Peacock, Walter Elliott (Elliott) Interview

Good afternoon. Today is Monday 31st May 2021. I am Lyn Sturm and on behalf of the Knowledge Bank I have been given the privilege of interviewing [Walter] Elliott Peacock, a farmer from Waipukurau, Central Hawke’s Bay. Over to you.

Okay. Well firstly, my great-grandfather, [Gavin Peacock], I know sailed from London in 1853, which was pretty early in New Zealand history. He did live in Okawa in Hawke’s Bay, I know that, and he got married in All Saints Church in Taradale in 1875. His youngest son was Hutton Richardson Peacock who was my grandfather. He was born in 1875 and he actually died in 1963, so I actually knew him quite well. I actually used to stay with him quite a lot; he was quite a character of a man. He was on the Napier Harbour Board [and] various things – I know he was patron of the local tennis club here, but a bit of a card of a man.

His eldest son was my father, Samuel Irving Peacock, who was born in 1907 and died in 1972, and I’m actually the only son of Samuel. I was born in 1945 and I’m still going strong today, so [chuckle] that’s good.

A little bit of history – my grandfather, Hutton, actually purchased land at the Mangatarāta auction when the Labour Government forced a lot of landholders to subdivide their large land holdings. Mangatarāta Station sold off at auction twenty-seven and a half thousand acres. The Mangatarāta Station actually bounded the Pharazyns at Motere and the Johnsons at [?Motutiroa?], so it was a big land holding. My grandfather purchased one of the blocks and he had a man working for him who lived in a whare; and then two years later he purchased another block which was slightly closer to Mangatarāta Station which [where] he built the homestead called Hononga, which Marcus Peacock lives in now. He built that in 1913.

My father married Lesley Carol Elliott. She was born in 1911; she was a local lady. Her father actually owned land at Dundee just out of Waipukurau, and so my father when he was first married, went out to manage a property at Kāpiti Station at Kairākau Beach. This was probably about … ooh, 1935 … little bit later than that; but he was there and managed that. I know he told me that the house he lived in was right up the Te Āpiti Road, and if all the gates were shut he had twenty-six gates to open to come to town. [Chuckle]

Anyway, in 1944 there was a house built for my father on Hononga next to my grandfather’s house up on the hill, and he moved back to Hononga [in] 1945, which was where I was raised as a child. He worked for my grandfather for probably fifteen or more years, until my grandfather decided he would split the farm between him and his four sons. In fact when Dad was twenty-one my grandfather remarried, Mfanwy Clay, who was a daughter of a doctor in Waipukurau here; [she] was only twenty-two, one year older than my father, which I’m sure caused quite a stir in the town at the time. And they had one son, my dad’s half-brother, Michael Peacock.

In 1960, ‘61, my grandfather decided to split up the farm for his four sons, and it was split up on economic value, so some of the undeveloped land was a lot larger than the smaller, more developed land. The brothers decided they would draw straws for which block they would own and my father, being the oldest, drew the first straw and he got the very back block which was the largest but the least developed. Barney, his next brother, who at that stage had come to live on the farm where my grandfather lived at Hononga, drew the next straw and he got the other back block. Pat Peacock, that is Terry Peacock’s father, drew the third block and he got the homestead and the smallest farm, and Michael Peacock finished with the fourth farm.

And so I left school in 1962, and because of my father’s health I virtually had to come and help him work on the farm. My father did build a house on his piece of land that he owned in 1965; he lived there for about five years before he moved into Waipukurau here. So he died in 1972, so I took over running the farm at a fairly young age. The farm when he first took it over was four paddocks, no yards, no buildings, no infrastructure at all, so it was a huge job breaking in the farm. Since then my son, Richard Samuel Peacock, has taken over the farm; and it’s his farm now and he runs it.

Just going back … the tennis club, which I’ve been involved with for a long time, my grandfather being the patron of the club – my father was a very keen tennis player, so as a child we were always brought up at the tennis club on weekends; virtually lived Saturday afternoons at the tennis club with all the other children. And when I left school the club was very busy; the numbers were great [and] the club had moved. Originally the tennis club was where today’s Waipukurau Bowling Club was, but between 1900 and 1910 it purchased land at Mitchell Street. And they must’ve had to borrow money because Sir George Hunter guaranteed the mortgage, I know that; but within two years Sir George Hunter died, and I presume my grandfather was one of the few that actually took up and guaranteed the mortgage on the property. As I say, when I first left school the club was [had] huge numbers, but within two or three years a lot of the older members had pulled out and the numbers dropped significantly; and we went threw a very lean time in the late sixties up until 1970, until a group of people came to us and wanted to build and join as a combined club. They wanted to build [a] squash club and new club facilities for the tennis club, so because the tennis club owned extra land behind the courts, we had land available. They did a huge amount of fundraising, and a new clubhouse and two squash courts were built. Squash to start with was booming – huge numbers; [the] tennis club was struggling until such time as daylight saving came, which was an absolute[ly] great thing for tennis because immediately we had a lot of people wanting to come after work and play tennis, mainly on a Wednesday night. And from there the numbers have built up considerably and today we’ve got a very thriving club. I think last time I looked we had two hundred and thirty members. On a Wednesday afternoon I need up to eighteen courts for men’s doubles … seventy or eighty. I’ve got over a hundred men wanting to play after work on a Wednesday night. So the club is really booming, and I’ve been involved with the club for a long time. I’m actually a life member of the club, and it’s good to see a club really thriving. Other clubs come to us from other areas and just cannot believe the numbers we have, the facilities we have; and it’s great for the town.

Interesting … my schooling. I had three older sisters who were five, seven and nine years older than me, and because there was no school bus and we were the only children living in the Mangatarāta Valley, we had a governess who lived with us and taught mainly my sisters, because at five and six I don’t think I actually spent much time in the schoolroom at all. My sisters went away to school, and then the Barney Peacocks arrived; and at seven I was sent to the local primary school in Waipukurau. It was quite interesting because I was absolutely at sea, because I hadn’t really had any contact with children my own age. And I know the teacher only found out that I couldn’t read the blackboard in Term 3.

So the next year when I was eight I was sent to a boarding school, Hereworth, and probably my schooling was quite a bit behind what it should’ve been. I had five years at Hereworth, boarding; you had one exeat a term where your parents could come and visit you, otherwise you were at school for the whole term. Morning drill was … the bell went early; cold showers; a run, and a pretty tough existence, and cold. I can remember being very cold there, because you could never sleep unless you had the windows open. And I can remember being so cold that – the mattresses were quite thin and you could actually bend the mattresses round you in a U-shape and get a blanket and wrap it right round the mattress; so you had a cocoon that you could actually slide into to try and keep yourself warmer.

After five years at Hereworth I went to Wanganui Collegiate for another four years boarding school. Again, discipline was pretty severe. Punishments were … you didn’t have to do anything very wrong to either get the cane, or for not hanging your towel straight, to get called out into the shower room by senior boys and get administered a slipper over your bottom.

So that’s for real?

Yes, that is for real. I don’t regret it, and I don’t bear any grudges. Some people say, “Oh, I had a bad upbringing”, and things. I don’t find that at all. It certainly … discipline was … yeah, pretty severe.

I probably would’ve liked to’ve studied to do some other thing apart from farming, but being the only son in the family and with my father’s health like it was, I felt obliged to come home and help on the farm which a lot of boys my age did.

Yeah, when I first left school we had a very strong Young Farmers’ Club in Waipukurau as there were three or four clubs in Central Hawke’s Bay. I had three cousins from the Barney Peacock family; my cousin, Terry Peacock, was in the Young Farmers’ Club. I think the numbers every week – I think we had a meeting once a week; just not sure on that – but at [the] least we had forty people at Young Farmers’ Club meetings. We had stock judging, we had days that we went to the freezing works; we had sporting fixtures against other clubs. And [of] course we had an arrangement with a Country Girls’ Club that was in Waipukurau, that we paid their hall rental provided they provided us with supper after our meetings nights. [Chuckles] Yeah. So it was a real social scene, the Young Farmers’ Club, and if there wasn’t a party on, or something on, someone found something somewhere, I can tell you. [Chuckles] They were good times.

I played golf for one year after I left school but there weren’t many young people playing golf, so I went and played hockey and joined some friends that I’d met at Waipawa. At those [that] stage the men’s hockey competition was very strong; I think there were eight senior men’s teams in Central and Southern Hawke’s Bay. So Saturdays was hockey, and party time afterwards as a rule. [Chuckle] Yeah.

Just going back to my school days … school holidays there was always a number of dances on, balls which you had to dress up [for], black tie, whatever; and often had to travel to Hastings or Napier to go to these balls. They were a lot of fun, but they were a lot of late nights and we used to come home very early hours of the morning. And if you had to work on Saturday or Sunday morning, it was pretty hard to get up in the mornings, I know that. [Chuckle]

Just going back, the year I got married was 1968. I married a local girl, Jeannie Peacock, and we had three children fairly quickly. Our first son Richard was born in 1970, Rachel was born in 1972, and my son Hamish was born in 1973. [Background heavy traffic] And I think we had three children under five, which was ah … yeah, interesting times.

And now what are the children doing?

Jeannie: Elliott, actually there were three children under three and a bit.

Elliott: Anyway, my son, Richard, has taken over the family farm, and has married and has a son and a daughter. My daughter, Rachel, lives in Sydney – she married a person from Sydney, and she has two boys. And my son, Hamish, got a degree in resource management, and has worked for innumerable different firms in Christchurch and still does; and he’s got a son and a daughter, and recently has remarried, so he’s got a young three-year-old now too.

I’ve been asked about farming practices and how it’s changed since I first started farming. Well, when we first started farming we did not have a wool shed, and at that stage we didn’t have electricity. In fact for seven years I was brought up in a house with kerosene lamps and candles in the bedroom; when you went to bed you blew out the candle, and that was it. And I can remember taking the sheep down to get shorn at Mangatarāta. The shed was run by a massive great big water-cooled motor, and as a child it was fascinating to watch it because the water was cooled by a huge vat, and it had big screens up into the ceiling and the hot water came out of a pipe at the top and ran down two sides of the screen back into the big vat at the bottom, to cool the water. And the flywheel probably stood three to four feet high, so it shook the whole shed; it was fascinating to watch as a child.

Mangatarāta Station was owned by three old McDonald brothers, none who [of whom] were married. Fascinating that the older two called the youngest one, ‘young George’. I don’t know what age young George was, but he was probably sixty-something, but it was still ‘young George’. And the old homestead which I went into – whether I was meant to go into or not as a child, I don’t know – but the kitchen with the old coal range in the back of the house, there was always a large pot of porridge bubbling on the stove; and I’m sure the old McDonald brothers had porridge for breakfast and lunch. [Chuckles]

And possibly dinner.

But in the farming practices – yes, quite challenging to farm with no woolshed, so one had to learn to use hand shears for cleaning sheep up, or as we call [it], dagging. Not a lot of paddocks, so you didn’t have a lot of choices about where the stock went. I did a lot of hours with a slasher, cutting scrub … many a hot day just spent cutting the scrub, stacking it and burning it to clear the land. And it was pretty hard yakka. And fencing, oh … fencing. Yes. Every year there was [were] huge lines of fences to be built, which my father and I – until he couldn’t build them any more – built every year; we built long fences, sets of yards, and developed [a] bit of tractor work, ploughing paddocks with a crawler tractor and an old plough. Yeah, it was quite interesting times; it’s certainly changed now, the farmer’s got innumerable paddocks and access, three sets of yards, woolshed, good cattle yards. And [of] course the amount of work you have to do with stock … you seem to have to vaccinate a lot more; animal health is [a] far bigger problem than we ever had. But in saying that, in some ways it was easier because you didn’t have all the regulations that you had to comply with. I know my son does hours of paperwork that I never had to do – everyone just got on with the job.

Did they have TB [tuberculosis] testing back then?

No, no TB testing, no. It was fairly early brought on all the same, because … I’m not too sure when TB testing started, but originally we had TB testing and brucellosis testing; and we did have brucellosis in our cattle, so we did have to test them every year until our herd was a clear herd. We never had TB on the farm, ever.

So did that hamper you with getting rid of your stock at the end of the season?

Oh yes, it was quite a big job to come in and get them tested. You had to bring them in the yards and they had to be vaccinated and then you had to bring them back into the yards three days later to see whether there was any reactors, so it was quite a big job, yeah. Originally, when I used to sell calves to the Waipukurau sale when the sale yards were operational in Waipuk [Waipukurau], I’d actually purchased some land later in Hatuma. And so I would walk a mob of cows and calves from my home farm at Mangatarata, all the way into the Waipukurau sale yards, and sell the calves the next day; then walk my cattle all the way out to Hatuma to graze them on the property there. You’ve got to be a fairly good drover, and I used to be pretty well-known for grazing the road sides.

At Hatuma I used to graze from Waiou Road right down to the Hatuma settlement. I was pretty well-known for grazing in the droughts, at that stage you were allowed to. I grazed the river banks from the bottom of Pukeora Hill down to the shingle company. One year in a drought I think I was on that riverbed for ten weeks. So that’s how we got round the droughts because we didn’t have the hay … we didn’t have the baleage like we have today. But then we didn’t have the equipment to feed out that sort of hay and baleage either. So yeah, times have certainly changed; but I don’t miss the paperwork that seem[s] to be brought at us to comply with the regulations today.

Now if you de-horn cattle there’s certain requirements, aren’t there?

Oh yes. We don’t have horned cattle virtually for that very reason. We try and buy bulls that are polled bulls, so we don’t get horned cattle at all. You learn these things pretty quickly, you know; repair and maintenance – if something has to be repaired and you need to get on with a job, you damn well should [chuckle] … [have a] really good idea. You’ve got to work it out, like, to fix something. Oh yeah.

It’s the Number 8 fencing wire, isn’t it?

Oh yeah. [Chuckle]

People joke about it but it’s for real.

Oh yeah.

Jeannie: Elliot, you should talk about the water on the farm …

Elliott: Water on the farm – it was interesting that I talked to a man who had worked for my grandfather, probably in the 1920s; it may’ve been actually 1909, because there was a particularly bad drought that year. And he said to me, “That back country” … which is the country that we owned … “the creek dried up completely, and we had to pull all the cattle from that back country off because there was no water.” And when I heard that I actually employed a contractor to build me some very large dams and reticulated water supply to a lot of the paddocks. And my son has continued by building two or three large dams. Just recently we have tapped a large spring, which unfortunately was right at the lowest point on the farm; put in a three hundred metre pipeline probably two or three hundred feet up a steep hill, and put in solar panels to pump the water from that spring up to a thirty thousand litre tank. We knew the spring was good, but we filled the thirty thousand litre tank in one day. So that’s certainly helped us with the water supply, because if you haven’t got water you can’t run any stock. Simple. And when I hear farmers that have run out of water for their stock … well I haven’t got a lot of sympathy because you can build large dams, you can build a water infrastructure to have water for your stock.

I’ve been asked about the stock that we ran. We built up numbers probably from about fifteen hundred ewes to over two thousand ewes, and we’re running a herd of breeding cows up to about two hundred – it’s back to about a hundred and seventy today, with some trading stock as well. The prices … well, prices. Yeah. We went from some very low prices for the meat products to very good prices for wool; in fact some years half our income came from wool. Today we’re not making any money, we’re actually losing money; every sheep we shear probably costs us over $1.50 more than what we get for the wool, so we’re actually losing money shearing our sheep at the moment. And that’s the reality, the wool market is just terrible. The only good thing about today is the old ewes and old stock that we used to virtually give away for $1, $2 if you were lucky, today will make over $100. And that is incredible, to think that old stock that’s in the last years of its life can make that sort of money. But that’s just the supply from the overseas markets.

Who’s buying the old stock?

China is taking most of it. Yeah.

For the people to eat it?

Yeah – they’re taking everything. Like, you would not believe what they’re not taking. In fact I think there was a seminar … a man came out with a small saucer, and on it were only a few little sinews. And he said, “These are the only things that we are not selling from the entire sheep.”

That’s incredible.

Mmm. Yeah.

If you’ve got a sheep with wool at the moment and you’re trying to breed a sheep with no wool, it does take quite a long time, because every cross-breed generation you get half as much wool, and half as much again. But in those years that you have to have half as much wool, you still have to shear them so your costs are still the same. We’ve gone the other way. We’re still trying to produce as much wool as we can off a sheep, because the more weight of wool you can get off the better off you are, even though you’re getting a very small price. And we’re hoping that the world will come to their senses and realise that wool is a natural product. and not an oil-based product that all the synthetics are.

But just talking about wool, every day I hear of a new product that’s suddenly on the market that is made from wool or used for a different purpose. I heard the other day that they are trying to investigate and produce a nappy that is still soft and made of wool. You can imagine how many nappies, even this country let alone any other country, the world uses; and it all goes to the landfill and they don’t degrade, they’re not biodegradable. If we could get wool nappies that are soft enough that could be used, and that would go to the landfill and decompose, it would be brilliant.

Humungous saving for everybody …

And look at the market you would have – absolutely astronomical if everyone came on board.

Just talking about the marketing of meat, the demand is that great around the world at the moment that I believe that the meat companies are actually having to turn down people that want to purchase meat products, because there is just not enough product available.

Talking about the Waipuk town, originally it was a service centre. We had the sale yards, we had the hospital in Waipukurau, and we even had a Nurse’s Training in Waipukurau. The sale yards and the stock firms … I don’t know how many stock firms we had in Waipuk but it must have been at least six at one stage, with all the agents and all the workers. And it was really a service town. It is still a service town today, but I think it has changed more recently with online shopping. And I really feel for the retailers in Waipuk because I don’t think their future’s great, because someone who’s got a large warehouse and minimal staff will undercut them by so much. I don’t like their chances of staying in business. I don’t like their chances in small centres anyway.

That means in the future people will travel to Hastings and Napier to do their shopping?

No, they’ll probably shop online. The next generation is doing it now, so they’ll keep doing it. And through Covid … I mean more and more people started to do it, and it’s not going to change. And of course we had a lot of banks too in Waipuk and they’re all going too, and all their staff.

Jeannie: There’s only one bank in Waipuk – the ANZ.

Elliott: Yeah, the Heartland Bank too, but …

BNZ’s here, I think I saw …

Jeannie: No, it’s gone. You can do a hole in the wall, but you can’t go in to the bank.

Elliott: No. There’s no BNZ.

Jeannie: No – it is a BNZ building, but it’s not a bank to go into; you can do the hole in the wall.

And the Public Trust has gone as well?

Elliott: Yep, there’s no Public Trust. Rabobank have a [an] office, but not really as a bank. Westpac … I think Westpac’s gone too, hasn’t it?

Jeannie: Yes.

Elliott: Westpac’s not here; ANZ’s the only one. Kiwibank’s going to close, that’s gone.

There’s a Credit Union?

Yeah. ANZ and Credit Union are the only … sort of operating as banks.

What stock firms are in town now?

Stock firms? Well Wrightson’s are still here, and there’s a few independent sort of operators, but Wrightston’s is the only stock firm. Farmlands do a bit but not much in the stock side; it’s more merchandise, and that’s it.

Elliott, thank you so much for a very interesting talk about your life and about living in Waipukurau, and sharing it with us. On behalf of the Knowledge Bank, thank you very much.

Thank you, it’s been … yeah, quite interesting recalling some days, like having a house with no power for seven years. [Chuckle]

Exactly. Thank you.