Watters, Sydney (Syd) Alexander Interviews

Erica Tenquist on the morning of 15th October 2019, and I’m interviewing Syd Watters who lives in Onekawa in Napier. Over to Syd.

My name’s Sydney Alexander Watters, and I’m married to Pam [Pamela] Thelma Watters. Her name was Stephens before she was married, and we’ve been married sixty-two years and we’re still living in the same house that I built in [on] the weekends. I designed it myself, and we didn’t have much money because I’d started a business with Lyal Jackson, and we were putting everything into that business because we had to build up capital. And so the only time I had was Saturdays and Sundays and evenings. I made the joinery myself in our little joinery factory; all the windows and door frames, and doors and cupboards, beds, and other fittings inside. Most of that was done at nights. Anyway, we’ve been in the same house and upgraded a few times of course, over the years.

Pam is now not well, and [microphone interference] she needs treatment for cancer. I’ve had a lot of cancer myself, I’ve had a third of my bowel plus two other bits taken away, plus a gall bladder, plus a kidney; and [interference] I’m not very good, but I’m still standing.

My life started in Ngāruawāhia, where Dad was Town Clerk. On the 14th August [19]26 I was born. Dad was previously employed in the Audit Department in Wellington where he met Mum [Victoria May Parsons] ; and he was there after they both got matric [matriculation] at Wellington College. Mum was a very good student; she was top of New Zealand in the matric year in the Fifth Form, and got in the eighties and nineties for all the subjects, so she was a really top scholar, but we didn’t know she was as good as she was because she never spoke about it. Ray and I, my brother, found her records in a shed at my grandparents in Wellington where we used to go as children, and we were quite astounded at her marks. We had seen her books and prizes she’d won at school, but she never spoke about it.

Dad also got maths prizes, and prizes for French at Wellington College. He was very smart at figures, and so he was a very good Town Clerk later in Napier, I guess.

When did he come to Napier to be the Town Clerk up here?

Dad went from first starting out at the government, which he didn’t like. He was like an inspector, going around looking for trouble, and he found troubles in all the government departments that he went to, and he wasn’t popular [chuckle] naturally, so he wanted to get out of that side. So he went to being a Town Clerk, and the first job was, as I said before, in Ngāruawāhia, but he quickly moved out of there to another job in Cambridge where my brother Ray was born [a] couple of years later.

And then after that, he got the opportunity to come to Napier as Assistant Town Clerk, knowing that the Town Clerk was just about to retire. And we all moved to Napier a week before the earthquake. But Mum took my brother and I down to her parents’ place in Miramar, Wellington, where we were at when the earthquake struck. Dad had been looking for a house, and he found one but of course the chimney fell down in the earthquake, and he had to get a bricklayer, I guess, to fix that before we moved back to Napier. So we missed the earthquake.

I remember the people in Wellington, although I was young at the time of course, but I still remember them being very alarmed at what had happened to Dad and [an]other couple of relations they had in Napier. But Dad managed to drive this old overland car from Hawke’s Bay somewhere – they cut wire fences and went across paddocks and things to avoid all the big cracks in the ground, and forded the rivers. And he got down to Southern Hawke’s Bay somewhere where he was able to send a message to Wellington that he was okay.

And of course Napier was burning very heavily at the time – the water pipes that supplied water had fractured, and the gas lines were fractured, and the fire started and burned through most of the town, so there wasn’t much left, but Dad carried on as Assistant Town Clerk for a while, and then he got the job as the main Town Clerk.

What was his actual name, Syd?

Fred. Frederick Robert Watters. He was Town Clerk from the thirties … early thirties … ‘til he had to retire at sixty. But he didn’t want to retire really, but that was the rules at the time. He was still very fit and he always wanted to be a farmer, but he didn’t have the money or have the opportunity. But after he retired he managed to buy ten acres of bare land at Link[s] Road between Napier and Hastings, and he established a farm there. His idea to start with was to plant asparagus all over it, because asparagus was a very valuable crop in those days and there wasn’t enough around. And so he did that; spent a lot of money buying the plants, but they had [a] couple of very bad winters with big floods, and these plants all rotted in the ground. So that was a total disaster and a great loss of course, and I guess he didn’t have insurance; so he decided he wouldn’t worry about that any more, and he put field tiles across the whole farm and built himself a little pump house and pumped the field tiles when there was too much rain, and pumped it into a big drain at the side of the road – a real big, deep drain.

This is on Link[s] Road?

Link[s] Road, yes. And then he went into fruit trees. He had peaches, apples, pears; but while they were growing and before they produced any income, he planted a lot of beans and tomatoes and things in between the rows which he got people to pick when they were ripe and sent to the markets to earn some money to pay all his rates and things, because he’d spent all the money on the land of course.

How much were the rates at that stage?

No idea. He was stretched though, that’s for sure. But he managed to get a house from Gloucester Street in Taradale – there was [were] houses down the main street in those days, and the shopping centre hadn’t started really. And a man from Shell, I think it was – one of the petrol firms anyway – was going to build a service station out there, and he wanted the section cleared, so Dad was able to get a house removal firm to pick up the house and shift it onto the Link[s] Road property. It was quite a decent sort of a weatherboard home in good nick, and he moved that there and so was able to sleep in that and get up early, at dawn on calm days particularly, rather than travel out from Napier for the spraying, which you had to do on the fruit trees.

So the rest of you were still living in town, in Napier?

Yeah – he was living in town; but what had happened in our life [lives] was that Mum, when she was about forty, had a late baby, my sister Christine was born, and she was exactly twenty years younger than me. Mum got leukaemia almost immediately, and they couldn’t treat it in those days; they hardly knew what was wrong with her. And they finally sorted out what the trouble was and she started to go downhill. I was living at home at the time and had just started in business with Lyal Jackson. And I wasn’t married of course, so I was able to help a bit but it was very tough for another year. She died when Christine was about eight, but she managed to be out of hospital, had some time at home. Dad had to get a housekeeper in because he had to go to meetings in those days. The councillors were never paid; it was an honorary job, and they met at night, and so Dad had to do the paperwork and run the meetings … or just record the meetings as required, so he was out a lot. And Mum did the best she could for as long as she could; but it was very sad.

So what year did she actually die?

Oh, I’d have to look at my records. [1955]

My brother at the time had got a Masters degree; he was a schoolteacher originally, and then before he was married he was a Housemaster at Wellington College to earn some money and get board too, while he was studying. And then they cut out the caning, and he said he lost control a bit of the boys at Wellington College where he was Housemaster, and he said, “Blow this for a job!” [Chuckle] So he gave up teaching and decided to be a lecturer at the university, and he got a Masters degree. He studied both geography and history particularly, and at the end he was proposed to be a lecturer at the varsity. And then he decided to do a Doctorate, and he got forwarded to Oxford University in England ‘cause they didn’t do Doctorates in New Zealand at the time. He got over there and he wasn’t accepted because he hadn’t done Latin. He’d done Latin in the Fifth Form but he hadn’t done it for University Entrance. He could’ve, but he didn’t – he concentrated on history and geography and maths and English. And he didn’t realise, so [chuckle] he had to go to London University. He got to London University and did his Doctorate there, came back and became a Professor … Associate Professor at Victoria, and had a successful life there and has written a lot of books.

What is his name?

Raymond Frederick Watters.

And do you know the name of any of his books?

Got some of them; he’s got one now that he’s trying to finish. His speciality was the Pacific and all the countries surrounding the Pacific, and South America. And he actually … sabbatical year, he actually took the family to the Amazon and he lived with the natives in the Amazon jungle, of all things, with his wife and kids. Unbelievable!

How many children?

He had three children, two girls and a boy. And they’ve all done … [shows photo of brother with his family, speech inaudible] [The son is] a very big businessman. He’s got my farm and he’s got two big dairy farms of his own; and he’s got shares in a huge lot of businesses. He’s been the main director of a farming company that has acquired dairy farms. This is Andrew Watters, Ray’s only son, and he now is a fifty-odd year old … he’s about fifty … but he’s got a lot of packing houses for instance; he’s got a lot of orchards in Bay of Plenty; he’s gone into manuka honey, and he’s gone into packing sheds in Hawke’s Bay for the fruit industry. He formed companies with ownership; I think he’s got ownership, but they run it … his business associates run it. And he is the chief share broker for Fonterra shares. So he’s got a lot of subsidiary companies. He’s got a lot of people working for him of course, and he’s based in Feilding, but he’s going to retire fairly soon because he’s got so many investments; he’s going to retire to Wairarapa where he’s got two farms, and live there and pull back a bit ‘cause the pressure’s fairly great.

Because Ray married a part Māori girl – only about ten per cent Māori – but she was the chieftainess of her tribe in Carterton-Wairarapa area.

What is her name?

Bethlyn Budd. And she had one of these Māori cloaks passed down through generations, which has now been stolen from their house. And she’s had a greenstone club which was handed down through the generations of Māori, and that has also been stolen from [daughter] Jane’s house – she was looking after them, a also some other Māori artefacts. Anyway, Andrew is determined to employ unemployed Māori on his farm, and try and help them in life.

And where were his farms?

He’s now in Feilding. He’s got two daughters only, so we’ve got no Watters coming on. There’ll be nobody; we haven’t got anybody, and Ray hasn’t got …

And what about your sister, Christine?

She’s got two daughters. [Chuckle] So there’s no Watters …

Nobody to carry the name? No. No. There’s only Andrew and Grant.

That’s a shame, isn’t it?

Yes. We’re mixing things up a fair bit, but yeah, after we came to Napier I was just about ready to start school. And of course Dad and Mum’s house was in Ashridge Road, Napier South; it was just a very ordinary cottage but we were very happy there, and we were mid-way between Te Awa School and Nelson Park. Well, Mum considered that Nelson Park was a better school for us to go to, but being brick it collapsed in the earthquake, as had Central School. And so Napier was very short of schools, and Te Awa was full of children, so they held the pupils back ‘til they were six years old. Anyway, Nelson Park was built in a big hurry – it’s pretty much the same today as it was then, just a few additional verandahs and things but not much changed, and I started there. But I was naturally left-handed, and Miss Pufflett, the teacher – she was a [an] elderly lady, said that I had to write right-handed. So she whacked at me solidly every time I picked up a pen or a pencil. It wasn’t a pen in those days of course, it would be a pencil or a crayon; pencil on the slate, I guess. And so I hated school. And Mum hadn’t bothered teaching me anything because we were just young children, and Ray and I just played around, and so I hadn’t started reading or writing or anything. She thought we’d just pick it up when we started school, I suppose. And so I got a bad start. But a good thing happened because they started zoning, and I was taken away from the last couple of months of the year after my birthday in August, and I started Primer 1 again at Te Awa. And I had a better teacher, and I started to learn something, [chuckles] I guess.

But my brother, Ray, he was a bookworm right from day one, whereas I’d been outside, playing all the time. And they wanted two of us together, and so when I wasn’t home Mum decided to send Ray to a kindergarten, and he started reading and writing very quickly, and always has ever since. But I was naturally an outdoor type of kid, and liked making things too; I liked hammering, and Dad only had a hammer, a very blunt saw and a very blunt chisel, and one screwdriver. That’s about all he had in the way of tools – and an axe for chopping firewood, and he had half a saw – the end was broken off, so I didn’t have any tools very much to do anything with. But Mum had a [an] Uncle George who was a child welfare officer in Napier, and he was married to an aunt of Mum’s, a sister of her mother. And they only lived …

What were their names?

That was George Young and Florrie Young, and they lived just round the corner about four houses away. And he had been a horticultural … highly trained in Scotland before he came to New Zealand. And he became a child welfare officer, and he duly changed jobs. He was a really kind man, and he had a beautiful workshop full of tools and everything was very sharp and very well looked after. And he had a beautiful big begonia house and a big garden in Georges Drive, in a two-storey house which is still there. It’s down Napier South, just two doors round from Ashridge Road. And I saw it the other day when I drove past there and it’s the same as it was in those days.

Anyway, Uncle George allowed me to pick up one or two tools at a time and bring them back, and then he’d give me more if I needed them. And I made all sorts of things.

Have you made furniture for the house?

All that joinery, timber joinery; all the windows I made; that bookcase over there was made; the beds in our bedrooms were made; our kitchen cupboards were made.

Well really, I went through Te Awa about the middle class I thought it was; but the last year there I got a hundred per cent for maths, so I was top of maths in school at Te Awa. But I’d always had reading problems and I think I had spelling problems, but I could do any practical subjects; I could remember enough history and geography and stuff like that. And anything … like I was top of art, and as I said I could do maths and make things, but I was really an outdoor sort. And I was a few months older than some of the other kids in the class, and I was tall for my age and big for my age so I was the fastest runner in the school; and also of course, naturally, in all the rugby teams and the sports teams, and so I quite enjoyed school. [Chuckle] Yeah.

When we went to Intermediate, they had an exam when you first went there, but they looked at what you’d done in the previous year at primary school. And I got in, as did my brother Ray, in the top form at Intermediate amongst all the clever kids, and I did okay there. And I was very happy there because they had woodwork; and I was top of woodwork and craft and art, so I did very well.

Was it just called Intermediate, or did it have another name?

No, Napier Intermediate – the only one, and that’s still there in Kennedy Road. And the requirement in those days was that all the children in Standard 5 and 6 go into Intermediate, and there they got cooking classes, woodwork classes, art classes, science classes and specialist teachers for sewing and music and those sort[s] of things. So the girls got cooking and the boys got woodwork, and then you had craft as well, making poker work bowls, and all sorts of things, learnt pottery. And we had a really good art teacher, and so I loved that school.

And I was in the rugby team of course, on the wing; and I was elected to play in the Napier Rep [Representative] rugby side in the Ross Shield team, which was quite an honour. But I chose to go to a Jamboree with the Scouts, because I’d just joined the Scouts and they were having a Jamboree at the same time; and it was a toss up whether I played rugby for the school – or for Napier really – or the Jamboree. But they only had a Jamboree every five years, whereas I played rugby every Saturday, so I thought, [chuckle] ‘Blow that, I’ll give rugby away!’ And so I enjoyed the Scout camp.

Where was that Scout camp?

That was at Rissington. The Rissington Scouts still own the land – the land was given to them by [a] farmer, Absolom. [Mrs G Absolom of Omatua] And it was a peninsula on a big river running round a gorge – and it was like a peninsula of land with a narrow entrance, and the river went round a big sweep, a real bend. And this land was almost like an island, and had these big cliffs around. All the side of it was covered with manuka, but the senior Scouts cleared the land in the middle and built a hut there for really rough weather when we were caught out there camping. And we used to bike out there with our pannier bags, and our billies on the handlebars, and all our stores for cooking. And it was about … must be about twenty k [kilometres] from Napier, a fairly hilly road. We used to have a great time getting there and getting home, and our parents let us go there from about … probably about eleven years old, I suppose.

Did Ray go as well?

Yes, he was there too, and we came to Kea Scouts, went right through it, and we were there ‘til we graduated at the end. We had to leave when we were eighteen, or became a Rover.

But you didn’t consider going to Rovers?

No. Well what happened, the war was on and this was in the war years. And so my next thing was to get a job of course. I didn’t enjoy Latin and French, and I didn’t enjoy high school years so much. I managed to get School Cert [Certificate], and we had algebra, geometry and trigonometry of course, and straight maths; that was the four subjects really, for a maths paper. And then you had English which was compulsory, and then history, geography, science and art and Latin and French; but I dropped languages. Anyway, I got Public Service Entrance in the Fourth Form, which [knock on door] allowed me to get a job in the government.

[Break; start of next part omitted from recording]

… place in Miramar in Wellington we went to Scout camp; and I carved these out for the different badges. [Shows carvings] These are all the camp things there … one of those is at the camp.

Five, counting that one.

That’s the King Scout …

And it’s all beautifully polished. What is the wood, is it totara?

No, it was manuka. Yeah, it was dead straight to start with but … see here, this is the stars, one year; three years – I forget now how many …

Five, probably.

Yeah. So that’s the sort of thing we did as kids. [Chuckle] You got fairly clever when you …

When you can do that; that’s pretty good.

We were only kids, and you know, getting a paua shell and carving it in and setting it in … yeah.

The shape of tents.

It used to be straight but as it dried out, it’s …

… gone a bit bent.

[Chuckle] Like me. [Chuckles]

Anyway, when I was just about due to leave school Mum and Dad said, “Save enough money to build a new house at 3 Gladstone Road up on the hill”, Bluff Hill. And Dad had Wally Atherfold who was a new council member, and he engaged Wally to draw a plan of the house or houses that he proposed on the site. And I got involved looking over his shoulder, and came up with some ideas. And after I’d got my final technological exams – and I was the only one at night school that bothered. All the other apprentice boys – you only had to get your preliminary exam and then your intermediate exam, and then you didn’t have to do a final unless you wanted to; but I thought I would, and there was only two of us sat and I passed, and so I had that.

And then I decided to go to Correspondence and do architecture. Although I didn’t have University Entrance they accepted me for Correspondence class with a Dr Lo … Professor Lo … from Monash University in Australia. It was under Engineering & Architecture Division of theirs, and this Dr Lo was a Chinese teacher who ran the course from Christchurch, and he used to send papers through for me to do. And I did that for one year and passed that lot.

But at that stage the war had finished, and the soldiers were coming back of course. And I’d come out of my apprenticeship and so at that stage Lyal Jackson, a friend of mine from school days – he was a class ahead of me at school; he’s a bit older than me – he was doing [a] carpentry and joinery apprenticeship which he’d just finished with A B Davis. And I was with Wally Atherfold, another firm, and I’d had a very good training at joinery, more so than carpentry even, but I’d done a bit of outside house building. And I met up with Lyal by pure chance in Holt’s Hardware store, and he tapped me on the shoulder and asked me whether I’d like to go to Australia with him, and then travel to Europe and England. And I said, “Oh, I’ve only got one week left of my apprenticeship”; and the timing was good. And Mum at that stage couldn’t stand, but we didn’t know that she had leukaemia. We knew she was a little bit sick, but not much.

And so anyway, I headed off with Lyal, and they were very shocked at me just heading off [chuckle] immediately after my apprenticeship. Had not very much money, because the apprentices in those days … I actually got 32/6d [thirty-two shillings & sixpence, or one pound twelve shillings & sixpence] a week for a forty-eight hour week. We started at half past seven, and had half an hour for lunch and a quarter of an hour for morning and afternoon tea; and we knocked off at five. And we worked on Saturday mornings, often for four hours, and then I went to rugby or whatever, so a very busy life, and night school two nights a week so it was flat out all the time. But I was determined to be a good joiner, and after about three years I worked harder and faster than most of the men, and in fact the foreman told me to slow down – it was a bit embarrassing he said, the apprentice boy beating [chuckle] … beating the tradies; they felt as though they had to work a bit harder. But they were all old tradesmen that were too old to go to the war. And the war was still on, and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll be called up anyway, so I want to learn all I can, quick as I can.’

And the war finished, and I was nearly through, and then when I got through, as I said, I went to Australia with Lyal. And we worked over there but we didn’t want to do all the hard work with houses and things; we wanted a change, so we worked outside at field jobs, and moved around.

Doing fencing or anything like that?

We did that later when we were building state houses, but didn’t do fencing. Like, the first job we had over there was on a huge, huge … must’ve been about oh, fifty acres or something like that, and inland from Gladstone in Northern Queensland, and it was a crop of peanuts. And they grow like a potato with a root system, and these nuts are under the ground in great big rows. And when they’re mature they get a huge tractor [to] drive down the rows with big blades underneath them, and the blades lift them a little bit – blades are tilted – and they go along under the ground and they’re loosened. And then they get pickers coming after that procedure and going up down the rows pulling these out and building stooks. We’d stack them round in rows like a pyramid with the foliage left outside ‘til it’s withered, and the nuts were left in the middle. And when all the foliage had died they came along with a tractor again – a front end loader – and picked them up and they had the nuts. And our job was just to pull up these things and put them in these stooks, so we were bending over double all day up and down these huge, huge rows; dusty, dirty, filthy job, but we were so fit and young we could stand it. And we thought, ‘Oh, we can work with anybody’, but the team of people they had on the farm were all professionals like shearers that came back every year, and they were very quick. And it was all contract and you got paid for what you did, and we couldn’t keep up with them. We jogged down these rows all day, and of course after the first day we could hardly bend, [chuckle] but after about a week we came right … kept going.

But when you got back at night all you had was a big, huge open-end shed with a four by two frame built around with sacking in it, and you slept on that. And you gave an order each week to the farmer who brought food for you, and you cooked it by billies at night on an open fire. So after a day’s picking when we’d had enough, we went back and had to cook our own food and feed ourselves.

But Lyal – fortunately his mother and father both split up and they lived apart from Lyal. He’s lived with each of them over time, and when he got home from school he used to start the cooking often, because they were working. And he became quite a reasonably good cook, and I was just keeping the fire going and preparing the food. And anyway, we put up with that job ‘til it had finished, and then the farmer offered us a job painting his house roof, which we took on and we lived in the house, were decently fed for a while, and we worked there for about a week, I suppose.

And then we decided to have a holiday so we went back to Gladstone where you could go out to the Reef; it was the southern end really, a port where you could go out to the [Great] Barrier Reef and see that. We did that, and stayed there for about a week, boarding, and we had a marvellous day’s fishing the reef. And we rowed around a lagoon, just the two of us in a glass-bottomed boat. None of the other people were very interested in that, they were catching so many fish all the time. And then we got sick of that, so [chuckle] … but you could look down through the clear water – there were thousands of fish everywhere. Marvellous.

Yeah.

So anyway, after that we had to find another job ‘cause we were running out of money again, and we got onto a job pulling pineapples. And the farmer had come back from the war, and he had acquired a piece of bushland with a little … like, a little pyramid on it of a little hill. It was a circular hill, bit like our Sugarloaf out there’; about as big as that;. And he’d planted pineapples in a rotary system right round with a row between them, and he was curling them up to the top. And our job with one other elderly Indian man was to go along and pull the pineapples. You hooked and you twisted them, and put them on the ground, and you went round every day picking the ripe ones, and the farmer came behind picking them up, and he had a horse and dray and he went around slowly.

But all our arms got prickled from all the sharp prickles on the pineapple, and all the leaves all have these spikes on them. But it was so hot there in Queensland you couldn’t wear heavy clothes, but we had a decent hat on. But you know, I got skin cancer [chuckle] from there. Anyway, that was our next job. We stayed there ‘til it finished and that job had cut out; and then they suggested we go to Mildura in Central Australia [north-western Victoria] where they had cropping. And these farmers’ve got these channels – they pump water from the Murray-Darling River into their channels, and they had like, sluice gates there; the water went up and down and they kept the water in the channels, which seeped into the ground between the crops. And this desert area they’d made into a great farming area, one of the main farming areas of Australia.

Well anyway, we took this big service car from the Queensland coast into the interior – a huge, huge trip in this big old bus. And we got there and we said to the bus driver, “How long are you here for?” The bus was heading to Adelaide, and we told him what we wanted to do, to try and get a job. He said, “Well, we’re having a meal here, and so there’ll be a stop for about three-quarters of an hour.” So we shot across to this place, a Labour Exchange, and they said, “Nothing offering; all the jobs are taken and we’ve got a whole list here of people wanting jobs, so there’s nothing for you.” And we said, “Well we’re pretty desperate; we’re just about out of money.” And they said, “Well head for Adelaide – the bus is going there and it’s a bigger place, and you’ll find something to do surely, in Adelaide. If you’re trades people and properly trained, there’ll be more opportunity for you.” And they said, “You should be doing your trades anyway, not messing around like this.” [Chuckle] We rushed back to the bus, and they’d taken the bus people into a [door squeaks as it’s opened] sultana and raisin factory, and given everybody a couple of handfuls of raisins and things – that was our lunch [chuckle] … we didn’t have lunch.

And then we went from there down to Adelaide, [teacups rattle] arrived there late of course, and got a taxi and said, “Look, take [door closes] us to some boarding house – we’ve got to find board somewhere.” And they took us to a boarding house and the woman said, “Well you’ve got to pay a week in advance”, and we said, “How much?” And she said, “Well the food and board for two of you – that’s two of you in the same room …” But it was a big, huge house, and it had a lot of army huts in the back yard – and they had a lot of single men living in those – and a huge, huge table and [they] all sat round that at night, and they prepared the food; good meals, but fairly costly. She said, “Well you’ve got to come up with a week up front before I’ll let you in the door.” And we said, “We haven’t got a job”, and we didn’t have enough money. So we said, “We’d better keep a bit of money back for buses and things to get around to get a job, and we’ve got to eat something.” And she said, “Well, that’s the best I can do.”

So I had this watch, a Rolex watch which was a twenty-first birthday present which I’ve still got; and I said, “Look”, [chuckle] – it was £100 or something – “will you take that?” “Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. Give me that, that’ll do.” Yeah, [chuckle] so she took us on. But to save money we lived on fish and chips, which was the cheapest food you could buy and we said, “Look, we’ll just get a room for the week or whenever, and we won’t buy any other food from you ‘til we get a job.”

And we were lucky enough to get to a big factory that’d been an American army factory, and been converted into an assembly plant for assembling refrigerators. And they had the annexe of one of them, and there was [were] about three chains there. The first job they gave us was building wooden crates to put them in to send them round the various places around the country where they were going. So we hammered these boxes together for a while, and then they promoted us to the chain and we did assembly work on the chain. And the power in those days was generated by coal, and the coal miners went on strike for more money and the country quickly closed down because all the trains brought all the goods in those days, rather than trucks. And this factory was quickly running out of parts – metal and stuff like that they were buying in from all sorts of places – and the chains were going to stop very soon, and we thought, ‘We’ll be out of a job!’ So we chucked our job and rushed to the railway station. We slept on the railway seats ‘til the train arrived; the odd train carrying goods was still running, not to timetables, just now and again. And it had the odd carriage at the back, a nd we managed to get back to Sydney.

And the trip to Australia in the ‘Wanganella’ had been extremely rough and I was lucky I didn’t get seasick. But Lyal got violently seasick and he said he’d never go in a boat again, and the only way to come back to New Zealand was by flying boat. So we came to Auckland, and my brother was up there at the time and he met us and we got back to Napier by train. And our bosses quickly heard that we were back, and Wally Atherfold, my old boss, lived over the back of our house in Gladstone Road; he came across and saw me and asked me to come back. Well Lyal and I decided we’d had so much freedom, we decided [chuckle] to start on our own and do our own thing. And so we had no work, but Mum didn’t charge board … good old Mum.

So how long were you away from Napier?

We were only away for about half a year, something like that, and it was a good thing we got back, though; Mum was ill and so I was able to help.

Because Christine wouldn’t have been that old either?

No. Mum died when she was about eight.

Lyal and I got back in ’49. In 1949 we started on our own, and … the first thing we did were [was] build saw stools and wait for the phone to ring. And it did, and Wally Atherfold, my boss, said “Look, Syd, I’m loaded with work”, because the soldiers had come back and they were all getting married and … well, they needed housing and furniture and everything. So things were starting to boom, and the Housing Department – not like now – the Ministry of Housing really got going on State houses, and they were whopping them up, you know, and the people really worked hard in those days. You know, we could build a house in a thousand hours … a weatherboard house like this … did the gib boarding and everything. And if you didn’t do it in a thousand hours you’re losing money. But the four-bedroom ones took about twelve hundred hours, but they were rough.

We quoted everything; took everything off – well, I took everything off – studs and bottom plates and dwangs, measured very exactly, and priced all the equipment needed to build the house. And we had statistics built up after the first few houses of time we could do things in; we could put a frame up in so many hours, and put gib board on [the] average house in so many hours, and so on and so on, you know, so it was all broken down; we were actually quantity surveying, you know, and I did that very thoroughly and that kept us going right through, really.

And we started, and Lyal did the bookwork and he chased all the subbies up and got all the subbies’ prices, and I did all the carpentry pricing and all the takeoffs of the plans at nights. And I ran the jobs during the day and I worked with the men during the day. And we drove them hard, you know – if some of the men were slow they’d only last a week. We were really, really tough, or I was, and it paid off because we got the best tradesmen.

So how long did you two have that firm together?

Lyal and I built up from nothing, right ‘til the nineties. From ’49 ‘til the nineties …

… we were the biggest builder in Hawke’s Bay for a little while. And we built a joinery factory that merged with two other people; became Consolidated Joinery, and that became the biggest joinery factory in the North Island for a while.

And then we branched out into Napier Glass because we were making so many windows, timber windows in those days, and we started Napier Glass, which is still going. We sold that of course, years ago. And then we started Stitson Laminated Surfaces – that was making formica benches. We had about fifteen men working in another factory doing that.

And then of course, after a while the native timber ran out and it all became pine. And aluminium joinery came in and the timber joinery died, and so our big joinery company was going backwards so Lyal and I at that stage decided to get out and sell; but it took us a while to sell, and we sold to a younger partner. He didn’t have much money and ran it into the ground anyway and he went broke a few years later. But we got out luckily, with a bit of asset.

But in the meantime we’d started Nu-Look Aluminium Windows – we got an agency for Nu-Look – and they’re still going of course throughout the country. So we had that company too; at one stage we had ten companies associated to our building industry. And so I had a very filling [fulfilling] life, really, and I’ve got a lot of documentation in the form of cut-outs from the papers about buildings we built.

What would be your most memorable building?

Probably the big Harris grandstand at the park. [McLean Park] We had a big pre-cast yard and we also were persuaded in the fifties … it’d be the late fifties … to start a pre-cast concrete stressing bed arrangement. There was none in Napier, and no pre-cast being done. But a young engineer had come up from Christchurch and started a [an] engineering company called Powell, Fenwick & Johnson; ‘cause Basil Johnson was a local man – he was about two or three years older than us. And he persuaded us that pre-cast concrete and stressed concrete, and post-stressed concrete, would be the thing of the future. And we borrowed money heavily and invested in a big property in Niven Street. Built another factory there, and built a big stressing bed and built a lot of underground tanks for McWilliam’s Wines up Faraday Street. And I worked on those building them with – we had another foreman building the parts over in the stressing bed, and I was up there with another couple of men erecting them.

And then we built a lot more for McWilliam’s Wines once we got started; they called tenders on other buildings up there which we won. And we got in with the architects or engineers and they came to us all the time for quoting. We got accepted most times when we went for the jobs, and sometimes we lost money of course, and sometimes we made money. That’s the building industry.

You have to have a built-in amount that you can afford to do it …

Yeah, yeah.

That’s where some of them these days go broke, isn’t it?

Yeah, that’s right.

‘Cause they don’t have enough capital …

That’s right, yes. I’m in the same house I built in my spare time – never wasted money. Pam didn’t waste money either. She was …

Prudent …

But we had enough, you know – we paid ourselves the same as we paid the foremen. Latterly they were getting $50,000 a year, and that was pretty good money. We paid ourselves $50,000 too.

But having a partner, I was able to go [on] a lot of overseas trips later, and we had quite a few trips to America and quite a few trips to Europe. And we had a son that was doing optometry in London, and when he finished we did a big Eurail round Europe with Grant. For about three months we travelled hither and thither on our Eurail pass; we just had to flash the ticket, then into a bus or into a train, or onto a ferry across to Corfu or somewhere, you know, and that was marvellous. And once we’d seen or had enough in Florence or somewhere like that, or in Rome or somewhere, we’d go to the railway station and hop on the nearest train that came along and flash the ticket; and perhaps sleep in the carriage on the train at night, and go to the cafe carriage and have a meal. And so we had a good life, yeah.

So anyway, we had our ups and downs. And when we latterly got the Courthouse contract … when we were perhaps part-way through it, three of the staff at work – one of the quantity surveyors, the accountant that we had for a long time, and one of the main foremen outside, his brother – all came to me one day and said they were going to leave and start on their own. They knew all our pricing; they knew all our methods …

Oh!

I thought, ‘Well hell!’ So I rushed across and saw Lyal who was at the joinery company, and said to Lyal, “Look, we’d better do something here because they’ll be opposition; they won’t have much money though, but they know our pricing and everything, and we’ll be lost without them for a while.” And so I said, “Look, I think we should join them for a year or two, form a joint company and then retire out of it, and they’ll be bound to buy us out.” So we did that.

And after two or three years they began doing wild things which we didn’t agree with. They built Lake Edge Resort at Lake Taupō … timeshare; very well done, but it cost a lot of money and they didn’t sell as they should’ve sold. And there was a downturn in the economy, people weren’t buying them, or buying into them, so that was a disaster, and they didn’t come out of that well. And then they started a Rural Bank building for Fletcher’s in Munroe Street, and they didn’t have the final signature when they started; the plans were drawn and I think they wanted to work, so they started that, and then the downturn in the economy forced Fletcher’s to pull out of that one. And so we got out fast, and got what we could get out; but they went broke two years later. [Chuckle] Yeah. But they all started again individually in their own little way.

And they were probably quite happy with that in the end?

In the end, yeah, yeah – that’s right. Yeah, we got too big, that was the trouble. When we did Broadlands in town, the car park building, that was supposed to have four floors of car parks. The council said they’d buy the four floors off us when we finished, but the council changed and the new council said, “Why would we? We’ve got two car parks there that you’ve built. You’ll have to let the locals park there; why would we want to spend the money on them?” We said, “We had an agreement”, and they said, “No, not with this council.” So we were stuck with that one.

It’s a wonder you and Lyal didn’t become councillors …

Yeah, [chuckle] yeah. Yeah, so … oh, they treated us rough! Argh! Gosh.

But what really started Lyal and I off in a big way was State houses when they started building them, rows and rows and rows of them. And we first got a contract for just a couple, and we got our pricing right; and then we got about six and then we got twelve, or it might’ve been thirteen, along Riverbend Road in a long row. Those days we were quite young; we were only in our like, early thirties, late twenties; and to have a big contract like that and to be paying off, you know, and working Saturday mornings and long days knowing you’d get paid every month; and doing the pricing right, we gradually got ahead. That’s what built us up quickly, and in the end we built fifty-one of them.

That’s a terrific number.

Yeah, it is, yeah. You know, we were quite young still.

Pam, your wife, did she work with the company at all?

Yeah, well what happened … what helped us a lot too, was Tucks’ Timber Company started around [in] Corunna Bay. And they consisted of about three or four returned servicemen, and they managed to buy some bush off the Māoris on the Taupō Road. And they produced native timber; and they got Corunna Bay and built a big machine shop there and did weatherboards and flooring and all the rest … the mouldings and things. And we had got into the State houses then, and they came to us and said, “Look, we want more capital in our business, but if you would come up with £5,000 you could have a share of the company and get preferential treatment; we’d guarantee everything you wanted, always, and we’d give you a regular fifteen per cent discount.” Well the discounts – the maximum you ever got was about five percent. So Dad came up with a guarantor, and we borrowed more money from the bank. And the bank manager was [chuckle] good to us luckily, and we got these shares and they saw us right through – yeah, right through our joinery life too, ‘til timber ran out; and then pine came in so Tucks had to close down, and then the situation changed. But that got us going really; helped us win contracts, and helped us make a profit of course.

‘Cause even if your margin’s not big, you needed to make a profit …

Yeah, well we only planned on five per cent, but we went ten per cent on carpentry, and we went five per cent on subbies. And after a while I realised that the way to make money was to go hard for the big jobs where there was a lot of subbies, and you got guaranteed five per cent from all those people, and you had very little carpentry inputs yourself; like a big wool store or something – you got foundation, and then the steel frame went up; you put some girts around, sheathed it, and that was it. And so the subbies do a big proportion of the money factor and you had five per cent on them; and even if you lost a little bit on your own carpentry work, you had that cushion there. That’s what we went hard for all the time, and with the gain on the likes of Tucks Timber, things like that …

Then after a while John Bridgeman started pre-mix concrete, and he came to us and said, “Well, you’re quite big builders – we’ll give you a discount.” And we had a very good rapport with him too, always, in the likes of [the] grandstand, and things like the Courthouse and big concrete jobs like that; we got a good discount too, off John. Some of the other builders like Mackersey would’ve got the same amount, but they would’ve had travelling time, you see, every day. You had to pay your men travelling time, so we didn’t in Napier so we had a cushion.

I think we’d better knock off …

Okay. So thank you very much, Syd; been a very good interview. Thank you.

This is a continued interview with Sydney Watters on 6th September 2022, and today he’s going to talk about some of the buildings that he has done around Napier. Okay, Sydney.

Okay. Well one of the things we were just talking about is the Westpac Bank. The bank manager of a small bank, Commercial Bank of Australia in Hastings Street, came to us and asked us to do an extension which we completed satisfactorily. Then he came back a bit later and said, “I want a bit on the back end, and a second storey”, so we did that. And then two or three years later he came to us again and he said, “Look, we’re expanding”; and he said, “can you really find a site around [Napier] and do a development for us, and get an architect and build a building, and we’ll lease it off you. If you can come up with a project, could you have a go at that?” I said, “Wonderful!” So I went walking around the block, and I sighted opposite the Post Office an old Custom House building. It was a timber building built last [nineteenth] century, you know; it’d be one of the very early buildings in Napier that hadn’t burnt down in the fire. And it was still there, it was a timber building, and it was [in] reasonabl[y] good shape. But it had a café lady on the ground floor only and the rest of it was empty, but this café had a lease running for three or four years or something like that. She was doing a roaring trade being centre of the town really, and a very good operator, and she said she wasn’t going to move no matter what because she had a lease. So that was a bit of a problem, but anyway we did a deal finally, and I went to Paris Magdalinos and got him to design a building – the Westpac Bank that’s there now. And Wellington guys came up and had a look and they said, “Oh, wonderful – how much would that cost to lease?” And we said so much, and we thought, ‘Oh well, that’s a marvellous investment and we’ll borrow the money from the bank, [chuckle] build the thing and lease it back to them.’ And we had enough equity to get to get a loan you see, to do that. Anyway, blow me – we had the thing done and just about finished, and then the Commercial Bank was bought out by Westpac. And Westpac came to us and said, “Look, we’re not going to go ahead with that because these buildings – we own them. The only way that we will come there into that building – otherwise we’ll go somewhere else – is to own it.” So we had no option but to sell the blimmin’ thing, and so we lost [chuckle] a very good thing, and after all our work. [Chuckle] So things happened, you know, and that was one of our bad things that happened. But anyway, we’ve got pictures of the bank in here somewhere. So that was the Westpac Bank. That was a drawing that we submitted to the bank from Paris – he did it in colour and everything, too – to sell the project to them. [Showing photographs] That’s part of the new bank.

[Rummaging through files; interference on microphone]

Other things that happened that I probably haven’t elaborated very much on are these buildings. When we were building for Rothman’s down at the Port, we had a big structure. But the good thing about a lot of these buildings we built, we had Napier Glass Company, we had NuLook Aluminium Company, and we had Consolidated Joinery, so we were able to use all those facilities as subbies [subcontractors] when we got these jobs. So we were actually helping other companies get ahead when we won a contract, because we got a very good price from them, of course. We still had to make a profit with them, but we were able to branch [tap] into Napier Glass, NuLook Aluminium Windows, Consolidated Joinery – that was the biggest joinery company in the North Island at one stage. They were making kitchens for Wellington, Tauranga, Auckland, and we had about five ladies designing kitchens, computer-wise, in Consolidated Joinery, and they got bigger and bigger and bigger. So by Lyal and I just starting building the odd house, it sort of went more and more.

[Showing photographs]

The Westpac Bank – we had to shift the lady that was in the front round the corner there, into an old building that was on the back site in Hastings Street, and that’s there now … still there. And that’s what it looked like, and we put a new front on it to make it look better. But that lady that was round in the old building that we pulled down, we shifted round to here.

So you had to shift that original building?

This building was in Hastings Street anyway, but the original building in Dickens Street that we pulled down, it was a timber building. I don’t think I’ve got any drawings on it here … no.

Sydney, you also were involved with the Rothman’s building?

Well what happened there is that … Peter Tait was Mayor of Napier and Dad was Town Clerk. And Peter Tait’s father had a fowl run; chickens and eggs he sold, out at Meeanee. You know the old church down Meeanee Road there?

Yes.

Just about another road down towards the river … there was a short road from Meeanee Road down to the river; but he was down there, and he had this very old house; it’d be about 1890s or something like that on the site. And he had some old fowl runs there, and they were all run down and the buildings were pretty rusty. And Peter Tait came to Dad one day – and Lyal and I had only just started on push bikes; we were doing jobbing work, and I don’t think we’d even had our first house built by then – and he asked whether we could demolish his fowl runs and clear the site, and he was going to lease it out to somebody else; he was an old man, probably in his eighties or something like that. And so we said we’d do that. We didn’t have a truck even then, so we biked out there with our sledgehammers and a few tools, and cut them down and knocked them out. And I said to Lyal, “Look, Lyal, we’re going to build a joinery factory in due course somewhere down the line.” “We’re going to do that?” he said. So I said, “Okay – look, there’s a lot of iron here. It’s a bit rusty – some of it’s not bad though.” I said, “A lot of it’s just ready for the dump.” But the timber was all just borer-ridden, not tanalised or anything, you know, it was just pine, and it was had it. So we built a big fire and burnt it all, and got rid of the timber. And we sledge-hammered and broke up the thin concrete slabs and things he had there, and piled it up and dug a great big hole in the ground by hand and shoved them in there and buried them, [chuckle] and got rid of them – cleared the site anyway, so he was happy. Yeah, but we had this pile of iron there and I said to Lyal, “Well look – let’s save all the good sheets and when we finally get enough money together to buy a section …” Because a builder has to store a bit of timber and bits of pieces; you’ve got to have a shed to put stuff at, you know, you get a concrete mixer and some barrows and all sorts of things, and gradually acquire more and more gear. So we ultimately had to do that. So we did that and we acquired our first section over in Onekawa when they were developing new land for factories. We got one of the first factories right next to Holt’s timber yard, and that was very handy to get supplies from, you know, right next door; that was good, and we developed this factory.

I was always good at drawing plans because I’ve got to do this sort of thing – that’s one of my drawings I did very recently. We’ve just developed an area in here and I got a new tenant for there; we divided it up into things like that. Anyway, they’re starting in another month; so I’m still doing bits and pieces like that.

Anyway, Lyal said to me, “Well look, can you draw a plan on this factory site?” Which I did, and he said, “Hell, that’s a flimsy building – those trusses are forty foot wide and the thing’s eighty foot long.” He said, “The thing’ll fall down!” I said, “No. I’ve copied …” I walked round town and I looked at a garage in town that used to be a mechanical garage, just a two-man mechanics thing. It’s where the first Countdown building is now – used to be a motor garage there. So I went in there and I saw these timber trusses and they were quite lightly built and they were spanning about forty metres.

Well we finally got approval for this very light factory. When I took it into the building inspector for a plan he said, “That won’t hold up, Syd.” I said “Look, come with me round to Andy Dykes’ workshop just opposite the railway station, and have a look with me”, and he did. And he hopped in my car and I drove him round there; we went in there and he said, “Oh”, he said, “that’s standing up all right, and it’s probably been there about twenty or thirty years.” He said, “That’s not even sagging.” I said, “Well that’s sufficient; we’ll copy that. And that’s what I’ve drawn.” And he said, [chuckle] “Okay – tick.”

So we built these trusses and things bit by bit in between jobs, stacked them in the corner over there, put sheets of iron over the top with a few bits of concrete on them, you know, to protect them from the weather a bit. Finally we built a workshop, but all the sheeting on the outside and the roof was corrugated iron for nothing, [that] we got from Peter Tait’s father, and because it was going a little bit rusty here and there we got the spray painter to spray on bitumen silver paint. And it was still there ‘til it was pulled down by Holt’s later; they bought us out when we shifted. So we got our workshop for very little really, and built it bit by bit, so that was our first joinery.

And then we saved like anything and got a Bedford truck – like that, it was. It was a dual-wheel five-tonner Bedford with a tray on the back that tipped. Anyway, these things here … I came up with that idea there, and we patented those. And Lyal, my partner, was more mechanical than I was but I was full of ideas, and it was my idea to do this – build a scaffold truck that we could go down, load all the stuff on plus all the tools and all the materials, and work at different heights; and then drive around and do buildings.

Sydney, are you saying that you actually have the patent …

We had the world patent for that.

… for this amazing scaffolder truck?

Yeah. We had ten of those throughout New Zealand. Look, that’s all the branches we had.

And is that it’s official name, a Mobile Working Platform …

Yeah, yeah.

… truck? And you actually invented that?

I actually invented it. What happened is that I was thinking about one of these buildings that for Rothman’s we had to do, and it was a high building. [Rummaging for photo] Oh no, that’s the grandstand. [Main grandstand built at McLean Park] That gives a bit of an idea of the grandstand, the height of the thing. [Chuckle] We had to buy a crane to do it. Anyway, [chuckle] you can see how big the grandstand is; how high they are.

So you used the truck when you built that Harrison’s [Harris] stand?

It was really the Rothman’s [showing photos] … Paris Magdalinos; he’s died now a few years ago, but that was the stand, you see.

Our Masonic Village in Taradale …

So you built the Masonic Village?

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. These are all buildings we did – that’s the bank, with the glass and the stone[?work?]; that’s the bank again; oh, there we are, that’s Rothman’s now – see Rothman’s, inside there they had all the tobacco manufacturing machinery, and they were on a timber floor and the roof was rather low down. And Peter Tait was a director, and he was Mayor of Napier and he knew what we were doing in the way of other buildings. And he came to us and said, “Look, we have an engineer working for us that’s [who’s] a designer, he’s got enough confidence to design alterations for us as far as the Council and engineering-wise and everything; and we want to raise the whole roof up and put a new concrete floor in – take out the timber one, put a concrete floor in and raise it up. Make a bigger work area, but keep the thing going all the time … keep all the machinery going. Can you do it?” It was [a] $40 million job! So, “We’ll do it, yeah.” [Chuckles] So we did that progressively; we had to do bits at a time, and the machinery had to be held up there with all sorts of [chuckle] props and things, [chuckle] but we got there in the end.

[Looking for photo] That’s the State houses there – we built a lot of them, fifty-two of them I think, altogether. We built the EIT [Eastern Institute of Technology] out there too, of course.

Did you?

Yeah.

How long ago was that done?

We started … we were the first one out there. This is a big one, Broadlands in town – that never happened. And that never happened. [Showing building designs] That never happened …

Yes, but this is Broadlands City Centre …

Yeah, that’s right – that was what was planned – that; tower block on top and four layers of car parks. We’ve only got two – we’ve only got over to there, so that’s not built. What happened was the economy tanked, and you know, everybody was going broke. The land agents had all these shops inside there all leased; everything was signed. And we went to the bank and they couldn’t raise enough money to build it. So we found out that Broadlands … Selwyn Cushing – you know Selwyn Cushing?

I do, yes.

Of Hastings? Yeah, you know, he was a very wealthy businessman, and he was an accountant, and he was financial director of Broadlands Finance Company in Auckland. We heard through our banker or accountant that I could go to Selwyn and see whether they would come up with enough money to join us in a shareholding company to own this building. Pretty big time for us – I mean, we’re only small fry, really. So … well, it happened. In the end we went with Selwyn Cushing and Bruce Judge; Bruce Judge was one of Brierley’s top men too, and he and Lyal and I went to the Council with this idea of them owning the car parks after we built them, and then letting them out to the public … like, you know, for extra land so that the public wouldn’t be all over the streets; and would be in Central Napier. And they said, “Oh, that’s a marvellous idea!” And we said, “We can’t establish exactly the cost that they’ll cost to finish.” Because prices were going like they are now – they were escalating quite quickly. We said it would be approximately so much – that was the present-day price with all the concrete and boxing and everything, labour. But they said, “Okay – Mr Chamberlain is a quantity surveyor in town, independent, and he can assess the value. You can produce all your invoices when you finish the job; and the quantities will be scheduled – the floors, the boxing and steels and everything – and we will buy the concrete floors off you and help finance the thing. And the Council will then own the car parks and they can lease out as they want to, to the public or whatever.” And the idea was that they’d have a couple of lifts built in here – takes people to car parks and up to buildings up here, and they would all be leased out to various people around town as offices, which you know, was needed a bit at the time. But anyway, the land agents managed to let all the shops down below, and … this is Broadlands Arcade.

Sydney, was that the first real high-rise building in Napier?

Well it was going to be, but it didn’t happen, no. And also there was a lot of objection about this mall happening from the owners of the shops in Emerson Street, because after the [1931] ‘quake, you know, the fire went through Napier, mostly the buildings and single brick walls – they fell down. And all the water mains were broken and the fire brigade had nothing to fight the fires with anyway, so the town was wiped really.

And then after that the Depression in the [19]30s; the shopkeepers were very game, they managed to rebuild Napier. After that they got tenants ultimately for Emerson Street, but there was nothing much more than Emerson Street in the way of shops. But they didn’t ever move the rentals up with inflation – there wasn’t much inflation, not like now. And when we came to do this we could see that the cost of building was miles more; we’d have to get more for the shops – a lot more than what they were paying for rental in Emerson Street. But there was a need because there wasn’t anywhere else to go, so we managed to lease all those shops.

But when the economy tanked, all the people there except … only about three of them … Alexander’s Menswear was one of them that stayed there, and a jeweller stayed there too; there was about three of them that managed to stay there and they did move in; but the rest reneged on their leases. They said, “Well, you’re no good suing us, we’ve got no money. We’ll declare bankruptcy anyway, so you won’t get anything. We’ll have to pull out of our leases.” So we had the job – we’d built two floors by then. Anyway, Broadlands came to us and said, “Well look, we’re going to go broke; we’ve got to finish something. In other words, we’ve got to lease it but you’ve got no money going to come in, so you’ll have to sell your shares to us.” So Broadlands said, “Well we’ll buy them from you for $1 each.” So Lyal and I had to sell our shares in the whole place for $1 [each]. But Selwyn came to us and said, “Well look, we might as well pull out now – go home and stay home, and build something else somewhere else. Go broke.” He said, “Well that’s no good to us either.” He said, “I’ll tell you what – you build the thing up to the two floors, stop there and complete the shops, and we’ll pay you ten percent” – which was blimmin’ good money on what it cost to do that – “and we’ll pay you $1 for your shares.” So we said, “Okay, we’ll get out.” [Chuckle] So we did, so we built those two, like is there now, for ten percent, so that was good money, real good money, and no worries. And then they got tenants ultimately, and they were big enough to have enough flex with their money to wear it.

But now it’s Chinese owned. Yeah, and the people that own it have only land-banked it. Apparently they’ve got so many shops and malls and things all over the world they don’t need to push it even; you know, it’s pretty downgraded at the moment. They’ve earthquake strengthened it a bit more to make it even stronger, which it is – that’s all done, and there’s a few shops there, but you know, it’s not much in the interior, not like it was to start with – it was quite flash. So that was that scenario. So we get a lot of ups and downs in life.

Sydney, would you like to talk about the wine tanks …

Ooh yeah, yeah …

… that you built in Faraday Street?

Yeah, yeah. Well when Basil Johnson – he was only about two years older than us, and he’d been to the war – came back, he had had experience in France or somewhere of Freyssinet who were inventors of reinforced [pre-stressed] concrete. And they invented the structural steel wire; they’d tension it like piano wire between some real big strong piles in the ground in the factory, and they had a steel structure each end and you stretched a whole lot of wires between the two. And you had hydraulic jacks that jacked them out. We had two hundred-ton jacks, and they jacked all these wires tight to a certain tension; and then you boxed in between and poured your concrete and let it set. Then you cut the wires, picked up the concrete slabs and took them [to] the job and erected them, and then the slabs were put up in lines. And the slabs had ducts through them from side to side, and you threaded more tension wires between them. All these slabs were erected in lines and tensioned from one end to the other and held together; then you put a mastic seal between the joints to seal them, but they had to be very smooth and grouted nicely, and pulled tight. The idea is that it’s extremely strong concrete and extremely strong structure, and Basil got onto this idea. And there’s a French crowd, Freyssinet – it started in Lower Hutt, and he took us down there and showed us and he gave us a book on what it was all about and how to do it. And we just read it up and did it. And [chuckle] nobody else would have it on.

And was this for Williams?

This was for William’s [McWilliam’s] Wines, Tom McDonald; he was a famous winemaker out in Greenmeadows there, you know, and he was the one that [who] went to Basil Johnson and said that he wanted some wine tanks built. He didn’t know anything about this lot though, you know – we knew nothing about it either, and Basil didn’t know much about it either, except he’d read about it, and he knew that they were down there and he arranged for us to go down. And he arranged for them to supply all the gadgets and things. And he designed a bed for us to do the stressing on, so Powell Fenwick and Johnson engineers got a bit out of the factory.

But we had to get another piece of land, build another factory, build an eighty-foot bed to do the stressing, so it was quite a big outlay, and it didn’t ever pay off actually. It started us though, with the knowledge that we could take on like the grandstand and big, huge structures later; it gave us the inclination, or the know-how, that we could do it, you know?

Sydney, do you know the volume that those tanks would hold?

I could pretty well … they’d hold, I would say … I could probably find drawings upstairs of those; they’re building over the top now.

The tanks are still there underneath the buildings?

There’s a floor over top of them, and a factory built over the top where they did the bottling.

This is in Faraday Street?

In Faraday Street. If you go up Faraday Street, you come to a flat area about two hundred metres up; you go up and around the corner, and there’s a flat area there. And in behind there there’s quite a big building which was their laboratory for wine testing and everything like that, and then behind that there’s quite a big building with these tanks underneath. They put a floor over the top of the tanks, and manholes in them of course, to pump the wine in and out and to be cool – that was the idea – and not take up any room on the site. And then over the top they had all their bottling plant and you know, conveyor belts and everything like that. And then they had a lab[oratory] built at the front across the street area.

So these are huge waterproof holding tanks …

Yeah, yeah.

How many do you think you built?

Probably ‘bout five …

Still empty …

… and they’re about as long as this house, and about from here to that wall long, and about as deep as the ceiling to the floor.

Huge!

Huge, huge – they were like a great huge swimming pool. And then there’s a floor over the top of them, and then there’s this big store over the top.

Did they ever use it for storing wine?

They did, of course, ‘til they outgrew it. And then McWilliam’s Wines … Tom sold the whole thing off when he was a very old man, to some other big wine making people – I don’t know which crowd bought it out, but Tom sold out when he got too old to do it any more. And then, I think, the YMCA or some other crowd like that leased the building in the end, when it was just vacant, and they just had second hand clothes up there or something like that. [Salvation Army Opportunity Shop] It was a storage area so there’s nothing under the ground, but it could be [a] store for water, as I say.

Sydney, you [were] involved with Paris quite a bit, and you’ve just told me that you really helped him get started in business, so I think that’s of interest.

Yeah, we went to him and said to him, “Well, the government have come to us and want a building built in Bower Street. And there’s old houses down Bower Street, but they want another government building built for the Labour Party office.” They wanted a ‘design and build’, so I said to Lyal, “Well look, we need more work, we’d better do something here.” And he said, “Well, what do you suggest?” And I said, “Well look, Paris Magdalinos … I can see that he’s a really arty designer working for the Ministry of Works.” We had just done the EIT out there, and it was a pretty plain building, the first workshop block; and I went in to pick up the documents to start the work, Paris said to me, “Well here they are, Syd”, he said, “my name is Paris Magdalinos.” I could tell [chuckle] … the Greek guy, you know. And he said, “Look, that’s rubbish what they’ve produced there”, he said. “These architects are so plain Jane.” He said, “This is what I’ve proposed, but they wiped it because it’s too elaborate.” And I said, [chuckling] “That’s a beautiful building, Paris.” He said, “They don’t want to know.” He said, “I can do better than these other architects”, he said, “I started my time as a joiner for Angus [Construction] as a fifteen-year-old; I didn’t go to university.” He said, “I came to the Ministry of Works when I left school at fifteen, and started architectural drawing.” And he was a beautiful artist, [?] artist, and he became a timber joiner. And then he decided to get out of joinery and go to doing architectural draughting at the Ministry of Works, and he got a job there. And he came up, you know, just as a draughtsman; and then he was so good he got accepted for university. He went to finish his degree at university and then he went back to the Ministry of Works.

And then the top man there came to us and said, “Look, can you do a Watters & Jackson building for the Labour Division in Bower Street?” We said, “Yes, yeah, we can do something.” So I went to Paris and I said “Look, could you do something here Paris – we’ll design a building, an arty building, a practical building, that we can quote on and submit a plan; and if we win the contract could you do it in your spare time?” He said “Yeah.” He loved that; he said, “That’ll make you some more money”, and he said, “that would be great.” And anyway, [chuckling] we won it. I said “Look, if we don’t get the work you don’t get paid for your drawings.” He said, “Fair enough; you don’t get paid for quoting either”, so he said, “fair enough – we’ll give it a go.” So we got our first building, and he did that in his spare time. And we finished that one and then they came back and said, “We want another one next door.” And then they came back again … “We want another one across the road, another one.” We built four buildings. He designed the whole buildings and we owned them. Lyal’s family’s got one lot and I’ve got the other lot on the other side now; we’ve still got them, and this drawing here is part of one of them and there’s another building here. So that gives us a good income.

Wilket House is a [an] accountants’ building at the bottom of Shakespeare Road, but it was built by Williams & Kettle who were [stock and] station agents for farmers in Napier for many, many years; they used to do the bookkeeping for farmers and sell their stock and work as bankers. And they came to us through Natusch Architects, and called tenders for this three-storey building at the bottom of Shakespeare Road.

But they came to us because prior to this … years prior when Lyal and I only had about five men … they came to us and said they wanted a big wool store down the Port. And we tendered for that and got the contract, and that was so satisfactorily concluded that they came to us later and said they wanted a big office building built, and could we tender? And we tendered and got it. And the first computer in Napier was in the basement – a huge, huge contraption, mechanical contraption, to do all the bookwork for you know, perhaps a hundred farmers or something like that; and now it’s all been bought out by an accounting firm.

Anyway, but Williams & Kettle started because the architect came to us to start with when Lyal and I were just on push bikes; and he wanted a house built for Reverend Carr out by the Showgrounds. And there’s a Māori pā out there, and this Reverend Carr was an Anglican minister for Waiapu and he looked after the Māori interests out there. Kingwell Malcolm was the name of the architect and he came to us because he heard we could build okay houses. And we only had push bikes at the time – didn’t even have anything else but push bikes; built a few houses though, and being joiners we’re fussy, [chuckle] and did a perfect job at the right price. Anyway, we did a satisfactory job for Reverend Carr out there, and then they came to us a few years later and said they wanted this big wool store built around the Port. We said, “God! It’s a big job.” We only had about five men working for us then, but we were determined to get it because I said to Lyal, “Look, we’ll never make any money in life just doing jobbing work. We’ll only make money by doing massive amounts of concrete in a day, or putting up a lot of framing, or doing rather little houses even.” There’s a lot of intensive work in houses sometimes, particularly architects’ houses. But you can make money out of pouring hundreds of metres of concrete a day and putting up big steel frames with cranes and things like that; and using subbies because we get five percent profit on the subbies, or whatever we chose we could get at the time. And the more subbies you’ve got the more money you’ll make in the end, because if you come a bit of a gutser with the weather or something and you lose time, you don’t make it up unless you’ve got other means of making it up. So you can lose money quite easily as a builder of course, so to have that cushion you’ve got to have big jobs really, and put through a lot of stuff.

So anyway, we got this big wool store to do round the Port, and they said, “How are you going to manage it?” It was a very high structure, and I said to Lyal again – this was before I invented the hoist truck – “Let’s get a scaffold frame and put pipes out to the ground so it won’t fall over; put channel steel, two lengths of steel” … a length of steel’s from about here to the wall long … “get four bits of those, levelled down like railway lines, put the wheels on the scaffold and wheel it along like that, right round the building.” Had to go up all the ladders of course; that was before we did the hoist truck.

Sydney, do you think that was the first mobile scaffold?

[Chuckle] Possibly.

Are those wool stores that you built still there?

It’s now the Anchorage Motel. You know, they’ve changed it all and made a lot of flatettes in it, and it’s still round there. Yeah. So it’s still the same structure underneath it all but they’ve put all these rooms and everything, and new faҫade on it, and new roof on it and everything.

Originally your wool store …

But because it was so satisfactorily done they came to us and asked us to do that, so one led to another. And then after that the managing director got us to build probably one of the flashest houses. Mr Mowatt was his name, and he was a Central Hawkes Bay farmer, and he came to us later and said “Look, [I] want a big flash house built at Westshore”, and it was the flashest house out there in those days. It had a house behind for the family … two-bedroom house … and a swimming pool in between; and he’d fly his little plane from Southern Hawkes Bay to the airport, [and] walk across the road to his house there when he had meetings in town here. Then he’d walk across the road, get in his little plane [and] fly back to the farm down by Te Aute. But it all came through Reverend Carr’s house out by the Showgrounds; because it was satisfactorily done Kingwell Malcolm came to us and said could we do the wool store. [Chuckle]

Is the house at Westshore still there?

Well [of] course it is … yeah, course it is. Yeah – it’s right down towards the gap.

Sydney, you’ve told me that when you and Lyal started you didn’t have any real transport other than your bikes, so explain how you got to your different jobs.

Well, Lyal’s parents had parted company; he had a father out in Taradale and [microphone interference] he had a mother in Georges Drive. He lived sometimes with the mother and sometimes with the father. His mother had a little car with a boot in it, and he used to borrow that. We used to put our tools in the back and cart it to the job, and then leave them at the house we were working in, doing alterations or whatever; then just bike to the jobs each day and bike home again, and get carriers to deliver the goods to us.

Mum and Dad had just built a new house up in Gladstone Road, and Lyal lived in Georges Drive. But Wally [Atherfold] had a house to build and he had only about ten men, but he had quite a lot of work on, and he said to Lyal and I, “Look, you’ve just come back from Australia”, and he said, “I’m loaded with work, but this accountant at the Inland Revenue wanted a little house built in Anzac Avenue.” He said, “Would you like to tender?” He said, “I can’t do it in time ‘cause they want it now … started straight away. Can you do it?” We said, “We’re doing [a] little jobbing work; yeah, we’ll have a go at it.” So we had to tender for it, but we missed out.

Well Lyal helped me with the first quote – it was the first house we quoted on – and I was pretty meticulous with my maths as you’ve got to be. And you know, I’m still doing quotes; like this sort of thing, you know, you take off all the concrete and you get the rate, and you get the excavation, the size of it, the number of cubic metres and the rate and whatever, and you make a quote up, you know, being particular. So I was always fussy at maths so I knew that that was the guts of it. You had to do it; you had to start somewhere, you know, you had to be right there otherwise you got nowhere. So Lyal was pretty lousy at maths, but he was a perfectionist at engineering things; like, I came up with the idea, and I said, “Look Lyal, can you make that happen?” “Yeah, love to.” And I’d get out on the job, and I’d be working with the men, pushing the job. [Chuckle] And we’d make that happen; he was good at that, you know.

So that house in Anzac …

Yeah, we built that by hand – didn’t have any skill saws, didn’t have anything at all; hammers and nails. But you know, if you get a pile of timber and you get two saw stools, and another guy with two saw [stools], drag a bit of timber there, you square it, cut it off; if it’s right, cut it there. You can cut a house load of framing, all the studs, a hundred and twenty studs, say, in a day. People say, “Oh that’s a lot”, but if you’ve got a decent sharp saw – and we used to sharpen about lunchtime again – you can do it if you’re fit enough, you can keep sawing all day. And you get there. It’ ll be amazing, actually, if you keep working.

And then when you finished you’d bike home again from your job?

We were lucky enough, we’d build a little shed like a garage, first thing [when] we got there. Part of the house is usually a thing with a little garage on the site; well we’d build that for a start, then we had somewhere to put our stuff at night, and the tools could stay there you see, and then they’d lock it up. There weren’t thieves around in those days, like now – I mean, if you leave a great big timber pile outside now, half of it will be gone.

And Sydney, explain how you got to Hastings for your work?

Oh, well we used to catch the bus at half past seven, or it might’ve been seven o’clock, at the railway depot at the bottom of Shakespeare Road. We’d hop on the railway bus – it’d take us right to the site out there, and we’d hop off at the nearest stop at Waipātu Pā out there it was called, and work all day and hop on the bus at night and come home.

And then bike home from the bus stop?

Yeah, well that was no … it was just up the hill up to Gladstone Road, so it wasn’t far to go, so …

I think builders today would be amazed to find that that’s how you and Lyal got to work.

But the first house we went to we got down Anzac Avenue; that was a real story too. We put our ties on and dressed up decently and went to see Mr Harold Holt. [Grandson of original Robert Holt] There was only Odlin’s and Holt’s timber merchants in Napier at the time, nobody else, and we went along to see Mr Holt. He was always a man in an office there with a collar and tie on and a suit and everything, you know. And we had to open an account and we said “Look, we’ve got a house to build.” He said “Oh yeah, so have a lot of other people.” [Chuckle] We said, “Look, this is a list of the material we need; can we start an account?” He said, “Well I don’t know you boys at all”, he said, “you’re obviously pretty young.” We were only in our twenties, you know … early twenties. He said, “I’ve got five builders that I produce five houses for.” He said, “I do five houses a week from Ohurakura, and I’ve only got one timber mill and that’s flat out on the Taupō Road.” And he said, “I’m happy producing joinery timber and drying it all, and running my own joinery factory, and supplying these five main builders in Napier because they’re established builders.” There was Angus, and there was Atherfold, and Davis and Mr Diack and … anyway, and we were only youngsters, you see.

But the soldiers had come back from the war, and they were getting married pretty fast and State houses were starting too, and so the builders were pretty busy. And Harold said, “No, I can’t supply you boys, you’ll have to go somewhere else.” We said, “There’s only Odlin’s, and Odlin’s can’t supply us either.” He said, “Well bad luck – you’d better go and work for some other builder then.” Huh! So we stalked off and we went home; and Mum said, “How did you get on?” I said “No good – we can’t build a house, we can’t do anything. We’ll have to go and work for Wally Atherfold again, and Lyal will have to go back to Davis.” You know, both were both chasing us to go back to work for them, ‘cause I could make joinery as good as any of the joiners, you know, when I left. And they were getting pretty old, a lot of them, because a lot of them were too old to go to the war. But they were hard men – they’d been through the Depression, and no work; and in those days – your father would know all about it – they had to line up for jobs often, and the foreman [would] – “You, you, you, you today.” And day by day they’d give them jobs to do, and if they didn’t work blimmin’ hard they weren’t engaged the next day. But they arrived every day with their push bikes, with their tools over the carrier at the back, and it was day by day stuff. So these men were the men that employed Lyal and I – God, they were hard men! But they knew their job, [chuckle] you know. They shovelled all day, flat tack; not like today, you know … shovelled all day. They were fit too. Anyway … but boy! They couldn’t speak English, they used to swear all the time, the language was shocking mostly. [Chuckle] Mum and Dad didn’t even swear at home, [chuckles] and oh, it was an eye-opener. But anyway, they’re the guys that Lyal and I served our time with, they were hard.

Anyway, the soldiers came back [and] got married; State houses started big time, we got into them – we got into rows of them and we were bashing out houses like anything after a while. And we were starting pre-cutting what’s more, so we had a pretty good run. We were just lucky in life that I was just too young to go to the war, and I served my time during the war years under a very good tradesman. And then things started booming when the soldiers came back and the economy started going well too. Napier was expanding after the Depression.

I think you and Lyal were very good workers and quite creative, so credit to yourselves [you both].

Sydney, would you like to talk about how your joinery company came into being?

Yes okay. Well Lyal and I had both been trained as carpenter/joiners. I was really five years inside a joinery company [and] about one year outside doing carpentry, building houses; and Lyal was fundamentally about three or four years as a carpenter and a couple of years inside a joinery company. So we both had skills in trades, and I’d got my Advanced Trade Certificate at night school which nobody else seemed to go for, and so we were able to foot it with other builders okay. And when we started off we were getting hold-ups with joinery suppliers. – the bigger builders had a bigger pull on the joinery companies. And there weren’t many joinery companies around because they required a lot of machinery of course, and a lot of outlay, and you’ve got to have pretty-skilled tradesmen; and it was easy to get carpenters and joiners. But however, we were getting houses to build and we were having hold-ups all the time getting our joinery, so we thought, ‘We’ve got to get our own joinery factory.’ So we saved all our money and gradually built this factory out of second hand iron and bits of timber, [chuckle] and did the concrete floor little bit by little bit on wet weather days, and finally got a shed built. And then we finally got machinery, one after another, as we could afford them. We bought brand new English top grade joinery machinery … it’d last a lifetime, sort of stuff, and it was a big outlay of course.

And then of course, when we were able to start the actual manufacture we had to have dry timber. So we were in with Tucks [Tuck Brothers Limited] then and we could get our dry timber all right, but we also had to stack a lot of timber in the yard and fillet stack it so that we had reserves of all the different sizes when we needed it. We then proceeded to try and get joiners; we didn’t have much luck for a while, we got just one or two good ones, and had to employ boys and train them up, so it was pretty hard going. We finally got a very good young joiner, Ray Norrie, that [who] worked for Holt’s. We’d heard he was one of the best apprentices they’d ever had. Holt’s had a big fire and the joinery factory burnt down, and Harold Holt decided not to build another factory because he was getting on in years a bit and he didn’t have any family to carry on. That played into our hands a bit, and one or two good tradesmen became free; Bill Ashworth became one of our outside foremen, and we got another joiner for that company.

But anyway after us getting going, we found that the competition was very tough price-wise. We didn’t have quite enough size and we couldn’t turn out … you used to have to turn out dozens and dozens of sashes while you were doing it – mass produce everything as we did here – to make things pay. And of course you had to have quite a lot of work to do that, there’d be two or three house lots there you see. And that had to be repetitious of course, so we were struggling.

But we got onto playing half a round of golf on a Friday afternoon after work; after four o’clock in the summer we’d go out to Waiohiki [Napier Golf Club] and play nine holes, Lyal and I and our foreman and another joiner, John Stitson from Greenmeadows. We were all about the same quality at golf, not very good; but we enjoyed it, and we yarned about things in general.

Ray [Norrie] decided that he would give joinery a go on his own, so he left us. He managed to get onto an old retired joiner in Palmerston North and buy his joinery machinery bit by bit as he could afford it, at a very cheap price, and he built a shed in Cadbury Street and got going in competition to us. Ray was a very good joiner and had a good rapport with all the builders that had been working with us. So some of those builders went to Ray to get joinery in competition to us, and that knocked us back a lot.

And then John Stitson said to us one day, “Look, I’m in real deep trouble”, he said, “I’ve got a huge amount of work.” He had about … oh, fifteen men working for him I suppose, out at Greenmeadows opposite New World – just opposite there next to the panel beater, they built a new big line of factories. Well he had his factory there – it’s been demolished a few years ago – and he made … Beazley Homes I think it was called … joinery for all over New Zealand. John made dozens and dozens of house lots a month and sent his stuff all over the place for Beazley Homes. He got new English immigrants across as very trained joiners; he had got on to the New Zealand Embassy or something like that, and arranged for these Pommies to come across here and work in Napier, and he arranged housing for them and all sorts of things; he was very innovative.

But John had heart trouble coming on and in the end he got, quite quickly, quite bad. He used to sometimes lie down; said, “Look, I’ve got a big pain”, and he would sit down or lie down on the golf course. We’d just hang around and he’d take some pills; he said, “Carry on, carry on, I’ll catch up with you later.” Anyway, we’d hang around and wait, perhaps only quarter of an hour or something, but he’d get up and carry on again. Gosh, he was a gutsy sort of a guy! Anyway, he finally said, “Look, I’ve got to pack it in – will you guys be interested in buying me out?” I said to Lyal, “Well look, we’ve got to do something. I’m making money outside building buildings and housing; you’re losing it in the joinery factory through no fault of yours.” But … didn’t have the size and we didn’t have the men. And we were in deep trouble because the soldiers [were] coming back from the war, things were booming, and we could see that things were going ahead like they are now, you know, in the building industry.

So we decided to form Consolidated Joinery, all go in together. And Ray Norrie in Cadbury Street, he had some bare land next to his factory so we bought the land next door and proceeded to build some more factories there. Sold the old one and sold the one out there a few years later, and ran it all; kept the best machinery, sold off all the surplus and used that as working capital and built up Consolidated. That was very successful, and we had about five ladies in the end designing kitchens, and sometimes one of them would win the title of the Best Kitchen Designer in New Zealand, and you know, that was quite good. Work came to us, so Consolidated grew very big.

Ray was a very conscientious sort of a guy and he worried a lot; and you know, if you’re getting a kitchen built in your house you have to often move out to a motel or something while it’s happening. You know, if kids are there too, all the kids have got to go and take their school … all their clothes and everything, you know, and it’s got to happen just like that. You’ve got to get plumbers, painters, floor coverings, electricians, joinery, it’s all got to go, wham! Well when you’re doing dozens of them, all the time all over the place … Tauranga, Wellington, Auckland, running those jobs … it’s a nightmare.

So Consolidated Joinery was building kitchens all over the country?

No, only in the North Island. We really concentrated on Wellington, Tauranga, Hamilton and Auckland. Got a lot from Auckland of course, [and] round here of course, and they made all our joinery of course. But we got good supply. Ray was manager of the place; and Lyal was working with me building, and Lyal enjoyed that better than joinery. But by then we had Stitson’s Laminated Services, which was a subsidiary making formica bench tops; and we also had Permacraft which was off on the side a bit making furniture. And then we had a spray booth spraying lacquer and finishing the joinery to whatever they wanted … the colours, you know, you could lacquer them all to suit, and they were clever people doing that. They were trained, and they had a special spray booth and everything, so we had it all there.

But Ray said, “Look I can’t do it any more”, he said, “I can’t sleep at night.” He said, “ So much in my head, so much going on; I’ve got to get out.” Lyal was working with me, and he said, “I can’t do it”, he said, “I haven’t got the ability to do it.” He was more a joiner – like a builder type of person, and he was very mechanical. For instance, if I showed him how I concepted that hoist truck and I drew it out for him, and he said, “Leave it to me, I’ll get that sorted.” [Chuckle] So he’d do that, but he wasn’t up to running a big business like that.

It was a big business, wasn’t it?

Well they had over a hundred people working for them. So Ray said, “Look, I’ve got to get out for my health.” He said, “I just can’t do it.” At that stage aluminium started coming in, so Ray said, “Can I buy NuLook off you as my share, and take that? And then you can square me off at that, and that will do me.” So we said, “Okay – well we have to do it”, you know, he was going to walk away otherwise. Anyway, we always had working capital required to run the business and at one stage there at the end, we found that an accountant was ripping us off, and we didn’t know. When computers first came in she was at PriceWaterhouseCoopers as a trained accountant.

Ray’s brother was a schoolteacher and he’d had a nervous breakdown and he’d had to give up teaching for a while. And he got right and Ray said, “Look, come and help me in the office.” He didn’t know anything about joinery and he was [a] terribly arrogant sort of a guy; we didn’t like him at all. But when Ray said he had to get out he sold a lot of his shares to his brother, so we had to inherit him or buy him out. This guy came in, took over the office, didn’t know anything about joinery, wasn’t even practical, and he says, “Look, why are you doing it that way? I want you to do it this way.” They said, “That’s not the right way to do it, that’s not the best way of doing it.” He said, “I’m the boss.” You know, he was one of those – took over. Anyway, he sat down in the big office all day and he had these other people doing all the work; he was a shocker! Anyway, I said to Lyal, “Well look, we’ve got to sort this out somehow.” Lyal said, “Leave it to me, I’ll …” [Chuckle] He couldn’t sort it out.

And meantime, we’d just started NuLook Aluminium Windows and NuLook Windows are a lot easier to make. You get a bit of extrusion, you just hack it out, join the joiners together and it’s coloured the right colour and there’s no planing of sashes, no morticing, no glueing and no dry timber to worry about, you know, you can make them fast. And you get quick turnover, and there’s no trouble provided you make them [the] proper size to start with – you’ve got to make your joinery proper size anyway, so it’s a lot easier. And Ray saw that and he took that over as his share so Ray was gone but we inherited his brother, a total idiot, and he drove us broke in the end.

Oh, did he?

Yeah, he drove us broke.

But how did Lyal manage it?

Well he went over and he couldn’t get into the office even, because there was not even a desk there that he was allocated to and he didn’t know enough about the running of it. And Ian [Norrie] got one of the very brilliant apprentices to come right through into the office to do all the detailing, and this bloke was very, very good, and he was actually running the place but Ian overrode him when he chose to override him, and messed it all up. But anyway, Graham Dickie was the name of this guy, and Graham left there later and went out to run Furnware, making furniture for schools And he was very clever, he kept the thing going. But Lyal decided that what he could do is go over to Stitson Laminated Services. They had a separate building, a big factory, making formica bench tops and other formica work, and they had about fifteen people working there. So Lyal had an office over there and ran that and supervised that, and he also supervised the furniture manufacturing company. That was a subsidiary that had come to us; this guy also had cancer, and he had this Permacraft furniture business and he offered it to us at a bargain price. So we said “Well right – we’ve got a couple of men here that are really good joiners. They can make the stuff.” And we inherited his staff as well, and Lyal ran that place and he ran Stitson Laminated Services. He tried to keep a tag on the joinery company but it got out of control.

Anyway, in the end Ian decided when computers came in that the office would have to go naturally to computers, and Ian wasn’t up to that and he wasn’t prepared to even learn how to use them. And we weren’t either – we were about sixty-five or something at the time, you know. So we were doing what we could do, ordinary maths and things, and we were pushed anyway, just to carry on doing what we were doing, so the thing went haywire really.

We got the books out, a couple of years, and there was hardly any profit in Consolidated Joinery. We thought, ‘Well where the heck is it?’ You know? ‘We’re doing a lot of work – huge lot of work – but the pricing is not sufficient.’

Anyway, one of the head ladies out of the design team who was very, very good at designing kitchens – she had a science degree; she was a university graduate and a clever artist. And she used to quote on very flash kitchens for say, Wellington or Auckland, somewhere like that, and then she’d go down and supervise the actual final installation; absolutely see that it was spotlessly done in the end, and get back. And she did all the sums all the time – the cost of the jobs and what she quoted – and she found that they were making a reasonable profit but the books at the end of the year were separated into the kitchen side of things and the other side of things. Colleen found that there was a gap there of probably £100,000 in one year. That was huge money in those days. And the only logical thing was that it was being siphoned off somewhere, and they found that this lady [accountant] had been … I forget how they copped her, but they got her and she wound up in jail.

[Gasp] Gracious!

But we lost all that money. Anyway, I said to Lyal “Look, this is a bit of a dead loss, Lyal – how about us selling the whole blimmin’ thing up and getting out; and buying some factories and buying some buildings and getting regular rent coming in, and retire from building?” So that’s what we did. Yeah.

But what happened … the same thing happened at Watters & Jackson Builders; you know, the accountant in our office, the quantity surveyor in our office, and the accountant’s brother, senior outside foreman, all came to me one day and said they were starting on their own. I think I told you that. I happened to look round to Lyal, and said, “Look, if they start their own, we’ve got to replace those people. And I’m about sixty-five or something now, and we’ve got to get somebody somewhere to fill those gaps.” And I said, “I’m too old to keep driving on like this every day of the week and every weekend and everything”, you know, you don’t get any rest if you’re a builder. “I’ve had enough.”

So anyway, we decided to do a deal with these other three boys, and we formed a joint company. And then we built the Courthouse as a joint company; we built the Mangaroa Prison, and that was too big for us; I did a deal with John Mackersey on that one and we went half and half; then we retired out of it.

But then our partners were stretched for work sometimes. So we had quite a lot of men then, and we had all the gear required – cranes and all sorts of things, you know – stretching beds and all the rest of it; we had everything required to do any sort of building, and the expertise too. So these boys took over, but to get work they did Lake Edge [Resort] in Taupō as a bit of a spec [speculative] job and sell them when they were completed. But the economy went sick, and they didn’t sell. Pam and I bought five weeks just to help out, and they were good for us for a while; we were able to use those timeshare [weeks] around the world, and give them to Christine and Ray and family to use too, at times.

But anyway, they finally ran up about $2-300,000 debt with a bank overdraft. They didn’t have the work coming in, and the blimmin’ bank manager pulled the plug on them. They would have come out of it if they’d had work. The accountant really stuck his neck out, John Palairet, and he just went along with the bank manager; he didn’t support us and yet we were employing him to do the books, and he knew that we were turning over massive amounts of money when we had jobs – I mean, we were doing constantly … all these jobs are jobs we did, you know a lot of the jobs were jobs they did, you know, golf club … that’s our joinery company, by the way. [Showing photos] That’s the Waiohiki Golf Club; that’s the Reef Motel at Westshore; Firman’s Centre – that was down Pandora Road opposite …

The big marine centre?

Yeah. This is out at the fertiliser works – we had to put that top on while the office was down below here. It was a rotten job because of the weather. And then that’s a little job we did in town in Raffles Street; that’s a service station we built; that’s Telecom, around Corunna Bay. [???] That’s at the bottom of Shakespeare Road, yeah, Wilket House, that’s there now. That’s Williams & Kettle I was talking about, and that’s the Power Board building in there. Anyway these are some of the schools we built. And that’s the Maraekakaho Church, a little job we did out at Maraekakaho, and that was a disaster. [Chuckles] You wouldn’t think a little thing would be a disaster like that, I mean, they’re blimmin’ easy enough to build you’d think, but the architect had specified plywood lining inside and he hadn’t specified thick stuff, it was only about three mil [millimetres] thick. And there was [were] no batts in the wall and because it gets very hot and very cold, the walls had … must’ve been dew and whatever had got in there somehow, and it went all buckled.

But not your fault – the architects …

Not our fault, no, but they said, “You should’ve known as a building expert to talk to me about it, and when my draughtsman made a mistake.” We said, “Well your draughtsman made the mistake, and so what do you want us to do about it?” He said, “Well there’s only one way to satisfy the client and get the job finished”, he said, “you’ll have to rip it off and replace it with thicker stuff.” We said “Yeah, but that’s going to cost a fair bit”, and he said, “Well it has to be done.” So we did it, put the bill in, and they never paid.

[Gasp] Oohh …

He said, “The church people’ve got no money.” I said, “Well look, you made the mistake.” But we didn’t like to put too much pressure on Martin Yeoman because we knew he would stop sending us work; you know how it is [chuckles] … you look after them a bit.

Sydney, would you tell me about the yacht you built please?

Yeah. Well what happened was that I had always wanted to own a little yacht. So P class yachts were popular at the time but they were just going out of P class into other classes. And Napier Sailing Club had [was] quite a strong club, and I got onto a builder friend who was just getting married; he wasn’t able to sail much because he was building a house, and he decided to sell his little P class. They weren’t racing them any more then though, they’d gone into Flying Fifteens and Cherubs and other types of yachts. But I bought this second hand one and pottered around there and tried to learn to sail a bit … not very successfully, but I got started a bit. Anyway, there was no racing in those boats then, and I sighted these Flying Fifteens down there and I thought they were beautiful looking boats, but you had to go to a boat builder or build it yourself. But they had a mould there [so] you could build these boats over the mould so they were the perfect shape, but you had to do it yourself really, because they were [it was] so expensive to get a boat builder to do it. And there was only Doug Black, the boat builder in Napier anyway, and he was doing mostly repairs of big yachts and commercial launches and things.

So I got the mould and built this Flying Fifteen in our garage at home over several months … might’ve taken about a year or something like that … and produced that boat and then got down there and just tried to learn to sail it. But I was right at the back of the fleet to start with of course, but gradually worked my way up through the fleet. Subsequently I sold the boat several years later and bought a new version which come [came] in. It was a plastic boat only – mine was a mahogany veneer boat – stripped three layers over each other, sandwiched together and then sanded down and fibre glassed inside and out. I got it sprayed by a commercial car painter to a beautifully smooth outside finish, and these Flying Fifteens had a cast iron keel under them, and they had buoyancy in the front and the back so they didn’t sink. Even if you went out in very rough weather and they filled with water, they would still float just about the surface level, so you were safe with them. And I did tip over a couple of times; I did break a mast when a stay broke, and I did break a boom once – it just rotted out through salt wear internally.

Anyway, I gradually worked through the fleet, and I went in two or three New Zealand championships, but got nowhere – I didn’t expect to get anywhere but I enjoyed being part of it. And then years later they happened to have the Worlds [World Championships] in Napier, because we had a very strong fleet. And one or two yachtsmen over the years had competed in Britain and Australia and done very well, and two of them had become world champions. And they were still racing in Napier, and we had about twenty-five yachts racing every Saturday, so it was very good competition, and very serious competition. But I gradually worked my way through the fleet, and managed by a bit of a fluke really; the wind changes helped me and I got up to be chosen to represent Napier amongst about four other boats, and took part in the Worlds. So that was quite a feat really; I enjoyed that.

But when I was about sixty I heard about one of the New Zealand champions having pranged his yacht in Christchurch. He had been winning a race down there … a New Zealand champion … and somebody had rammed him and punched a big hole in the front of the boat. I rang him up and said, “What’s happening with your boat? Are you getting it fixed?” He said, “No”, he said, “I’m giving it up for a while, I’ve got a house to build.” He was a builder, and he said, “Do you want to buy my boat?” He said, “It’s got a great big hole in the front.” I said, “Well I’ll come down and have a look at it”, knowing as a builder I thought I could [chuckle] fix those things, you know? So I went down to Christchurch, bought this boat – it had a hole in the front of it but it wasn’t very big – only about as big as this, where some other bow had punched a hole in it. That was nothing – I crawled inside the boat; I made a bit of polystyrene and I filed it down all straight so it would fit perfectly inside – or more or less perfectly – and I fibre glassed the whole thing up and bonded it up with builders’ bog, sanded it all down, got the outside fibre glassed, painted, and you wouldn’t know [it] had a hole in it.

And anyway, I got sailing this new boat, and I went from about middle of the fleet right up to about fourth or fifth. And my back started popping out all the time; I thought, ‘Gee, I’ve got a great big boat now – just point it in the right direction, and it goes.’ It just had the right shape of sails, the mast was tensioned to exactly the right thing; it was tuned better than I could ever imagine tuning my own boat – I didn’t have the skill, you know. Some of these people have got that … like a piano tuner or a musician, they can just do these things, you know. [Chuckle] And I wasn’t good enough at that to improve things much. Anyway, this boat went like a charm, I just pointed it in the right direction, shot up there all amongst the leaders [chuckle] no trouble at all.

But then I’d get about three quarters of the way round and my back would go out, and I couldn’t get power down my leg and I was in great pain; and I’d limp round the last … I’d get back in there somehow. The crew would help me pull the thing down, hose the boat down, put it in the shed. I’d go home; I’d be a cot case, and I’d have to go round on Monday to physio and get them to work on my back ‘cause I could hardly stand up. And this happened quite a bit; especially when you’re working hard, you know – you’ve got to be pretty fit for yachting like that.

So what happened was that I went to Marcia Sonneveld, my doctor, and she said, “Well we should investigate your back; get it x-rayed and see what’s going on.” So I did that; they found that I had a kidney that had grown large – it was full of cancer. It had gone like a solid mass, like a football. It was enlarged and it was pushing on the spine, and I only had to do a little bit of something like that and it popped my spine out. [Of] course I’d push it back, and [it’d] easily happen again. So I had to give up yachting straight away. Anyway I had that operation done and my back got better; and my back’s okay now, it’s only my knee. Bur I’ve got one kidney, but luckily the other one’s still working.

But the same thing happened with the cancer; I had stomach pains and all sorts of things, and Marcia got that all checked out and they found that I had bowel cancer big time, so I lost half my bowel. And then I got two other little bits dug out too, so I’m lucky I’m still operational.

Very fortunate that it was done in time, but sad that you had to give up your yachting ‘cause obviously you were very successful.

Well, you know, ‘specially when you get a boat that’s the best you’ve ever had, and you’ve finished your yachting days. Yeah – ‘cause the first one, although it looked really good, they put rods over it all to make sure it’s within you know, a millimetre or two, and the width and length, and everything; they’re very, very fussy. They go through all the hoops, as they have to do with all classes – they can’t have them all different sizes. But to get a boat that was really tuned up and going like the wind … it was [chuckle] bit of a shame, really.

Still Sydney, it’s a beautiful boat that you built – how big was that boat?

It’s fifteen-foot on the water line, that’s why it’s called a Flying Fifteen; twenty-foot overall. Yeah … that’s about it.

[Ends]