Phillips, Rosalind (Ros) Aileen Interview

I’m Jan Dearing, interviewing Ros Phillips on 13th September 2022. So Ros, what was your date of birth?

29th July 1936.

And where were you born?

In the nursing home in Grays Road – the old home is still there, and our whole family followed, in the same place. [Chuckle]

Is that Grays Road in ..?

Hastings.

Could you just tell me generally, a little bit about your mother and father? You know, their names, where they were born, their occupations etcetera … anything that you recall?

We’ve always been Hawke’s Bay people; very parochial. When I was born we lived at Elsthorpe. The local beach was where the people from Elsthorpe and round about – and Mother had family who were in Otane for a while – and so the local beach was Kairākau for all of them. And they all put up little huts out there for the holidays, in the days when they went out on a horse and cart and somebody took the cow behind it and someone took the chooks in a cage behind it, because there were no shops and no access easily because it was a shingle, very, very windy road. And I’m lucky enough to be still going out there for my holidays in the summer.

My father’s family came out from Ireland, a mixture of north and south. So they had a lot of difficulty being recognised as being married because in those days Protestants did not marry Roman Catholics, and my grandmother was given a very hard time by the priests in Hastings for that reason. But my mother’s family were half Scottish and half Swedish so we’ve ended up being a mixture, but I wish to say that the only thing I regret is the coloured skin in Hawke’s Bay in the sun.

So Ros, what were the names of your parents?

My mother’s maiden name was Nilsson, whose mother was Scrimgeour, who’ve still got a very big whānau around Central Hawke’s Bay. They were [a] very long-living family and so we’re very lucky to have a great family all around us, which now, I’m finding, are decreasing fast in age because the only hundredth birthday I’ve been to, I think, was one of them. Now everyone’s going bit by bit, and we get to such a venerable age ourselves. But anyway … that happens.

And your father?

They came out from Ireland and got off the boat in Australia; and worked in Australia on farms for a while before they came out here. And then they drew a block in Elsthorpe – his father and his mother, [who] was a McGaffin; who also drew a block in Elsthorpe. So in those days I think mostly you married somebody in the same area, ‘cause the travelling was not what it is now.

So your maiden name was McGaffin?

No, no, my grandmother. My maiden name was Ryan. My grandfather had three brothers, one of whom died without being married, who drew the block of land next door to the one he drew. So the farm became a lot bigger because he had inherited the brother’s farm. The other brother had traction engines in Hastings for very many years.

And was that cattle and sheep farming out at Elsthorpe?

Yes, yes. And it still is, but all these places are becoming thoroughly spoilt with lifestyle blocks and trees.

And does your family still own that original farm out in Elsthorpe?

My cousin is still on the original farm, but that was divided in two for two of them; so half of it’s been sold and the other half is still there, and the original house is still there, and over the years we have gone back a lot when the aunt and uncle were still there. But I’ve since been quite disillusioned because I always imagined it was an enormous house and when the last older person died I went back for the funeral and I couldn’t believe how small the house was. [Chuckle] But it’s not actually, but anyway …

So your early years were growing up on that farm at Elsthorpe?

Yeah. And my father was particularly good with machinery, and he was very keen on it in the days when there was no machinery, only horses at Elsthorpe. When we grew up we came to town once a fortnight; if we were lucky our grandparents took us to town on a shingle road. And my memories are of sitting in the dicky seat going home, and my mother growling profoundly because we got covered in dust and she didn’t like it.

But we shifted to town when Mr Wattie inveigled my father to permanently go to town to grow peas for Wattie Canneries, when he started. And in those days he was in one little old house, and the peas all got vined and put into a box; when the box was lifted into the windowsill of the truck to go to the cannery, which was only tinned peas. So we’ve watched Wattie’s change over the years and all the functions change over the years, and some for the better and some for worse but at least Wattie’s in Hastings is still going.

How old were you when you shifted to Hastings?

I was five and a half; but I’ve got vivid memories of the farm. And it was interesting ‘cause my sister, who is nearly two years older than me, could not remember a thing about the farm. So it’s interesting, one’s memories, but I always regarded the farm as home and was very thrilled when our youngest daughter had the opportunity with her then partner, now husband, to buy a farm at Elsthorpe. And so I now have lots of associations back with the district; the grandchildren are at primary school.

We lived in Pakowhai Road in the middle of farming land; there was a Fresian dairy farm next to us and sheep opposite. And on school days we walked down Pakowhai Road, and you jumped into people’s pathways over the fence on a Wednesday – on sale day – because the sheep and the cattle were coming down Pakowhai Road in mobs, carefully controlled by the drovers, to the sale yards at Stortford Lodge.

So the people had to get off the roads so the animals …

The school children did because we were scared of the cattle. [Chuckle] Yeah. And so my father leased land from a Mr Lasson at Twyford, and the house we lived in on Pakowhai Road was Mr Lasson’s house, which subsequently now is the YMCA. But round it were paddocks where I could keep my horse, and my father had his dairy cow; and we had chooks and all the usual farm bits and pieces. So it was very handy because in those days you could ride down Pakowhai Road on a horse very happily, and now it’s hard to walk across Pakowhai Road because there’s so much traffic. I’ve seen it change from shingle to tar seal when we were still at school, and my sister and I used to skate and play tennis on Pakowhai Road, which I have been called a liar … good imagination and a liar for saying.

It’s changed enormously, but the biggest thing that happened to that area was the altering of the river at Pakowhai, which has proved to be so successful because we no longer have the great floods we had several times every year at Pakowhai when the orchards and Poplar Avenue went under water there – and along the farmland down Evenden Road. And subsequently Mr Lasson sold his farm at Twyford and he bought a farm on Raupare Road which my brother, Rupert, turned into an orchard. And last year they took the old viner shed down because now T&G [Turners & Growers] own it, and it’s been planted in trees where the viner shed was.

The viner history Rupert’s come out with, which I remember well because it was our job after school to go and work on the viners. And in the winter we were taught to steer the tractor at a very young age, which would not pass Health & Safety now, while our father fed off the silage which was the pea vines made into a stack at the end of the pea viner; and it was the winter feed for the cattle there. And the first time I ever was allowed to steer the tractor I went from Evenden Road to Twyford, and I was told to put my foot on the clutch at the gateway when I turned in. And I put it on, and when my father got off the trailer I took it off. I wasn’t allowed back on the tractor for a while ‘cause my father was not pleased.

How old were you?

I think I was probably about seven. [Chuckle] Mmm.

Where did you go to school?

Mahora, which was just round the corner. And on Sundays we waited for the church bells in St James [Church] to ring before we ran round to Sunday School, for a while. I don’t know what lasting effect that had but we then went to a boarding school at Woodford; and I’ve been forever grateful for the manner in which the headmistress … in the Sixth Form her sermons taught us about religions around the world, which has been an interesting general knowledge as years have gone on, with the way the world’s gone. But I did not appreciate boarding school one little bit, because I could not ride my pony.

So your pony and horses have been a big part of your life. How old were you when you got your first horse?

My first pony died the year I went to school, and my father went to Stortford Lodge and bought another one for me. She was five years old and she’d been sold by a very well-known horsewoman called Dora Nelson, because it grew to be fourteen-two and a half hands’ high, so it grew out of pony class and she had bought it for her relation, Judith, as a pony. And I had that ‘til it died when it was twenty-five; we actually used to put our children on it as a very, very old horse, but it got very intolerant and when it’d enough it would just wipe them off on a tree [chuckle] and go home. [Chuckle] It was wonderful fun, but my father was never keen on horses and I had a big struggle all my life with riding. My husband was purportedly told: “Take her, and take the damned horses”, when he asked for my hand. My father said he wouldn’t have been so awful, but this is what I was told.

Then I fell out of the frying pan into the fire because I could get round my father, but not my husband; [chuckles] so my first show horse became a cattle horse. But I well remember the days in the beginning of the FEI [Fédération Equestre Internationale] jumping, and it was just so challenging and so much fun. I certainly can’t believe how sport in that level and every other level of sport has gone up and up and up ever since I stopped. When I got married there was a very sharp end to all my running around at shows and hunting, because there was no money.

But what a wonderful experience to have; can you tell us a wee bit about what you used to do in the shows, and perhaps a little bit about the hunting as well?

Well, because when I still had the pony we only had one source of getting anywhere, which was hiring a space on a Majestic horse float. And one day they forgot me and they left me standing on the side of the road, [chuckle] and my father was so wild he built me a horse trailer. [Chuckle] So from the time I was fifteen I was allowed to borrow the car with the horse trailer and go off and do my own thing which became masses of fun, because I had other people who I knew who rode. And I often used to take two ponies or two horses when we went places and we had a lot of fun, but nowadays you would never be allowed to do that sort of thing, would you?

And so would you go to different venues for the shows?

No, not shows; they had sports meetings every weekend for probably four months around. And then over about three months you had the hunting which was round Hawke’s Bay. And my horse was very undisciplined and very clever at jumping, and so I had a lot of fun. But the problem with my horse was that if it couldn’t get over the jump it wouldn’t jump it, so it balked. And in those days when the FEI came in I was at a great advantage, because you only got three faults for a balk and you got four for hitting a rail; so I really, apparently, did better than I should’ve done, because I think it was a far worse sin to balk than it was to hit a rail. Anyway things have changed now, and that doesn’t happen.

Ros, how many people would turn up for a hunt about?

Ooh, probably sixty. And there were special ones which were run by different people which had a lot more at it [them]; and some that were far away. But the other thing [is] that we were lucky enough that there was a carrier in Hastings called Dave Walker, and one of his drivers was an ex-jockey. And Dave used to give him a cattle truck and fill it with petrol and say, “Have it for the weekend.” Norman would go round and pick us up and take us away. I remember a very memorable weekend at Tūtira with the Māhia Hunt Club, and various things like that which were masses of fun and occupied us very well in doing something healthy. [Chuckle]

So was it your teenage years you would be doing that?

Yes, yes. So I resented boarding school ‘cause I didn’t have my horse at boarding school. [Chuckle]

The hunt still goes today?

Yep, but I have lost total touch. But the huntsman is still the son of the man who won all the jumping when I was jumping, called Hugh Thompson … very famous horseman; and Murray Thompson’s still the huntsman at Maraekakaho. I don’t know anything about anything now.

How old were you when you sort of gave up the riding?

Oh, I didn’t give it up until I got married. I wanted to go to the shows and then I found I was pregnant, and so that was the end of that.

I think you should tell us a little bit about when you got married and how you met your husband.

I got married a year to the day that I met my husband. [Chuckle] I wasn’t going to get married, I was going to go to England with … there were four of us booked to go to England – no, I wasn’t booked because my mother would not allow it until I saved up enough money for the return ticket. The others only had a one way ticket. So mother wouldn’t allow me to put my name down until I had enough money for the return ticket; and I had to go somewhere I didn’t want to go and I was sulking. My future husband came up and said, “And what do you think the matter with you is, in the corner?” [Chuckle] And that’s how I met him. If I describe him he’d come off very badly, because his nickname at that stage was ‘Flea’, and he was described as ‘a fart in a bottle’. And it was about what he was. When he died very suddenly at the age of only sixty-one, I said, “My life has been many things but never boring, because it was all go.” But his basic philosophy was, ‘If you want something do it yourself’, so that’s how we lived our life after we got married.

We went up to a leased block on two paddocks on two hundred acres of steep country at the end of Rowe Road, off the Middle Road, and I found myself right next to an uncle of mine, and a relation of my husband’s in between – neither of whom ever had anything to do with us. So my husband then got a mortgage and bought the two paddocks, and we bulldozed the top off a hill and built our first three rooms.

And what date was this that you got married?

Well, my husband was determined we were going to get married in the garden at my parents’ place and he asked my father when we could get married, and my father’s reply was, “Not ‘til after the pea season’s finished.” Because in those days he was running a very large complex outfit. “When does the pea season finish?” “Oh, about the end of January”, so my husband’s reply was “Right, on the first Saturday in February we will be married”.

And what year was that?

1956. Now when I look back I think how utterly unreasonable and unfair and selfish it was, because there was no time for anything; we left everything to my parents because I would’ve been married in a Registry Office, but my mother wouldn’t have it. And so I was not interested in dressing or anything else, and I contributed nothing. So my mother dressed me [chuckle] and I got myself to the altar all right but that’s about all. [Chuckle] I’ve been very privileged – he was a wonderful guy.

Ros, your husband was John Joseph Phillips ?

Yes.

When you became a farmer’s wife it suited you perfectly, but that was not your mother’s ambition, was it?

No, definitely not. Mother had ideas that we would do anything but farm. I think when she was married … she surprised us by saying she’d actually worked on the farm with my father … which surprised us because she’d certainly got totally intolerant about farming by the time we remember her. But in retrospect I think she was probably a cultural snob, but in a nice way, not a … [Chuckle] She must have been very disillusioned about her daughters who became very domesticated family people.

But she wanted you to go to university, which you did do for a while?

I did. But I didn’t enjoy city life in Christchurch because it was flat except for the Port Hills; and I missed my hills and my animals, and I couldn’t wait to get home. And I finally had the courage after two years to come home, with no occupation but a horse to ride. After I’d been home for a week riding, my mother said, “Right – you’re going to get a job right now.”

And I was lucky enough to be in a [the] day when employment was not over full, and there was a job in the office at the London Wool Brokers. I wanted to get involved with farming so I thought, ‘A shorthand-typist there? I shall go and apply’, with no shorthand typing to my name. And I went off and applied; I didn’t confess I could not do shorthand and typing. But the first day I was there I was called into Mr Coutt’s office, and he said, “Take this letter at my dictation.” And I sat there and I kept pace with his talking because I had got so good at having my own way of writing things at lectures at university. So having achieved enough to do that, I then got taken into the other part of the office and sat down at a typewriter; and that was not quite so easy to bluff. But the boss lady, Evelyn Johnson in the office, was a lovely lady and very patient with me, and I soon became capable of typing a letter, if not rapidly, slowly. That allowed me to ride my horse when I wanted to and Mr Coutt was very good, because I could put in hours and get off – come to work late if something was on, or get off on a Friday afternoon to go somewhere for sports and things.

So horse riding was very important to you?

My only passion. But I’ll just go back a long way in history when I started – my father bought a pony from Mr Brownrigg off the swamp, and it was a big, fat, lazy pony, and I adored it. But my parents would supply nothing in the way of clothes, and I wanted to go to Pony Club. So my great-aunt, who had been through the Depression and would not do anything which required any money, had been married briefly to a house painter; and so she undid a pair of his trousers and put them inside out and made me a pair of jodhpurs. And I was always terrified of falling off and being carted to hospital and having my jodhpurs cut away from something broken, because I knew they were covered in paint in the inside. [Chuckle] And my uncle who’d been in the Air Force gave me his riding boots, so I had riding boots and jodhpur[s] so off I went. [Chuckle] But subsequently things got a lot better when my parents gave in and I was allowed [chuckle] proper clothes.

But London Wool Brokers was a wonderful place but far too revealing because I subsequently met a lot of the farming families and I could remember the notes about them in the London Wool Brokers’ office. [Chuckle] I left from there to get married.

And you did confess to me that clothes were never very important to you so that farming life was quite suitable, but you didn’t have much when you started

No, we did not. And my husband had been brought up in a family that had very strict monetary standards, that you did not borrow money for anything – if you didn’t have the money you didn’t have it. Therefore farming, which was quite a different attitude to money because of how you farmed, became quite difficult for us. But in those days the insurance companies would lend you money for mortgages, and so we had a mortgage from the AMP [Australian Mutual Provident Society] and so to this day I still insure with the AMP, even though I know they’re probably one of the worst people money-wise to insure with. But I think our start in life was only because they would lend us the mortgage money, so … Nobody exists in AMP any more, but anyway, it’s now something else. I still regret the lack of loyalty that goes on now with banking and stock firms and anything else.

We were fortunate that we had an accountant for a brother-in-law and a lawyer for a brother-in-law, and so we were very well looked after in that direction although my brother-in-law who was the lawyer was totally frustrated because my husband was ‘anti’ anything written down; he grew up where your word was enough. I finally am grateful that he was made by my brother-in-law to make a will, but the will was never changed our entire married life so it was somewhat outdated. [Chuckle] It didn’t matter anyway because it all amounted to the same thing. But we’ve been very fortunate in that both our families have been wonderfully supportive and things.

But as someone said, if we’d had a million for all our ideas we probably would’ve been billionaires by now. But we’ve done lots of things; like, we had a little wee flat beside the house and the first year we were married we grew strawberries and sold them in town. And I remember the first punnet we ever got we hid some green ones in the bottom because there weren’t enough ripe to make a punnet, and we took it into town in our ancient truck to Mr Pacey’s on the main road, which is now where the strawberry farm is. And we made our nephew hold it for us and he wasn’t allowed to eat, [chuckle] because there weren’t enough ripe ones to eat. [Chuckle] And Mr Pacey turned round … his first packet was sold to my father-in-law going [laughter] home from town. But anyway, we had chooks and we used to sell the eggs, and … oh, we’ve done all sorts of funny things that haven’t worked, but it’s been fun trying.

But throughout that time you developed a great interest in cattle?

No, we had no cattle; we had only sheep. And we were over-stocked; my husband was mistaken that he had to have more stock because he didn’t have enough money to pay the mortgage. So on many occasions in the summer when we dried out, my job was to sit in front of the sheep and he got behind them and we drove them to town. And we were able to graze the paddocks after Mr Wattie’s crops had been through them around the plains in Hastings. But that led to some funny things too, because when we got cattle we didn’t know that the beans from the bean harvesters bloated the cattle because they had so much air in them. [Chuckle] And when we bought the apple pulp from Mr Toogood in Havelock, who used the old TMV [Te Mata Vineyards] winery things to make apple juice, that the cattle got drunk on it. We learnt the hard way all the way down the line.

Do describe what happens to cattle when they get drunk.

Well we couldn’t work out why they couldn’t walk properly. [Chuckles] But when they got bloated we had to walk them round and round the paddock because if you don’t get rid of the wind they die. And you can stick a knife if you know where to stick it, and we did it once successfully; but when something’s bloated and you can’t get rid of it they die very rapidly because it fills up inside them and chokes the heart. But the drunk one was something that we really were bluffed about, because we couldn’t work out what was wrong with the cattle.

Ros, to get those … first of all the sheep … into town did you drive them along the road?

Yes, yes. And I was in the front and my husband was behind. But my friends used to give me all the most atrocious books to read while I was in the front of the car because I’d never had racy novels to read, and one day a neighbour came and he said, “Oh, you’re the heading dog?” And I puffed my chest out and said, “Oh yes!” And he said, “Yeah – you’re sitting in the middle of the mob.” [Chuckle] You got so engrossed in the book you didn’t notice the sheep had gone past you. You couldn’t drove them anywhere now [chuckle] – you’re not allowed to now.

And was that the same with the cattle – you drove them along the road as well?

Oh yes. Oh yes, we used to graze the long acre alot.

So that was the way you managed to get extra feed for the animals?

Yes. But then my husband said his dream had always been to have a Hereford stud. He had made a great friend at Massey, a gentleman called Michael Coombs whose parents were the brewers in Palmerston [North], but he didn’t know that … didn’t know anything about them. But they had a Hereford stud up the Pohangina Valley and he used to go up and stay there at weekends and he loved the cattle. And we were surrounded by Angus studs and my family were all involved with Angus cattle; Herefords were not very common in Hawke’s Bay. And he went to the Hawke’s Bay Farmers and he asked to borrow money, and the then financial man, Athol Hutton, said, “No”, so he came home disgusted. And we did our own shearing – I did the wool, and then once or twice he had people he knew used to come out and help. And we had someone who worked at Whakatu who came out to help him who said he was taking out the daughter of the Hereford breeder in Marton, and did John want some cattle, because he was selling all his horned Herefords and going into polled Herefords.

So the next thing is we had an appointment to go to Marton, and we bought seven Hereford cows with horns. Frank Brice came over when the cattle came over, and these cattle had been on firm flats in Marton. Frank said to my husband, “These cattle will be dead very rapidly because they cannot get up your hills.” The hills were very steep. Many, many years later when he came back he said, “How I envy you! I have never seen fit cattle like this.” Because they only had hills to climb.

But it turns out in later history [phone notification noise] that Frank Brice’s father had been great mates with my grandfather. I could remember two gentlemen from Feilding coming over to visit my grandfather at Elsthorpe, and we children were not allowed anywhere around to disturb the men. I met the granddaughter of the other man who’d come. They had stud cattle too, but not Herefords; but I’ve met them at shows and things, and they were Buchanans. It’s a small world, is Hawke’s Bay.

So the Herefords you actually stayed with and …

Yes.

… became interested in breeding them?

Yes.

But obviously they didn’t die on the hills, they actually thrived on the hills by the sound of it.

They did. [Chuckle] And of course we were converting to polls – we didn’t ever intend to have horns; but by putting a polled bull over you’ve got a percentage of polls, and some bulls were very good at leaving total polls. The first bull we could afford we got off the [freezing] works truck from a neighbour who had a Hereford stud, and this old, old bull was being sent to the works, and it was a bull from Wilencote in Gisborne, called ‘Dunby Jen’. It was the most ghastly looking bull because it was all bones, and left us lovely calves. And when we went to the first Hereford occasion which was a dinner after a sale in Palmerston, the person who made us most welcome when we didn’t know anybody was Wilencote’s daughter, Diana Wakelin, who subsequently became the most wonderful friend and we had lifelong fun with them. Diana was a lovely person had very similar likes to us and we all got along very well. Her husband was very difficult; I got along very well with him because I gave back [chuckle] as good as I got. But when both our husbands were dead we went on a wonderful Hereford tour to South Africa as companions on a World Hereford conference, and it was a marvellous experience. But unfortunately, none of these people are left any more.

But that interest in Hereford cattle has remained with you, hasn’t it? Have you got any Hereford cattle on your property now?

No, but a few of my calves went to a granddaughter who is farming an hour south of where the mother and father are. And she was at Lincoln and she’s always loved the Herefords, but unfortunately her partner is an Angus fan so they have both Angus and Hereford. [Chuckle] We have a lot of rivalry between the two, but Ella and John are wonderful farmers and very keen on the high country, and I don’t know if they’ll stay because they both love the South Island. But anyway, in the meantime they’ve got the Hereford cattle, the few remains of mine down there, and they’re carrying them on. But they’re not studs any more because stud breeding has become a totally different game and it requires a lot of outlay to even belong to the Hereford Society let alone comply with all the regulations, which now require frequent weighing and recording and all sorts of things and they have got no facilities where they are. They farm the forestry at the top of the Puhoi Range and all around them is forestry, which is very sad to see has happened since they got the farm. But the granddaughter works for her father back where they grew up, and the partner is on the top block where the cattle are.

So you still have a bit of a connection with your beloved Herefords?

I do. I regard him as a grandson-in-law because they’ve got a child and they’ve lived together for years, but these days I’ve got so many family that are not married but they’re in permanent partnerships.

Which is the way of the world now, yes.

Hard to accept for old people like me.

Did you do some stud breeding yourselves?

Well, the day that the youngest child in our family started school, my husband was heard to say, “You will not be playing golf – you are going to have sheep to look after.” And he bought me four Hampshire in-lamb ewes from the South Island, and when they arrived he discussed it with the owner and the agent and said, “Now is there anything that you do that we don’t do up here that I need to know about?” And they said, “No, no.” Well we buried two of the sheep and seven lambs. They all had twins on board ‘cause they all had iodine deficiency. They didn’t have their iodine injections before lambing. And when I was trying to tube-feed a lamb I picked it up, ‘cause I said to my husband, “This lamb’s got a lump that I’ve never felt in a throat before.” And he felt it and he said, “Oh yeah! Now I know what’s wrong.” But it was a bit late, wasn’t it.

Is that goitre?

Yeah.

The same as a human would have?

Yeah. So we didn’t start off very well. So then we bought three in-lamb hoggets from Australia, and they were three dry hoggets. And I got told I was so ignorant – didn’t I know that hoggets didn’t lamb? But the hoggets do lamb when they’re that breed. [Chuckle] And so we didn’t have a reasonably clever start because the sheep then were £100 each; in those days that was a fortune so that’s why we only started off with that many. I was since told by the people who sold us the four that they weren’t going to bother with us, because people who only had that many were just fiddling and they never did anything with them. I proved them quite wrong by the end of it, but it took a lot of getting off the ground.

But my husband then couldn’t find a Romney he liked, so he also got a Romney stud. So after not too long we had only stud animals; every one was recorded, and as I had a husband who was anti office work, it became my job. [Chuckle] And he was very, very naughty in the office and would pay no attention to anything.

But it became quite amusing – they promised us a high school for the year our oldest child started school in a new primary school in Havelock [North], called Lucknow, and it turned out the high school actually got opened the year the youngest child left school. So there was no choice; they had to go to boarding school. and as my sister-in-law was the Old Girls’ representative on the board at Iona [College], I was not allowed to send them to my old school – they went to Iona. And the first year that the oldest one went I had a ring from someone to say, “Quick, hide the mail, the accounts have come in before the kids have even got to bed the first night at school”, and she said, “the price has gone up from what we were quoted.” So I hid the account until it was time that it had to be paid and I wrote out the cheque and handed it to my husband and said, “Can you sign here? The boarding fees have got to be paid”, and he signed and never said a word. And this was not in character, so I just posted it and didn’t reply. And a couple of months later I said, “I can’t believe you didn’t grizzle about the fees!” And he said, “But I couldn’t growl about that for a year, could I?” So I didn’t tell him no, it was only for a term. [Chuckle] How we paid for our four children at boarding school all at once I have no idea, but it happened. When they left my husband said, “Wow – we’re going to have some money to spend”, but that doesn’t happen either. [Chuckles] Anyway, we didn’t ever save because we always had to spend everything we got on a stud bull or a stud ram or a stud something, [chuckle] which was fun.

And so life was very interesting because he said later, “We’ve never bred any really memorable animals, but it’s the places we’ve been and the people we’ve met that we will never forget.” And how right he was, because we had friends all round New Zealand, and every year the Hereford people went to a different district for several days, and we toured the country with the Herefords out of the towns; I mean my husband would not travel unless there was a ram or a bull at the end of it, so it suited us fine. But we saw an amazing amount of New Zealand, our own country, and round about, and we really did make wonderful friends everywhere.

So you had stud sheep – different varieties?

Yes, I had Hampshires, and they were mostly in the South Island but they were a black-nosed mutton breed. The people involved were not generous breeders like the Hereford people were in those days or a lot of the Romney people were in those days; things I’m sure have changed. They’ve got a lot more cut throat now. But the Hampshires were very naughty about stabbing each other in the back and although we had several wonderful friends in them, I always was very careful about who qualified as a friend.

But sadly, when my husband died the first thing I did was – I had an offer for the whole Hampshire stud, and as I thought I would have to go to town because I couldn’t farm on my own, I sold them. And then darling Di came down from Gisborne with her pyjamas and said, “I’m going to sit on your doorstep ‘til you promise me two things, and one is you will not make another decision until six months or a year is up, and secondly, you will not say no to anybody who rings you up and invites you anywhere.” Because it’s a thing you do – you don’t want to go out and you don’t want to see anyone, so you don’t go out. So when people ring up you find an excuse for not going anywhere.

I don’t think that would be unusual …

It wouldn’t.

… in the circumstance, no. But Ros, you kept records of everything, didn’t you, including your wool clip?

Oh yes. Very, very many years ago when it was a very, very young outfit they started trying to record lots of traits in animals to try and get some things. When I’d been very young I’d listened to a lot of drovers because the drovers went up and down and they had horses and we got involved because people like Bruce Tweedie, who was a very good rider, was given a drover’s pony at the weekend and used to win a lot of jumps with it, and then on Monday it would go back to droving again. But you got to know the family who owned the horse, which was the Royal family; and Johnny Royal’s down here with the buildings. You know, so it leads to a lot of rich things. But these old men all had these wonderful old sayings about stock, and it was because they were able to observe with their eyes how they behaved and what they did, and why they wanted this and that that they had these sayings, but they didn’t know a definition of ‘why’. And I’ve since heard so many of the old sayings being proved by scientists since … something new they’ve discovered, and I think, ‘Oh no, they’ve known that for years’, but [of] course it wasn’t put like that.

But they started a beef breeding thing that used to have a trailer with scales and all sorts of things on it and they’d go round and they’d weigh everything for you and give you records off a computer, of [in] the very early days, of how they were doing and things. A lot of their basis was quite wrong, but you do things because it’s what you believe is the best you know. And we’re being blamed for wrong things on farms, and wrong things in living, and wrong things in colonising, but you do the best at the time; and you do things the way you know how to.

Ros, it was an interesting comment you made about the iodine deficiency and what it cost you, because it really did. That must still be a problem today, but the scientists know about it.

Yes. That’s standard practice – they inject things, I think it’s once or twice a year. I mean they discovered the cobalt deficiency in the central [North] Island, but they didn’t know why the stock didn’t do. And the cobalt deficiency is in other places as well; they’ve discovered when things don’t do it’s often the reason, because they need to put cobalt in the super.

And selenium …

Yes.

Ros you worked incredibly hard, you and your husband, on your farm ‘cause it was really, as you said, seven days a week working. And you did have one holiday that you recall?

No, one family holiday.

Family holiday, yes.

We did have holidays going for three or four days on these Hereford tours, [which] got us off the farm. But we always had to have people … I mean we had four children, we had to park them and you had to get someone with [for] the animals, so you didn’t go on holiday as such. Later on I borrowed my father’s caravan and I used to take the children to Kairākau.

Then we were able to purchase a section on the front with no title, and my husband was going to put a tent on it. And my mother would not allow it [chuckle] because the wind blows beautifully out there sometimes; so she assisted putting what I called our ‘butter box’ out there, which saw many wonderful holidays, but that wasn’t until the children started school.

But apart from the men – the stock agents and the wool men and that sort of thing – I did not have contact with other adults, so I dreamed up starting Homestays when my husband on my shoulder growled at me about being lonely, [chuckles] and met a lot of wonderful people doing that. Started off in a very small way having a bus company foursome; you had all the rules about what you did with them, and you returned them the next day back to the bus. I could never understand why the bus company was allowed to discharge people at the hotel in Havelock to be taken elsewhere to stay, but that is what happened. They stopped doing that, but I continued the homestays, [chuckle] and had … not a lot because it was country; but met some wonderful people over the years and I’m still in contact with several of them many years after I’ve stopped doing it, in Holland and England and Canada.

How wonderful.

In fact when I shifted here the Canadian people arrived on the doorstep when we were in cartons and suitcases, and I was not very pleased to see them. I hope I didn’t show it, because they stayed for a long time and he put up all my hooks and shelves and all sorts of things around this house, and he was a blessing in disguise. [Chuckles] The only thing I regret was, he arrived with a bottle of Baileys [Irish Cream] which every morning at ten o’clock went into his coffee. And he offered me one every day and I said, “No, thank you.” And the last day he said, “There’s enough Baileys for two coffees”, he said, “come and join me”, and I joined him, and I thought, ‘I’ve wasted so much time without Baileys in my coffee’. [Chuckle]

We’re looking outside at Ros’ beautiful garden, and …

An unusual bird.

… and you’ve always had a garden, I would imagine?

Successfully or unsuccessfully; it was on our original place which was two hundred and fifty acres at the end of Rowe Road. There was no water.

Oh!

And we had one tank for roof water which supplied our house and everything else that we used, so there was no water for the garden. So I subsequently had wonderful success and shocking failure, and determined I would never garden again when everything died in the drought; then the rains came and you gardened again. So it’s been a rollercoaster with gardening.

So you did Homestays but you also did tramping, so when did you start tramping, Ros?

Not until … it was meeting Di and Barry Thompson through Homestays, and they were very keen trampers of [with] a group in Hawke’s Bay which was started by Jim … Havelock gentleman … many, many years ago. And it was a small group of very enthusiastic people who once a fortnight packed their lunch and went up into the Kawekas [on] day trips. You had probably an hour to an hour and a half’s drive and then you had a tramp for two to two and a half hours with lunch, and then back home to the cars; so you got home somewhere between three and four [o’clock]. If it was any earlier Jim would find something else to do, because he said his wife would make him do the dusting if he got home before four o’clock. [Chuckle] It was a very structured group and wonderful people, and they all helped newcomers. I got so enthusiastic because I saw Hawke’s Bay as I have never seen Hawke’s Bay, [chuckle] because we didn’t ever go those places.

We did have one family holiday when our youngest child was seven, and we told awful lies because we weren’t allowed to take them tramping until they were older, but we knew that she could manage. [It] gave us a rude awakening, because she was the only one in our family who had glasses; and one day my husband was growling at her for not standing up straight walking, and we did not realise that when you had glasses and it was raining you could not see where you were going. Took me a long time to learn that. But isn’t it funny what you do when you don’t …

Now that’s the family holiday where you were doing the ..?

Milford Track. And they all said, “We’ve fallen in love with this place – we’re coming back.” But none of us ever have gone back. Afterwards my husband would not go anywhere civilised so he asked somebody on the Milford Track. “Where do we go to stay at Gore?” And we stayed in the Dolamore Park, and at half past three in the morning we were all woken up because my husband said, “You cannot miss the dawn chorus.” And it was the most beautiful song I have ever remembered birds singing; it was just wonderful. So at the Dolamore Park the caretaker was a gentleman who’d done the Milford Track, and we said, “Well we want to go to Manapouri and have a look; now where do we go?” And he said, “Well if you can put up with a very, very rude woman, there’s a camping ground right on the edge of Manapouri which is not very well patronised because the woman is so rude.” What a polite way to describe the woman [chuckle] … anyone other than my husband would’ve run a mile. We had our tent in the middle of the trees all on our own, right on the edge of Manapouri and it was beautiful.

I imagine this was about fifty years ago or more was it? With your youngest child being seven?

Sandy is now sixty this year.

Yes, so over fifty years ago.

They asked for money to walk to the store in the morning and they were told by their father they would not have any, and they came back after a walk with sweets. He said, “Where did you get those?” They had found a slot machine on a native tree in the camping ground, and they didn’t have any money so they thumped it and money fell out. [Chuckle] And my husband was so rocked that anybody would put a slot machine on a native tree in a camping ground that he said, “Well you can keep the money”, [chuckles] after he’d told them that they could take it back. When he thought about it he said, “No, you can keep it, I’ve changed my mind.” So they got their sweets.

Ros, along with farming, four children must’ve meant you had a pretty busy life. But some of those children … one of them anyway … is a farmer.

Three of them are farmers. [Chuckle] There was less than four years between the four children. We had a three-roomed house when we started, and we had a cot on one side, a bassinet on the other, and a cot in the passage, and when we were having the fourth we had to add on – money or no money, we added on. However, we added on several times after that; it was a lot of fun, [chuckles] but we actually ruined an awful lot of stuff ‘cause when you’ve got no room in a house you ruin a lot of stuff outside. We didn’t even have a garage.

John had an uncle down the road on a much nicer farm than ours which was very tough, but he was very old-fashioned and he had a wife who was a recluse; and she would not allow people in the house or anywhere around her. I think I was the only acceptable person up the Middle Road. And when he was subsequently ill I was sent for to go and stay at the house with her, and we got along very well but she was a very nervy, unusual lady; I know why now, because she was the result of cousins marrying. She was very nervous and the family were nervous. When you’re young you don’t realise that.

When they wanted to retire to live by their only child in Tauranga, John’s uncle came to him, and he said, “We’ve drawn up a list of people who are going to get offered the farm, but”, he said, “I have got one thing that I’m absolutely against and that’s land aggregation. So”, he said, “if you sell your place you can have the first option on this place. But”, he said, “there’s a few stipulations, and one is that you can’t go into the house and see it before you have it, and we’re not shifting until we’ve built” – which led to a fair bit of strife. But my husband agreed to sell, and when we shifted to a two-bedroomed place – two big bedrooms on this occasion, not two little ones – the house had been built in 1936 and never touched. So it had chalk on the plaster ceilings and scrim on the walls, holes in the lino on the floor; it was a major, major, major to do anything with it. Beautiful home but it was uncared for.

Were your children still at home when you shifted?

We shifted the year the oldest one went off to boarding school, but we couldn’t shift to the house because the building process of uncle and aunt went on for two and a half years. So when our house went we lived in a little wee house on the corner down the road, and we had three beds in the only other bedroom down there, and one was out in the passage. But the kids had to walk across … … the first person had to go to bed first because you had to walk across the top of the three beds to get there. But the oldest one was at boarding school that year and subsequently, by the time we added onto the house we went to she was at boarding school. It’s typical of life – you get what you want when it’s too late, isn’t it?

But anyway, the kids never forgave us for shifting from where we were, and when David was eighteen he came home one day … he was sent to Rathkeale [Agricultural College] because my parents lived right next door to Lindisfarne where everyone else went. And I was very scared of my mother who was encouraging the children -none too gently – academically, and our son was anything but academic. I was very scared that my mother would encourage him a little too enthusiastically to stay next door. She was very good with them, but he was a reluctant scholar all his life ‘cause he just wanted to be on the farm, and didn’t forgive us for sending him to Rathkeale because he didn’t want to leave home. But off he went to Rathkeale.

A bit like you with your horse when you didn’t want to go to Woodford. [Chuckles] And he’s ended up on a farm …

When he left home we had a South Island Hereford gentleman for breakfast at the Royal Show who’d bought rams up. And he marched into my house and he did not wait to get introduced; and he said, “I want your son to come farming with me.” And there was a young man in the house and he attacked him about coming farming, and this turned out to be our future son-in-law [husband] of another daughter – he didn’t know anything about who Tug was, [laughter] and he didn’t want to go farming anyway. [Laughter] He couldn’t get a word in edgeways, ‘cause Tug was in full cry and was going to have our son down there. But our son refused to leave home, because he said, “You sent me away to boarding school; away from home. And I’m not going anywhere farming.” But then the neighbour came over and said, “I want your son farming for me”; so he took him farming which was good, except that he learnt a different … he did learn a different way of farming. But this gentleman had a farm at Mahia, and he was very good because they all loved fishing and the farm was by the water; so they used to farm and go fishing. So our son thought it was a pretty good idea farming up there, but after a year he came home. My husband had been a hay baling contractor with very ancient old gear, and he decided he was going to resurrect the hay baling, but his way, which was with much smarter, better gear; and he subsequently did that and on each occasion it’s given him enough money on the side to invest in land.

So out of your four children, three of them have obviously inherited your love of the land and farming?

Mmm. I think the other one would’ve loved to too but the man she fell in love with was not a farmer, and they’re the ones that are now in Australia.

That’s great. Thank you, Ros.