Tait, Robert Gordon (Gordon) and Allison Christine; Tait, James (Jim) Adrian and Philippa Interview

Today is 15th November 2024. I’m privileged to be speaking to a group of four people, all related, in Greenmeadows, Napier. My name is Robyn Warren and I would like to introduce to you …

Jim: Jim Tait.

Could you say your full name?

James Adrian Tait.

Philippa: Philippa Tait.

Gordon: Gordon Robert Tait, [Robert Gordon, known as Gordon]

Thank you. Now, I’d like to ask each of you some of your history. Jim, would you like Gordon to do the first part?

Jim: Yes.

All right, thank you.

Gordon: Okay. Going back to our ancestors on our maternal side, born in Scotland were John and Mary Gordon [Sutherland] and they decided to come to New Zealand. They left London on 15th September 1839 on a sailing ship, the Oriental. They arrived at Port Nicholson on 31st January 1840, and this was just before the Treaty [of Waitangi]. Port Nicholson was a port, but there was no such thing as Wellington; it was Petone foreshore where there were some whalers’ huts and things like that.

[Note: Gordon was the maiden name of Mary, wife of John Sutherland, who were passengers on the Oriental to New Zealand in 1839, arriving at Port Nicholson in January 1840. There was no one by the surname of Gordon listed as passengers]

The Oriental had a hundred and fifty-five passengers; it was the first family ship or boat to leave London, but they were the second to arrive in New Zealand; they arrived in Petone. They lived in Petone for twelve years and then moved to Matakana [Mataikona], which is just past Castlepoint on the Wairarapa side. Their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, born on 14th June 1840 – now I don’t know whether it’s true, but she was reported to’ve been the first white child born in that part of the country.

She married James Tait who was our great-grandfather, on 30th May 1861 in Napier. James and Elizabeth had four children, being Mary born in 1862, John 1864, William 1866 and James, 1870; James is my grandfather, and the one of interest today. He married in Gisborne Letitia Florence Jane U’Ren in 1901, [and] he died on 31st March 1943. His first wife, the one that we’ve just been talking about – they called her Florrie – died in 1912 with like, an undulent fever after Pat Tait was born, and he was only just a little baby. [Other] children of the first wife were Beth, short for Elizabeth, born in 1902, Reni in 1903, Isobel 1906, Dina 1908, Marge 1909, John 1910, and James (Pat).

How would you spell Dina’s real name?

She was actually Milly Donaldina; Dina was the shortest …

Philippa: Was it Millicent or Milly?

Gordon: Millicent. Wife number two was my grandmother, Jessie [Puflett], and they married in 1915. They only had one child, Robert (Bob), that’s my father, born on 23rd April 1917.

The family suffered a severe tragedy when James Senior was drowned off the Wairoa coast in August 1870 while returning to his station on horseback. A large wave swept him off his horse. James number two, our grandfather, was nineteen days old. Great hardship was endured over the next few years, considering the uprising by Te Kooti when the family had to hide in river cliffs. Elizabeth married again and another three sons were born. Elizabeth went on to an old age.

Thank you, Gordon. Would you like to continue with your own life and marriage and then some of your working years?

Yes. Okay – I’m the eldest child of Bob [Robert Gordon Puflett Tait] – let’s call him Bob because everybody knew my father as Bob – and I was born on 2nd October 1944, which makes me just over eighty. We had a very good life; we lived at Whirinaki, north of Bay View, and my father subdivided all the Whirinaki sections opposite the pulp mill. That was all Tait land, right along the stretch of beach, and he subdivided – I just remember as a young boy, around about 1952. The next in our siblings were twin sisters, Anne and Margaret Rose; they were born three years later. Next in the line was William John, he was born in 1951 and the last of the family was Derek Maxwell, and he was born in 1953. I grew up with Jim, across here …

Jim’s your first cousin?

Jim’s my … we always knew him as Jim, and right from an early age we played … we had meccano toys, and Jim got into model aircraft, and we had a wonderful upgrowing. [Childhood] We swam in the Esk River and we had a lot of fun.

Your mother’s name?

My mother – Bob, my father, married Eileen Kyle in 1942. Ironically, my mother Eileen’s sister [Jean] was Jim’s [mother]. His mother and my mother were sisters.

[Note: Robert (Bob) Gordon Tait married Eileen Kyle, and John Warnock Tait married Jean Kyle; Bob and John were half brothers. Bob’s son is Robert Gordon (Gordon) Tait and John’s son is James (Jim) Adrian Tait, who are both being interviewed]

So you’re double cousins?

Yeah, we are in a way, yeah. My mother was one of ten children. My mother came about half way, born in 1922. My father was born in 1917. We had great family gatherings; we’ve got something like forty-five or fifty-something cousins. [Chuckles] The ten children averaged about five children each and [in] my father’s family there were seven, so we’ve got a lot of cousins. [Chuckles] Like rabbits. Unfortunately my mother died with cancer quite early in the piece, devastated my father and his health deteriorated badly with his heart, and he died about five years after my mother, so there was quite a lot of sadness in our family.

What age were you at that time?

I was twenty-six when my mother died and thirty-two when my father died, so orphaned, you might say, at thirty-two years of age. We had a farm in Wairoa that my father had set up and we had some early struggles. Yeah … no doubt about that. I would like to put on record that the youngest brother, Derek, was still at Napier Boys’ High School when Father and Mother had died, and he went on to university – the first of our family [who] went to university – and became a very successful lawyer. He retired and lives in Motueka.

My other brother, William, two years older than Derek, lives in …

Jim: Breckenridge.

Gordon: … Breckinridge, just outside Taradale. He has a small block of farm land. And my sisters … Anne lost her husband several years ago; she lives in Christchurch and had three children; and her twin sister, Rose, lives in Auckland … never married. Just a little bit of history there. We all attended Eskdale Primary School along with Jim and Jim’s two sisters.

Your school days?

School days – in those days we had to ride a bike. From Whirinaki to Eskdale was approximately six miles in those days.

[Voices in background]

Jim: It’s interesting going back over the years, and what you might’ve forgotten, or remembered.

Gordon: You remember the meccano toys we had?

Jim: [Chuckle] And the model aeroplane crashes. [Chuckles] Gordon’s brother, William, took a fancy to my model aircraft, and when we saw him coming … “Hide them, ‘cause William will snap them.” [Chuckle]

Gordon: Brother William was, dare I say it, a naughty little boy, and he could walk past a model aircraft and go like a violin, just [chuckle] … a massive pile of balsa wood. [Chuckles]

How did you feel about that, Jim?

Jim: Oh, a bit grumpy, bit grumpy.

Gordon: Never got caught again, did you?

Jim: No.

Gordon: You put them up out of his reach.

Interesting that you both talked about model aeroplanes, because you could enlarge on those.

Gordon: Jim was very keen on his model aircraft, and I well remember one day he used to give the rudder a little bit of a tweak so the model aircraft was doing big circles. And then it ran out of fuel and landed in a big wine block of grapes, so [chuckles] Jim and I had to go off – I well remember – trying to find this model aircraft in the vineyard. Just another thing …

Did you find it?

Oh yeah; oh yeah, yeah, we found it …

Philippa: How many grapes did you eat?

Gordon: [Chuckle] … probably a couple of hours later. “Must be here somewhere; it must be here somewhere.”

I started working for my father on the farm. The Waikari farm that we also owned was at the mouth of the Waikari River, approximately half way between Napier and Wairoa, taken up in 1865. So with various wars and depressions and whatever, the farm was subdivided and my father got what is called the coast part of the Waikari Station. Originally it was six thousand eight hundred acres and he inherited the coastal side, sixteen hundred and thirty acres. First of all, the First World War was very devastating with lack of manpower, and manuka scrub I well remember – and Jim can refer to that too, when he talks about the manuka being like, twenty feet high, and the bulldozers in [the] early 1950s trying to break in the scrub that had grown because of lack of manpower. Mohaka was only nine miles north of the farm and that’s where the main work force used to come from, the scrub cutters, the shearers, the fencers and general stock work[ers]; they used to ride their horses along the beach and come to work that way.

I well remember when I started with my father we had eighteen hundred breeding ewes and approximately seventy breeding cows, and when I left some years later when we bought a farm in Wairoa, we’d increased the number of sheep to three thousand two hundred and a hundred and fifty breeding cows. A lot of the farm had been cultivated, in those days with giant discs behind crawler tractors, and we had a series of contractors that used to come, and one that sticks in my mind was a very good operator with the name of Don Bateman; my father used to be very, very particular and he said this particular contractor was very, very good and he employed him for several years. Apparently, as far as I know, Don Bateman is still alive today.

Philippa: Yes, he’s in Te Awa.

Gordon: My wife, Allison, and I married in [on] 31st August 1968 and we were on my father’s farm for a little while. My father said, “We’ve got to enlarge; you’ve got two brothers who could be interested in land.” And he didn’t want to subdivide the Waikari property ‘cause he could see from his own experience with his father that subdivision sometimes doesn’t work; it creates some other problems. It’s best to go and buy land somewhere else. So we purchased this thousand and eighteen acre, or four hundred and twelve hectares, only eight kilometres south of the Wairoa township, right on the coast. It was a hill country farm, but very good – the climate in Wairoa is very, very good for growing young cattle, it’s not so drought prone, regular rain but very, very fertile soil. Wairoa is under-rated as a farm land, it’s very, very good.

We farmed there for twenty-six years, and our two children were born. The first was a daughter, Marie, and she was born [on] exactly the same date as Allison, my wife, on 16th March. Allison was born in [19]46 and our daughter was born in ‘79 [1969]. My wife used to say she missed out by being a saint [chuckle] … that was the next day.

Anyway, our son, Robert, was born on 25th October 1971, so he’s recently had his birthday too. He trained as an engineer in the Wairoa Freezing Works, and later when we moved down to Hawke’s Bay out from Hastings, he started work on farms and became an agricultural contractor. Marie married a local farmer in the Kereru area, name of Paul Renton, a well-known Hawke’s Bay rugby player … played a lot of his rugby for Hawke’s Bay. Big tall strong person, and they farmed a five hundred and fifty hectare property in the Kereru/Mangatahi area out west of Hastings. Unfortunately our son-in-law took his life; it was a very traumatic occasion. That was seven, nearly eight years ago, and our daughter hasn’t married again. She runs the farm that she married into; has three children – Elsa, she is thirty years old, currently got a partner, Tom. They’re over in Spain at the moment; he’s very into yachting and boating and things like that. Next in Marie’s children is Hugh. He’s taken up rugby like his father, and has been playing for Hawke’s Bay recently and has now got a contract with the Highlanders in Dunedin. He’s twenty-six years old. The next is Zana, and she has a partner, Michael, who’s a professional footballer, and they live in Auckland.

Our son Robert has three children. His son is Lochie, and he helps his father in a transport business at the moment. Next born is Denby-Rose. Lochie by the way is twenty-six and Denby is now twenty-four. Denby is a professional jockey – she’s very small in stature and a lot of her races in Riccarton in Christchurch. The last of our son Rob’s children is Brenna and she’s twenty-three, and she’s … like her sister, Denby, she’s a horse trainer. And recently she’s been living in New Plymouth and now lives in Waverley with her partner. That’s just about our story at the moment.

Oh, that’s a wonderful story; thank you very much, Gordon. Would you like to say something, Jim? Just as you find it best.

Jim: Well I went to the same school as Gordon, Eskdale School, which we thoroughly enjoyed and we got up to a bit of mischief there. My father was farming at Tait Road, Bay View and farming most of his life. He took on several roles as school chairman of Eskdale. He was also a member of the Education Board, a member of the Hawke’s Bay County Council and other various duties. He loved that sort of work …

Philippa: He was dux at Eskdale.

Jim: … dux at Eskdale, yes. But he enjoyed farming along with my mother.

What was your mother’s name, Jim?

Jean.

Philippa: Jean Kyle. And your father was John Warnock [Tait].

Jim: John Warnock, which was an unusual name, which I think is [of] Scottish origin … John Warnock Tait. So I spent some time after high school helping him on the farm, odd-jobbing, tractor driving, and anything that was going on at the time.

I went flying commercially, [speaking together] and I finished up with I think about eight thousand hours. Aerial topdressing was just in its infancy and being trialled; got me interested in aircraft, model aircraft and, much to my father’s disappointment, full time flying. So from there I moved into flying training, became a flying instructor for a year or so, and then I decided I wanted to take the profession further and I transferred to the Wellington Aero Club and flew as an instructor for them. At that point in time New Zealand National Airways [Corporation], NAC as they called them, were looking for pilots so I put an application in and was successful. So I spent several years with them flying a variety of aircraft, mainly big aircraft, and then decided that my mum and dad were struggling because of age of the farm we had still, at Tait Road Bay View … wanted help. So I decided to retire and come back home and help them out. I still wanted to fly and I flew for a number of companies. One was called Air Central; flew for them for several years, and also another company, Eagle Air; flew for them, and finally finished up flying, believe it or not, in Rarotonga for Cook Island Airways which I enjoyed.

Did you live in Rarotonga?

No, no, they Air New Zealand owned the airline and would fly me across as a fill-in pilot, which I enjoyed. And then I came back from Rarotonga and basically at that stage retired from flying, and we carried on farming the Bay View property, Phip and I, and all the chores and problems that go with it, so I haven’t flown since then.

I’ve got two sons, both qualified pilots. One’s a captain with Air New Zealand; the other one has still got his flying licences but is not currently flying.

And what are their names?

The older one, the captain, is Russell …

Philippa: James …

Jim: … and the younger one is Daniel.

Philippa: Daniel John.

Jim: So as you can see aviation was in the DNA.

Philippa: We have a third child, Katrina Marie.

Jim: Now she has three youngsters …

Philippa: Four. [Chuckles] Gabriela Rose, Lachlan … I don’t know what his second name is … Owen, and Zara Stuart.

Jim: And they are living in Auckland, and we’re, as you know, living still in Hawke’s Bay.

Philippa: Russell’s in Nelson …

Jim: And has been flying in Africa for several years, and is required to have a co-pilot. She has since moved from Zimbabwe to Nelson and they’re now living together; they’re not married. She has a grown son, Russell also has a grown son, and they’re quite happily living in Nelson with his new job as a training captain.

So it’s really in the blood isn’t it, the flying?

Oh, it’s in the blood, yes, yes. Every aeroplane that goes over, I’m flying it.

Do you miss flying?

Oh yes, yes – it’s not a job, it’s a disease, [chuckles] and a hard one to shake off.

Philippa: Terminal. [Chuckles]

Was it hard being a captain’s wife?

I used to run the farm while he was over in Rarotonga and he’d come back and think he owned the place again. [Chuckles]

Jim: And they would call me up every time they needed a pilot and ask me to stay longer, so I’d ring Phip and tell her, “It’s Jim here on the phone.” She said, “Jim who?” [Laughter] Which wasn’t well accepted.

Did you have help on the farm?

Philippa: No, no.

Jim: I flew for a local company here for … oh, about ten years on and off, so yeah, I had quite a lot of flying – I think round about eight thousand hours in total, which is quite a lot. But I enjoyed every minute of it, and would do it again if I had the opportunity, or the age.

From there on we’ve sort of semi-retired here, and our son – the younger son who’s not currently flying – is looking after the farm, and is leasing it.

It’s kept in the family then …

Yeah, we’ve kept it [the] best we can. The farm we did have at Bay View was more agricultural cropping, and my father sold off half of it in the early days to McWilliam’s Wines. They were one of the first wine companies in the district. It was quite a big operation, and since then it’s been on-sold and our son is now leasing it off [from] us.

So as a farmer’s son, what was your role?

Probably mainly tractor driving and raking, cultivating, ploughing, everything to do with cropping, and a lot of stock work as well; rebuilding yards, rebuilding the wool shed and the other amenities, so yeah, quite busy.

And what crops would you’ve grown?

Potatoes mainly; barley, lucerne – crops were grown in quantity, anything that could be harvested was harvested and made into hay.

For the local market? Or did you export?

Some for private use and some for the local market. My mother loved stock work. She loved all the animals and had a great knowledge of animal welfare. And she had a lot of chickens which she used to feed, and ducks, and my father would have to buy all the feed for the chickens. She sold the eggs from the chickens which clothed us post-war, and my father unfortunately had to buy all the feed for the chickens, so she thought there was a great profit [chuckles] in that. But she loved doing it. She was a very, very farm-orientated person, loved horses, loved animals, and animal welfare, and the two of them seemed to get along very well.

Had she been a farmer’s daughter?

She would have been in her infancy at Rocky Basin [which] was the original home farm – yes, she would’ve had a lot of farming.

Rocky Basin?

Rocky Basin is in Eskdale.

Philippa: Yeah, there were ten kids at Rocky Basin.

Ten kids in your family, Jim?

In his mother’s family.

Jim: And Gordon’s mother, [Eileen], was a sister to my mother, [Jean]. Because it was post-war, things were tight. Everyone had a duty, and one was to look after the sheep, one the cattle, one the horses; my mother’s role was to provide bread … make bread for the whole family. One had to be on vegetables … gardening, and you had to do [?] on horses. Everyone had to do their thing to make it work and survive.

Gordon: My mum was more the needlework; clothes were second hand and ripped and torn, and you know … [To] get ready for school we had to have tidy clothes, so as far as I know my mother was always given … “Here, fix this.” ‘Cause clothes wore out, they didn’t go to a shop and buy new clothes, so they patched and patched and patched.

And Jim was talking about horses – they had to keep several ponies because they rode to Eskdale School … [there was] no other way, you know. They did have motor cars but the cars weren’t used for school transport. And my mother was one day riding, almost at the turnoff into the Eskdale School, Hill Road, and a stock agent in a big Chev [Chevrolet] car came round the corner – the road’s all shingle – and skidded to a halt and hit her horse and my mother went over the front of the car. Fortunately, no bones broken. It was just one of those things, you just get [got] back on your horse again and went to school, scratched and bleeding probably.

Philippa: How many girls were in the Kyle family?

Gordon: There’s four.

Philippa: And they had to share a pair of shoes if they wanted to go to a dance. [Chuckle]

Gordon: Yeah. There was Ena, Gwen, Eileen and your mother, Jean. And there were six boys. The eldest was George – George remained on the Rocky Basin farm. My mother’s parents and Jim’s mother’s parents came out from Ireland – Kyle was a [an] Irish surname – in 1908 I think it was, and George, their first, was born in about 1910. Jim’s father, John, and George were very similar in age .. days apart or something … yeah.

Jim: We lived in a hand-me-down environment, and you never ever really got new clothes, it was tear up my brother’s trousers or whatever. And as you grew clothes were handed down from person to person. And this is probably why your mother was involved more in the upkeep of …

Gordon: She was very good with the sewing machine, could make clothes out of bit of cloth and put things together quite quickly.

Out of necessity.

Jim: But I think post-war was a case of survival. Yeah, if you had a duty you had to stick with it. If it was horses they were your concern; if it was sheep they were your problem, and all those jobs were allocated. You were the one growing vegetables – he had to make sure that the cabbages were ready on time. But that’s the life; for all that they sort of …

Philippa: They had a lot of fun, didn’t they?

Jim: I think they had a lot of fun.

Gordon: Just a little side issue there – the thing through the Depression that kept them going – they milked some cows. They had an old petrol … for machine milking, and I think they had about a dozen cows. Can you remember how many cows there would’ve been? Dozen?

Jim: Enough to feed the family.

Gordon: Yeah. But they separated the cream and they took the cream down the Waipunga Road from Rocky Basin to the Eskdale Railway Station, where it was loaded onto a train that went into Napier, and the cream was taken to a dairy factory. And that kept them because it was a regular income and the cream paid a lot of the bills.

In saying that, two of the Kyle boys – my mother’s brothers and Jim’s mother’s brothers – were called up. They served in the Pacific in the Second World War and …

Jim: Korean …

Gordon: They were in the Second World War. But anyway, they were lucky enough to get farms when the rehabilitation scheme …

They stayed local?

Gordon: Yes, yes, west of Hastings off the Taihape Road. My Uncle Jack got a farm there – no power, no facilities, no house. Do you remember those days, Jim? And my father and Jim’s father and some other friends – oh, another uncle – built a cottage on my father’s farm – little lifestyle – and it was transported up and that’s where my Uncle Jack and his wife Jennifer lived, in this cottage with wire over the … to stop it from blowing away. No wool shed … it was very tough.

Jim: Just bare land.

They did work hard though …

During World War II my father [John Warnock Tait] was part of the Home Guard – and I’ve put a note in here, ‘maybe Dad’s Army’. [Chuckles] I think they had a lot of fun despite the job they had of guarding the coastline.

What branch?

Jim: It would’ve been what we call … Maori name of Petane, Bay View.

Closest to where you lived.

And there’s gun emplacements that I think are still on the coastline. [It] was where they used to practice their shooting and whatever.

But going back to the Kyle family, Jim [Thomas James Kyle] was a senior policeman who lived in Wellington for years and then transferred up here, and then to Hastings. So he was quite senior in the ranks of the Police.

Gordon: He was the chief of the Hastings Police as far as I was aware.

Jim: That’s right.

What years would that be, do you recall?

I don’t remember the years.

Now another brother, Max, who was the youngest in the Kyle family, went to the University of Sydney and became a veterinary surgeon and set up a veterinary clinic here in Taradale which is still there. I think he died recently.

Gordon: He died a couple of years ago, yeah. He was ninety-something.

Jim: So I come from various and mixed backgrounds.

Yes, but all hard working as well, through necessity.

That’s true.

And how did you meet Phip?

Philippa: [Chuckle] Through your cousin, Jan Kyle. They moved into the farm next door to my family farm in Dannevirke, and she was match-making. [Chuckles] We met at a party at her place. [Chuckles]

Gordon: The rest is history.

Philippa: [Chuckles] The rest is history, yeah.

What year would that’ve been?

1970, ’71. We got married in January ’72. Russell was born in ’73, Daniel was born in ’74, [chuckle] and then Katie was born in ’78. Yeah.

And so your family were Hawke’s Bay people too?

Farming, yes, out of Dannevirke, yes.

What was your maiden name?

Blyth. My dad was a top farmer, yeah … Thomas Philip Blyth.

Jim: [The] boys went to Lindisfarne College. I got a phone call one day from the headmaster to say that he had some good news for me and some bad news, and said, “What do you want first?” I said, “Well I’d like the good news first – what was that?” He said, “Your son has just duxed Lindisfarne.” “Okay, now for the bad news.” And he said, “I’m sorry, but he’s just been expelled.” [Chuckles]

Now which son was that?

Philippa: Daniel. The whole class had been out drinking at the end of exams and no one would own up. [Chuckle] They got caught.

So was he declared dux in the end?

Philippa: Yes, yes. [Chuckle] It was the last day of school anyway.

Jim: He took up flying training and ended up flying for Air Chathams … Chatham Islands … flew for them for a while then joined Jetstar; flew for them for a little while.

Philippa: He was with Pioneer [Airlines] before that.

Jim: Yeah, Pioneer as well; he’s had quite a lot of flying experience. I think he’d still like to be flying.

Would you like to tell us a little bit about the Blyth family, Phip? How did you come to be called Phip?

Philippa: My name is Philippa, and one of Mum and Dad’s friends called me ‘Phipilla’ all the time, and eventually it got shortened. Yeah. And Philippa is a lover of horses, and I’m not. [Chuckle] So I have two older sisters and a younger brother. Yeah, Mum was a doctor’s daughter from Wanganui, and she arrived out at the farm with, I think eight ball dresses. [Laughter] She thought it was going to be a social life. [Chuckle]

She got a rude awakening?

She got a real rude awakening, but she was amazing; she worked her little butt off. No, she was great.

So what sort of farm did you have there?

We had beef and sheep.

What was your role?

We used to just pitch in. I used to love at lambing time doing all the docking and mustering and things.

So what about schooling – how far would you’ve had to go?

Primary school was about two or three miles away, and then we went to – oh, there were three girls – went to Woodford, and my brother went to Hereworth and then on to Wanganui [Collegiate].

Was there a school bus in those days?

Mum used to drive us; otherwise sometimes we would walk.

You would’ve had some farm duties to perform before and after school?

Yes … can’t remember that far back. [Chuckle]

Well you would’ve been boarding at Woodford, so … how did you get home in the holidays?

How did we get home? We used to go by railcar.

Were there many other girls from that district?

There were, yeah, probably four or five. [Microphone interference]

Did you enjoy your years at Woodford?

No, [laughter] … didn’t. Sally did, our second sister did. I didn’t. [Chuckle]

Homesickness?

Just wasn’t me, I don’t think. [Chuckle]

You’d’ve rather been home on the farm?

Yeah, probably.

And where did you go from Woodford … to work?

Yes, I had several jobs. I worked at the chemist in Dannevirke; I worked for Dr Hunter in Dannevirke for a wee while; and went over to Palmerston [North] and flatted over there with a friend and worked for the Abraham Seed Company as a typist; Beattie Homes … if we didn’t like a job we just walked out and got another one. [Chuckles] It was easy in those days. And then I went overseas for a couple of years.

Oh yes, and worked?

Worked, yes … yes, got temporary work – office work, or worked in bars, and travelled round the Continent [Europe] that way.

This was all before you met Jim?

Yes.

Jim: I think my greatest blemish happened at Eskdale School. A good school friend of mine, Alan Payne, and I used to buy the big paper rolls about ‘yay’ long, fill them up with pine needles and paper and race round the yard, with flames coming out the back [chuckles] and then promptly set fire to the forest [??]. [Laughter] There was severe growling for that; fire engines … [Laughter]

How old were you at that time?

Probably about ten, if that. [Chuckles]

Were you quite a mischief, Jim?

Aww no, just fun-loving. [Laughter]

Philippa: Might need to be abridged. [Chuckle]

Jim: Flying on from [?] was the key, because I was flying bigger aircraft, DC3s, Fokker Friendships, Viscounts, and they were all a challenge; big aeroplanes. I really, really enjoyed that life and to some extent I was reluctant to come back to the farm, but I could see that there were problems developing there. And we didn’t really want to lose the farm or have my parents forced off it because of their age, and so I thought, ‘Well I’d better do something about it’, and that’s how it all happened. But I did enjoy every minute of it.

Yes. You’ve had a very fulfilling life, all of you, haven’t you?

And then they purchased another farm just north of Bay View at Tangoio, and it was pretty run down … it was a bit of a train wreck, and we had to cut I think nearly six hundred acres of scrub, bush. Aerial topdress, fence, roading it all, all our supplies. We went ahead and built a new house, new workshop, new wool shed, new yards, so it was ongoing. I was hoping it would become a legacy for whoever, and I’m still operating today, but … one of life’s challenges.

Philippa: I’ve learnt a lot today actually, from you … that was good.

It was very good, yes.

Jim: It’s a memory jog for us, too.

Philippa: Thank you for doing it.

[Break]

I’m just introducing Allison Tait – she’s the wife of Gordon, and she’s going to give her side of her history. Thank you, Allison.

Allison: I’m Allison Christine Tait. I [be]came connected with the Taits as a little five year old when my parents came up from Ward in the South Island after the war. My father were farmers down in Ward and had also a lime works at Kekerengu, and a big agricultural contracting business. It’s between Ward and Kaikoura – it’s on the coast there.

Dad was not allowed to go to the war. The army wanted him because he had all these explosives from having the lime works, but the government kept him for food production because he was the biggest contractor – he and his brother – from Blenheim down to Kaikoura. He got very sick … run down … because his brother went to the war and he was running the family farm, Te Moana, at Ward, which my grandfather had got – it was one of the first subdivisions. My grandfather fought in the Boer War, and when their Flaxmere station was broken up he was able to get land.

It so happened that there were three brothers. My father was Percy William Wooding; he was the eldest of three brothers. The second brother was Reginald, and the third brother was Arthur. Reg was in the police force, so he never went to the war; Arthur did go to the war, which left my father running the whole of the agricultural contracting, and as you can imagine, there was a lot of wheat grown down there, so it was very important for food production.

After the war Dad got very, very run down. He was harvesting clover seed and had a carbuncle, normally now known as a boil, on his arm, and he got blood poisoning very, very badly – sepsis really. The one thing the army and the government did do for him – he was the first person in New Zealand to have penicillin which the Americans flew out from the Islands for my father. As you can imagine, after the sepsis he was extremely ill, and at that stage his brother, Reginald, was the policeman at Mohaka and he suggested [microphone interference] that Dad came [come] up and have a holiday with him.

As you can also appreciate, it was impossible to buy land after the war with the big stations being cut up with [by] the government, and also farmers returning, so they would not let my grandfather divide the home farm, Te Moana, between my father and his younger brother, Arthur, who was also wanting to go farming. So it was decided that Dad would come to Mohaka and have a rest and recuperation with his brother. And it so happened that his brother borrowed a pony for him from some of the local Maori people; he said, “There’s a nice block of land of a thousand acres over on the south side of the Mohaka River, owned by an old man, John Tait.” [Chuckle] Dad was a great horseman – very, very good horseman – he rode over and he and old John sat and yarned, and John told him all about his travels overseas and that the Mohaka Valley was one of the most productive and best soils of anywhere he’d seen in the war. I’m sure you’ve gone through where John …

Gordon: Not so much about John, no.

Allison: Well he travelled over through Patagonia, and Mississippi and all those sort of places.

John was your grandfather?

No …

Gordon: No, my grandfather’s brother. [John, born 1864, older brother of James, born 1870]

Allison: … yeah, his grandfather’s brother. And old John took a great liking to my father, they got on extremely well. And he said, “Yes, I will sell you my land. The relatives want it but I think I like you better.” [Chuckles] Typical old Scotsman. So he did, and Dad came home, back down to Ward. I was only five at that time, and in May 1951 he and Mum and my sister, Beverley, who’s now Beverley Haliburton – we all moved up to Mohaka. It was quite a trek because Dad brought up quite a bit of his machinery. Dad’s mother was an Andrews of the Andrews & Beaven firm, so there was always lots of machinery. And as an aside, Grandfather Andrews invented the first mobile chaff cutter in the world, here in New Zealand. So there was always a connection with machinery; so the tractor and trailers and tools and all sorts of things came up, which in 1951 was quite a trek. The house had had rabbiters and various people living in it. Mum, who came originally from farming in Oxford but spent most of her life in Christchurch, was horrified when she was having a bath in the tin bath and a rat popped up underneath. [Chuckles]

What was your mother’s name?

Beatrice Mary Wooding [McGrath]. And so we grew up there; Beverley, my sister, is five years older than I am, so she was two years there and then came down to Napier Girls’ High School. I had Correspondence [School] because I never walked ‘til I was three years old, and then I had calipers on my legs ‘til I was five. And because we lived on the south side of the Mohaka River there was no bridge in those days; the bridge had been washed away in one of the floods … ’38 flood. There was half a bridge and then a long swing bridge that you could only walk over and it would sway from side to side, which we delighted in doing when Mum was on it, much to her horror. It was a fairly primitive lifestyle as can be imagined, in 1951 … no power, go to bed with a candle. Dad left the car on the north side and we walked about half a mile back down to the house. When we went to town I used to get extremely carsick, so old Dr Riddell in Wairoa would only give Mum six little heroin [morphine] tablets [chuckle] so I could travel to …

Gordon: Might have to cross that out. [Chuckles]

Allison: … well, there was a heroin base. And they were the tiniest little things, no bigger than a pinhead … travel to Napier. And at ten years old I refused to go to town, and I went to Wairoa because my legs ached so much after walking around on the pavements, so they stayed home; one wouldn’t leave a ten year old while [chuckle] your parents went to town; and lit the old Coleman lamp, which … anybody that [who] goes camping lights Coleman lamps. Those were quite an interesting exercise.

But getting back to old John Tait, he really wanted Dad to bring Mum and us girls over to meet him; that was the arrangement, but unfortunately he took sick and he died, so we never met him. But Dad always had a lot of respect for what he had done and where he’d travelled, and also as a very competent builder. He appreciated John’s skill in building his own launch which he used to take his wool across to Napier, so they seemed to have a lot in common to talk about. So I was connected. And of course because John never left Waitaha, it was my future father-in-law, Bob Tait, who actually did the to-ing and fro-ing for the legal things with Williams & Kettle and Dad, so the connection was there. And of course Gordon’s sisters and our sisters-in-law, Anne and Rose, were a year behind me at [Napier] Girls’ High School.

Bob was Gordon’s father?

Yes. Yes, so the connection is meant to be. But the ironic thing is that there is a branch of the Tait family [who] went down to the South Island; and of course I was born in Blenheim and all my relatives are down in Christchurch, Geraldine; and out from Geraldine there was a crossroads, and one road is Wooding Road and the other road is Tait Road, and that’s out towards the downs. They were another branch of the Tait family that [who] went down there.

And where did you work after you’d left school?

The only schooling I went to was four years at Napier Girls’ High, and unfortunately my father died suddenly. We called the property Glen Marnoch, and Dad was only there ten years and he died suddenly with bowel cancer, which left Mum at … ‘bout forty-nine, [with] not a single relative in the North Island – all her brothers and family were down [in] the South Island. Beverley had left school and was working at home. So that was a very tough time for Mum. I left school, and then because I’m slightly dyslexic I actually went into join Lands & Survey [Department] and did survey draughting – I think it’s possibly a throwback into the Andrews Engineering drafting side – drafting for five years with Lands & Survey, and eventually specialising in the title work; helped the original Mr Apatu put a lot of their titles together in reasonable blocks. So yes, I really enjoyed drafting. Mind you, when the Jaycees all those years ago decided that they would do farm location maps, I drew the original farm location maps for Central Hawke’s Bay and also this Napier area … Hawke’s Bay area. So they were my work originally.

So then after we were married and Gordon and I went to Waikari, we had Marie, and then we moved to Whakamahi.

Philippa: Where did you meet?

Allison: Oh – well, we’d sort of known each other of course, through things … some of Gordon’s cousins, the Kyles, were nursing, and I’d been at school with the girls; various parties, but we actually got together in Auckland. Mother and I had been doing a trip round North Auckland and came back down to a wedding at Auckland, and Gordon and his parents came up to the wedding and …

Philippa: It was history. [Laughter]

Gordon: Long time ago.

Allison: That was Richard Orr’s wedding. They farmed across the river, the other side of the river from Waikari. As I said, my father was a very, very good horseman; he actually went over … which would’ve been a big trip in the late fifties – went to Fordell and bought Arab ponies, from a dispersal sale. And that was quite special because a mare had been brought out from Egypt, and she foaled and had a colt foal; he was Sabre, who was well-known in the horsey world. So I went on and I rode; was one of the youngest competitors for the early Dorothy Campbell Pony Club Trophy, and I actually qualified to go but because I was the only eleven year old from Wairoa they didn’t take me because it would’ve been too hard to get to training, and to come down.

You mentioned a sale?

It was a private stud sale up in Fordell – Dad went over and bought a pony for myself and one for my sister, and a bigger horse for himself. But I went on and competed competitively riding, show jumping up ‘til I was forty-six. The children both rode, and Gordon was actually one of the top course builders for FEI jumping in Hawke’s Bay, with Peter Bennett from Gisborne.

What does that mean … FEI?

Federation of Equestrian International. There was a trainer come out from Hungary, a Colonel Coleman Bulgar, and I was in the first schools with him. And because the horse that my father had broken in was a bigger horse, as a child [I] rode with the adults, and at twelve years old jumped a five foot two inch fence, which was [chuckle] considered quite a high jump in those days. But I also went on when I was at school … got the legs working and did athletics, and for a wee while I had a high jump record at Napier Girls’ High.

When did you get the calipers off, prior to that time?

I had them ‘til I was five and six, but the legs were never that strong. And now of course, they’ve decided to give out again and I’ve had knee replacements since 2007.

You’ve had an interesting life too, Allison.

My mother went on though, you know … she rose above being widowed early and she kept Glen Marnoch, the Tait property there, until I was twenty and then sold it. But after Gordon and I were married in ’68 she then got more involved in National Council of Women, and represented New Zealand at a lot of conferences worldwide; she spoke worldwide. And she was supposed to receive … I’m not quite sure what the decoration would be from the Queen Mother … in England, but by that stage she was not well and couldn’t travel. But recently when three of the girls, our granddaughters, were sixteen and still at Iona, I had pearls [rings] made from pearls that Mum had brought back from one of the conferences in Japan when she went to the Mikimoto factory; so each got a ring that their great-grandmother’s pearls are in.

Well you’ve had a wonderful life …

Jim: Now was it your mother that opened the Mohaka Bridge?

Allison: No, I don’t think so. They weren’t involved there ‘cause that bridge was built after Dad died. One of the memories, because the old Mohaka Hotel site was on Glen Marnoch, and it had an orchard round it and Dad used to take me possum shooting at night. [Chuckle]

It was quite tough after Dad died, ‘cause Beverley and Mum ran the farm for twelve months, and when I came home from boarding school – and of course in those days there wasn’t dog sausage and dog pellets – you shot goats. And I used to take the tractor and go and shoot goats. And I’ll never forget one Sunday morning – there was quite a hill coming down from what was the aerodrome – don’t know if Gordon mentioned there was an aerodrome on Glen Marnoch which had been made as an emergency landing aerodrome for the war. And it was sixty acres of perfectly flat land and it had all been levelled and everything, but there was a reasonably steep hill down the road coming down to the house. And one Sunday morning I’d been out with the Nuffield tractor with a .22 and shot two goats, and I’d slung them across the back of the hydraulic arms. As these two know when going down a hill in an old tractor you could make one hell of a noise if you let it over-rev; [chuckle] and I came screaming round the corner, singing my head off, and some startled people were [chuckle] in the middle of the road, and this apparition on this tractor, singing her head off with a rifle over her shoulder and two goats slung on the back, came round the corner. [Chuckles]

Philippa: Did they do a runner? [Laughter]

Allison: They hid in the ditch. [Laughter] I kept on going. [Chuckles]

You’ve got some wonderful memories … [speaking together]

Jim: I think one of the interesting outcomes of discussions like this is the near misses you’ve had in life [chuckles] … on tractors, aeroplanes.

Allison: Now there was [were] a lot of farm utes and things like that that had various dings, and I think too, looking now at mental health, a lot of the men – the drink laws weren’t so strict, and they used to go down to … whether it was the Tiniroto Hotel or the local pub. And okay, they might’ve had one too many, but they were working a lot on their own; they went and they had some companionship … they unloaded a lot of their troubles. And I think probably, there might’ve been a few dents in vehicles, but it probably saved a lot of men’s mental health. And I think – because we have been impacted with suicide – I think a lot of the next generation didn’t have that social interaction out on the farms going back ten or fifteen years, and a lot of men suffered a lot. It’s been recognised a lot more now that they do need that.

I think I’ve said enough. [Chuckles]

Do you?

Allison: Yes, well …

Philippa: It’s been interesting.

Allison: … it’s what life was in those days, wasn’t it? You know, we all had a lot of fun in a lot of ways; we worked hard but …

Gordon: I’m just going to point out John’s old yacht. He was a hermit … never washed, never changed – his clothes sort of fell off him.

Allison: Oh, John? Apparently … I don’t know how Mum would’ve got on because you really didn’t want to be downwind of him. [Laughter]

Gordon: This is my grandfather’s brother, John, and he was jilted. He built a home on his Waitaha property, and his wife-to-be didn’t want to live there, and she – choof – out the gate. He took it very, very hard; as a Scotsman he was very proud, and he became a hermit. Never slept in the house ever, any more. He slept in the wool shed with his dogs and pulled an old rug over him[self] or something – he was a rugged, rugged man. He had massive big hands from hard work. They used to scull in the river with the wool bales – the scull was a big huge oar out the back of a punt because there wasn’t room to row with wool bales on the punt. So they learnt as [at] a young age, and my grandfather as well, learnt to scull. But it required [a] huge amount of wrist movement, and their wrists were apparently very …

Allison: Yeah, strong.

Gordon: In 1901 he took off overseas for five years and worked on railways and …

Jim: Sailing ships.

Allison: And up in Norway; he knew where a lot of the fjords were in Norway, because his father, Bob – during the war he used to go up and check on him and see him – he was working at Waikari. And old John … Dad always said … well he wanted to know where the Germans were and what was happening; and he’d say, “Oh, I’ve been in that fjord.”

But the other thing of course with Gordon and I and talking about the Taits, because originally there were cousins that came out, and I don’t know who said – has it ever been established whether it’s your lot that were out first, or the Taits ..?

Gordon: No, no, they came later.

Allison: Well the Taits …

Gordon: Maraekakaho Taits.

Allison: The Maraekakaho Taits who are cousins, came out earlier, and they were to meet Gordon and Jim’s people at the wharf. And they were late, and of course Scots … a lot of them aren’t very patient, so there was a disagreement and they never spoke for forty years. But then later on when Gordon and I sold Whakamahi, we actually brought back Glenelg, which is Tait Road in Maraekakaho. It had been sold out of the Tait family by then, but only one lot had been sold to the Russells. Those Taits had sold to the Russells from Tunanui; then we bought it off [from] them and had it for fifteen years out there. So that’s another Tait twist. [Chuckle]

Gordon: But Jim, you remember what we used to call old John?

Jim: Yes. [Chuckle]

Allison: He had a big beard. [Chuckle]

Gordon: Which he never shaved; never cut his hair.

Philippa: Had dags in it. [Chuckles]

Allison: It says a lot for my father because he, you know, had a lot of men working for him. And he sat down, he and Old John; and later on when I spoke with Gordon’s father and said things that Dad had told me that John said, he said he’d never spoken of those things to anybody else. And so obviously they just had a connection and got on, and he opened up to Dad.

Great rapport.

Allison: Yes, yes.

Jim: He was a very highly strung bloke; a very strong will.

Allison: Very strong-willed, yes.

Jim: Did it his way.

Gordon: Oh – he got gored by a bull. ‘Cause most cattle, ‘specially male cattle, had horns with very pointed ends on them because they used to sharpen them on scrub and things, and they were very sharp. And Old John, as we called him – John Tait – got gored, and he used to hold his intestines from coming out. And daily he rode down to the beach – that must’ve been an agonising way to get to the beach. Anyway, he bathed in the sea, and eventually – it took months and months and months and months – but eventually healed himself. And he put it down to the salt water. But being gored was reasonably common because the cattle were wild … well Jim can remember some of the wild cattle …

Philippa: In our stockyards.

Gordon: You didn’t go into the yard with them because you’d get … yeah, hit by the bull.

Jim: He shore his own sheep, put the wool on the trolley down to the coast; and had his own boat, the MV Waikari, and would sail the boat himself from Waikari to Napier.

Quite a character.

Allison: Used to take thirteen bales, didn’t it?

Gordon: Ah, no, I think it got [to] sixteen in the end, doubled up. It was nine metres long. It was quite a …

Allison: Think he built it himself.

Gordon: I’ve got an article on my phone of them building that particular boat.

Jim: The MV Waikari.

Gordon: It was named by my Aunty Beth, the eldest daughter of James Tait.

Philippa: So that article is in the Wairoa Museum.

How would he’ve loaded bales one on top of each other?

Philippa: By manpower.

Gordon: [Chuckle] That’s why they were so strong in their arms and …

Philippa: Brute strength. Very, very strong, a lot of those men, and Dad was the same, because he was contracting of course, and you know, loading all your grain, you know, your big … they were forty bushel ones, or probably more, the big bags. A lot of, you know, young ones go on now to Jim about lifting, and you see them all bend their knees; all those old men – they did; they always lifted on their knees and bent; and that’s where you use your legs … power from your legs. And they all did it because they had to do everything manually; they couldn’t just bend down and lift something. They could lift incredible weights, those old men, ‘cause they had to; they didn’t have front-end loaders and all those sort[s] of things. So you know, they had to look after themselves because if they got a bad back – well, they had to keep working. The Wairoa Museum is very good, it’s got a lot of …

Gordon: I’ve got a photograph here of the bridge. This is my old Uncle John, great uncle. He built that bridge onto his Waitaha Station across the Waitaha Stream … built it all by himself; all the concrete was poured by him – he sledged the sand from the river upstream, but all the cement had to come from Napier by boat. And he built the whole bridge – I was probably about eight or ten when health and safety started becoming an issue; they demolished the bridge. But that particular truck was an imported International in 1938, and after my great uncle died in 1951 I used to travel with my dad in that particular truck. They didn’t sell the truck for about three or four years after John died. It was a lovely, lovely truck – I’ve got a picture of it here in 1938 – that was like a Rolls Royce truck and very, very expensive, but John must’ve had a lot of money and was able to get that. And 1938 was one of the last, because International started doing war work.

Allison: Is that the one the army wanted?

Gordon: Yeah, that’s the one. The army went in there, into his station. He came out with his rough looking … Jim can help me out with all the dogs – the dogs were everywhere, and they took a dislike to this army man, who had a chauffeur. He was all dressed up with a cane and everything, and John said, “No. No.” That was one of the very, very few vehicles that the army weren’t able to get a hold of. [As] soon as the army man opened the door, the dogs … ‘grrrr’;  showed their teeth.  [Chuckles] They quickly shut the door and they trickled off when he said no.  Because he’d already been warned; the army man saw this truck parked outside the Waikari Hotel. He had a Maori chap driving it, so the army man went straight into the hotel. He said, “That truck over there – whose is that truck?” And they’re all looking at each other, [chuckle] still drinking, and started laughing. “Who owns that truck? I’m coming to get it.” And they said, “You’ll be lucky.” [Chuckles] So they trekked off following the truck into the station which was about an hour trip … just a clay track … and John Tait said, “No, you can [chuckles] bugger off.” [Chuckles]

What an amazing man! That’s a great story.

There was a person that wanted to do an interview about him wasn’t there, Jim?

Jim: Yes.

Gordon: And he said, “No.” About all his world trips … he sailed; he built his own dugout …

Philippa: A riverboat – he built a riverboat.

Gordon: … riverboat, yeah, dugout; and sailed a thousand miles, from memory. I think it was miles, not kilometres?

Philippa: It would’ve been miles.

Gordon: Down the Mississippi [River], and he stopped and took in all the history of natives and everything that he’d met along the way. He was very, very … what’s the word?

Philippa: Well travelled.

Allison: He was very well travelled, yes. He was an intelligent man actually.

Did he put this booklet together?

Gordon: No. No, that booklet was put together by Molly Spence. Molly was a distant relative.

This is wonderful.

Jim: Another thing John did was he introduced Kerry sheep, which were quite popular for a while, quite an unusual breed.

Allison: They were virtually a forerunner of … the nearest modern breed would be the Perendale, wouldn’t it?

Jim: Yeah, be close to it. He bred those and kept those …

Gordon: [Speaking together] That’s my Uncle Jack Kyle, and he’s mowing hay; [there’s] the mower.

Allison: You must tell about the connection with Iona [College], because Elizabeth …

Gordon: The eldest child of my grandfather; or my aunty, Beth – Elizabeth was her proper name. My grandmother, [Jessie] – when she joined the family there was [were] already six children and as a stepmother she was disliked quite a lot. But she insisted with my grandfather that the eldest daughter should go to Iona, which he reluctantly agreed to. And in 1916 Iona was only two years old as a girls’ college, and Beth was the only one of the daughters who was able to go.

Allison: But there’s been quite a connection through the Tait women, and then the grandfather’s brother, Willy, his daughter, Mary – who became Mary Brownlie – she went to Iona and she was responsible for the Chapel. Our daughter, Marie, and our four granddaughters, Elsa and Zana Renton and Denby-Rose and Brenna Tait, have all been to Iona. Gordon and I have given Iona our old piano, which is an old American piano which was brought out to Wairoa for the Winter sisters to play. It had four pedals; none of our family are playing and so that piano is now up in Iona.

Oh, that’s wonderful. And somebody plays it?

Well I don’t know what they do with it now.

It was just an entertaining afternoon. [Several people speaking together]

Jim: That’s all right, it was a pleasure.

Gordon: Been enjoyable.

Philippa: It has, I’ve learnt a lot.

So have I. Thank you very, very much … been most interesting; a wonderful sample of Hawke’s Bay life.