Newspaper Article 2014 – Parade maestro

Parade maestro

By CLINTON LLEWELLYN

If there is one person especially qualified to help decorate the city for this Saturday’s Blossom Parade, it must be Graham Ellery, 77.

The former window display artist at the old Roach’s Department store, ventriloquist, puppeteer, magician and animatronics maker has made and painted 80 blossoms from plastic foam for Creative Hastings to decorate the city’s street lights.

The grandfather of four was happy to lend his talents.

“It does add a bit of magic to the place,” said Ellery, 77, who had built about 10 floats for various Hastings Blossom Parades in the 80s and 90s.

As a young ventriloquist, Ellery made his first puppet at 12 when growing up in Greymouth, before moving to Hawke’s Bay with his family.

He honed his early creative skills to become a window display artist in 1954 – a career he continued for nearly 20 years, mainly at Roach’s but also for department stores in Australia.

After creating animated window displays to promote the touring Disney On Parade show in the 1970s, he started making and selling animated figures from his garage studio.

He continued that side business after starting another long career as an assistant newspaper advertising manager-a job he took a year off from in the mid 1980s to build the “mountain men” and animated characters for the log flume ride at Rainbow’s End theme park in Auckland.

He went on to build “quite a few” blossom floats in the 80s and 90s. Ellery was disappointed that floats in more modern times “weren’t a patch” on those of yesteryear.

“We used to have Birdseye, the [Tomoana] freezing works, all those big companies used to spend months on them and thousands of dollars – or thousands of pounds as it was in those days. We’ve lost a lot of that support.”

He remembered the old blossom parades as “stupendous” events, with train loads of visitors turning up to line the streets of Hastings with tens of thousands of locals.

The parades were a great way of bringing the community together, he said.

There was an exception, in 1960, when the infamous Blossom Parade Riot broke out.

Revellers from Wellington and Gisborne arrived by train to learn the parade had been cancelled due to rain. They converged on the old Albert Hotel to drink and started playing up around town, Ellery said.

A riot erupted between visitors and locals in what later became known as The Battle of Hastings of 1960.

“They had to get the fire brigade to come out and that chap – ‘Tiger’ Harlen, he was the guy – he turned the fire hoses on them to quieten them down,” he said.

Photo caption –

Long career: Ellery with the mountain men he made in the 80s for Auckland’s Rainbow’s End theme park, and the float: A Toast to the Millennium, he made for the district council in 1999.