.” And he had a look at him and he said, “Send him down to Wellington, I’ll see what I can do”, and they fired him onto a train down to Wellington; and he came back and had three kids of his own. [Chuckle] He was gutted; I mean …

How was the fire started?

In the fifties there was a fad of Hawaiian shirts, and they were made of a plastic material. And we used to have bantam chooks, and Peter and [my] job was to feed the chooks. So one Sunday morning we got up and went outside and fed the chooks, and come [came] back in and it’s cold as … And he had this thing on, and we pulled the chair up to the stove and turned the elements on, the ring elements. And I can still see it – Peter put his hand out like that and the front of his shirt flicked out at the same time and just touched the thing and he just turned into a column of flames; took off and got down the hallway and collapsed.

That must have been horrible for you all …

Yeah, it was, it was, it was … it was something traumatic. But anyway, he survived, and married and had three kids, and his kids are thriving; he’s got great-grandchildren now.

So that’s two of your brothers …

Yeah. Then there’s Jack – he married a girl from Blackball in [on] the West Coast; and then there’s me, then there’s my sister, Patricia, and then there’s Alison, the baby.

And you’re all close in ages?

Yeah, yeah, very close. I think there’s about eighteen months between us all, as there was in those days.

So can you tell us more about your memories of your upbringing?

Okay, I’ve been thinking about that. I went to Frimley School and I found it was a wonderful school; but I think I found it was wonderful because I found it easy. A lot of guys my age now, they talk about it not being such a wonderful experience. But my abiding memory of it was, you had to be ashamed of being poor and we were poor beyond belief … I mean like lunchtime, going for a walk so no one would pick up the fact that you didn’t have any lunch, you know, no lunch money or no cut sandwiches; hair cuts once a year, because they were 3/6d [three shillings and sixpence or 35 cents] for a haircut, and I had unfashionably long hair just before the Beatles arrived, [chuckles] where I was always ashamed of having long hair, and then the Beatles arrived and everyone had long hair. [Chuckle] So yeah, I can recall you were made to feel ashamed for being poor like it was a choice you’d made. I didn’t have shoes until I was eleven; I went to Intermediate [and] it was the first time I ever had any shoes or a pair of sandals. Everything I got was passed down from Jack, who’d got it passed down from Peter, [chuckle] sort of thing.

So your memory there was being poor?

Totally aware of it in so much [as] it was something to be ashamed of, you know? I had cousins across the road, the Sandilands, and they were Maori ‘cause Bernie’d married a Maori girl. And they were pretty poor and we were a bit alike [in] age, so it sort of gave us something to be you know, akin with.

Thinking back to Frimley School, I used to enjoy it, and the school was so wonderfully built. It was big rooms facing the sun with walls of window, and you’d sit there and you’d be in the sunshine, and it would be lovely. And they’d open the big windows up and it was just a really neat environment. But thinking back, all the State house kids were on the far wall, and all the orchardists’ kids and the kids whose families come [came] from money were the ones beside the windows. And I never picked that up … one day I was just sitting there thinkin’ about something and was I thinking, ‘Jeez! That was the same in every class.’ They actually separated us by economic backgrounds. And at first I couldn’t believe that that actually happened, but the more I think about it, the more it was every class that we went into … ‘Hang on, why was I always ..?’ ‘Cause they allocated the seats; you didn’t walk in and grab the seat sittin’ beside your best mates and all that, you were allocated. And you know, ‘Why was [were] all the State house kids sitting on one side, and why were all the ..?’ And we were; and it was separated like that.

So you know this really nice environment at school … what was it like at home? What was the environment like at home?

Well it was incredibly … we had nothing. I mean, quite often the power would go off and it’d be off for a few days ‘cause Mum couldn’t afford to pay it or keep it going, so you just … bang, no power. So no heating, no hot water, candles at night, cooking on an open fire. That was really regular, I mean really regular.

And what about how much food you had?

[Chuckle] Behind us was a three acre paddock; it’s called the St Aubyn Street Reserve now, I think, but it was always referred to as the playing area. And there was all these houses backed onto it and [of] course everyone had vege gardens. When the old man disappeared we had nothing – I mean, nothing. So we were going out at night into the playing area and raiding peoples’ vegetable gardens, and Mum was making pumpkin soup, and pumpkin this and pumpkin that.

But Mum had an amazing sense of humour, which she lost when she got older; she didn’t age very well. But she had an amazing sense of humour and she kept a real bright environment in the house. I mean I don’t think I’m looking back with rose-tinted glasses – I don’t look back at it with a ‘poor me’ feeling; I look back and I smile about the funny things that Mum used to do or get us to talk about; she used to keep us engaged.

So she was pretty upbeat?

She was, she was. She wasn’t later on in life, and my children and my grandchildren who met her didn’t really get on with her because they found her very abrupt … very harsh.

But your memory was quite different?

Yeah, well I could see her changing as she got older. She did not like getting old … she didn’t like it in the slightest. Yeah, and I think that was reflected in how she started approaching life.

So did you do some secondary school years?

My secondary school year was a joke. When I was in Intermediate I got a job in the morning as [on] a milk run, which I got thirty bob [Thirty shillings or £1/10/-] a fortnight … $3 a fortnight for doing, which meant I had to get up at quarter to four or four o’clock to be on the road – on foot ‘cause I didn’t have a bike – by four-thirty. Then I’d have to run from Hinau Street to Ikanui Road which would’ve been about three and a half kilometres; get there, get a trolley, load up seven milk crates. There was twenty bottles of milk in a crate … load them onto the trolley and then take off and run up and down and do these streets, and then somewhere around changed over and got another seven I think it was, and finished the run off. And I would finish the run about seven o’clock, I think. Then you would grab – it was a [an] Edmonds can with a hole in the top – of [with] all the money … pennies and sixpences and thruppences, [threepence] and I’d have to race off down St Aubyn Street right down to McLean Street, down the end of McLean Street. And the guy who had the milk runs, his name was Mr McLeod and he lived down the end of McLean Street – through a gate, put it on his back door [step], all the way back down to Hinau Street, get home. If I was lucky I’d then have some breakfast, usually Weetbix, and grab school gear, get into my high school gear, grab my bag of books, ‘cause in those days you used to have to carry a suitcase of bloody books – can’t believe that, but anyway, that’s what we did – run up Southland Road all the way to Karamu Road to high school. And you’d get in and sit down – there was no thinking for at least two things, you’d just be rooted. And I did that from Form 1 to third Form.

My brother got a job at the horse trainers next door to the high school; and I was late one day and he says to me “Oh, just come in here and wag – go in tomorrow.” And I didn’t want to face the wrath of being late – I got two canes for having my socks down in Heretaunga Street one day after school, so you know, they didn’t overlook very much. Yeah, no mercy would be what it was. So I thought, ‘Oh yeah’, so I went into the thing. And I just found an easier way – go into the horse trainers and spend the day in there or go into school and so I got out of school when I was fourteen.

And did you go into the horse trainers …

No …

… and work there? What happened?

… I can’t stand the bloody things.

Oh, right …

[Chuckles] No … no, not in the slightest. Mum realised I wasn’t going to school, and she heard about a job going at McKenzie’s. So she told me to report there, so I did – June 1966. So I went to McKenzie’s.

And what were you doing there?

Working behind the counter and loved it. There was young girls walking past the street all the time, and yeah, I fell in love with the job. I did that for two years then went and worked at the Freezing Works ‘cause they had the decent money; then went up to Auckland.

And what age were you when you went to Auckland?

Just on seventeen, I think … something like that, yeah. I was pretty young.

And what was your reason to going to Auckland?

Just wanted to leap into life, it seemed exciting; off I went.

How was it?

It was exciting. [Chuckles] It was tons of fun; counter-productive, but it was tons of fun.

So tell us a bit about your experience – you know, what you did and where you lived?

I just worked in factories – it was just such a time that you could knock on any factory door and you had a job. I was just floating loops, doing whatever. I remember at lunchtime being bored, and going along and knocking on doors and seeing if they’d offer me a better hourly rate. And they would, just to get a worker. So I did everything … just trying to think of anything significant.

I was working in a clothing factory … yeah, just working as a labourer in a clothing factory and there was an Aussie guy there; young fellow, little bit older than me. And we weren’t mates but we got chatting, and then one day he come [came] and said to me, “D’you want to go flatting?” And I was boarding somewhere which I wanted to get out of, and I said, “Yeah – yeah, what’s the story?” He says, “Oh, I’m looking for another guy; there’s myself and this other bloke, we’ve got a flat in Remuera.” Yeah. “It’s $20 a week.” “Holy shit!” He said, “So you know, we need someone else to help us.” $20 a week was an unimaginable amount of money.

Anyway, so … went and had a look at the flat, and it was amazing! It overlooked a lake – we had a private lake – there was one wall of glass and it was just all modern; it’d only just been built. There was three flats, and there was me, Clive and Dave. “Yeah, I’m a starter.” So we lived there for a year and it was just so much fun. Our neighbour was …oh, who was that singer? Lee Grant. Yeah, he was our neighbour. Did he have the flat? Sorry, I may have the wrong guy; I know he was involved, and it might’ve been somebody else who had the flat. Anyway, they used to have some great parties and we’d get involved with them. Yeah – no, it was great; we lived there for a year.

And then I met a girl and she was from Whangarei, her father had a dairy farm up there. And we hooked up, and then next thing she’s pregnant. Can’t have a disaster, I’ve got to have a proper disaster – so she was having twins. So we got married and the twins are now fifty-three years old I think.

So how old were you when you got married?

Coming up nineteen, I think; something like that, I really can’t remember. I know [at] twenty-one I was married. Here’s the difference – I was nothing, I was just working labouring jobs all over the show – got married, twins, moved into a flat in Greenlane, and got a job loading railway wagons at Greenlane railway thing. So I was on I think, $40 a week, and that was with an enormous amount of overtime; and within a year we had moved into our own house.

You saved all that?

No, no. Bugger all savings … just the ability to earn got us in there.

Great!

Yeah – I still look back and think, ‘Holy ..!’ We had a three percent loan; there was either a five percent or three percent, and we got a three percent ‘cause I didn’t earn enough. I mean, you know, there was a threshold, if you earnt over the threshold you went five percent. I stayed under the threshold so we were on a three percent loan, and yeah – had our own house. It was a spec [speculative: built new to sell] house – it was built; moved into it, we were the first owners. It sold a couple of years ago; it cost us … $11,000 was the full price, house and section in Papakura … and it sold a couple of years ago for $740,000. Yeah – in 2013 I put that deck on, and that deck cost me $10,000 and I kept on thinking, ‘This deck cost what a brand new house cost in 1970.’ [Chuckle] Amazing.

I know – how times have changed.

It’s depressing. And now they were talking last night, it’s going to cost $1million to get in it by the year 2050. Sorry, that was a bit rambly, but … yeah.

Interesting though. So you moved into the house – were you still working in the same ..?

I’d moved to a furniture factory in Penrose, so I used to catch the train backwards and forwards, but that was costing me thirty-six cents a trip and I just couldn’t afford that. So I eventually got a job at Namco which did outdoor furniture, and marinised car engines to fit them into boats; I got a job doing the welding on the car engines. I’d never welded anything in my life … never have since, but I did that for three years.

And just learnt on the job?

Yeah.

So life in Papakura, how was it for you having a young family?

Very, very difficult, very restrictive. I was nowhere near ready emotionally, maturity-wise or anything really, to have a family let alone … I loved having daughters – absolutely loved having two little kids – couldn’t wait to get home to see them, to spend time with them. Just absolutely gave you a new outlook on life; loved having a family. Shouldn’t have been married at all … yeah.

So did that marriage last?

No. No, that went about 1973, I think. Yesterday was the anniversary, 5th November. Glenys and I had a massive blow up on Guy Fawkes night, and when it all calmed down I just said to her “This isn’t working. You [We] can’t live like this, we need to do something.” She said, “Well, I was going to take the girls and go back home to my parents in Whangarei.” So we sat down and talked about how we could do it. I conceded the house, gave her everything; walked out with $34 in my pocket, I think, and … and yeah, basically that was the end of our marriage but I still remained, you know, the parent and stayed involved. Yeah, stayed involved with their lives the entire time, school holidays and …

You had the girls come and stay with you in the school holidays?

Yeah, yeah; stayed with me wherever I was. Made sure that there was [a] stable place for them, and they got to see a bit of the world through that.

So did you stay in Papakura?

No, no – pointless, Papakura was too small. I knew that I had to get out of there and I think Glenys wanted me gone. So I’d become friends with a guy in Papakura – it was funny because I was standing at the back of my section – I’d been working on it, I had a back section – there was a guy on that side of me and then at the back there was [were] other sections, and I was standing there talking to this guy. And a guy came up the drive in a big Mark 4 Zephyr, brand new – roared up the drive and he went to the house at the back. And this guy I was talking to whom I had never met before, he looked at it and he goes, “Churches, the bastard”, he says, “make sure you never have anything to do with him, he’s the biggest criminal in Papakura.” And what? Fifty years later, him [he] and I are still best mates.

So you didn’t take notice of that?

Well, we were a similar age and we just fell into becoming friends. His marriage was at an end and when I said to him, “I’m going; I’m heading off, I’m going to shoot down to the South Island, go to Christchurch and sort of get me [my] head around what’s happening next.” And he says, “Oh, well go with me, I’ll go … we’ll go together.” I said “No, I’m not draggin’ anybody else out.” He says, “Well, I’m leaving – we’ll drive to the same place or we can go together, but Nola and I are finished.” And so him [he] and I went down to the South Island together.

Down to Christchurch?

Down to Christchurch, yeah. He met a girl … she died last year, Cheryl … they had two kids. Yeah …

And did you get work straight away down there?

Yeah, it was easy – well, no sorry – I hit there as the Commonwealth Games were starting, and it was on Christmas and nothing was open … Was that Christmas? I know there was a long period where you couldn’t get work anywhere. But anyway … survived, got work somehow, got money somehow.

And were you flatting with this friend at the time?

Oh, that’s right, I went and got a job in a pub, the Gladstone Hotel, and pretended to this guy that I was a barman from the North Island. He was the publican … yeah, I’ve worked in pubs for years … so he gave me a job. I started that afternoon. And there was a barmaid working there, a Maori girl, and I says to her, “Can I get you to help me? I wouldn’t have a clue how to be a barman”, and she sort of showed me the ropes so I could bluff my way. And then she says, “Where are you staying?” ‘Cause Ray was in the bar as well; and I said to her, “Well, in the back of a Mark 4 Zephyr at the moment.” And she says, “Oh – well you can come and stay at my place, there’s plenty of room.” So we went around and stayed there; she was down by the Christchurch Girls’ High, down by Cranmer Square. Ray and I stayed there about six months; it was great fun ‘cause it was a real party house and …

And what happened after that? Where did you go?

I finished hitch-hiking around the South Island …

So you tripped around after that?

Yeah. Ray got hooked up with Cheryl and they got all serious, so I headed off down to Twizel [and] worked on the dam for three months; and when the worst of the winter was over [I] did the West Coast, then hitch-hiked back up to Hawke’s Bay … oh, ‘cause I’d bumped into my sister in a shop in Christchurch. I walked into the shop and she was standing there, and she told me that the old man had come back and he was dead … he’d died. And so I thought, ‘I’ll go back and catch up with Mum.’ I hadn’t spoken to her for a long, long time, so I went back and worked up here for a while doing anything and everything. Even did the night shift at the morgue at one stage.

What age were you when you got back to Hawke’s Bay?

I can’t remember … twenty-three, twenty-four … somewhere round there.

So you’d fitted a lot in from those years from when you left school.

Yeah, all the wrong stuff, though.

What happened after that?

Bumped into Anthea … met Anthea one night; June 1976 I met her, and forty-seven years later, still together. Two kids, four grandchildren, three great-grandchildren.

Oh, gosh …

Well, two and three-quarter great-grandchildren – one’s due in December.

[Speaking together] Oh okay, one’s coming soon. So what sort of work have you done in between?

Well, Anthea and I got together; and you know, I’d done a lot of years of just hanging around bouncing from pillar to post and getting nowhere in life. And it was a Saturday morning, we were sitting in her flat and it come [came] across the radio that the Army recruiter was at the RSA [Returned Services Association] in Hastings. And I was just sitting there and I said to her, “I might go along and have a look”, and she went, “Oh, okay.” So I shot down there and they said, “Oh, you have to go across to Napier”; made an appointment for me on, I think, the following Tuesday. So I come [came] back and told her and she said. “Oh, I’ll go with you.” So she worked at Seven Oaks when it was [for] people with disabilities. So on the Tuesday we go over, and I filled out all these forms and then I had to be interviewed. I’m in being interviewed and the guy asked me about Anthea, and I introduced her. And he said, “What do you do?” And she said, “I work in the disability sector.” So next thing, he stops interviewing me and he spends an hour interviewing her which was quite funny. Turned out that he was retiring and wanted a job in the sector. Yeah, so I enlisted. A year later, April 1977, they come [came] and picked us up and took us away; it took that long to get in. And [I] joined the Army; I thought I’d do a year at the most, just to have a look at it … something different. Twenty-one years later I took my release.

So were you going back and forth, you know, to ..?

Oh no, no, I got posted to Waiouru, did my training; they posted me to Burnham, so Anthea went down to Christchurch and we got a flat in Christchurch but she lived in it – I had to live in the barracks; you weren’t allowed to live out while you were under training. And then when the twelve months were up we started living together. That become [became] difficult, so I asked for a posting and they posted me from Burnham into Christchurch … into 3 Brigade Headquarters in Christchurch … and that’s where we basically started off our life together.

I was really lucky throughout my entire career. Hawke’s Bay’s got a battalion, 7 Battalion, right? And they have five or six Regular Force people in there. It is one of the hardest battalions to get posted to; a) because there’s very, very few Regular Force positions, and b) because so many people want to get here. Completely unaware of all this, I was going through this thing about where you could get posted to and it said ‘Napier’, and I thought, ‘Oh I’m going to try that.’ So I put in a posting preference for Napier and got it within a week, and got posted down here. We got transferred back down here and put into Army housing, and I thought I was … you know, that’s just the norm. Wasn’t until I was down here about six months I realised how difficult it was and how much I’d fluked it; so we did two and a half years here.

Can you remember what year that was?

Holy ..! September ’79 we got posted here, and in ’82 we got posted down to Burnham again, which was back to the battalion. And then I got selected for Singapore, so the whole family got posted to Singapore; we did two and a half years over there.

That was when you had your children?

Yep. Yeah, Peter was born April ’78, and we got Amy May ’82.

So when did you make your relationship permanent?

I don’t know … I don’t know if we still … [chuckle]

It was never made permanent?

We would never’ve got married ‘cause there was no need to. But in those days, you know, women couldn’t get a loan, they couldn’t open a bank account – Anthea couldn’t do anything because she didn’t have my name. Not only did she have the hurdle of being a woman, she was an unmarried woman. So one day she said to me, “We’ve got to get married”, so …

So you did.

It seemed to work – forty-seven years later. [Chuckle] Still here. When did we get married? May … look, it was so insignificant; I always count the time together was when we first met, June ’76, ‘cause that’s basically when we got together. Yeah, and getting married was just …

A formality?

Yeah, it really was, you know …

Just to make life easier?

It was, it was to make life easier for Anthea. It would be hard for people to understand today how difficult it was for a woman in those days. Everything was stacked against a woman for what you could and couldn’t do.

So you came back from Singapore … came back to Hawke’s Bay?

No. We got punished after that because we were posted to Waiouru, which was my son’s favourite posting … can’t believe it! All the places we went to – Singapore, all over – Waiouru was his favourite posting. I got promoted to Sergeant in Singapore, and I got to Waiouru and I got promoted to Staff Sergeant in a really short time, I think thirteen months, which was ‘bout the barest minimum time you could spend as a Sergeant before you got promoted. So I was really lucky there; then I got Warrant Officer in Waiouru. I got posted to … where did I go? Queen Alexandra Squadron which was the Armoured Squadron; and then posted back to Napier.

That was the lucky one?

That was the second time I’d got it – that was like another Lotto win to get Napier again. I did three years here, then I got down to Linton – had a massive motorbike accident. It was July ’91, smashed my leg and my hip and ribs and arms and everything. Took a long time to recover from that. They were going to discharge me from the Army but I’d fought that and managed to stay in there. Then I got posted to 2 Engineer Squadron in Linton, and then 4 Logistics Squadron in Waiouru. All this time I was on my own, because our kids never had a home town ‘cause we were always moving. After I got posted out of Napier the second time, [we] sat down – Anthea and I talked about it and I said, “It’ll be better if I travel and live in the mess during the week, and come back on the weekends and give the kids a home town”, otherwise they’d just be like Army brats – all over the show with no roots anywhere. So they stayed here, I travelled down – that’s how I ended up having the motorbike accident. And then I got Waiouru, so I used to travel across the Gentles [Gentle Annie] every week.

Took my release from there, came back here; there was a job advertised as a unit manager out at the Prison, one of the residential units, so I applied for that, got it …

What year was that?

That was ’98. Yeah, I got out on 14th February ’98, started work at eight o’clock on 15th February, so I didn’t even take a half an hour’s break.

And then how many years did you do working in the prison?

Twenty-one … another twenty-one bunch.

D’you want to say something about your work in the prison?

I’d never ever done anything like it. Someone suggested I get a job in the prison and I went, “No, I’m not going to swap one uniform for another, I’ve had a gutsful of uniforms. No, I’m not going to do that, but I want to go to Hawke’s Bay.” And of course I’m nearly fifty so it’s hard to get a job at that age, and I don’t want to labour. So when I got told about this one at the prison I thought, ‘Well I’ll go there and I’ll work there for a year or two, and while I’m there I’ll look for something in Hawke’s Bay; and then I’ll get out.’ Got in there, really enjoyed the job; it was full of challenges – never done anything like it in my life before. And I was the first unit manager in the Prison Service who hadn’t come off the floor – usually they start on the bottom, work their way up, become a unit manager. They found that the culture wasn’t working, and so they decided that they’ll try bringing people in from the outside, and I was the first one they ever did it with.

And I guess your background lent itself to that?

Yeah … yeah. It worked against me, there was a lot of resentment. And I had been in a culture where you get a job to do – everybody’s thinking is, ‘How can you achieve the job? How do you do the mission?’ When I got to the prison, you were given a job to do and immediately it was your job to find the solution. No one else would join in, and the solution you put forward … everybody else’s job was to try and work out why it wouldn’t work. And that culture was still there twenty-one years later, when I left.

That must have been frustrating?

Oh, incredibly frustrating. I just took so long to get used to it; I just was so used to working with people that wanted to get the job done, would not stop until the job was done. And then all of a sudden I was working with people who were just desperate to prove that your solution, or the job, could not be done.

It’s a wonder you stayed that long …

I enjoyed the job; I worked with some really good people. And the clients were fascinating – killers and rapists and – yeah. And the money was terrific … the money was excellent, you know, coming into the years when you’re putting it away for your retirement – that was the best that it could possibly be.

So did you end up retiring from that job?

Yeah, I retired in June 2016, so I went from June ’66 to June 2016 … nice neat package.

Yes. And how have you found your retirement?

Difficult. I loved it at first. For the first time in my life I was time rich and I didn’t have people and things inflicting time constraints on me, and jobs, and do this and do that. But all the health rubbish come [came] in on me and I lost mobility and you just … there’s an enormous feeling of pointlessness, you know?

Because of your limitations?

Yeah, yeah … the limitations are real hard to shake, you know, I try and stand up and I get dizzy and want to fall over, and stuff like that. Anyway …

Yes, ‘cause you know, when it’s ongoing, it’s ongoing loss, isn’t it?

Yeah. And they say to you, you know, “If you could do this and do this and do this, you’ll get better, and all we can predict is, it’ll get worse.” So you know, there’s no life in the end.

And that’s not easy for you to get your head around either, really …

Yeah. But it happened at the point of my life when I’ve got grand kids and great-grand kids; that makes it vastly easier.

And are they all in Hawke’s Bay?

Yes, I’m lucky there. I shouldn’t have seen any grandkids, and I’ve seen them all. I’ve got granddaughters who are breeding now, they’ve got kids. And my oldest great-granddaughter is two in seven days. She’s two … owns the world. And I’ve got a one-month-old great-grandson – his name is ‘No Name’; they can’t agree on a name, so he’s called ‘No Name’. And then the third one is due in December; looking forward to that, it’s going to be a little boy. So I’ve got two grandsons, sixteen and fourteen – they live here all the time, I look after them on Tuesdays and Saturdays. And I use the term ‘look after them’ loosely these days; they come in here and look after me. [Chuckles] They tower over me, both of them … I don’t know if I’m shrinking or what, but they’re both bigger than me and they look after me; treat me like a pet. No they don’t, they’re great boys.

And have you got other grandchildren as well?

I’ve got grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

So you’ve got the two grandsons ..?

I’ve got … I don’t even know where I’m at; because I’ve got two families, in my mind I split them. Lisa Marie has got three children, she had two daughters and a son. We lost one girl at ten months – of Sudden Death; yeah, so she’s got those two. Tracy Anne chose not to have children. Peter had two girls, and they’ve had three children. And Amy has two boys, so that’s … Well I didn’t expect to see any of them, so I’m really quite rich and they fill our lives. I don’t see them ‘now and then’ … see them all the time. My two boys have never missed an Anzac Day; in fact they’ve both seen one more Anzac Day than the years they have. Tobias is sixteen and he’s been to seventeen Anzac Days, and Ezekiel is fourteen and he’s been to fifteen Anzac Days, ‘cause they went with their mother when she was pregnant both times. [Chuckle]

Oh, that’s amazing, isn’t it?

Yeah. [Chuckle]

So I’m just wondering at this stage whether there’s anything more that you want to add?

No – I wanted to talk about Hawke’s Bay. You’ve probably had enough of me …

Keep going.

But the things that I had in my mind that I wanted to talk about was growing up as a kid in Hawke’s Bay, and like … you know, you looked forward for Labour Weekend because it was [the] start of the swimming season. It used to open on 23rd October, and swimming for us meant going to the Mahora swimming pool at the Mahora School. And you just lived and breathed waiting for that to happen. And I mean, you’d go there and it’d be as cold as hell. I was thinking the other day on 23rd October, ‘Did we honestly strip off and go swimming?’ Anyway … it used to be thruppence [3d] to get in. It would open at nine in the morning and it would close at eleven-thirty, and you’d get thrown out and you’d have to go home. And then in the afternoon at one [o’clock] it would open and go until four. I remember there was an old lady, Mrs Smith, who used to run the thing, and she was there every weekend. And we gave her such a hard time ‘cause she was a little fat woman; I’d loved to see her now and say, you know, ‘Thanks’, ‘cause she was obviously a volunteer. And it was such large chunk of our lives, was at the swimming pool, and she took so much bloody, you know, hardship off [from] us. ‘Cause at eleven-thirty when it was time to get out of the pool you did everything not to be found, and her job was to go around and find us all which … she knew every hiding place. Yeah. Walking to the swimming pool or to get the thruppence – that was the story – to get the thruppence you’d go around looking for Gilberd’s soft drink bottles; you’d take it down to the shop and get tuppence [2d] back.

Or the other one was to go down Evenden Road, they had a berry farm there, and you could pick raspberries – not strawberries, they didn’t allow us kids to pick strawberries – and it used to be thruppence a punnet. You’d pick these into a tray – six to a tray – and then you’d take them up and they’d tally them. But you’d turn up with six punnets where you’d pick them and tried to get as much air and sticks and leaves in there as possible. And the guy’d pick all that up and shake it all down, and two punnets would end up to be one punnet – [chuckle] that would be the thruppence.

Or to go to the movies … to go to the Embassy Theatre which was ninepence [9d] to get into the theatre … you know, you’d spend your whole week trying to find ninepence somehow … to get your hands on nine pence. Can you believe that? These kids today wouldn’t bend down to pick up $5. [Chuckle]

It’s changed, hasn’t it?

It has, yeah, yeah. Going to the movies on a Saturday or going to the swimming pool just used to be such a highlight; down to the parks, Frimley Park or Cornwall Park – spent hours in there climbing trees and it’s funny, I walk around and I see all these different trees, and I’ve got so many memories of them now, you know, and they look so small. I was talking to my oldest grandson because he’s a bit of a thinker, and we were talking about how to recognise different trees – well in Cornwall Park they’ve all got their names on them, they’ve put wooden plaques on. And I said to him, “I’ll show you the next time we’re there”, and we go down there and none of them have got their names on. I said, “Oh, that’s a bit of a shame – they always used to have a little wooden plaque and it would have its Latin name and then its English name underneath.” And that’s how I learnt which tree was which. And about six months later I was out there; I’d parked out the front and I was thinking about that, and I looked up and way up is the plaque. [Laughter] All the trees had grown [laughter] … taken the plaque with them.

Well a least nobody could pull them out.

No.

You know, those memories, have you got others that you want to share?

Stealing milk bottle money, that used to be a …

I wondered about that …

… big one, yeah. One time my cousin, Bill – he was just a little bit younger than me, we’d grown up together – we’d been down to the swimming pool at night and we were coming home. It was in the summer and it was dark and we were walking back through Mahora and decided to steal milk bottle money. We were going to go to the movies, I think, the next day or something. Anyway, Bill was on the other side of the road and he’s up this thing and he’s trying to tap this money out and a car come [came] round the corner and turned into the drive. It was a little Morris Minor and the lights hit straight on Bill, [chuckles] and this joker yelled out, “Now I’ve got you!” Bill took off and this car off after him, and it went down Kowhai Street, into Lane Street, into Titoki Street, I think it was … Fitzroy Ave, into Hinau, into Pukatea Street … I don’t know if you know any of these, but then into the St Aubyn’s Street Reserve. And [chuckle] Bill’s running like that – ‘cause I’m running after them, but I’m okay ‘cause I’m behind them; the guy can’t see me – and [chuckle] Bill’s running around this playing area with this car[’s] lights [laughter] chasing him. [Chuckle] He was too silly to jump over a bloody fence and he would have been gone. Anyway, he got caught.

Yes.

Ran home to his grandmother’s place; the guy just went straight in. That was him in trouble; he got a hiding. Talking about Bill, he died just recently; the rust got him … cancer … just went to his unveiling last week.

Another thing we used to do when we were kids was get sacks and go down to the racecourse after a race meeting on a Saturday; guys used to go up to the tote, [totalisator] put a bet on and they’d get a paper ticket, right? The race’d run – no – throw it onto the ground. So at the end of a race meeting it was like snow; it would be six inches deep of these tickets, so as kids we’d go racing along filling these sacks up with tickets, take ‘em home and we’d go to my Aunty Em’s place, which was his grandmother’s, on a Sunday morning. And there was a paper called the Wellington Sports Post and it used to have all the race results for the Saturday in there, and so we’d just sit on the floor with these sackfuls of tote tickets and go through them and see if there was any winners there. Bill got one which was worth £500. A fortune! It was a quarter of a house!

Uncle Mick come [came] home, he’d been down the pub. “What are you bloody kids doing?” You know, he was … And Bill told him, he was all excited; “Oh, Granddad, I’ve got £500.” He says, “Give it here”, he says, “I’ll go and cash it in.” You had to take it to the Jockey Club on a Monday if you didn’t cash it in at the tote, and then get a BNZ [Bank of New Zealand] cheque. So [he] gives it to his grandfather and off Uncle Mick goes. On Monday night Uncle Mick comes home drunk as a skunk, driving on the wrong side of the bloody road and … Anyway, Bill’s going, “Where’s my money? Where’s my money?” [Mick] gives him a crack; he says, “It’s not your money, it’s my money.” [Chuckle] Bill never saw a penny of it [chuckle] – never got a bloody skerrick out of Uncle Mick. Boozed it all up.

Ohh, that would have been hard, forgiving.

Oh, he got … lot worse things than that happened to him, poor bugger.

So have you got anything more that you want to ..?

No, not really, I can’t think. I was going to run through all the people around in our street and all that, but oh … I suppose that doesn’t really mean much to people, ‘cause they’re all gone. Everybody’s gone, it’s just amazing – you look at it and you think, ‘That whole vibrant community, and they’re all gone.’ There was a Japanese lady [who] lived across the road; she was a Korean war bride, they brought her back from …

This is your childhood home you’re talking about?

Yeah, Mrs Gray, lived across the road, and they gave her a hard time ‘cause she was Japanese – you can imagine, those days. Turns out that she had a harder bloody war than any of them, because she was a school girl in Hiroshima when they dropped the bomb. She did a radio thing about it on the National radio [Radio New Zealand] about eighteen months ago. All the adults in our street gave her a hard time because she was Japanese.

Yes – just shows where the thinking was at back then though, doesn’t it?

Yeah, yeah, it does, it does. Hard to think of now … you think, ‘Oh, racist buggers.’ But you know, the war had just finished and …

Yeah, it was different back then.

Yeah. But she’d been a bigger victim than any of them, and no one took the time to find out her story. I met her years later, she was lovely.

Well you’ve done really well; we’ve actually been going for about an hour and a half.

Does feel like I’ve rambled, but anyway …

All interesting. So thank you very much.

That’s okay, my pleasure.