Tomoana Freezing Works – Ian McPherson

[No introduction. Recorded on 21 July 2021]

My name is Ian McPherson. I’m eighty years old, and I first came to Hawke’s Bay in 1970. A bit of background – I was born in Suva, Fiji; third generation of European descent. Although I was born there my family’ve had some history in New Zealand, coming here in 1845 and then later in 1856. In 1870 my great-great-grandfather went to Fiji and we arrived back in New Zealand to live permanently in 1956.

After serving my engineering apprenticeship at Chelsea Sugar Works and spending time at sea with the Union Company as a marine engineer I eventually was able to obtain a job as a sales engineer with McEwan’s Machinery Limited in Wellington. Part of my job was to visit Hawke’s Bay on a six-weekly cycle to sell pneumatic automation using pneumatic valves and air cylinders, to automate machinery that had already been purchased but was not automatic.

When I first moved up here in 1970 I was introduced to the people at McEwan’s. Across the road the firm Murray Roberts, which was the parent company of McEwan Machinery initially, had their headquarters. Murray Roberts was a Hawke’s Bay stock and station agent and produce supplier to the farming industry of Hawke’s Bay. Eventually they amalgamated with National Mortgage [& Agency Company] and became NMA.

While Murray Roberts was in existence and controlling their own destiny you might say, I believe one of the directors was interested in utilising equipment from the UK, [United Kingdom] so they employed a firm who [which] was a buying agent and they used to supply goods which they noted on the market which might be of interest to the company. Amongst those was a brand called Martin Air Pneumatics, and this became, for a period during the seventies, premier equipment used to automate machinery throughout New Zealand. They employed sales engineers, McEwan’s trained them and sent them out, and they not only sold the equipment but they designed circuitry. In Hawke’s Bay there were a lot of large firms like Morrison Industries; there was UEB Packaging; there was the Fertiliser Works, [now Ravensdown], and in Napier there was Rothmans [Tobacco Company]; Robert Holt [& Sons], the forestry company and saw millers; and there were people like Easton Industr[ies] who built bridges; and there were firms such as Kerr Engineering in Napier and various others who did OME work utilising our equipment. We called on these firms; and also, when supplying circuitry we became well known amongst the Meat Works, where we supplied equipment to [for] the automatic operation of the killing chains; in fellmongeries, and various other areas.

The industry in Hawke’s Bay at that time was quite buoyant. We had a large number of smaller engineering companies that got involved in work. One particular firm in Napier was Eyles & Sherriff, and they became involved with a firm called A R Turner. Turners were initially were builders, but amongst the requirements that they needed were gangnail plates to hammer trusses together with. Gangnail was an American patent, and they found it very, very hard to make the plates here in New Zealand. In the sixties and seventies New Zealand was still suffering from deprivations of the help that they gave England with war costs, and although the wool cheques and that were buoyant there was still a need to preserve our overseas funds. So everything that was coming in here had to be applied for by licence. A R Turner was run by Mr Turner who had actually been a seaman, and came out here and decided to try his hand at building. So he set to work to try and find a way to break the patent, and he came up with a hammerable gangnail plate which had the spikes formed backwards on itself in the form of a knee action, you might say; and people just laid them on the timber and hammered them together. This caused the firm to start producing them and he purchased a whole number of presses from McEwan’s Machinery, which I subsequently automated for them, duplicating some of the more expensive systems.

Now this was just an example of what used to happen here, and you’ll find that there were various other firms – there was another firm which automated wood lathes and they turned out colonial furniture in the style of probably the late 1800s, 1900s. Now in Hastings, Morrison Industries with their bike manufacture, they also utilised air cylinders for small presses, and there were firms in Hastings which provided stainless steel sinks etcetera, such as Baybrite Stainless Steel, not only to the domestic market but also to the commercial market in the meat industry. So a lot of pneumatics went into that in the way of automating folders and guillotines, etcetera.

The business in Hawke’s Bay with McEwan’s was interesting in that McEwan’s themselves had been taken over by Murray Roberts, and they in turn amalgamated with Pearson [?Riddell?] in Palmerston North I believe, and with various other companies. And they held some very, very good agencies such as Ajax Pumps which were commonly used throughout Hawke’s Bay in farms and in industry; they had the agency for Reardon Gray machinery – that’s ploughs and suchlike – Kuhn Mowers; they also had in the woodworking division, Jonsered and various other products which were well known in Hawke’s Bay at the time.

In Hawke’s Bay also, there was a firm called Rowe Engineering, and they were based in the middle of the industrial area of Hawke’s Bay. And they decided that they would manufacture power hacksaws; they did this by … rather than casting them they fabricated them all, and we supplied various bits and pieces to them from the point of view of automation, but also in tooling; we had the agency for Exacta Presses and the tool holders that went into them. Rowe Engineering manufactured their hacksaws right up until the mid to late seventies when the restrictions were taken [off] … or eased at least, anyhow … on imports and they found that they in turn couldn’t compete with the imports from India. They found that in fact the cost of their steel alone was what they had to compete with, ‘cause the Indian models were able to go on a shop floor for what their steel cost. McEwan’s became a distributor for them and ultimately that distribution went to Fletcher’s – Fletcher Steel, that is.

Eventually Murray Roberts and NMA were amalgamated or taken over, or combined with Wright Stephenson’s Stock & Station agents, and it became known as Wrightson NMA. They were a much more, shall we say profit-orientated firm, and so McEwan’s found that a lot of their divisions were slowly sold off because Wrightson’s demanded a twenty-five per cent net profit. This of course might not’ve helped the New Zealand consumer, but it sure as hang helped their shareholders.

At this time I found that with the pneumatics, the Martin Air people in England were developing systems for logic control which were far simpler than having a whole host of pneumatic valves coupled to the cylinders. So they invented a system called Biesse Vektor which worked on a principle of a telephone relay and stepped around from station to station, and you had a high pressure and a low pressure signal. The high pressure went out and initiated an action and the low-pressure signal caused the unit to step. At the same time in the UK and Europe, and America, programmable controllers using computer technology came into being and there was a vast need for high production steel to run solenoid valves and various other things that were required in the electronic[s] industry. This brought about the fact that our industry suffered a loss here in New Zealand of not having enough solenoid valves to compete with what was being required overseas. In Taranaki, a firm over there was contracted by Martin Air to make valves in New Zealand, and so we were able to offset some of our costs and get extra licence to bring in stuff from overseas. This helped for a little while; however eventually electronics started to take over.

So at just about this time in 1979 I was asked to transfer to Rotorua. This I didn’t want to do, because who would leave Hawke’s Bay’s wonderful weather? So my wife and I made a decision to resign. My wife had just taken up a job with what was to be one of New Zealand’s largest private insurance brokers; that was called Crombie Lockwood Limited. She was the fourth employee, and she helped build that firm – [it] has a head office here in Napier – from four people to a conglomerate which involved virtually every major town in New Zealand. And eventually this company grew to the point where it was sold to Wesfarmer’s in Australia, and has now been on-sold to Gallagher’s Insurance Company in America. So small things do start in Hawke’s Bay, and they grow to quite big trees, you might say.

I also decided that I would leave and I was lucky enough to obtain a sales engineer’s job selling transmission pneumatics, De Soutter air tools and electric tools with a firm called De Pelichet McLeod, again another stock and station agent who were based in Hastings. De Pelichet McLeod were interesting in that they also had agency for motor cars and the various other engineering supplies, which they set up in a workshop or store in Maraekakaho Road. The manager was a guy called Jack Broomhead, and he was a mechanic in their workshop for cars. One of the directors was fed up with the quality of portable drills … electric drills … which were being marketed in New Zealand, and so he asked his buying agents in the UK to look out for a suitable good drill. Now the agents over there were a Kiwi firm, or a group of Kiwis, and they found a firm called De Soutter. De Soutter was a firm that manufactured not only tools and various other things, but were in the main, aircraft manufacturers; and they also found the same problem so they set about and built their own drills and air screwdrivers etcetera. This happened just after the war, and so when they got the agency the director came back and approached Jack and said, “Look, I don’t know much about these things but you do; test it out, see if it’s any good, and if it’s any good we’ll take the agency on.” So Jack gave it a real robust tryout and found in fact that it was almost indestructible. So they said, “Well seeing as you know more about it we’ll make you manager, and in charge of selling it.” So they set about setting up their engineering side of the business. De Soutter Drills then went on probably to be one of the most sought-after and highly-respected drills and the equipment involved, to the point where we became probably the premier supplier of automotive assembly tools to the New Zealand assembly industry which was CKD; [Completely Knocked Down] which meant that they were sent out basically in flat packs and people assembled cars here in New Zealand.

Unfortunately that all died as well, but while that happened we were amongst the leading supplier[s] of tools from Hawke’s Bay to the rest of New Zealand. That company still exists in another form, taken on by Jack’s son, David Broomhead; and even in the seventies and eighties we had a direct line to Auckland and we could supply through the couriers directly to Auckland and have it there the next day at the customer’s doorstep, at the same time as the Auckland couriers would deliver their equipment. And it got to the point where people used to get quite annoyed that they couldn’t just pop around to our workshop and drop their tools off, not realising that we were a couple of hundred kilometres away. This to my mind proved that probably a lot more Hawke’s Bay firms could’ve done this sort of thing and taken advantage of the very good courier services that we had, namely one which was here again started in Hawke’s Bay, now known as Aramex, but it was Fastway’s. As I said, lots of good things grow big from Hawke’s Bay including apples of course.

Now around this time I continued to work with them, and I found that I was doing a lot more work with the Freezing Works, not only with just pneumatics but also by providing the information and expertise on mechanical drives for machinery such as belts and pulleys and gearboxes, etcetera, etcetera. Around about 1979 the Tomoana Freezing Works which had decided to build a new mutton slaughterhouse suffered a pretty disastrous fire in their beef house. This started in an area of an old Freezing Works freezer which they were converting to be a lamb cutting room, and unfortunately they’d been doing some plumbing work in the ceiling and went away for lunch. And although they had a fire watcher, by the time the fire was noticed meant it just flashed up, caught onto the tarred walls of the old kauri wood and raced into the ceilings, and raced up passageways which connected the Freezing Works to the slaughterhouse, and raced across the ceiling of the beef house floor. That took about fifteen minutes from the time the fire was noticed until the fire was basically across the whole top floor of the old Tomoana building. The fire was at the time the most expensive fire in Hawke’s Bay, and in fact New Zealand. It cost, from memory, something in the vicinity of $25 million. Now although Tomoana had its own fire brigade which was well trained and well equipped – they even had an old 1940s Ford fire engine – they found it very, very hard to get to the fire, being on the third floor. And we had a large lake on the site of Tomoana which I’ll come to later on, and that held thousands of gallons of water – or millions of gallons of water – and luckily that was able to be put to good use; and so they had a very good water supply and the engines from all the stations around Hawke’s Bay which attended that fire were able eventually to save the majority of the building below those floors.

At this time as I say, I was working for De Pelichet’s, and because there was a need to immediately set to work and rebuild the beef slaughter facilities and boning rooms we spent a lot of time being involved with supplying information and equipment, both pneumatic and transmission both in gearboxes etc to help refurbish what was salvageable and also to assist in supplying new equipment. At the time I was involved with supplying all this, I became very well known to the engineers, and they were aware that I had been at sea as an engineer and that I’d had a good training. And although I had been away from the engineering business – that’s the hands-on running of mechanical plant – for about ten years, they eventually approached me and asked me would I become a foreman in charge of part of the Meat Works. And so I resigned [from] De Pelichet McLeod and joined the Meat Works.

I will say at this point that … I’ll just digress slightly … when I went into engineering I knew at about an [the] age of twelve that I wanted to be an engineer. I knew that I wanted to go to sea because living in Fiji I thought that was one of the best ways to see the world, and so I never had any doubt as to what I wanted to do. When I came ashore in the mid-sixties and I found pneumatic automation, I found another passion there. And so I followed my likes and my passions – you might say almost my hobbies – into my work and was paid for it. However, I will state here right now that at times you can follow your wants and likes and your heart, but at a certain point in time sometimes you have to think about what you’re being paid for and how much you earn, particularly when you have a young family. And at this time when I was approached by the Meat Works, although I loved the life of a sales engineer travelling around the southern half of the North Island, I actually realised that I’d better provide for the family; so I joined them, and had quite a substantial rise in my income. It was most satisfying.

However, when I joined it was a bit of a steep learning curve. Tomoana at this stage had just commissioned their new facilities in mutton slaughtering; they had built a six-chain Works along conventional lines in that although they had adopted some areas of automation where they [were] required to have a bit of muscle, like hide pulling etcetera, these were done mechanically. There were various other smaller areas, and of course they used a lot of mechanical guillotine type instruments to chop off legs and hocks, etcetera.

Starting at the beginning of the mutton slaughterhouse, they had yards which could hold twenty-nine thousand sheep, which is quite a large number – per day. And we were able to almost immediately ramp up the Works quite quickly, and in about late 1979 … I know that I have a cabinet [on] which a chap had written on the walls the date that they had killed 23,900 lamb equivalents, and that was a record at the time. So they quickly ramped that up and got going. When the sheep were taken from the yards they were taken into the holding areas with Judas sheep, and the Judas sheep led them up races to the killing area. And once those races were full the Judas sheep were diverted off to one side and taken back to the yards, and the sheep then walked onto a conveyor which gripped them. And it was in a V-shape with no floor, and they were transported up to a killing pen. Now the killing pens were a new design in that the sheep was advanced forward, and when it reached a certain point the conveyor automatically stopped and two clamps came down; and when I say clamps, they were two metal plates with protrusions on them which when they contacted the sheep’s head would provide water, and at the same time a shock went through the sheep’s head to stun it. The killing box then opened up and the sheep was dropped onto a barred table. Now this was to provide the system of Halal killing. Halal killing requires that the sheep must be killed from live, and be bled out as a live animal. Although that sounded pretty gruesome, the stunning kept the animal sedated you might say, until this was finished. And periodically this would be tested by the animal being stunned; one would be removed and it would wake up, and they would know that it was okay. I know this sounds gruesome but it was a very, very effective system, and as far as we can tell, reasonably humane. No human of course, had tried it. [Chuckle]

From there they were put on a chain and they were hooked up by their back feet, and they proceeded up what we called a bleed ramp, and this ensured that the majority of the blood was taken away. Now that blood was collected and that was pumped to what we called a blood house where it was cooked, and it was dried and made into a powder and sold as blood; and of course after a while it was mixed with bone, and you get blood and bone. But the actual dried blood itself was full of very, very good chemical properties you might say, or nutritious properties, and Tomoana’s blood was one of the most desired bloods amongst the industry in New Zealand and overseas.

From there the chains proceeded down and the animal was eventually stripped of its carcass, and various other actions were taken where the animal was dressed, and proceeded down to the end of the chains where it went to an area where we eventually developed electrical stunning to … not stun the animal, but to treat the muscles so that they relaxed and stopped the toughening of the meat. This was timed, and they went up and down through a circular serpentine type of arrangement, and from there they were taken to blast freezers. Now the blast freezers consisted of about three or four floors of very, very mechanised chains, or rails, you might say. They were designed so that a number of carcasses went into the system, and there was a slight pause and then hydraulic rams would push those carcasses a few millimetres into the chamber; and another group would arrive and so it went on until the room was full of carcasses. And then they were shut down and taken down to below freezing. This happened overnight; and then of course they had night shift people that came in to take these carcasses out. And in those days they were bagged with mutton cloth bags which were sewn in our bag factory.

Now – and I’ll deal with the mutton slaughterhouse first – as time went on more and more equipment was looked at as to how we could improve on hide pulling and various things like cutting the heads off automatically. And a lot of this was not so much to get rid of labour but to make it safer and to stop the problems of RSI, [repetitive strain injury] ‘cause people punching either side of the skins to release the hides from the body would suffer shoulder aches and pains and various other problems. You’d also get skin rashes etcetera; and there was also a slight possibility – and whilst I was there one or two did contact [contract] it – and that was leptospirosis. So there was a lot of work gone into this area; this was done in turn by a Dunedin firm and they became quite prominent in providing equipment to our company. We eventually automated four of the six chains, and not only did we do sheep and lambs but we also did goats, and one of the chains was primarily set up to do goats in the end as the throughput of our four chains and sometimes the fifth chain would increase; although through the early part of the eighties we still utilised up to six chains at the height of our killing season.

When the carcasses were finished with, any offals and equipment [things] like that would fall down chutes and eventually find themselves, through pre-breakers and munchers-upper of bone and various other fats etcetera, in hoppers; and those hoppers eventually would deliver a charge into a blow bottle. Now these large blow bottles used to blow six-thousand-pound of product from the mutton slaughterhouse approximately five to six hundred metres into the older Tomoana building, where it was blown again into large hoppers. They were blown through six-inch pipes. Now these big six thousand pound bottles would take a charge of around about eighty to ninety psi [per square inch] of compressed air, and just blow the charge right through pipes to the big hoppers where it would come out in a cyclone and fill the hopper. Quite often if there was insufficient liquid with the product, or if the product had been sitting in the hopper say overnight for whatever reason, they became a bit dry, and quite often in the morning you would go in and the blow bottle would stick. And on a number of occasions we would have to pull pipes out and sometimes blow product onto the ground just to get them going. On one memorable occasion I recall, with my knowledge of pneumatics I was called across at six o’clock in the morning because the early morning cleaning gang, which had just ensured that everything was clean before the day’s start, found that when they went to blow the bottle a residual charge had somehow been left in it at night and it had blocked the bottle. And so the bottle had been sitting there under a high charge for probably about half an hour and they felt that we needed to discharge it. So they called me over, and to get at the valves to effect an emergency shut down, you might say, of the pneumatics and to bleed it off slowly, I had to walk across RSJ [rolled steel joist] beams. And although it was relatively safe – I could hold onto rails – it was still just walking on a six-inch beam to get to the valves. I made a mistake, and instead of ensuring that the valve was going to keep the bottle lids closed, I opened the top lid. This caused the six thousand pound of product to erupt and hit the ceiling and come down on me, and if you can imagine the stench and smell of six thousand pound of product which had been putrefying overnight … I couldn’t move for fear of slipping, and I couldn’t breathe. Luckily I had what they called a bump cap on, so I was able to keep the product off my head and away from my face, but it was dripping down onto my nose and I was finding it very, very hard to breathe. This of course, caused me to suffer quite a bit of shyacking throughout the Works for the next couple of weeks. However, these little things happen, and you know, you can never really plan for all types of accidents or things that could happen; but we did our best. From there, the casings – the bowel content – went down into a department at the bottom floor of the mutton slaughterhouse which was the casings department, and the intestines were cleaned out with water where they were then flushed properly, and sized and various other processes were carried out; put into cartons and sold off to people like sausage makers and various other people.

The mutton slaughterhouse was a very effective building in the sense that being so highly automated in the end, it became one of the most sought-after Works for people from overseas to come and look at.

When Tomoana finally shut … it was put into receivership, which I’ll come to later on … but when it was put into receivership I was employed with another chap to help the receivers sell off the equipment. In the process of doing that we would take people through, and they would identify what they wanted to buy and put in a tender, and we would give it a number. On a Saturday morning a chap from the UK flew in; he was an international broker that [who] bought and sold Meat Works, and he was acting for an American company. We started in the mutton slaughterhouse and walked up through the plant; when we got to the top floor where the main dressing was done he was counting in his head, and he said, “145”; and then he said another number. And I said, “No, no”, I said, “I will provide you with the numbers of the items that you wish to buy”, ‘cause you know, that way we ensure that when people are putting the tenders in they all tender for the right item. He said, “No, no, no, I’m actually counting the number of containers I need to put this equipment in.” So as we then proceeded down the chain he stopped me, and he said, “Why are we finding this Works on the market? Surely to goodness it is too valuable to New Zealand to sell off, with its degree of automation?” And I explained to him the reason why this had happened, and he said, “In my mind”, he said, “this is criminal. You could almost say that it was treasonable”, (ha!) “for New Zealand.” And he could not understand; he said, “In my travels around the world I have never seen a plant of this quality or standing anywhere in the world.” He was quite scathing of the New Zealand industry and the government and banks for allowing it to happen. However, it did. And primarily it happened because [of], I believe, being owned by the Vestey company in Britain.

Now I’ll move on from here to the beef house. After the fire everything in the beef house was reconfigured and a lot of new ideas were installed there. However, a lot of the gate changes which diverted heavy beef carcasses from one rail to another were done with pneumatics, and to this end that was another reason why I was asked to come and work there, because of the high amount of automation taking place. The beef house was originally designed to kill seven hundred and forty carcasses in a six-and-a-half-hour day. The butchers worked on a principal of a bonus system and they were paid for so many carcasses a day – I think it was six [hundred and] forty – and everything over that they got a bonus. Now this led to quite a number of disputes; obviously, as you can imagine, with the unions. But as time went on it actually got quite lucrative for the butchers and so they didn’t tend to abuse it because they wanted to keep things running; as opposed to a sister company in Auckland where they decided to stop killing at the drop of a hat. Tomoana progressed the killing and we ended up being able to eventually increase the kill rate to eight hundred and forty a day, and the quality of the boning etcetera was very, very good. We had a new system of boning whereby they had four boning conveyors and the meat went onto cross conveyors, and they could divert the meat [to] one side of the room or to the other.

However, as time went on they realised that more and more we were going to investigate the types of way[s] we marketed the meat in the UK. One of the things that they found was that people were looking for more fresh product, and the general manager who was in charge – an English gentleman who was there in 1982 when I first joined – in early ’83 or ’84 he went to a big conference in Wellington. They imported a whole number of people from big industries overseas, like United Steel in United States, and British Steel; various other large enterprises and they all came to Wellington and were advising the government and our industry on how best to hone our skills at marketing and production. One of the things that came out of this conference was the fact that a lot of companies after the war – particularly in America and in Britain there was a shortage of skilled staff, and even though they were employing a lot more women in the industry there was still the need for higher productivity. So they introduced bonuses. Now prior to the war apparently this was very rare. When they introduced the bonuses in America and in England, one of the things that they found, given the fact that they were doing it well before New Zealand, was that eventually the people came to regard the bonus if they met the targets as their right; and at times then complained that they wanted higher wages again for doing the job. And so it became a continuous cycle where they got a rise, and then they wanted an increase in the bonus, and they wanted better conditions. And so the general consensus was that they should do away with bonuses; don’t start them and you don’t have to continue with them. So the manager came back and he mentioned this, and he said, you know, “We’ve got to look at a way of increasing productivity without this cycle of bonus, pay rise, bonus rise etcetera.” So one of the systems was to try and get the staff involved in upping their skills and their … I suppose you could say their interest … in providing a quality product. One of his early trips back to the UK to report to the Vestey group back in England involved him going to France and Switzerland and places like that and investigating how they marketed their meat. And we found that in places like Switzerland and also in France, New Zealand lamb … chilled lamb or even frozen lamb … would be thawed and marketed in prime cuts. And in some of the butcher shops they were set out on glass, almost like cake tiered plate arrangements as you would have at a tea party, with very fine cuts. And where we were selling some of our cuts in New Zealand for you know, $7-8 … the prime cuts that is … for a pound in those days, they would be getting anything up to $35-40 in the UK and France.

So that meant that we had to look at the possibility of chilled meat, so when it came to the beef going into our beef chillers before they were cut down and dressed into cuts, we then looked at various ways of ensuring that we didn’t get chiller burn. This we carried out with spraying water on them to ensure that they didn’t actually freeze; all sorts of experiments like that. Also, they investigated and found that overseas they were putting more and more cuts into vacuum packs which are air barrier resistant; in other words they filled their bags with nitrogen and pulled a vacuum and then sealed them. Now this meant that they had no air or aerobic or anaerobic problems, and the other thing was that they tended to provide better life.

Now we carried out experiments, and we were getting to the stage where with our chilled beef and lamb we could send that to the UK and it would last anything up to sixteen weeks initially. Later on I believe it got even more. Now I know that they would provide our test packs which we retained, and offered them out to various staff members to report back on what we found. And I can tell you that some of the meat, particularly the lamb cuts and that, were very, very, very tender and retained very good flavour; so much so that when Tore, or the mutton house or the lamb cutting room that caused the fire, when it was being built was completed Tomoana eventually shut, the chemist and his staff were snapped up overnight immediately, before it was even confirmed that Tomoana was shutting for good. We shut on a Friday night and they had jobs on Monday morning.

Now I’ve digressed, and I’ll go back to the boning rooms. The boning rooms were eventually changed around and we put in large machines which were rotary. Meat products went into them and they were vacuum packed, they went into hot water baths, they were sealed and put into freezers. We also provided of course the old-fashioned frozen goods in cartons, and these were taken down and put into blast freezers on [a] below floor. The lamb cutting room that caused the fire when it was being built was completed, and we went into quality lamb cuts as well, and were providing those directly to local butchers as well as overseas. So all in all our meat facilities were at the peak of what was then known science, you might say, when Tomoana shut.

Now the mutton slaughterhouse … I’ll go back there. The hides were floated across in flumes; so they were floated across, again, [a] couple of hundred or three hundred metres in large flumes around about nine hundred millimetres in diameter. There was just enough water flowing through the lower part of them to build up enough flow to slide the hides down the flumes, and the flumes were at an angle of 1:100 (1-2mm in 100) slope, so that they would slide down from the second floor of the mutton slaughterhouse down to the first floor of the old beef house. Now at the bottom of the end of the flumes there were three large steel Archimedes screw trummels and these were approximately about twenty to twenty-five feet long … or thirty feet long … and they rotated; solid drums with internal screw flights so that the skins dropped into them and they were transported up in a quantity of water to the third floor of our Works. And from there they were again flumed down to washing trummels, and they went through two washing trummels and when they came out of that most of the blood and sand and various other bits and pieces that the wool had picked up had been washed out. They went down onto conveyors and the conveyors moved along until they found a barrier which was placed mechanically over the conveyor by an operator, and they were diverted into large spinning dryers, rather like a spin dryer in a washing machine but on a much larger scale. They were then spun and dried with most of the water taken out of them, and they were dropped out in the centre of these into a hole to chute below. These eventually were taken and they were placed on carts, and then they were taken around, put onto large rubber conveyor belts and they were spread out on these rubber conveyor belts, and they went through a chamber which provided paint – which we called paint – which was a mixture of lime and chemicals and was sprayed on the skin side of the sheep’s skin with the wool down facing so that they got minimal amount[s] of chemicals on it [them].

They were taken from there and they were placed on wooden sticks, probably three to four carcasses per stick, and the stick ends were placed on two conveyor chains. The two conveyor chains went like train tracks down guides with the skins hanging between them, and the chemicals would react over round about twelve to fourteen hours as they just inched their way down towards the area probably about a hundred and twenty metres – three hundred or so feet, something like that; down the floor to the other end of the floor where they were taken off one by one, put on a metal barrier, or horse you might say, rather like a pommel horse which was sloped away from the operator. Wearing gloves he would then use his hands to just pull the wool off the skins; this was called slipe wool, and at the same time as he was pulling it off he would grade it.

The quality wool in the centre of the hide would be in, you know, one lot of bins. These were taken away, and eventually they went through a supplementary wash which beat the wool very vigorously, with arms rotating, with copious quantities of water; and this was thrown out onto a belt, partially drained, and eventually found its way through chutes to dryers. These dryers were rotating drum dryers and they would suck the wool onto the top and bottom half each of a rotating perforated drum. And as the drums rotated it would meet another drum which would suck that wool off the previous drum as it entered a dead zone, and it’d make its way through the wool dryers to come out nice clean fluffy wool, and be taken away and stored in hoppers to be graded, put into wool bales and sold off as commercial wool.

Now the graders who were doing the slipe wool were highly skilled men, and it was a very, very back-breaking job because they leant over the saw-horses, you might say, for approximately, you know, six to seven hours a day; well, that was from what I observed. But it was their skill with their grading which was the most sought after thing and people tended to look at some of the jobs in the industry as rather menial and, you know, didn’t require much thought and knowledge. But my experience showed that even in the butchering area there was a lot of skill; there was a lot of need for reasonably good intelligence to understand what you were actually doing – where to make the right cuts. And sure, a lot of it came down to practice, but I did have a regard for the people that [who] were able to perfect their skills and hone them to the high degree that we found that we had at Tomoana.

From there, the wool would be taken away. We also had a wool scour, I should say, and that wool scour was brought in from various other organisations … farmers and wool brokers etcetera … and we would scour that wool. It was quite a large scour, and over a period of time we were doing a lot of experiments there as well with stopping the use of chemicals getting into the effluence and water supplies. We utilised various experiments with cyclones to ensure that any sludge was separated from wastewater and coming out of the bottom, particularly the first and second bowls where they washed and you had a lot of not only mud etcetera, but also sheep faeces etcetera mixed with it. That involved going into a save-alls. Now the wool scour had a [an] above-ground save-all, and that was a large metal structure which consisted of three or four tanks; waters progressed through there until the water was relatively clean and you could get it through the up and down action of taking the water through lower gates and then over weirs, and back down through submerged weirs, you might say. We discharged a lot of water and this water was utilised from our lake.

Now in the process of having refrigeration we had a large engine room supplying ammonia freezing. Ammonia, as you know, is a volatile gas and it is anhydrous; it means that it will be dispersed in water, so it was still relatively safe to utilise. So we employed large electric motors which were large compressors, and we compressed the ammonia gas. The ammonia gas when it was compressed would be returned to liquid and it would go into large receivers, and we would take that away as a liquid form and it was pumped to our freezers. When it got to our freezers it was then expanded into large coils. And of course you need heat to cause expansion because liquid has to be heated to expand, just like a kettle – steam is the expansion you might say, of water. So of course it was contained in the coil, and it would take the heat that was in the carcasses; that heat would cause the carcasses to freeze down and thus we had refrigeration. Very simple way of telling you about refrigeration. This was then sucked back to our engine room and we would then recompress it and of course return it liquid form, and the cycle would complete.

Tomoana had one of the largest engine rooms of its type in New Zealand. We employed over six thousand horsepower in electrical energy. We had also probably the largest group of one thousand horsepower operated electric motors driving compressors. All told, I think the lowest horsepower was four hundred and fifty, so it was quite unique in the sense that overseas people were quite impressed with the amount of refrigeration that we employed in New Zealand. And of course Whakatu, before it closed in 1986, and one or two of the other Works down in the South Island who [which] were primarily mutton slaughterhouses – I think there was a seven and eight chain one down there somewhere – they also had large engine rooms as well.

However with Tomoana, we actually had a satellite engine room when we built the mutton slaughterhouse, and this was the one that supplied the liquid to the chillers and the freezers and our blast freezers in the mutton slaughterhouse. This created a little bit of a problem for us initially, because transporting liquid over to the supplementary holding tank that we had, sometimes caused – what we subsequently found out after the Works closed when Wattie’s took over – a slight anomaly in the way that we had been advised to set up our ammonia valves. But this would create a problem, because when the tank got to the point where it would fall it sometimes overflowed, and this would shut the engine room down and cause at times, a bit of a problem with our refrigeration, and would stop the killing chain. So it was a problem, and it wasn’t really solved correctly until subsequently the Freezing Works was being run on a temporary basis by Wattie’s, and the problem was found.

However, I digress. The engine room itself originally was built way back in the 1920s when the Works were built – I think around about 1929 it was built in its present form – and a lot of the cooling was done with brine. When I first went to Tomoana they’d had an area where they had the fire; they had pulled down part of the old storage facilities for frozen goods where they just stored them prior to being sent overseas – that’s whole carcasses – and they were all kauri and matai timber. The kauri was in the walls, and it was something like over three inches thick, or you know, just under a hundred millimetres thick by around about three hundred and fifty millimetres wide and they were anything up to three metres long. So there was a lot of kauri [chuckle] utilised in these stores.

The ammonia chilled brine, and the brine flowed through wooden ducts and went back to the engine room, but it was supplied to the freezers in steel pipes, and these steel pipes zigzagged their way across the ceiling and provided the cooling. Not a very efficient way of doing it and subsequently in the new mutton slaughterhouse it was all air blast through large fans. The engine room of course still had the residue of the old stuff still there and they still had a few of the old pumps when I first went there.

Over a period of time they installed new, up to date refrigeration, and towards the end of it in around about the late eighties, early nineties, we actually automated the engine room. This was done by in-house engineers as well as consultants from overseas and in New Zealand but a lot of our computer work was done in-house. When the new mutton slaughterhouse was built they employed a man from I believe it was the DSIR [Department of Scientific & Industrial Research] and he became a consultant working with the people building the mutton slaughterhouse and he was subsequently employed by Tomoana full time. He brought with him a clever young chap from university, and he was the computer boffin. Now he automated the system for computers; that’s with weighing and grading, keeping tallies of the way that the carcasses were tallied, who sold the carcasses to the company etcetera; and to do this they devised a system of using holes. What they did was they took the skids and they drilled a series of seventeen holes, I think it was. It was either thirteen or seventeen, I can’t quite remember now, but those holes then gave us sufficient information. By their patterns we could then programme the computers with light emitting diodes which would be seen through the holes and registered by the collectors of that information at each point along the chain. This would give us things like … when they went onto the scales the weight was taken; Joe Bloggs’ carcass was weighed and he knew exactly what his dressed weight was. And so it went on. And so if there was a fault, this sometimes was also noted at the stations where the MAF [Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries] inspectors were. They would make comments and this information would be taken through the holes and logged on the computers.

Now the young chap who designed all this, he was subsequently also employed, and what with his help and various other people’s help we were able to automate our engine room. So whereas we still had to have twenty-four hour coverage – this was required by law because of the degree of danger of the ammonia – we still employed four engineers on shift who rotated so they had time off. But they would work twenty-four hours, so the engine room was always manned. Subsequently, in the very latter stages of the running of the plant we were able to run the plant at night with just people – watchmen and people like that – just going in and checking that everything was running. If there was a failure we would get automatic alarms and somebody was called out to come in and restart the engine room which would automatically shut down should there be a failure. So it was quite a successful system, and although it was pretty cumbersome at the time given that some of these automation ideas were still in their infancy right up until then, in the nineties – I mean things have moved ahead in leaps and bounds almost on a daily basis since the mid to late eighties.

Now so with the mutton slaughterhouse we employed stainless steel hooks which were specially made. When they originally came out they had metal coding put into them, but this we found was no good because when they were washing the hooks they were tumbled in dryers to ensure there was no blood or contamination on them, and then they would be distributed back to the chains. And of course there was damage involved in this so that’s when they put in the drilled hole system. Now just prior to Tomoana shutting, we were carrying out experiments whereby we would embed into the stainless steel hooks’ carriers the chips which would be sealed internally into the hooks and gambols as they’re called. Unfortunately we were just starting on the experiments for this and it was looking very promising when the Works shut. Again, as I said, Tomoana Works was well ahead of its time, and the rest of New Zealand really, in its automation.

The beef house offals went down through chutes and found their way to pre-breakers etcetera, and again, were blown to the rendering department. And the rendering department had a number of very large cookers. These cookers were steam jacketed and were approximately around about twelve feet long and around about three foot or three foot six [inches] in diameter … something like that. They had large doors on them; they would blow product into the cooker from a blow bottle which was placed beneath the receiving hoppers, and they would put a six-thousand-pound charge into each cooker. They would then start cooking the product and when the product was cooked a series of pipes would open up, and the cooked product would be raked out into a travelling bin which went across the front of these cookers. This would be diverted down into bins, and then they would be taken – with all the lanolin and various other fats etcetera, mainly fats, oozing out of it – and put into large presses. These were steel units which had very fine holes slotted in the base of them; the product would be compressed into the machines, and at the end of the machine they had what they called a choke. This was controlled by a very powerful hydraulic ram, and would keep a constant pressure on the product so that as the product came in, the product had to push the gate open to break away and fall into a supplementary hopper. Now this became the meal which we made Tomoana biscuits and other things out of. It also provided the meal and bone etcetera for blood and bone. These presses were very, very important; they needed a lot of looking after, put it that way, to maintain their efficiency. However, the quality of product that Tomoana turned out was first rate, along with the blood. I know that the foreman in the blood house was highly respected by other people when they visited the company.

I will now come back to the lake. We had a large lake, and in conjunction with the refrigeration we had to cool our ammonia, and so we utilised water. Now the water was supplied directly from wells. Tomoana had a large number of wells when I first went there. A lot of them were from upper aquifers, they weren’t deep well[s], and they were … probably some of them only forty, some fifty feet, below the ground where the suction was taking place. We had a laundry at the back of Tomoana where we washed people’s overalls. We also supplied some fresh water to the drinking fountains in the parts of the old mutton slaughterhouse, and also to the boning room where we used fresh water to wash meat during the boning processes. This was all potable water, so it was directly from the wells. Tomoana was very lucky – or Hawke’s Bay actually, was very lucky – in that most of the water that we had was potable; housing, most of the towns were supplied directly from our aquifers and Tomoana was no different.

Around the engine room there were three or four wells, and over by the mutton slaughterhouse there were at least three wells, and these were slightly deeper. However, they eventually started to also suffer from the increased use of water around the district. When I first went to Tomoana we found that we were in some days losing suction because the well[s] weren’t filling with water through the aquifer as fast as they normally did, particularly in the summertime when they started to do things like watering the Tomoana Showgrounds and the polo grounds; plus there was orcharding going on around the place and so more and more water was being drawn from the upper aquifers. This created a bit of a problem. The water was needed for cooling in the engine room and this water was used twice. What we did was we took it through the engine room and we provided it up to our fresh water areas to provide hot water for boning and sterilising the workers’ tools. The automatic machinery which hit carcasses was always washed with cold water then hot water at ninety degrees [Celsius], or eighty-five degrees, and then cold water again so that we didn’t burn the carcasses afterwards as they came in contact with the cleaned items. And that fresh water – a lot of it that didn’t come in contact with blood or fats or anything like that – was taken down and put into a lake. Now that lake started off … in the morning it would be full of water, and so as the killing took place water for flues to wash the skins from the mutton slaughterhouse to the old processing plants, and from various other aspects – washing the slipe wool, and things that didn’t require potable water – would be drawn from this lake. So although we used a lot of potable water from the ground, the vast majority of it was used twice. And this lake would start off full, and by usually around about half past three, four o’clock, it would be getting to the point where it was just about running out of water.

As things progressed towards the end of Tomoana’s life before it shut down, our productivity had increased to the point where we were finding it very hard to supply sufficient water given that we were suffering from the supply of water through external usage by other people. So it was decided that we would put down three new wells; so the sites were selected – one by the mutton slaughterhouse, which is now Wattie’s main food place where they supply their jams etcetera; one by the lake and one by the engine room. Now these went down, I believe, something like around about a hundred metres, and they were beautiful waters. They had a head height of around about twelve to fifteen feet at times with pressure, so they were excellent waters. And when we did our tests in the beef house, which I primarily was in charge of as an engineer for engineering services, I noted that the chemists found that we were getting counts of dirt you might say – not faecal matter or faecal pollution – but just dirt pollution up to seven hundred parts per million. Now the World Health Organisation at that stage stated that potable water in the rest of the world was deemed to be potable at ten thousand parts per million with no faecal matter. In New Zealand we were under a lot of pressure in the meat industry by the British Health Department and the American health authorities to ensure that we had very clean water. The Americans required four thousand parts per million minimum and the British the same. When I say the British, we also had to cope with such big firms as Tesla, [Tesco] the large English retail outfit, and a couple of other large retail outfits in Europe, who demanded that we should actually be putting chlorine in the water. So to meet that our New Zealand MAF decided that we were required to use non-potable water if we wanted to, at no more than one thousand parts per million, and so over the last three or four years we were able to do that with these new wells.

I can tell you that after our beef house was cleaned at night and again washed down in the morning, if I did happen to walk in there with a sandwich for smoko or something – heaven forbid, because it was not allowed – and it fell on the floor I would have had no hesitation in picking it up and eating it. I can guarantee you they were absolutely clean.

Now the potable water would fill the lake; and I know that when I first went to Tomoana, my very first year there in 1982 … you know, the Christmas/New Year ’82-’83 … because there was very little kill going on we had reduced days. Over a thirteen-day period I found that we used sixteen million gallons of water out of our lake. Now that meant that we had pumped sixteen million gallons of fresh water through our plant in those thirteen days in the form of potable water; a lot of it as I said, was re-used. The stuff that was used as hot water of course, was just for sterilising butchers’ tools; that went away to waste down through to our main save-alls. Now the hot water in Tomoana was supplied by boilers adjacent to the engine room and we had three boilers in there. Now they would make hot water. We had three large thirty-thousand-gallon tanks, and these eventually were supplemented by a further one, so we eventually had four thirty thousand gallon tanks, and these would be full every morning by five am. We would provide hot water at eighty-two degrees minimum to all the sterilisers and knife washers and anything else that needed to be sterilised throughout the Works, as well as providing hand wash water at forty-four or forty-three degrees in all the hand washers. These trickled all the time and ran all the time. The sterilisers of course were rather like kettles, and they were topped up all the time; so a large quantity of water was used all the time. Now those thirty thousand gallon tanks at times would run out of hot water, so we did a lot of work during the late eighties and early nineties by putting in supplementary heat recovery systems on our chimneys, and onto our ammonia plant compressors to ensure that the maximum amount of heat that we could recover out of any of our processes was converted to heating water, and this water, you know, was pre-heated to make up our hot water for storage for our killing. This was also done in our wool scour where we took very clean water from the last two bowls, which was round about eighty degrees, and we recycled that through heat exchangers so that we pre-heated water, again potable water, going into heating the water in the wash tanks in the wool scour.

I’ll come back to the sheep yards now; the sheep yards were another area of useful non-potable water from the lake, and of course as you can imagine, anything up to you know, ten thousand in the off-season, up to nineteen, twenty thousand during the height of the season on average, would leave a lot of deposits through the grates in the sheep yard’s floor, and these would have to be hosed down every night so that the gratings were cleared. The product fell onto concrete floors beneath the sheep yards and was hosed by fire hoses into drains, and this was drained down to our save-alls. Now our save-alls consisted of two large concrete tanks which were around about twenty foot wide say, and they were at least, I would say, almost two hundred feet long. They consisted of two large chains running at a very, very slow speed; you had to really look at it to see that it was working. These carried wooden planks sixteen feet across the internal [part] of the tank, and they would be driven down to the bottom of the tank by chains attached to pulleys which were submerged [and] taken to the bottom of the tank. And they slowly edged their way along the bottom of the tank, or the concrete floor, until it [they] reached almost to the end where there was about a forty-five-degree angle. They then started to progress up and would bring any heavy solids up from the bottom at the speed that they were running, of course; although the planks did have very small holes to allow that water to disperse back into the tank and deliver product over the top of the weir into screws which took the product away and disposed of it as solids into our landfills. The water of course would be maintained at a set level, and the chains as they returned the wooden blocks would slowly pull the fat back along the top of the water to the start of the tanks. There it would be extracted again through worms and put into a blow bottle and that would be taken away and processed as rendered fat. It was not suitable for use as a [an] edible fat which we made in our blood house and rendering department, but used for other uses. So we had quite a large extensive save-all; it was closely monitored by the City Councils etcetera, and was very, very effective.

However, with the steel one which was utilised by the wool scour, although we had a system of extracting the fine particles through what they called a rotary screen, we found that we were still transporting a lot of moisture or liquid to the landfills. We estimated in the last year of its operation, of [it] being in the vicinity of costing us $100,000 a year. So just as we were shutting we were going through the process of trying to extract as much of the sheep manure in its raw form prior to going to anywhere near our save-alls; unfortunately, just as we were starting to perfect it, Tomoana shut. The flow-on from that would have [been] felt probably [by] farmers in their milking sheds as well, because this was being looked at by other people in the industry as well.

So really, I think I’ve sort of covered as much as I can of the slaughterhouse and beef house and various other aspects of the Works. What I will say is that we were going along very nicely; the system with Tomoana encouraging the workforce to come on board with productivity etcetera, was working very well. We had people like Henare O’Keefe, who is now a city councillor for Hawke’s Bay, being a team leader of union members; we created committees where we would take union members from various departments to look at a problem in the mutton slaughterhouse say, or in the beef house. We would take people from the wool scour and the rendering department, the skin departments and various other departments, and because they had no prior knowledge of what they were looking at they sometimes came up with one of those eureka ideas, and these sometimes worked, but they took it on board.

One aspect I will say I discovered is this problem that I mentioned before about people honing their skills and finding that they had a degree of expertise which other people didn’t have. One form of expertise that came to my attention was a chap who had been at Tomoana for many, many years and had worked in the fellmongery department where they treated sheep hides and sold them off as raw leather to overseas places. These were graded, treated etcetera and packaged, and sent away from the fellmongery department, and one of the leading hands in that fellmongery department was a well-respected bloke. Everything seemed to be okay and no one noticed anything different with him, but when it came to joining one of these committees … we were going to look at the damage and the stress caused to cows when they were delivered to the beef house. We noted that there were sometimes dog bites on them and sometimes the animals were highly excited when they got there. We were starting to video these things and discuss what was happening; and just by the by a lot of the dog bites weren’t happening at Tomoana because the dogs were muzzled, and if they weren’t they were dogs which were trusted never to bite. Secondly, we noted that the treatment on some of the trucks given to them by truck drivers was not the best, and so a lot of the animals were highly stressed. However, when we came to examine all this, this chap that was in the fellmongery came to me and he said, “Look, I’d rather not be on your committee – could you please make excuses for me?” Which I was reluctant to do because I thought he was a valuable person to have on the committee. Eventually he had to admit to me that he could neither read nor write. He had been able at school, to learn a way to get people to do the work for him. In the fellmongery he always either had dirty hands, or he had chemicals, or he had to go to the toilet, or do something, and he was always able to have somebody fill in the paperwork for him. They sometimes worked in pairs, so he said, “Well I’m better at grading, you do the paperwork”, etcetera; just an interesting little point that people can find expertise in all sorts of ways.

However, we used to have these committees, and it was working well in my opinion; on the two or three that we had we were able to come up with new ideas and start to put them into practice. Unfortunately Tomoana shut, but one or two of those people who were on those committees realised also their own potential, and Henare O’Keefe is, in my opinion, a man who went on and utilised his potential to quite a high degree.

Tomoana shut as I understand it, because politically … and also because the meat industry was going through hard times. I know that it created a bit of embarrassment for me personally, because we were told by the British owners that they were going to provide an increase in money into our bank account of something like $30 million to continue to top up our shortfall. This never happened. I believe that, listening to what was going on, the government and the banks made a decision that AFFCO [Auckland Farmers Freezing Company] in Auckland which was New Zealand shareholder owned, and one or two of the other shareholder owned companies in the South Island, deserved protecting. Tomoana, notwithstanding the fact that it was highly efficient, was an overseas company and so it made political sense for Tomoana to shut. Whakatu of course had closed in ’86, and Tomoana had taken over some of the operations there; we were running the fellmongery and we had supplementary boning rooms built over there. When Tomoana shut we had been told two weeks beforehand that we were going to get this $30 million. I had people who I was purchasing goods from in our local community asking when could they get paid ‘cause we were sometimes up to six weeks, seven weeks behind in our payments. I was being assured by our management; I told, you know, some of these people, and after Tomoana shut of course it became a little bit embarrassing for me because they came back and said, “Well, we continued to supply because”, you know, “we had your word.” So yes, it was a bit embarrassing.

We had no idea that we were going to close. We were working on going to rejig our beef boning room for a second time and we had drawn up plans. The manager had had a midnight call with the British owners on the Sunday night and Monday morning, or early Monday morning, and he was told to go to tender on Friday … put the documents out to tender with the engineering companies to do this work. On Wednesday it transpired there was a meeting in Wellington with the Wellington head office management of W R Fletcher which owned Tomoana Freezing Works, or Weddel … it was called Weddel Crown in one takeover in the late eighties and then reverted back to Weddel when Crown went bung. They had a meeting with Britain and said that they were going to go [in]to receivership on Friday. I was on the afternoon shift. We had two shifts in the engineering department.

I forgot to state earlier on that when I first joined Tomoana we had around about a hundred people in the engineering, electrical, carpentry, plumbing trades, and when Tomoana went through regroup or re-evaluation of their requirements in the engineering and electrical trades, we ended up basically with just engineers and electricians. Everything else was done on contract, and we had around about thirty-two to thirty-six fitters at any one time. We had three shifts; some were permanent night shift doing maintenance, and we had two-day shifts … six to two [pm] and two to eight [pm] … and I was on the two to eight on this particular Friday when we shut.

At around three-thirty I was called to a breakdown in a chain which held up the mutton slaughter works – a chain had broken and we had to repair that. While we were busy repairing that I was called up on my radio by people over at a boning room at Whakatu, and they said that we‘d been told to go home, that “Tomoana is shut; there’ll be no more work.” I had no knowledge of this, no one had approached us. I went across to the main office, and when I walked in there I saw an accountant who was actually my accountant for a private company which I had on the side. He was known to me as a receiver [chuckle] and he was in the main office with the general manager, Mr David Gusscott. So I asked around the office and they said yes, that they’d been advised at something like three-thirty in the afternoon that the receivers were coming in. They arrived around about that time. So I waited until Mr Gusscott and the receiver came out, and asked what was going on and were [was] told to tell everybody to go home. So we got the chain going so we could get the carcasses into [the] freezer – the fitters worked on and got that going; they got it done by about half past five. They went off home – we weren’t allowed to take any of the equipment home; everything was frozen. One or two electricians were able to take their hand tools away with them, but [of] course the engineers found it a little bit harder with their heavier equipment. We talked to the receiver, and they agreed to keep the place going the next day so that we could render out all the offals and fats so we didn’t end up destroying equipment with it all going rancid in the cookers etcetera; they would’ve gone hard and it would’ve been like cement. I came in at six [o’clock] in the morning, and was first refused by the receivers’ people on the gate, but eventually one of them recognised me and allowed me to go in and start the compressors etcetera; and the boilers were started up by the boilermen, and we continued and rendered out everything, and the place was shut down around about midday.

We were called in on Sunday, a small group of us. One of the chaps, Peter Murton from the engine room, had been the second engineer at Whakatu when it shut and had been re-employed by Tomoana to run the engine room when we downsized. And I was called in because of the rest of the engineering expertise for the Works. We worked with two or three managers and other foremen that came in; we then worked out with the receivers that we should keep the engine room running. We arranged to have a clean up of the rest of the plant, and eventually both Peter Murton and myself were employed by the receivers to run the engine room and keep the freezers going so the receivers could sell off the remaining stock. They also hired out some of the space to other outside people in the short term.

In that time the receivers set up a system to tender, and the company that bought Tomoana was called Trial Run Holdings, and Trial Run Holdings was made up of a conglomerate of meat works companies around New Zealand. It was decided that rather than one or two wealthier meat works – and I use that term advisedly [chuckle] – buy[ing] the prime equipment from Tomoana, that none of the equipment that Tomoana had would be sold in New Zealand internally. So it was put out for tender so that everybody in New Zealand could tender, and the overseas people could come in and tender first and then New Zealand would come in and tender after. This happened, and we had a lot of Australians come through the plant, and a lot of them, because of the size of the plant, liked to be photographed in front of the ammonia compressors ‘cause they had never seen anything like that in Australia. And it seems strange seeing as they were such big beef producers, but however, their plants were a lot smaller than New Zealand’s.

I was eventually employed by Wattie’s, as was Peter Murton. We continued to run the engine room for Wattie’s; Wattie’s then moved in, rebuilt the mutton slaughterhouse to their requirements for producing their jams and sauces etcetera. They also built a large pet food factory, and again, they used the refrigeration for that. However, the amount of refrigeration that Wattie’s required was quite a lot less than what our engine room could provide. Our engine room was old … antiquated … but more than adequate for what we required. However, they decided that they would make a fully automated engine room, so they used the supplementary room which was in our mutton slaughterhouse which had a large receiver; they used that as the genesis of their refrigeration engineering plant, and they built a small supplementary plant which they leased back from a large refrigeration supply company, and as I understand it all the servicing and that was done by contractors. Once this had been done we were offered jobs in Wattie’s, but we decided that we didn’t want to work for Wattie’s and accept the jobs they wanted, so we resigned.

I went on to form my own little company, and I continued to do automation in a small way with pneumatics, but I also did general engineering and intended to do jobs which young fellows didn’t like doing or didn’t want to do, or didn’t have the expertise in doing. And I eventually did a lot of work for Amcor Paper Products until they shut; did a lot of work for PGG Wrightson’s on their corn drying plants; and I worked for a large bean grower in some of his plants.

I subsequently retired when I was seventy. I enjoyed working in Hawke’s Bay; I found that over the years in Hawke’s Bay [that] although new industry came in and the apple industry burgeoned, there were a lot of industries which were lost to Hawke’s Bay. You can’t blame it on anything other than mismanagement … perhaps on the economy at times, or overseas things. The Free Trade Agreement helped destroy a lot of businesses. There was a lot of expertise like We Can Engineering; a man who grew up in Hawke’s Bay, served his time, I believe, at Wattie’s, was Lindsey Hill at We Can. He was taken to America by FMC [originally Food Machine & Chemical Corporation] because they noted his expertise when he was working at Wattie’s. He worked with them helping them develop tomato harvesting machinery in America. They brought it back to New Zealand, worked a couple of seasons here in the off-season to America. Eventually he left them, came back to New Zealand and was put under an embargo for ten years that he could never patent anything etcetera because it would be claimed by FMC in America. After ten years, which was in the early seventies when I first came to Hawke’s Bay, he formed We Can Engineering and started to develop machinery. He was one of the first to develop a swing mower machine for the orchards where a supplementary arm would swing in and out of the gap between trees. He developed a hydraulic pruner which had a single pipe going to it so that when the pruner was pressed the hydraulic pack on your back supplied oil to the thing; the blade would chop the branch off and it automatically reset itself. The backpack which supplied the hydraulic pump – he took the idea of a wobble gear box, which was again developed by a New Zealander, and he developed it to make it far more useful and reliable, and put that onto a hydraulic drive so he could have a small high-speed motor driving his hydraulic pump. He also developed other mowers and other machinery; went on to develop and build parts for Jaguars modified in Hawke’s Bay by a doctor who had a Jaguar modifying refurbishment company, and so it went on.

There was Prebensen’s Plastics in Napier who developed plastic pipe for large sewer and water reticulation systems. He developed that here in Hawke’s Bay and we supplied you know, pneumatics and gearboxes to him through de Pelichet’s. [De Pelichet McLeod]

Rothmans did a lot of development work; Hawke’s Bay Farmers Meat did a lot of development work; there was a wool scour in Napier who [which] developed a high pressure intensified baling system whereby he squashed three bales into one, and that was banded with steel bands. The steel bands to lock the bands together … he developed a system where they punched a series of shaped slots in the ends of the bands which were made to a certain size, and when you wrapped them around the three bales they were put together, and when the bales were released they locked and held the bands. This machinery was developed by Napier Tool & Dye for the gentleman, and manufactured by Kerr Engineering who did a lot of development work as well. So there was a lot of expertise in Hawke’s Bay. Hawke’s Bay should be very proud that they still have a lot of expertise and innovative ideas going on, and you can see that in the apple industry even today. So I think that’s about all I can say about Hawke’s Bay, but I hope I haven’t been too much of a bore.

I will say one other thing; while I was at Hawke’s Bay Farmers’ Meat my wife was working for and helping develop the firm of Crombie Lockwood, which started off as Crombie Stevens Associates but it went on to Crombie Lockwood; and the chap Lockwood went on to be probably one of New Zealand’s richer entrepreneurs in the insurance company business, as did Colin Crombie, who has become a benefactor to Hawke’s Bay in various ways.

With my wife and another chap called Peter Stephens who was the original partner in Crombie Stephens, we bought the old Loan & Mercantile wool store in Ahuriri which was then owned by Wright Stephenson’s. They tried to sell it for six years, so we made them an offer that thankfully was accepted, and we found ourselves with a 1.8 acre-sized wool store. We then turned ten thousand square feet of that into a weekend market. This was just prior to Sunday trading ending, [starting] so we had to go to Court and provide references from local firms in Napier in particular, to say that we would not be a threat to them. So we established Harbour Markets at Ahuriri. Now initially, we decided that we would play the game and only open on Saturdays from nine ‘til four [o’clock], and then eventually we were open from ten ‘til four. After a couple of years my wife and I leased the company back from our other partner, and for another six years we ran Harbour Markets. At times we had up to fifty-five stalls there on a Saturday and Sunday, and we are proud to say that we believe that we were part of the start of the re-establishment of Ahuriri as a desirable area to live.

I know that when I first came to Hawke’s Bay working for Wrightson NMA, their marketing arm for farms and houses had the job of assessing a company loan which I was able to get by transferring here at ninety percent of the mortgage value of the property. I looked at two homes on the corner in Ahuriri opposite the ice cream shop now, and they were going for the princely sum of $7,000 – the two homes $7,000 – in 1971. I was refused because they said that only drunken fishermen and other reprobates lived in Ahuriri; it would be the worst place and the quality of their investment wouldn’t be upheld. I think the proof in the pudding [chuckle] in our idea to buy there has been borne out.

It wasn’t long after we established the Harbour Markets that we noticed that a crayfisherman who used to have a stall at the market … not selling crayfish, but produce with his wife … said that people were starting to draw pictures of what they were going to do with their house when they bought it and refurbished it etcetera. So from that time onwards we worked with Anne Tolley who was a city councillor, and we developed the first historic walks through Ahuriri in conjunction with DOC [Department of Conservation], with points of interest. We had an ice cream shop there full time, and various other shops full time in the place during the time that we had the market. Subsequently we sold it back to our partner, as we had other things to do.

I was also highly involved with athletics with the Taradale Athletic Club and Tomoana Freezing Works sponsored a cup for a competition at the Hawke’s Bay Amateur Athletic Club, which was run by the Potts in those days; Sylvia Potts of course was a Commonwealth Games champion. During this time, in 1986-’87 Taradale Athletics ran the Colgate Games for Hawke’s Bay, and they were held at the Showgrounds. It was run by a Mr Charteris who was the manager of the Fertiliser Works at Awatoto … Noel Charteris, who was a very, very highly efficient man. I don’t know how he did it but he managed to organise us into running a very successful games. We even had Dave Pike, the radio announcer, donate his time and he ran music between events, probably one of the first times that this had ever been done at an athletic carnival … definitely in Hawke’s Bay and probably in other parts of New Zealand. And we actually established a record of sales and money that was brought into the games. Colgate provided all the equipment for selling – that’s all the souvenir equipment and all that; they provided a lot of the expertise in the way of written information etcetera, and subsidised the setting up of the grounds. We used the Hawke’s Bay Showgrounds; we put in temporary throwing pits … concrete pads for discus and shot put etcetera; and over the three days we took in $40,000 profit for the athletics of the East Coast; that’s Gisborne, Hawke’s Bay and Waipukurau.

The first day of sales at the souvenir shop was so frenetic that when we opened the gates at eight o’clock and people started to file in, by ten o’clock – I was sort of in charge of security and the general dogsbody, running around emptying cans and looking after the parking etcetera; thankfully we’d been offered the services of an ex-high jump champion of New Zealand who was a sergeant in the police force. He and my wife and one other person ran the ticket box and counted the money, and when I went to collect this money the chap in the souvenir shop was frantic. He had paper bags full of cash, his till was overflowing; and he said to me, “Look at them!” And people were literally throwing money from three people back, saying, “I’ll have four or five socks and I’ll have two pairs of shoes”, etcetera. It was very successful, and at the end of that first day he was so afraid of protecting the amount of money that we had collected that when I and my wife drove out to take the money to the bank – we’d arranged, you know, after hours collection – he followed us with his car door open ready to pounce out and protect us. Anyhow, this went on over the next three days. At the end of the three days, the last lot of money we took back to the police station and put it in the police station safe, after my wife and he counted the money. On the Tuesday morning he and my wife took the money to the bank – and I won’t say which bank – and deposited this $40,000-odd.

At around about three in the afternoon he contacted us to say that the bank had contacted him to say that they were $2,000 short of what my wife and I had counted. Being a policeman and being in charge of bank security, he immediately demanded a shut-down of the bank and an audit taken. Thank goodness we had him on our side. After the audit was taken, the money was mysteriously found in the bottom of a wastepaper basket on its way to the main destruction bin that was taken away for burning. One can only wonder. However, he was told by his superiors never to do any volunteering of that nature again, and when he arrived at our place he arrived with some libation and was overjoyed to have a drink [chuckle] and celebrate with us at the finding of the $2,000. I can tell you that was quite a worrying moment for us; however, all’s well that ends well. But it was a very successful games, and unfortunately not long after that the Taradale Athletic Club went into abeyance and joined up with the Napier Club, and as far as I know they’re still, you know, functioning.

I will say one other thing – I was born in Fiji but my association with New Zealand was through my great-grandfather who was the second in charge of the first troops that [who] fought at [in the] Māori Wars in Ōhaeawai Pā. His son with his wife, after he died in New Zealand in 1859, bought Tekapo Station. They suffered two years of disastrous freezing [and] lost all their sheep, so my great-grandfather and his two brothers in New Zealand and one brother in Australia, decided they’d go to Fiji in 1870. As I said earlier, we returned to New Zealand in 1956 and I’ve remained in New Zealand ever since.

Thank you for your time.