Mulvanah, Garry & Marie Ann Interview

Today is 5th April 2018. I’m interviewing Garry Mulvanah of Havelock North on the life and times of his family. Garry, I’m looking forward to hearing what you’ve got to say.

Thank you, Frank, and likewise I’m looking forward to talking to you today. We’ve been involved a little bit with the Knowledge Bank and supplying them with all sorts of good information, and I think they’re very happy; and I’m looking forward to seeing the end result.

But personally, I was born in January 1939, which of today makes me seventy-nine years and two or three months. I was born in Royston Hospital; unexpectedly, because I was originally started almost over the road from where my parents lived in Eaton Road, on the corner of Grays Road; and Mum had organised that I go over to come out in the Nursing Home in Grays Road. Anyway, complications set in apparently, and I was transferred to Royston and Dr Rowland Cashmore – who was our family doctor, and mine for years also – performed a caesarean section and that’s how I came into the world. Interesting that it was just across the road in Eaton Road where Mum and Dad were living, and just around the corner from where my grandmother, Mum’s mother, lived at 705 St Aubyn Street, virtually just round the corner from Grays Road. That house is still there, and I often look at it. I can’t ever recall going there, but have got photos of it.

Both sets of grandparents were born in England. My grandfather on my father’s side and his mother were both born in Halifax in the 1870s. Dad was an only son and he was born in 1906. Mum and her family lived in Kendall in England, and Mum was born in October 1910, and she and her older sister came out to New Zealand in 1911; Mum was four months old and was a babe in arms. And I’ve got here the Third Class Passenger’s Contract Ticket (Steerage). I think there was about twelve bunks in each of the rooms. They came out; left on the ‘Norfolk’ which was the Federal [??] Line [Steam Navigation Company Limited] to Australia and New Zealand and they came out here leaving for Wellington from Liverpool on the 4th of February, 1911. So Mum was just four months old.

So she would have no recollection but what a journey! Mother with a baby coming in steerage, ‘cause it wasn’t luxury.

No, that’s right. By a strange coincidence, my father came out with his parents on the same ship. And they were in Halifax; the others were up north in the Lakes District, and they caught the same ship and came out. I didn’t talk to my grandfather Mulvanah about it, but Granny Halstead said. “Yes”, she said, “we knew the Mulvanahs on the ship, but lost track of them of course after we arrived in Wellington.”

My grandparents on Dad’s side stopped in Wellington and he got a job almost immediately – the next day he got a job – delivering in Wellington the day they arrived; delivering bread off a wagon. There were no bread shops in those days, and he delivered bread for two or three days; and went around and found a succession of work. An inspiration to the young ones today who don’t want to work at all, because if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat.

And then ultimately, Grandad moved up to Taranaki, to Whangamomona where they were building the railway line. And he got a job up there; arrived there in the middle of the night; the next day they gave him some bits of 3×2 and a bit of canvas, and said, “Build yourself a hut”, which he did. And in due course … he was trying to ring or get in touch with Wellington and get Grandma and my father, who was at the time four and a half, to come up and live. And he’d extended this little “house”, and I put it in inverted commas; one bedroom, one room, and that’s where they stayed for a couple of years and it was pretty tough going.

Whangamomona even today, is not the most welcoming place, and in the winter … I don’t know how they existed; I really don’t.

No, no. Although he was on the … they were making the trusses for the tunnel they were building one of the tunnels through. But it must’ve been almost unbearable. But from there the Mulvanahs moved to Feilding, and Grandad got a job as a secretary in forming a cooperative in Feilding. And health reasons ultimately bought them to Napier, and that’s where they lived … Grandad and Grandma lived … for the rest of their lives.

Where was that?

Well they lived in Bowling Road; and the house is still there, we drove past it the other day for the first time for y… and I said to Marie, “Let’s drive down Bowling Road and see if we can see it”; and it is still there. Grandad got involved in all sorts of things, and he got elected to the Council I think, in 1927. And he was on the Council when the earthquake struck, and he wrote graphically about his experience as it was happening. And he was responsible for housing the people temporarily down in ‘tent alley’, I think it might’ve been, down in Clive Square. But he lived well into his seventies, and died in 1953 in Wellington, in a hotel – he was on his way back to England for a holiday, and that’s as far as he got. He’d been a widower for quite a long time, nine years; my grandmother died … and it’s one of my very earliest memories, of my grandmother collapsing at the dining room table on Christmas Day after we’d eaten. And she just slid away, and it’s one of my earliest memories.

So Granny Halstead, Mum’s mother, spent most of her life on her own. She was divorced, and she brought up three children: Nora, Mum’s older sister; Mum had a younger brother, Harry Costello, who was born in New Zealand, and he died about ten years ago. And it was a pretty tough life for them too, because there was no widow’s pension and those sort of things. And Granny Halstead worked as an assistant out on farms; she worked for the Lowrys out at Okawa. Mum went to school out there, to Pukehamoamoa, and when they had their ninetieth year, I think Mum was the oldest pupil; would’ve been the first day pupil other than the fact that they … the school was originally held in one of the family homes. I can’t recall which family it was, but their children were classed as the first day pupils.

Was your Halstead family related to the local Halsteads?

Yes – my grandmother’s second husband, was William Halstead, and related to the ones that I think were in Tomoana Road.

And they ran the Taihape Road …

That I really don’t know, Frank.

Yes – the Halsteads, they started … it was called Overland Transport, and they used to transport the Cascade beer from Taihape to Hastings across the Annie. [The Gentle Annie : Napier-Taihape Road]

No, that’s the first time I’ve heard of that.

So maybe there’ll be a link.

I do know that she was very close to Mrs Lonnie Graham, who lived with her daughter, Betty, who never married and was a dental nurse at Hastings Central School; a few years older than me. And the Grahams, Lonnie and Betty, lived in quite a modern house in front of the Kia Toa Bowling Club, right beside there. And I think the Grahams were the ones who had the farms out at Ngatarawa.

So Dad was a builder; served his apprenticeship in the twenties with I think it was a Mr Abbott in Hastings. Left with a glowing reference, and was actually working on the State houses in Awatea Street, and probably in Akina Street, which were the first State houses built in Hastings. And we … I say ‘we’ because I was there then … got one of them at 511 Awatea Street – two bedrooms, ideal when I was born, but in later years we could’ve had three, but had two. And they lived there virtually all their married life. Mum and Dad were married in 1936; I came along at the beginning of 1939, so I was just a three-year-old when they moved in in 1939, into Awatea Street. Lots of happy memories there; some of them worrying times – I remember one of the first things I remember them worrying about was in 1951 … so they’d been there twelve years … and had the opportunity to buy the State house from Sid Holland’s National government, which was one of their election planks in ‘51, was to let you buy your State house. And I know Mum and Dad talked for hours, whether they could afford to buy it, and in the event they did. And I think it was no more than about 2,000 … it was less than £2,000; forty-year loan at 2½ percent fixed; and it would’ve apparently taken an Act of Parliament to change it. And all those people who had them were fixed at 2½ percent. They paid about … when it was converted to decimal currency, it was about $11 a month; they paid that for forty years. So fifty-one and forty is ninety-one; Dad died in 1985, and Mum didn’t move ‘til about 2004 when she moved into Waiapu. And I remember she got a letter one day with about five years on a forty-year loan to go. [Chuckle] And she rang me up and said, “I’ve got this letter from Mr Tizard” – who was the Minister of Housing – “We’re broke and we need the money. Help us to build another State house; would you like to pay off the balance of your loan”, which must’ve only been … less than a few hundred dollars, if that. And I said to Mum, “Just put the letter away in the bottom drawer and forget all …” “Oh, I can’t do that”, she said. She said, “It’s from Mr Tizard!” I said, “Didn’t come from Mr Tizard.”

No. [Chuckle]

I said, “Just forget about it.” And in later life, before she moved out, we had a State Advances officer living next door to us in Napier; and I said, “Look, can you find out how many people have still these forty-year loans?” And he came back and he said, “Yeah”, he said, “there’s two in Hawke’s Bay”, and he said, “Your mother’s number one – theirs is the oldest one.”

State homes were warm, they were secure, they had big sections and they were built of good … because they didn’t have pine to build them with those days.

Heart rimu, and …

That’s right.

So my earliest remembers [memories] I think are probably photographs of me sitting on the front lawn with our little Cocker Spaniel we had at the time. [Shows photos] What you’re seeing are photos of the garden being extended, and Dad building sheds – albeit they weren’t certified or probably weren’t permitted, but he would build them better than anybody else would build them; extended the little shed we had and turned it into a storeroom, and then a wood shed, and a coal shed; and the copper which he pulled out eventually and put down the back of the section. But they were great times, because they were all mostly families who moved into Awatea Street, and we were all round about the same age. And lots of children, you know; we had the Rosses who came to live next door to us over the back – she swapped houses with somebody else. You couldn’t do all that today – swap for a bigger house with an older couple. The Wrightsons lived next door to us …

Trevor Wrightson?

Trevor Wrightson, and I think Jane Wrightson, who finished up being … she was part of the family too … who finished up being the film censor. So Jane; who was the next down the road? Two doors down the road were the Kirks; Ken Kirk drove for the dairy company.

That’s right; well, he used to pick up our cream.

Yeah. Well he took me out one day, and I’d never been out that way; we didn’t have a car. And we went out to Moteo way, and I thought we might’ve been heading up to Taupo for all I knew. But he picked up all the cans and he brought them back to the dairy company at Stortford Lodge. Over the road we had the Bowmans – Mrs Bowman lived with Barry and Irene; her husband was killed overseas. So they were there.

And Barry was killed coming home from the golf club on the road one night.

That’s right, out at Bridge Pa corner … one of those corners, yes.

The Lewises lived across the road; the Wilsons lived next door … Robyn and [?Vaughan?]; the Rowlands lived up the road – they had four girls, a set of twins. And the families were an assortment of workers, and we had a schoolteacher, Miss Williams, who looked after her mother – she was up the top of the street; truck drivers, shopkeepers, salesmen; we had a policeman, which … we weren’t really … he didn’t worry us, but … In fact we had another …

You were aware of him.

… and we had another one round the corner, Schollum – at the corner of Pattison … just by Pattison Road. So yeah, we were well looked after, and as kids we all played together.

Well, actually all the homes were about the same size; even when you went away from the State home areas, homes were between eighty and a hundred square metres. No one had big homes, everyone had a big section. It was only when you went to places like …

York Street there was good grand homes, and Henry Street.

And so the rest of Hastings … everyone was the same.

Yeah. It was a level playing field and we were all the same. But no, we’d go away; we seemed to go away for the day and play, and have lunch at somebody’s house and nobody would worry. We never had telephones; a lot of us didn’t. When we finally got one it was a four-figure number. [Chuckles] And we used to go round the corner to the post box, just two blocks round in Willowpark Road, and put the penny in and ring up or wait outside to get your call.

And we made our own fun. The boys used to … I mean, we used to make sinkers out of lead; pour the hot lead and cook up lead … bits of lead … and then pour it into moulds and put a staple into it, and then make little sinkers for going down to the creek at the back of Akina Park trying to catch eels. And stay down there and play all day.

And summers – well I will say there’s been no summers like we used to have in those days – six weeks of just being out in the sun. And people say, “Oh, this is hot!” Well we say, “Well this is what we had in the forties and fifties.”

I know; I keep records of temperatures and wind directions and so forth; do you know, nothing has changed really. In fact the summers used to start at the beginning of November and go right through ‘til March. No rain; we’d get huge thunderstorms that would build up over on the ranges and come through, but it was so dry and so hot. It’s just that the human memory is so short.

Don’t get me started on global warming. [Chuckle]

So no, school days seemed to be fantastic, ‘cause of course when you’re young the days are long, and as you get older there’s only three days in a week now; and all of a sudden – there’s something you do on Wednesday, but it comes up – what used to be about three weeks is now only a couple of days.

So we went to kindergarten. By 1941 I had a sister, Toni, and I used to go to kindy. Mum didn’t take us; I could even go to kindy on my trike I guess, on my own, which was in Warren Street round in the Buffalo Hall … first block round on … so it’s where the Council chamber is now, basically. And Warren Street went right through to Southampton Street. And apparently, you know, my sister who was then only about two, would follow me on a trike. And they couldn’t keep her home, so they said, “Oh look, you might as well stay.” So she was one of the youngest ever to go to kindy. But we all went on our own. And I can’t remember much about that but I think I can remember a Christmas party that all the mothers brought all the kids. But off we went to kindy.

And then of course we came to big school, to Central. I was five, and what a great experience that was. Again I don’t remember much about it, so it must have been okay; there was no great trauma at primary school. I went right through Central; good school, good teachers. I know I can remember most of them; going backwards, in Standard 6 we had a great fellow called Wallace Wilton. I remember he taught us ballroom dancing out on the quadrangle before the school ball, and we learned to do the Valeta and the Waltz and the Foxtrot and the Gay Gordons. And of course for young boys of twelve, it was our first experience of being able to take girls in your arms and dance around in public, and we all thought that was pretty good; and I think we sorted out one or two that we liked the look of more than others. [Chuckles] And I guess they did too – the girls did the same thing.

Absolutely.

So Wallace Wilton had a car with a coke burner on the side, and I’d never … it was the only one I ever saw. I don’t know what happened to it, and whether you could still use it if you had one. I don’t know how it went, but I know it was there on the running board of his pre-war American car.

Standard 5 we had Miss Pinfold … Doris Pinfold … what a lovely lady she was! And her great claim to fame was that she looked after the staffroom … the staff cafeteria; and any food that was left over after morning tea would come down – and after lunch … playtime, ten o’clock … and she’d share it with us, as long as we’d been good. And if we hadn’t been good and we got the strap, then she’d give us a piece of cake or something.

We were in what I think was called the new block; a block that was built in the late thirties. And they were built all over the country, but they were big open-air classrooms. The big bi-fold doors open out to face the north. The windows on the south were high up; plenty of light, and we had individual desks. We had classes of forty in our class, boys and girls, and we seemed to learn so much. There wasn’t time to go away like kids do from school today. I was just thinking yesterday, we had a trip to Morrison Motor Mowers, we had a trip to the post office, and a trip to the fire station. And as a special treat at the end of the year Miss Pinfold [took] us by bike, not by bus, by bike, and we all biked out to Te Awanga for the day and that was the extent of our adventures. Now of course, today, they all head – even primary school kids – they head overseas. Yeah. Don’t begrudge them but …

We’re just digressing from school, and you mentioned Horseshoe Bend. We went and camped out … the family went and camped out – we did a lot of camping. But good friends of my parents … my Mum … Mrs Joe Donnelly, who lived out of Mokopeka Station; Maud and my mother worked together hairdressing. That’s where they met. And Mum did her apprenticeship with Mrs Lauder, and Maud must have worked there and they were good friends all their lives. And we’d go out to the farm at Mokopeka and stay out there with them and their sons, David and James. But we got a photograph of us down where we were camping at Horseshoe Bend, and Joe came down on the horse; he drove down.

And in later years then I went on a St John Ambulance cadet camp, and we had that for a couple of nights out. I would’ve only been about eleven then, that was in the fifties. That’s a whole other subject. And we had one-or-two-nights camp, and that was at Horseshoe Bend, and we crossed the river and went up in the hills and saw the Maori dugouts. You never hear anything about those today, but they must still be there.

They would be. Maybe there’s no one left that remembers except you. [Chuckle]

But they were built as a lookout, because they could see up the river towards Waipawa way – just above the bend. They could see southwards into what would virtually be the sea, so it was a great spot. [Throat clearing]

But I digress from school; but you know, we worked hard at school. We got lots of interesting subjects, and good teachers. And I mentioned the new block because at the time we were there in the forties and fifties, there was the old – probably could’ve been built at the end of the 1900s … 1800s – a wooden block with about four classrooms in it. And instead of central heating we had the stoker upper …

Chip heaters?

… chip heaters. And we’d take our potatoes in the winter, and everybody would carve their initials on the potato and put them into the ashes, and we’d have them at playtime – at high school – we never thought of doing it at primary school. But we had one at high school in a prefab we had down at Boys’ High School, and somebody stoked it up one day and it was white hot, and the teacher, he evacuated us out; [chuckle] thought the thing was going to blow up. But those are the things one does.

But we had an area down the bank, that’s the old riverbank … old river that flowed through there, but what is now the Karamu Stream. We had a big school vege garden down there in the back of the Madison Baths as they were called then.

So the riverbed did actually run very close to there then?

Yes. James Morgan knows the story on that; because it ran through by the Municipal Theatre and through and across by New World shop; went on down and went into the stream at Windsor Park, and ultimately out. But there’s photos of the Maoris sitting on the side of the riverbank, on the corner now where the sports shop was … the Ford Motor Company were.

Yes.

One of the things that we had at primary school was the Hastings Primary Schools’ Choir. That was all the schools in Hastings, which there weren’t too many of them; and Havelock North, Bridge Pa, and I think Pakowhai were involved in it as well. And we used to rehearse every Thursday afternoon between half past three and five o’clock at St Andrew’s Hall in Market Street. Cath Colville took us – wonderful choir mistress, and a pianist – and we had another couple of pianists as well. We were divided up into altos and tenors; most of the boys were [chuckles] alto and soprano. But I had four or five years in that, and made a lot of friends. Again, last night I met one of them … was Annette Sherwood; and she and her twin sister Rosemary were in the choir all those years with me, and we only saw each other on Thursdays. And Annette came up last night and said, “Hi Garry” – sixty-five years later. She still looks like Rosemary … both look alike. But they were fun.

And then at the end of the year we would have our concert in November in the Municipal Theatre, and we’d all be dressed in our black trousers and white shirts, and we had colour sashes to distinguish what sort of sections we were in. And they set up the old wrestling and boxing stands on the stage, and we’d be tiered up there. And the Hastings orchestra did a lot of the playing there too, with Mr Fairbrash. The other conductor that we had … Eastwood, who worked at the Herald Tribune, Bill Eastwood … and his daughter was on the Opera Trust with us, and she and her husband died within weeks of each other. Now I can’t think of her name; her other daughter was a dancer … a ballroom dancer, and a very good dancer. But Bill Eastwood came and conducted as well in the first couple of years before Miss Cole took over. But they were fun years.

And of course, just being around from the Madison Baths at Central School, we got involved in swimming as most of the kids did. They were great experiences. We’d go and pay our penny on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon to queue up to have our swim. Sundays were a short day because they had to empty the pool on Sunday afternoon, because there was no filtration plants …

That’s right.

… cleaned them down, scrubbed them down. The Heretaunga Swimming Club did that. But the pool was literally green, and you could almost stand up in it; it was really like a soup, and it was … Nobody ever got sick. And it was warm! And in later time we were in the club; I think about nine when we joined the swimming club, and taught to swim by Peter Price who’s still alive; and that’s a whole other story.

He’s an amazing man …

Isn’t he? And he was married to Cecily Doig, whose father was Cecil, who was in St John Ambulance – I don’t say with me, but he was a great guy to go on St John Ambulance duty with. And he of course died on the ‘Wahine’, doing what he’d always done, helping people.

So Peter Price, and Mac Mason; Ron Shakespeare was the President of the club and L G Rainbow was the Patron. They were wonderful, dedicated people. Mac Mason, who …

Don’t forget the ladies, will you?

Yes, well there was Mrs Durant, and Mrs Mason, Mrs Murdoch …

Very strong lady …

She was a strong lady. [Chuckle] So they had a falling out with Heretaunga, and formed a new club at Hastings West, Raureka baths; and that turned out to be nearly as good as Heretaunga. There was always keen competition. Mrs Durant … Mavis … they ran Aquacades once a year, and the little ones were done up as ducklings and things. They had a couple of water polo teams and then they had the deeper diving off a three-metre board into about five foot six of water; it wasn’t very deep. In fact we had a display one year; some champions came round, must have been from the Commonwealth Games … British Empire Games they were called then … 1950. And Jack Stewart and Jeanette Lawson from Napier – Jack was from Dunedin – and he dived into the pool and broke his wrist. And he was by chance staying over the road at Lewis’ house right across the road from us; they were put up as guests in our houses, so I got a self-appointed job of looking after his wrist while he was here – I was a cadet in St John Ambulance, and I was only twelve or thirteen then.

But back to the school days; we had the Primary Schools’ Choir, the Heretaunga Swimming Club, that kept me busy. And then sort of halfway through the year Mr Wilton put up his hand … in Standard 6, so I was twelve … and said, “Mr Spence has been round from the theatre, and they’re looking for two boys to sell programmes.” So of course my hand went straight up and I got picked. And I went home to Mum, I said, “I’ve got myself a job at night for four nights at the theatre, selling programmes” for whatever … sixpence or a penny a programme, I think we got … “and it’s the Gilbert & Sullivan operas from Australia.” “Oh, you won’t like that.” said Mum, “it’s all ‘haw, haw, haw’”. And it turned out not to be, and what started off as something temporary kept me going for nearly five years, selling programmes. It gave me the love of the theatre and … although, I was able to perform at high school in the two Gilbert & Sullivan operas as a third former, which was most unusual for third-formers to get in. But I was selected and we did ‘Pirates of Penzance’ in 1952 with Constance Miller, our senior mistress, and all the staff. And then two years later we did ‘Yeoman of the Guard’. I just loved that, and we had proper makeup and all that sort of thing. And later on when I went to Waipukurau I joined a dramatic society down there, and that’s …

That’s another story …

So I had a chance to sell programmes for the international shows; New Zealand shows; New Zealand Players; New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – anybody that came to the theatre; individual singers and performers; soloists that came. I did that ‘til I was sort of almost halfway through high school.

Marvellous! Little sideline …

It really was. And we always got a seat; except there was only one thing – it was absolutely jam packed for the three or four nights they were here – and that was one of the British Military bands that came, and I can’t remember which one it was; I never even got a programme from it. We had to stand in the back of the gallery, and they were just incredible with the brass and the pipes and drums. There were some incredible shows we saw – harmonica band from Germany came, and ukulele bands and …

Well, you know, when you look back and think the Opera House was really the focal point for everything.

That’s right. Well, Dad took me to one wrestling match; it was Ken Kenneth and somebody else. And truly, there was blood all over the ring, and Dad said, “We’re going home”, and I said, “No, we’re not!” [Chuckles] I think we were sitting in the dress circle, but they were great days. And then later on of course I got on St Ambulance duty, and we got a front row seat on the stage; a ringside seat at the wrestling. But it was great showmanship, and …

Yes – they probably had little sachets of blood …

Yes, probably did.

… that spread it round.

So of course, when the time came, Ron Shakespeare was instrumental in wanting to do something with the theatre.

Yes.

I just couldn’t keep away, and so that was it; that’s another story of being at Stage one … now three stages … of completely redoing the theatre.

And of course we had our school balls; we mentioned the dancing, being taught to dance. But they’d [there’d] be school balls for years; when we were kids we went into costumes. I went as an Indian chief one year and a sailor another, and had our photos taken by Roy Batchelor, and we’d have a grand march; and I don’t know what else we did – maypole dancing and that sort of thing. But they were all part of growing up.

They were wonderful times …

Yes. Well you know, imagine learning to dance again. In St John Ambulance John Tobin was one of our … and his parents, Bruce and Mrs Tobin who had the butcher’s shop, they were very youth oriented. And they’d come down on Sundays with their gramophone records and we’d put them on in the St John Ambulance Hall which was in Karamu Road South, next to Peach’s garage where the carpark is. And we did highland dancing, but we did other dancing; but they taught us with an old gramophone record. To dance with it you had to hold the gramophone record on your tummies and don’t let it fall, so you were really, really close to the young lady. So that was primary school; high school I sort of think I drifted through.

Play any sports?

Played a bit of hockey. Although I loved sport and I love watching it and going to it and seeing all sorts of sports, I had other interests. See I never played any musical instruments ‘cause I was left-handed, and although my father was an absolute magnificent banjo player and is renowned locally for it, it wasn’t ‘til I went to America, you know, twenty years ago and went to New Orleans and saw good banjo players … but my dad was right up there as a world beater and if only we’d have taken him to … he didn’t want to go, he was quite happy to do it for fun. But we could be living in the States. [Chuckle] But he really was … and we’re fortunate that we’ve got records that were made in the fifties, and we’ve had digitally … whatever. Magnificent playing; he played at a [an] Anzac concert and they just about lifted the roof off with the cheers and the clapping, and that’s still on the record. But he played in dance bands with Les Henry.

I remember him actually.

Les Henry, he was the manager of the gas company. They were all part-timers and they’d go off and take everything with them to dance bands; they played in all the country bands, country balls – sometimes two a week in the season – and then arrive home about three or four in the morning all shickered up, [chuckles] and go to work the next day.

We must take some of your father’s digitalised banjo playing. Have you got any?

Yes, I have, but the one copy that I’ve got is with Michael Fowler ‘cause he got it before we went away; got three copies done and I gave one each to my son and daughter … I’ll get [it]; Michael had it temporary for when they were going to open the theatre. So that was an Anzac concert some time in the early fifties.

So that was primary school. High school as I say, I drifted through, probably because I took the wrong subjects – I only ever wanted to be a schoolteacher, never wanted to be anything else. But I had a leaning towards secretarial and accounting and that. So I missed School Certificate. It was a pretty black mark at the time but I missed that, and circumstances were that I had to go out and get a job. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but there was tons of work – nobody ever left school and didn’t have a job. And all our class went into banks or mercantile firms; and builders, plumbers; and training college, university; and most did very, very well in the professional class that I was in, and ultimately, you know, we did well in life as well.

So Dad had a friend of a friend who said there was a job going at Hawke’s Bay Farmers in the hardware department. I knew nothing about hardware, … I knew nothing about retailing except that I’d been a shop sweeper at Baird’s.

But you’d sold programmes …

Yeah. Did all the sweeping at Baird’s before school, and then in the afternoon delivering parcels. That was while I was at primary school, and just into high school. Again digressing, the first day we came back to start at high school, of course King George VI died – it was 6th February; we were just back at school, and I had to get up on the roof and raise the flag at half mast for the King, because that was quite a big thing – probably won’t happen this next time. But all the shops were done out in purple and black. That was Baird’s, and of course they’re gone now. They were just beside the hotel.

But the other thing I was going to mention was about the jobs that I had and was able to do things. I had a paper run for a little while, which meant not only going down and wrapping the papers, but going and collecting the money every second Saturday morning. And that was a big, big job; I did that for about six months.

When Akina Park wasn’t a park, and it was a paddock, you know, down the back; a fellow called Paddy Nihill, who lived in the last house on the left in Willowpark Road, he kept a couple of racehorses in there and had a barn in the back corner by the high school rifle range where he kept hay bales. And we used to play in there and Paddy would come and chase us out of the paddock, and we’d all run across to school, and he’d never catch us.

But when it was first developed Wattie’s put peas in vines in the whole big paddock – I suppose it was about … probably about five or six acres on it. The cutters couldn’t get in to a couple of metres from the edge, so I went in with a wheelbarrow and made about ten trips with a wheelbarrow laden up with vines; and brought them home just round the corner into Awatea Street. And I think Mum helped me, but we took all the pods off them, put ’em into sugar bags, and I put them on the front of my bike and I went to the pubs and sold the sacks of peas to the pubs for their dining rooms. And the ones that I couldn’t sell, Dad said, “Well, take them down to Charlie Slater’s”, and so we got rid of them that way. But then we had this stack of vines [chuckle] that Dad just chopped up and dug into the gardens. So nothing was wasted, so that was another enterprise. And I went peach picking down in Williams Street at Orbell’s – which is all houses now; that would be the Northwood subdivision – picked peaches down there. And I biked out to the other side of Pakowhai on the Farndon Road for a couple of weeks and thinned mangels.

Whenever we had someone we didn’t want to keep working for us, my brother would always put them into thinning and hoeing mangels and they would only last ‘til lunchtime, [chuckle] and they’d come and say, “You can keep your job!”

Later life of course I did all sorts of things to supplement our income. But in high school we had the military training, and we all had to get … in February … get into these serge uniforms. But we had time on the road for a while, so I enjoyed that. And I must’ve had a good eye because I could shoot pretty well, and we went out to Roy’s Hill and fired .303s. And one day we had the chance to shoot the Brens, which was a good experience, stripped them down and started them off. And my biggest regret was that I never got into military training; I got stopped because of my eyesight. At the time I wore glasses, and they said no. My mates had all got called up and I missed out, so …

I got in with … you would know Calvin Appleby?

Yes. They were in Hastings West Swimming Club. Did they work at Cliff Press?

No, he was an engineer. You’re talking about Trevor … they worked for the Cliff Press …

Palmer.

Colin, Trevor and … the other one …

Used to go down when they were in Heretaunga Street.

Colin’s the only one that’s left.

Gosh, is he?

The others have all gone.

They used to do all the lead typesetting; under the Assembly Hall, they were in there.

Yes.

That’s another thing that we used to … often people said, “Well what did you do when you were kids?” Well on a wet day my sister and I would sit and we would have a competition to see how many of the shops starting at the Municipal Theatre, go right down to Nelson Street and come back down the other side, and see how many we could write down and then check and see that they were correct. And it’s amazing, ‘cause they never changed, and they were all full.

So we had military training, and the masters were [chuckle] officers.

Yes – they were all ex …

Some of them were, and some of them all of a sudden became officers. But they were pretty good, and we set up a pretty good battalion and … very impressive parade of cadets and officers. And we had sort of a pipe band at school. So no, school life was good, and I wished I’d probably studied longer and worked harder perhaps, but I don’t regret anything.

I think you know, you’ve obviously been successful at what you were doing; what more could you ask for?

That’s right, yeah. So to end up, we had a good life; good parents; good family, they looked after us; we didn’t want for anything but we didn’t have much. But we had a gramophone; we had trips away; we went camping … long camps, six weeks; Dad would knock off and we’d go round the East Cape – one year we went right up the East Cape and camped on the side of the road … camped right on the beach. My birthday was the beginning of January and I missed it, because when we got to Whakatane I was able to find a calendar somewhere, and it was two days ago. [Chuckle] I thought it was tomorrow, but it’d been. So that’s the sort of life we …

So what sort of car did you father drive?

The first car he had … would’ve been the late forties, ‘cause he went to work with the tools as a carpenter strapped on his bike; his saws and all that sort of gear. And he got a 1927/’28 Chev [Chevrolet] Tourer, [?] Nashville. We had wonderful times in that, [the] first one – don’t know what happened to that, he traded it in for … must’ve been a ‘29 Tourer – ‘27/’28/’29. Cut the back of the front seat down, hinged it so we could drop the seat down, turn the back seat … bottom part of it … around and my sister and I slept … that was our bed. We built a trailer on the back which took a double mattress; he and Mum used that. Had extended poles to make it a higher level, and everything went in that. He found out that the best thing was when you built the trailer you put the same size wheels as you had on the car, because the first trip – we went away in 1946; we went to Taupo with friends of the family, with Cyril Barclay and his family [from] Barclay Motors; they were old, old friends. And we took off and got as far as Mangateretere and got a puncture on the trailer. No phones, no anything. Cyril got halfway and decided to come back, and came back and found us on the side of the road, and kindly went to town, rang the garage and said, “Sort them out and take the Mulvanahs up to Taupo.” I went up, took the rest of the gear without the trailer. So after that … don’t know whether we ever got a puncture, but no tarsealed roads up there those days.

I know.

Dust went everywhere; but no, we had wonderful camping trips.

Is Gary still alive? Gary Barclay?

Yeah, Gary; and Graham, and Val. Graham just lives around the corner here.

Well Gary used to live down the end of Willowpark Road.

That’s right, round the corner … the street they built.

And he went to Napier Boys’ [High School] a year behind me.

He married a girl from Clive; and Graham married a schoolteacher. And I met her just the other day again, and no, they live … we see them walking past, in our subdivision here. So no, the camping trips as I say, were good.

So I set off to Hawke’s Bay Farmers; worked from nine ‘til five in the hardware department. Well, it was seven and a half minutes – that was the time officially we started to work to get the forty hour week and to finish, and we worked on Friday nights.

Wasn’t that a wonderful store? When you think of the grocery store – you could buy Canadian salmon, you could buy anything from anywhere in the world there.

Yeah. Well when we were younger of course, we got our groceries from Hatherell’s store on the corner, we were talking earlier, on the corner of Elm Road which was Knowles’ Folly. And we’d sit on the stool there, and old Mr Hatherell’d take the order, and then somehow it got to our house in the afternoon. And some of the things – ‘cause we bought bags of sugar …

Bags of flour …

… seventy-pound bags of sugar. We had bins that that were … in the State house … built in, one for flour and one for sugar. But Mum would bottle, bottle, bottle; and there was [were] relishes of fruit and vegetables; chutneys and all done from somewhere. And baking. Now we buy everything, and there isn’t time to do it.

How long did you stay at the Farmers?

Oh – end of 1956 I’d been there a year, and there were whispers of Jim Vesty, who was the manager of the hardware department – he was wanting to retire, and they were wanting to transfer somebody up from Waipukurau, who I thought was a lady because his name was Shirley … Shirley Anderson, a hell of a nice guy … and move everybody up. But they couldn’t find anybody to replace the replacement they were replacing down the line, and they said, “Would you like to go to Waipukurau?” And I said, “Well, I don’t if I’d like to go to Waipukurau, everybody I know is here.” Anyway, I thought about it and went home to Mum and Dad, and they said, “Well where would you live?” I said, “Well, they say there’s a lady that takes boarders.” So anyway, the long and the short of it was I moved to Waipukurau to start work there in the beginning of 1957 in the old hardware department, which’d been there since sheep were first [??]. [Speaking together] It was an old building and we were right beside the grocery department, and it stretched … one long counter with a division for us to get in. And we had a lot of produce things down there, and we were responsible for wire and iron and posts and all that sort of … which we hadn’t had in Hastings. The produce department looked after that over the road in the stores where now the ANZ Bank and Hastings Building Society were [are].

So I headed down to Waipukurau; and so I got involved in swimming and they welcomed me with open arms; I got involved in St John Ambulance again, probably ‘cause I’d been in Hastings; and the Dramatic Society; and I joined the golf club. I didn’t play after that; once I got married I decided that I’d heard so much about golfing widows, so I decided that … and I wasn’t the best golfer, but I enjoyed it. But that’s where I played, at Waipukurau.

So how long were you at Waipukurau?

I was in Waipukurau working … I was married in 1960 … nearly five years in Waipukurau, and all but one year with Hawke’s Bay Farmers. We saw the change from the old building to the new building, which I see being sold, on the corner of Kitchener Street. That was built in the last year that I was with Hawke’s Bay Farmers.

It was pretty smart when it was built.

Oh yes, top effort.

Best building they had actually, though Wairoa could’ve been as …

Oh – Wairoa wasn’t built then. But Waipukurau was – it was a very good …

So during this period Garry, you met your first wife?

Yes.

What was her name?

Her name was Lesley, and her mother was in Waipukurau and had a shoe shop. She was married to a footwear retailer and they had a footwear store – Anderson’s Footwear in Waipukurau.

What was her maiden ..?

Lesley Aitken. And she had a sister, Diane, and they had lived with their father for many years in Levin; and came up to live with their mother. And of course two young eligible ladies arriving in town set the hot blooded young fellows, farmers and all, very excited. And I met Lesley at a dance, and it went from there. And we were married in 1960, and got a house to … in fact we brought our wedding forward because we got a house to rent, a brand new house … for six months, from a Dutch builder who built it and then went home to Holland. He was a bit older than us but his name was Harry Lepelaars, and he died just last week, or in the last couple of weeks I saw his death notice in the paper. But he built a lovely home in Waipukurau and we had that for six months; and he came back and we moved out. We had a shift up into Eden Terrace to an old house owned by a fellow called Prussing, who was an uncle of Peter Kale.

Not Reg Prussing?

Well, might’ve been; TD were his initials. But he was in Waipukurau or out there somewhere.

He later retired and came down and had some land at Meeanee.

Could’ve done. I don’t know. I know we rented the house off him. And he was … Peter Kale, who was ultimately with Wattie’s. And I’d met Peter through St Matthew’s Church choir, and him going to Lindisfarne. And they came to St Matthew’s on Sundays and that’s where I met Peter. We haven’t even talked about that. So Peter said, “Oh, I’ve got an uncle that’s [who’s] got a house that’s empty.” And it was a ramshackle little cottage that was built on a slope, and it had about six levels on it; and that’s where we lived.

I’d wanted to get into the office; I told you. Don’t think I’d’ve been cut out to be a schoolteacher; but I wouldn’t have stayed as a schoolteacher, I’d have gone into administration. And I wanted to get into the office in the Hawke’s Bay Farmers. And they had a policy then that you couldn’t change from one department to another, so you stayed where you were or you left. So I left at the time I got married; and came back from our honeymoon and I went to work for an accounting firm where Lesley, my wife, had worked for a couple of years – Watson, Watson & Blampied. They were in Napier; they had a Blampied – Blampied was in Napier. It was Watson & Watson, which was father and son; Claude was one of the old school, and he’d opened an office in Taupo. He was a wonderful guy, and he used to come down about once a month and just check; and Dick ran the Waipuk [Waipukurau] office. And they had a young fellow who’d just qualified, Graham Knobloch, and he died in a boating accident out at Kairakau, or one of the beaches … Pourerere or somewhere … a few years ago. And his father had been chief of the hospital there. So I had twelve months there.

But I applied for a job after that as ambulance driver in Hastings, and I got it; and we had twelve months in 1961 living in Haldane House on the corner of Eastbourne Street and Southland Road. And that was an experience. Our daughter was born then, in Hastings Hospital – the only baby that I know of that went to the hospital in an ambulance and came home in an ambulance; because we didn’t have a car and so we took them both in and brought them both home.

That was another great experience in life; I don’t regret it. We were building the new ambulance station round the corner – not the one that’s there now. But we lived on the job. We worked for a committee; committees would be the worse thing – everybody was your boss. We had the pipe band came to practise on Saturday mornings, and we had a new baby; and they would arrive about seven o’clock in the morning and walk around practising … tuning up before they played. Anyway, I thought, ‘We’ve got to find something; got to find a house.’ We didn’t have any money, we didn’t have a car. I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ And of course coincidences work out. And my wife at the time, Lesley’s mother had separated and was going out with a fellow who was the merchandise manager of the Hawke’s Bay Farmers and he’d actually been responsible for building the new building in Waipukurau. Great guy; died well before his time … Trevor Cook. And he came to me one day and he said, “Hey”, he said, “there’s a job going in Wairoa in the office” … in the Hawke’s Bay Farmers in the old building, over the river. And he said, “The guy’s the cashier, and he’s transferring to Waipukurau and they can’t find anybody to take the place.” So I said okay. “And there’s a house that goes with the job, but it’s on the site where they’re going to build the new building, but you can have it for a couple of years.”

So I handed in my notice as an ambulance driver, and we shifted everything up to Wairoa, and I started work there. And we had three years in Wairoa; we built a house. We had to get out eventually; after twelve months we had to get out of the one … it was right on the main street. Sharon was [a] little baby of course, so we built a house in Ostler Street in Wairoa – two bedrooms; tiny, tiny little house. It’s had a garage put on to it but it still looks exactly the same from the Google photo. So we couldn’t do much, ‘cause we didn’t have a car and Wairoa’s spread out a bit, so we didn’t go ahead much. But I was in St John for a while, and the swimming club. But it was a happy time. Andrew, my son, was born in Wairoa.

So eventually, after three years as cashier there – they’d advertised for a clerk in the garage in the Hastings office – so in September ‘64 we came back to Hastings, and we got a house to rent in Duke Street … 1009 … house is still there; belonged to a schoolteacher who’d been transferred to Taihape, and we rented that. Big garden – planted it all, which we’d done in Wairoa, must’ve liked g… [gardening].

So came back to Hastings and the garage. And it was a good family arrangement there; I loved the Hawke’s Bay Farmers … I loved being back with people that I’d worked with six or seven years beforehand. And [of] course people didn’t change much and they didn’t want to move – it was hard to find people to move, it had to be a good promotion to leave. So I went into the garage in Hastings and … great team of people. 15th September, and we had a new car salesman started that day, and we had a new Hastings branch manager started that day. And I never met the manager who was my boss; I never met him for about a week or ten days. And I saw this bloke walking around in suits, so I said to him, “Where do you fit into the … and he told me. That was Bob Williamson, who was Rosemary Sherwood’s husband. And Bob had been a mechanic; he was also an administrator, and a good one too – so good in fact, that General Motors sent him to Flint [Michigan] in America to their big factory, and he spent about two or three months there in the sixties. So the boss, who was Ivan McKenzie, in the whole motor division – I don’t think he wanted to let it go, but as it turned out he had good managers and we ran a pretty good ship. We set up a new accounting system in line with General Motors. And I went to head office, and just at the time that I moved they set up a head office of the motor division in Napier, in Bissell’s old building, next to the RSA Club in Dickens Street. That was at the time of the changeover to decimal currency and I’d been appointed one of the tutors. We were taught how to tute [chuckle] … to teach everybody in the motor division in Hastings how many beans made five, sort of thing, [chuckle] and run classes; and we’d go over to Napier. I enjoyed it, but we were in an ivory tower and I lost touch with people. And I think that’s when I discovered when I did that, that I was away from people, and the garage, and the clients, and the people around us.

Had Baillie Farmers moved the garage?

No, it was still Farmers’ Motors, and it was just called part of Hawke’s Bay Farmers. In the head office, Bob Williamson was the MD; [Managing Director] we had Bob Keeble of Napier rugby fame, who was the Service Manager; we had Evan Hughes who was the Sales Manager; and I was the accountant … called me an accountant. And I had a couple of staff and they worked … did the typing for the others as well, so that was our team. But I had [a] couple of years, in which time they decided that they would set up Farmers’ Motors. Kirkpatrick was the Chairman of the Board of Hawke’s Bay Farmers, and they were ready to have some major … there was going to be some big changes. Control of the company had gone from farmers to business people, so they set up Farmers’ Motors … formed a separate company … so they needed to appoint a secretary and they had to be qualified. So they appointed a fellow from Wellington – I think he was with Tip Top, and obviously a good fellow, but I felt disadvantaged. I felt out of it, and all of a sudden I had a boss who wanted to do it his way. Bob Williamson wasn’t my boss any more. And the personal relationship …

Well that was the change in the Hawke’s Bay Farmers as a company …

That was part of the whole thing. It still wasn’t Baillie Farmers; it was still Farmers’ Motors. Changed the colours and everything; and set it all up.

So anyway, I applied for another job outside; I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of this, and I’ve got to get back into retailing.’ And I got a job managing a footwear store … Ross Footwear in Napier. And Les Ross had been through the hoops – he’d started off as a young fellow working for somebody else, and built up a very good business. And he was more interested in playing the share market with a couple of business friends, and enjoying life and his golf. And the lucky thing for him … well he obviously bought out his shares, but he bought a brand new Jaguar; I remember it was under $10,000 for a brand new Jag, and that was his pride and joy. But I had three years there.

But I wanted a change again, and I saw an ad [advertisement] in the paper for a Manager of a furniture store. Didn’t know much about furniture, but it said ‘Apply to a Box number’ … Accountants. And I said I’d never apply for a job that I didn’t know where I was going; and I’d do just about everything but sell insurance and probably real estate, but I would do just about anything else.

So anyway, the company that the applications went to was a [an] accounting firm that I had been involved with the Hawke’s Bay Swimming Centre, which … now I was the Secretary/Treasurer of the Hawke’s Bay Swimming Centre. And McIvor O’Donnell did the auditing, and I’d been with them for four or five years, from Wairoa back to Hastings and then for seven or eight years. So I rang up Joe O’Donnell and said, “Joe, can you tell me the firm?” And he said, “No, I can’t, but” he said, “I’ll tell you – apply for it.” So anyway, I applied for it, and I still didn’t know where I was going; and anyway, I got this call, “Yeah, we’d like to interview you.” So I went to be interviewed at the furniture firm in – they had a retail store in Carlyle Street as a retail outlet in Hawke’s Bay for their furniture that they manufactured in Onekawa. So anyway, we had the interview with the MD and Secretary who were both about my age … turned out to be just a fraction younger. And when they finished the interview – and it was well after five ‘cause I had to go after the furniture store [closed] – I said, “Could you run me home?” I said, “I just live round the corner in Pirimai.” We’d bought our second house there; and ran me round and I said, “Would you like to come in and meet my wife?” So they came in, and half a bottle of whiskey later they left me and went home. And I sat for a week and never heard a word. So I thought. ‘Well this is no good,’ so I rang them up. And I said, “When am I starting? Have you appointed me?” And they said, “No – we had a hundred applicants”, and he said, “we haven’t gone through them all yet. But” he said, “actually, you’re the head of the list.” And I said to him, “Well how did you come ..?” He said, “Well, our Sales Manager” – whose name was Fletcher Walker, and a relation by descendant [descent] of Fletcher Christian; he was Fletcher Christian Walker … Fletcher Christian of the mutiny fame, and the islands – “he said, Garry Mulvanah. He taught me to swim in Waipukurau ten years ago. A great guy, he said” … blow my own trumpet … but “he said, he’s the one.”

So I joined Permacraft New Zealand Limited, as it was called, and got the job as Manager of Colonial Craft it was, in Carlyle Street. We turned the shop around ‘cause it wasn’t being run properly. And I didn’t know anything about furniture but I knew how to run a retail business; and it doesn’t matter what it is, you can do it. And that’s what I did. We opened a new branch in Hastings in the Wright Stephenson’s building on the corner opposite the Hastings Club; Lesley and I got a share in that, and instead of calling it Colonial Craft we gave it the name of Colonial Furniture Court. And ultimately when Permacraft factory closed down later, we bought the rest of it from the owners, and stayed good friends with them ever since. They now live in Australia; we lived round the corner from them when we were living over there. We had a wonderful experience with them.

And of course, so we had Colonial Furniture Court and then we veered away from Colonial Furniture into bedding, and water beds – that’s another whole story. And we got PR [public relations] people in … promotion firm … they changed the name to Bedroom Bedroom. We painted it pink – the outside of the building – and our truck was pink.

We had that until the early nineties, but closed down after Big Save got bigger and bigger, and the Harvey Norman’s were coming. And we were at the stage that we were … Marie had come in; that’s another story. Marie and I decided that we’d sort of had enough. We’d got the travel agency by then, and that’s a whole story on its own. So we had the travel business for twenty-five years – half my working life.

So you’ve – and that was just down the road, wasn’t it?

Yes. We made lots of friends in the furniture business of course but … no there weren’t that many friends. When we opened in Waipukurau, they said, “You’ll never do any good – you’ll never be able to start a business in Waipukurau, because it’s so tiny.” And I said, “Don’t worry, I know everybody in Waipukurau.” We opened up at a little shop. If you drive straight on and veer to sort of eleven o’clock at the main square corner, you’d run into the old building. And we painted it pink; we told every[one] that we’d put glue in the paint to hold the building together. [Chuckle] It was literally falling to bits; it’d been an old bakery. But we had a party, and we invited all the retailers that I knew and the only ones who didn’t come was the furniture store. Lesley and I had bought our furniture for our first home there.

But anyway, we enjoyed our time in Waipukurau, that was an experience being down there with the furniture. But somebody once told us you’ve got to have five shops to be really successful, but we only had three.

Okay, you had two other shops?

We had two shops. We sold the building in Waipukurau; we tried to auction it and nobody came to the auction, so anyway, somebody came one day and said. “I’ll buy your building.” And I was hanging on underneath my desk hoping like hell that he would buy it. And it did … we agreed on a price; we were glad to get rid of it, and we closed Waipukurau down, and Napier, and then we just stuck to Hastings. And ultimately one of my staff had had a call one day, came in and said, “One of my friends has got a business in town, and she’s looking for someone [who] knows a lot of people, got business acumen and plenty of money.” And I said, “Well we’ve got two out of three – let’s have a look at it.” And it was Twin City Travel, which was round opposite … it’s now Spex, or one of those eye shops, opposite Blackmore’s. So we looked at it and we did the figures with our accountant, and we bought it. And I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ We still had the furniture business.

So anyway, they were very enterprising, the staff – this in ‘89 – and they’d put tours together, two tours themselves, to New York to “Phantom of the Opera” which had opened in 1988. They sold the first one, which was going in April/May, and got forty people, nearly all locals, to go to New York with a couple of stops; and put another tour together in September. And they were finishing up selling that when we bought the business, and took it over in January. And they said, “Well, you and Marie might as well take the second tour.” I’d done lots of swimming tours as a team manager, knew how to deal with people. We’d been overseas to Los Angeles, and there ought to be a person that’s done that; and that was as far as we’d been. But I thought, ‘Well I can look after kids on swimming tours for ten days – I can look after adults somewhere else.’ And that’s what we did; that’s how we started off. Marie and I took the tour … the second one; first one was very successful, and the second one equally; most of them locals – I got a couple of our own contacts out of town that said, “Well, we’d love to go”, and we fitted them in. And off we went, and we were away for three weeks; couple of nights in LA; we then flew to Washington and New York … started to get me thinking; we had to fly from Washington to New York which is only an hour’s flight. And we found out that every time you get on a plane – it doesn’t matter where you’re going – it’s a whole day, from the time you start to the time you finish. And we thought, ‘Well one day there’s got to be a better way.’

So anyway, off we went. Some of us did six shows in seven nights. We had six nights in New York; we were in the theatre district. In fact in the block that we were in, just on Broadway in Times Square, we could walk round the block, which were 200 by 400 – there were eight theatres we could go to without crossing the road. Well that was the only one we had booked, and the rest – we queued up for the others. People went off and queued themselves to go to whatever they wanted to. So that was our first experience of New York, and I just fell in love with New York. And we went back the second year – we put a tour together, coupled it up with theatre and doing a land tour with one of the Grey companies to go up to the autumn leaves in the fall; and then had a stopover at Honolulu on the way home. And we flew again from Washington, and they said, “Do we have to fly back to Washington?” And I said, “Well there must be a better way”, and somebody said, “What about Greyline?” So that didn’t work ‘cause you couldn’t book seats. So they said, “Well go down to Amtrak; go down to the railway station and see what you can do.” So we went down there and they welcomed us with open arms, and said, “Yes, yeah, sure, we’ll take you. When do you want to go?” They said, “Oh, you’ve got forty people? Oh, we’ll give you a carriage.” So we got on the train; bussed us down to the railway station … bus took us down there instead of to the airport; train down to Washington in our own cabin, and were met there, and all right in town again, and had half a day to spend in virtually both places. And that’s how our Amtrak tours came about – why couldn’t we do rail tours round America, and use the train as a means of transport instead of flying? All in all we did nineteen tours around America; sixteen of them by train. They were wonderful – everyone was different because we did different things; we went to same places … if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. There was no need to change the itinerary; change the places we went to, although we did find by accident, after about the third tour, we found Chicago. Because people said, “Would you take us to Elvis? Can we go to Memphis?” Which is off the beaten track, but we did, and it meant going in and out of Chicago. And that is the best kept secret in America. And now that Air New Zealand is going to start to fly to Chicago … that is just going to be wonderful. It’s the most beautiful … one of the best cities in the world. It’s building architecture … it is absolutely magnificent. The windy city, it’s called windy because the Chicago people spout so much how good their city is, and they’ve said so for a hundred and fifty … the wind does whistle round the buildings, but it does everywhere. But that’s why it was called Windy City, it was nothing to do with the wind and the skyscrapers. So that’s what we do.

So as I said, we did nineteen rail trips round America plus other tours we did to America. We got involved with taking people to the Chrystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller’s church in Orange County, and we did four specialist tours there which was about the only thing … we never did special … [they were] open tours to everybody, a real ‘curate’s egg’ thing; there was something for everybody on all our tours. We got into cruising and we did eight, nine, ten cruises in the Mediterranean. Through my time on the City Council – we didn’t talk about that; I had a term on the last City Council – we got involved with Guilin and the China group there, and we took tours there, to China, and they were great experiences. We did a couple of tours to Antarctica – Marie and I went down to check it out and that was out of this world. And so it was a busy time; we were doing four or five tours a year and we were putting them together, marketing them; national radio and press; did it all from our office.

But then we knew … we were into our seventies … it was time to go when we were getting older than the people we were taking, and we were supposed to be taking oldies. So we passed it over to another travel agency and I worked with them for three years on Amtrak tour[s], and bowed out.

But my grandmother is Annie Halstead, who I loved dearly. She loved travel; she spent a lot of time in the Islands, and I think that’s where I got it from – I would be away travelling all the time. Since we’ve retired we’ve done a couple of big trips ourselves, and we’re doing another one in a couple of months … going to England to do the villages in six regions in England, and finishing up with – not going to the big cities – finishing up with a week long canal cruise. But I think the time’s come where we just like to be home.

So at what stage then did you and Lesley ..?

1979.

So you were still in – where?

Permacraft. I had the Hastings shop, and she worked for an accounting firm that had been taken by Permacraft – it was a family business – and she ran the office of the factory. But things as they do don’t sometimes turn out, and we separated.

About what stage was that?

That was when I must’ve been coming up to forty. I was still at Colonial Craft. And Marie’ll tell you; she had applied for a job at our shop in Hastings and I’d actually interviewed her and discovered who she was. I was still happily married. Anyway, she started; and the high school reunion was coming up – Marie had gone to Hastings High School which was a girls’ and boys’ school in the fifties; lived round the corner from my parents. And I was now on my own, in that two-month bracket before the school reunion in October … Labour Weekend, ‘79. And Marie said, “Well if you want to change or come round …” I said, “Well we could go to the school reunion together.” And she said, “Oh no”, she said, “you’ve got your class and I’ve got mine.” But I said, “Well I’ll take you and I’ll bring you home afterwards.” And that’s what happened. And we finished up at somebody’s house that night after the reunion out at the Showgrounds; that was in October ‘79, and we’ve been together ever since.

Marie, where did you grow up?

Marie: I grew up in Hastings so I’m a Hastings girl, and well we grew up to the age of eight in Victoria Street, and I went to Parkvale School with my younger sister. But my mother had died when I was six, and we had a housekeeper, and another housekeeper, which was quite difficult apparently, to get funding for. But my father remarried one of the housekeepers, and we shifted to Wellwood Street. So I was, from there on in between Wellwood Street and my grandmother’s … Mrs Morrison that is. My earlier life was either in Wellwood Street or in Gillean Street where my grandmother lived, but I went to Mahora School. At one stage I was out at Maraekakaho School because my grand aunty, Una Thompson, they lived out at Te Awa Farm. And she was very kind – she was a wonderful person.

Garry: That’s Thompson’s Butchers.

Marie: She sort of took us under her wing too, at times. And so while I was out there with the Thompsons I went to Maraekakaho School for a few months. So there was a bit of a mixed placement during those years.

And then I did all the regular things … I used to go roller skating; I worked during the week at Aerial Mapping, and also with …

Everyone worked at Aerial Mapping …

Well, I worked there twice, I’ve just remembered. The first time my grandmother … I’d been there a little while … she always got me the jobs; she was my backup. And she said, “Roswitha Robertson’s looking for an apprentice, or someone to work there.” So she said, “My granddaughter’s a …” I went and worked with her for a while; she actually apprenticed me and one or two others, and that was not working out for her after two or three years.

So she dissolved that, and I went back to Aerial Mapping, and worked at the weekends at Mario Cesarini’s. And when I left Mario Cesarini’s … because he wouldn’t let me off one day when one of my friends and colleagues was killed in a motorbike accident; and he didn’t like motorbikes so he wouldn’t let me go. And I said, “Well look, I am going to the funeral.” And so I left after quite a few years there, and just worked in the evenings then at another little bar, just down a few stores from him. And interestingly enough, when I was with Mario the first time, it was £3 for the weekend I was getting. I was also getting £3 at Aerial Mapping for the week. And Mario put it up to £5, because my girlfriend was there too … Ngaire Schaeffer … she’s a wonderful girl. So he appreciated this.

And then oh, just … life went on, life went on, until I was living out in the country. And I came to town; and I’d already done a correspondence course on interior decorating, and I saw the advertisement – Colonial Furniture Court were looking for someone in their store, so I wrote them quite a good letter apparently, and so within two days I was working there. And that’s when I met up with Garry again; I’d known him at school – I was the same age roughly as his sister, so I knew who Garry was. And I used to look at him, thinking, ‘Now he looks a very cultured boy and a very serious boy’, which I really wasn’t into those days, but it was a bit of a challenge I suppose. And yeah, I didn’t see any more of Garry or anybody else really, for quite a few years. And then when he said he was Garry Mulvanah when he phoned me, I said, “Are you Toni’s brother?” And he said, “Yes”, so …

That’s how it all started?

Yeah, that’s how it started really; and I worked there, and … been working for him ever since. [Chuckle] Yes. No, Garry’s probably told you how our lives evolved through there, and travel, and retirement.

You were involved right through the travel agency, all the travel?

For a start I wasn’t, because it was a standard travel agency, which meant people would come in, say, “Can I book a …”

Yes, sure.

… “trip to Australia?” And as it evolved there were the escorted tours came into it. So I came into it then to sit out the back, away from the everyday traffic, working with Garry on the tours. And then after one or two changes, like … oh, there was a fire there, and then an amalgamation with Terry, down the road. And he died, and we went back, and … you know, it was not easy. [Chuckle] But it worked out in the end, and we got into the tours. And it was really a full-time job in the end because it was just Garry and I doing it. And it worked when we had no staff, but it took all our time; we’d either be away – everybody knew which dates we’d be away, and then we’d be back organising not the one ahead, but two ahead, ‘cause this lot was all ready to take away the next time and we had to sell the one ahead.

Well it must have been successful otherwise people wouldn’t book with you that far ahead; it’s to get people to commit, isn’t it? And not back out.

Garry: And it was interesting that they committed not knowing us, ‘cause we advertised nationally. And when you advertise on the radio and you don’t say where you are ‘cause you’ve only got so long, people would think we were in Auckland.

Marie: Because it was being advertised in Auckland.

Garry: [Speaking together] Because it was being advertised on Radio Pacific, and later on Newstalk ZB; and we advertised in the Herald and in the Dominion, in the travel sections. And we just put our phone number, which was 0800 etcetera; we never said where we were. And people would ring up and assume we were in Auckland and when they asked where we were they were very surprised.

And it worked.

And it worked.

Marie: Oh yeah – they’d ring, we’d talk to them; so we almost knew people before we took them away, and knew each other.

Garry: They knew whether we wanted to take them.

Marie: [Chuckle] And sent a brochure which was … they were very good brochures. They started off black and white.

Garry: Cyclostyled.

Marie: [Chuckle] And they developed into full colour … open out. Yes.

Did you have any other interests?

Garry: Didn’t have time. [Chuckle]

Marie: Oh, well I didn’t have time then, no. I used to roller skate; that was the only sport I ever liked doing. And I used to love drawing and painting, and it stopped; it just stopped in later life … in early life, almost. It’s only when we were back in Australia that I managed to get started again. And I’ve done nothing since we’ve been back here, ‘cause it’s been run, run, run. I’m so busy.

[Speaking together] You’re probably to busy to do those things.

I’d love to. I open a drawer and I see the paints and I see the brushes and I see the pencils, and I think …

Garry: On one of our cruises that we were on with [a] group, Marie went to an art class. And then at the end of the four or five days that they were going to art every day, they had an exhibition of their work in one of the foyers; they put it all up. And [a] lot of them were very, very good; but I said to Marie, “Look, I’ll be your manager and I’ll sell these, and we’ll get enough to pay for the trip.” [Chuckles]

Marie: [He] says that sort of thing. [Chuckle]

Garry: Yeah. But they wouldn’t let me; they said, “No, you can’t sell them.” Palm trees and that sort of thing.

Oh – sometimes you create an image that reminds people [of] something and they pay for the memory rather than what the painting’s about.

Marie: Yes. Though I guess there’s a time for everything, because we watched Gauguin last night, the film; nobody wanted his paintings. He was in Tahiti, and they wouldn’t give him a cent for them.

Garry: [Speaking together] Came out of France … French artist.

Marie: He died broke and in poverty, and hungry. So there we are.

Okay.

Today is 9th April; this is an extension of Garry Mulvanah’s history. Garry, tell us about the things that you forgot last week.

[Chuckle] Yes. Frank, one of the different things I did was join the Hastings City Council. In 1986 I stood for the Hastings Ward as they were then. Havelock North was not part of Hastings at that time, and it was still the Hastings City Council. I’d sort of always been involved … interested in politics in its widest possible form. Anything that I’d been involved with I sort of got involved in administration – was secretary of the Hawke’s Bay Swimming Centre, and treasurer for a long time. Wasn’t a champion swimmer, but I put my efforts into administration.

Other things, sure.

And when we had our businesses we were involved with the Retailers’ Associations and Chamber of Commerce; I was on the Hastings Chamber of Commerce for many years – gave that up when it merged with Napier, and I thought it was a good time to change. I’ve been president of the Hastings Retailers’ Association.

Now we haven’t mentioned Rotary – I’m sure you were a part of the Rotary …

Yes, I was in Rotary … Hastings Rotary. I was invited to join after I got the travel business, so it would be in the early nineties. We took that over in 1989, so it was early nineties, and I had probably six or seven years in Rotary – thoroughly enjoyed it, but it was a lunch time meeting, as it always had been for many years … always. And it was a chance to meet a different type of business person, but it got to the stage where we were down to just two of us running our business. It was just too difficult to take the time off for lunch, and so I had to regretfully pass. I’ve still got quite a lot of friends and we meet people that are still in Rotary.

Yes, there’s only eleven of them left in the Club now.

Is that right?

It had a hundred and ten at its peak – it was, I think the second club in New Zealand, and was one of the biggest clubs in New Zealand.

But all bodies are struggling to get members today.

Especially getting younger members; they don’t seem to be community minded. But it was a different world – the whole dynamic’s changed.

That was another subject we never talked about, was a real home life; the way that I and my sister were looked after. Well I think we appreciated it, but not as much as we did in later life when we were out on our own. But no, we had a good family life.

There was always someone home when you came home.

But no, I decided to stand for the Hastings City Council. We sort of formed a [an] ad hoc committee with half a dozen people who were standing; some of them had been on the Council, some were. Ron Shakespeare was with us, and he was standing for the Mayor and he’d been Deputy Mayor for many years; and Peter Young from Twin City Motors – Peter was already on the Council. I was there in that group and it was good to have a group of people to help with the advertising and the promotions and everything. In any event, when elections came I didn’t get on.

Why?

I was the next in line. Actually I decided that I would almost make it a profession, and I stood for what was then the Hospital Board, the Harbour Board and the Council. And I was next in line in all three. I did a major campaign with a … I forget the name of the firm, but we agreed that if they could … we’d always said that who knows how much of advertising works, and what works. And I said, “Well here’s your chance. You get me elected and I’ll pay.” So we agreed that I’d pay the advertising costs but their fee would only be if they got me elected. And it didn’t happen. And they were good about it; I was disappointed but it wasn’t the end of the world.

So anyway I was, we were on a tour in America in October ‘87, into the first year of the Council term, and I ran into somebody local in Fifth Avenue. And he said, “Oh”, he said, “Jeremy Dwyer’s wanting to get hold of you.” And I … what could Jeremy want? So it had to wait ‘til I got home, and Jeremy of course had been elected Mayor over Ron Shakespeare. Interesting I was bypassed. The other new candidate in our group was a young fellow called Brian Hutchinson; and Brian of course, we both had talked about it and he didn’t think he was going to get elected and I wasn’t too sure whether I was. And any rate, he topped the poll and was made Deputy Mayor, and turned out to be a very good councillor, as he had been in business. We got on very well.

So when I got home I rang the office, and Jeremy said, “Yes”, he said, “I want you to come on the Council.” He said, “We’ve had two resignations; one through illness and one through moving”, I think it was. And he said, “I want to appoint; I don’t want to have a by-election, I want to appoint the two highest candidates.” And that was Robert Timu and myself. So of course I had only had just over two years, into three, so I tried to be absolutely totally involved, and I loved every minute of it.

Interesting, the first thing that we got invited to was the opening of the transfer station at Henderson Road. That had just been finished; hadn’t had any involvement with that. And we went to that, and quite impressed; and everybody thought it was funny that the first thing you go to is the opening of a rubbish dump. But it’s good to go out there now, you know, thirty odd years later and it’s still in A1 condition, it’s well looked after.

But it’s all taken to Omarunui; it’s clean …

It’s a pleasure to go out to the dump.

So there was that; and the other big thing in my term on Council was the sister city relationship with Guilin in China, which O’Connor, when he was Mayor, he set up. And it was going well, and Jeremy took to it like a duck to water and followed on and did a lot more. And in my first year there we had a visit from Guilin and it piqued my interest, and we had a very good relationship with them when Marie and I went to China, particularly through to Guilin, two or three times. We took tours to China and we went and spent a few days in Guilin; and when we were in Guilin we did our travel arrangements through the Foreign Affairs office of the Guilin City Council. So we were treated to different things – not a state banquet, but we had functions where they would … because it was part of the cultural arrangement … we would be able to have access to have the Mayor come to a function with us, and be welcomed. And that was good for us, and …

Wonderful!

… good for the people that came on the tours. Some were local, some weren’t. And Guilin’s a very special city, and it’s got things that no other city in China’s got.

It’s got those funny hills.

Limestone hills, yeah, and the river. But it’s a beautiful city now; we haven’t been for some years, but it is an absolutely beautiful city. And when we first went there there were more bikes than people. Now there’s more cars than people. But we arranged official tours that people wanted to go on, so we got involved with them. But the most impressive function we did was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Guilin/Hastings arrangement, and Jeremy had passed on of course then, and we took Marilyn, his wife Marilyn Dwyer – now Mrs Terry Longley – we took her as a guest, and Guilin made a big to-do about that. And also the Deputy Mayor’s parents were with us on that trip; that was Cynthia Bowers’ parents, Mr and Mrs Whittle, who lived in Taradale but had previously lived out in the country in Puketitiri. And the Chinese made almost as much if not more fuss and looked after Mr and Mrs Whittle; they were so proud to have Cynthia’s parents there than they were Marilyn – not distracting from that, but they made the whole group welcome, and we had a wonderful time there. But the most exciting bit was the banquet that was put on; and we’d been on delegations before and had social activities with them, but this was over the top. It was a gold plate dinner – tables of ten, and there was about sixty or seventy there; and the food was … Marie’ll be able to tell you more about the food.

Marie: I may; but there were tables of about twenty. They were big … huge round tables. And the food – well, I can’t remember exactly what the courses were but there were about ten of them; and as soon as one was nearly complete – you couldn’t dawdle over it – it was whisked away and another one was put down. Cutlery was gold … gold plated.

Now the gardens at Cornwall Park, are they related to Guilin?

Garry: Yes, they are. So that was another project that Hastings did to commemorate the protocol signing, and they came out here and we had the opening … oh, I can’t remember when it was … certainly long after I was on Council. Jeremy had gone … And I understand that they’ve just had a lighting …

This week.

This week? I didn’t even know it was on. There was an editorial in the paper this morning about being beautifully lit up, because Guilin, and China particularly, everywhere is lit up at night; the limestone caves in Guilin … the Reed Flute Caves … they’re all beautifully lit up as you go through them – all the different coloured lights too.

Well you must have been on the Council at the same time as …

Terry Coxon.

Terry Coxon. What made you think that I was thinking of Terry Coxon?

Probably because he was Terry Coxon. Good councillor, good social guy and he’d been there a long time so you know, we looked to Terry for advice. That was the Council, and of course the next election was the new Council with Havelock and Hastings combined. And I stood again and was defeated so that was the end of that. But a great two and a half years in our life I really treasure, and the work that the councillors do unseen, and there wasn’t much … it was an honorarium we got virtually then, unlike what we get today. And it really is with the regulation and everything – it really is a full-time job today.

So that was Guilin; the City Council; I think I talked mostly about my early work that set me up; I mentioned selling programmes at the theatre; and in the retail – hardly got into retail, but I was a floor sweeper at Baird’s.

Actually you gave me a pretty good resume. So maybe at this stage we should ask Marie … you were going to tell us something about the Morrison family, was it?

Marie: Oh, well I could … I’ll start with the boys, and my mother. There were five in the family. They were Sid Morrison’s children; but I tried to find out from Jack the other day when they actually divorced, or separated and divorced, because my grandmother actually brought them up on her own because Sid was an engineer, and his brain was an engineering brain. But the oldest brother was Noel Morrison, and he was a great cook and chef – probably encouraged and took after my grandmother; she was just the best. And he opened this shop in the Mayfair shopping centre on Karamu Road, and he baked all night and had some time off during the day, but not much; but he was a great pastry cook, and he was commercially making cheese cracker flakes and people were buying them by the dozen. Beautiful pastry cook, and sponges … And I think prior to that – or maybe after that because the supermarket came in there and wiped the little shops out. And at some stage, I think it must have been before that though, he was working with my grandmother; she worked – did you know of Sid North? He was a businessman around town, but I think more in the accounting or some side like that.

Was it with an ‘e’?

Well not that I know of, but I don’t know that; I knew his name. Well he wanted my grandmother to share with him a cake shop, and it was next to Lovell-Smiths really, the photographer … down there. So it was the West End Home Cookery, or Bakery, I think, and Noel worked with her there. So she did all the cooking and managed the shop, and he somehow shared everything with her. So that was Noel.

Then there was my uncle Trevor. He was next and he died when he was twenty-seven, of … I think, from what I heard … a brain haemorrhage or something like that. He’d been away as a serviceman, but came back; and he was lovely.

And … well, sorry, my mother actually came after Noel.

Yes, yes.

There was Noel and my mother, and she married Jack Golds, so I can’t tell you a lot about her life. She was great friends with my aunty, Bev’s sister … great friends. She was Emily Golds, and the families were all pretty close; all the cousins. And there was Basil – yes, Trevor, who died – and Basil was next. And he was into … well, he couldn’t stop making things like his father, and he got into developing these spore counters for facial eczema. So he was big into that, and Jack told me later, with consultation to him – Jack worked on improvements. Basil died when he was fifty-three, so he wasn’t very old either. And then there was Jack of course, you know his story.

So the spore counters made me a lot of money over the years because I was a spraying contractor.

Well I think the farmers were quite grateful for having it, so I guess it was effective. They could move their stock.

Yes.

Yes, so I think it turned out all right. So basically that’s the family; Basil actually did work at Gough, Gough & Hamer for a long time. And he was very interested in music too – he did sound and recording. He’d go to the Municipal Theatre and record with whoever requested something be recorded; and singers, the Maori singers from Clive. So he used to press his own records then.

Did you ever sing or take part in any ..?

[Chuckle] I did when I was young. I used to love singing and I used to go into talent quests. [Chuckle] I remember going into one at the Embassy Theatre once and when I got home – I did all right I think – I got back to Nana and Basil, and they said, “We heard you on the radio – it was pretty good.” So … I don’t know if they were kidding me, or whether it actually had been recorded then. And also later, in teenage years, I went [to] the talent quest that was on at the Municipal Theatre. Most of the audience were Maori, because they were into the talent quests. But I did ‘Stupid Cupid’, and they were all up in the aisle [chuckle] clapping. [Chuckle] so I won that night. But that fizzled out because that was only the one night.

‘Cause you worked at Mario Cesarini’s, didn’t you?

Oh, yes.

We always went at half-time for an ice cream, from the Regent.

Everybody did I think.

We’d walk past the other milk bar to come there.

Garry: That’s right.

Marie: Yes – empty.

Garry: And there was the Black and White across the road.

Marie: No, everybody came, and they all came at once because there was always a half-time.

Funny, because the theatre sold ice creams there; was it the Maine Milk Bar? Or what was that milk bar called – the long one.

Yes, I worked there later. The Unwins had it.

Now the Unwins … what’s happened to them? I knew John and Reg …

Garry: When the mall was opened – and the potato stand is still there in the mall outside where the ANZ Bank was; where Land and Heighway’s used to be. I don’t think they own it now but one of the Unwins set that up.

It’s amazing how some names just disappear.

Yes. And it’s amazing I thought of it, but I did go to work there later when Mario and I had had a difference of opinion whether I could take some time off to go to a funeral on a weekend. Yes, so I said, “Well I’m definitely going to the funeral.” And I went and worked at Unwins, but that was in the evening. I’d worked with Ngaire Schaeffer – she was wonderful; she was my best girlfriend who died very early in life actually … and she was an artist … when she went to Australia. So after doing the weekends there I just did evenings at the other dairy, which we can’t think of the name of.

Garry: You mentioned the Unwins – their uncle Fred was for many years the ambulance driver, long before St John Ambulance took it over. They actually owned a dairy themselves, right down the far end of Heretaunga Street on the right hand side, ‘bout opposite Stortford Street I would think, and the ambulance shed was right down the back of the long drive. And they had a little shop on the corner of their drive – almost on their front lawn. And that’s as much as I can remember about that. And he drove an old ‘37 … his ambulance was a ‘37 Chrysler.

I can remember him ‘cause that was the only one.

And in those days on the switchboard … we didn’t talk much about my St John Ambulance days, but after being a cadet and going to Waipukurau I came back to Hastings and had twelve months as full-time driving the ambulance, and that’s another experience that I don’t regret. Everything I’ve done in life I’ve enjoyed doing with lots of people, and latterly these last … almost half my working life now with Marie … and enjoyed it all.

Now, the hospital switchboard was run by one Mrs Tacon. She ran the hospital because she was in charge of the telephone system.

Well I went to school with her son Bill. And there were two girls too; I forget their names.

Marie: Now where did they live then? Because we lived in Victoria Street; they were behind us. I just wondered if it was the same family.

Was the same family.

There were Aberharts I think, on one side; I think they were the Aberharts. There was a big family – that was on the corner.

Now you were writing something down to say, were you?

No, I actually … to remind me to get my tape of my father playing at the Anzac concert which Michael Fowler has got for when he has his function when the Municipal Theatre re-opens; want to get that back off [from] him.

Just thinking about things … driving the ambulance in the days when Heretaunga Street was open from Havelock to the hospital and beyond; only the railway line was there in the middle. There were traffic lights at all the crossings, and the only way to get from the Havelock end to the hospital was down the main street. And the fire brigade controlled the traffic lights, and our intercom system was connected through the fire station and we could let them know we were coming. And as you came up towards the traffic lights, you would be holding your handpiece and click the button twice; and they would lock the lights; the whole lot would turn red. And then we’d do the next lot, and the next lot.

Talking about you started in Central Hawke’s Bay, my niece is the chief down Central Hawke’s Bay; she’s a trauma … they’re like doctors.

That’s right – oh yes, it was totally different then. We had a first aid certificate; we had general knowledge; that was about it.

It was better than nothing.

It was. And lots of times we were on our own, and had to either pick somebody up on the way, or have the assistance of a bystander to help you get the patient on to the ambulance and into the ambulance, and then you know, there was no way you could look after them, because you were solely … It was a wonderful starting off service, but today it’s an incredible service. See we only had two ambulances in Hastings and two in Napier; now they’ve got about ten or a dozen, and a big staff.

Now, that sort of … I guess might …

Can you think of anything you’ve forgotten?

Marie: No, but I was going to say when I was earning my £3 at Aerial Mapping and my £3 at the weekend, which later grew to £5; and then I think I must’ve carried on with £5 in the evenings, I bought my own bike. I had to have a bike, that was to get to work really, and to the skating rink. Used to love going to skating. And the sewing machine was a very good … it was a Pfaff; German made Pfaff … in a cabinet, and it was £100. And I bought it over two years, and the man drew out the little book, and it had £106 on it. And I said, “Why is it £106?” And the £6 was interest over two years. I didn’t really want to pay any … [Chuckle] I hated paying for anything that I couldn’t actually see. He said, no, that was interest, and it had to go on. And I had my little tins with … ten shillings [10/-] a week, ten shillings a week, ten shillings … for everything. So that was the way I paid off that; and when I paid off that I bought my bike, which was quite expensive, but I don’t think it took two years to pay the bike off. Bought all the bells and whistles, but you know, we worked for what we had.

Oh, absolutely.

And we were encouraged to. My grandmother wouldn’t, you know … or probably couldn’t really, but we were made responsible for what we wanted.

It’s interesting hearing you talk about Aerial mapping. Half of the girls of Hastings seemed to work at Aerial Mapping …

Yes – if I could just think of some of the names. I know Mary Dawson was there.

Yes, some of the names … Frank Peach was the one you may know I was working with upstairs once I …

Brian Perry?

Yeah, Brian Perry – he was up there too. And Don Trask of course. Yeah, we met him again at a funeral recently, and had a good catchup. And Peter, his brother, was there too.

Anyway, I think we’ve probably gleaned some history from you; and thank you both for telling us your story.