Family History 1.128

Gaze History: NSG Memoir

 

After the War

Olwyn had continued to grow, but was a slightly built little girl.  Unfortunately at this stage she contracted pneumonia. For some days she was very ill and Noel and Mary were very worried.  However the sulfa drugs were just coming available, and a course of one of these new wonder drugs beat the pneumonia.  After a suitable period of recovery, Olwyn never looked back healthwise, and grew into a healthy adolescent. 

In 1944, Noel was involved in a strange legal case. A group of people had grown up in Auckland with a charismatic leader who taught that Christ would return on a specific day later in the year.  This teaching had been attacked as misleading and worse by Dr J J North in the pages of the Baptist magazine, of which he was the editor. The leaders of the apocalyptic Christians filed a defamation suit against their critic, and Dr North asked Noel to defend him. Fortunately the jury agreed with Dr North and the matter was closed. In spite of elaborate preparations and a gathering on the summit of Mt Eden on the appointed day, no Second Coming occurred, and the movement faded away.

 

The effects of the presence of so many American servicemen, and the growth of Papatoetoe as a dormitory suburb, forced the expansion of both church building and church programmes at the Baptist Church.  The services of a young vigorous pastor were needed, and the church turned to a final-year student at the Theological College, Lloyd Crawford, to fill this role. When he finished his training and became the full-time minister as Rev Lloyd Crawford he needed somewhere to board, and the Gaze’s large front bedroom was ideal.  So Lloyd was a member of the Gaze household for the first part of his ministry at Papatoetoe.

Among the contributions made by Noel and Mary to the church were the holding of an annual Garden Party on their property.  Noel would organise an entertainment programme, with skits and acted songs, jokes and singing, and people would crowd into the lounge to watch and listen and roar with laughter, while outside there were coconut shies and white elephant stalls, and cake and jam and produce tables and a host of games and competitions to raise money. 

Noel also organised the Saturday night youth programme for around fifty young people for several years, and was a member of the Deacons’ (lay leadership) meeting, as he had been at Sandringham and was later at Epsom. He also encouraged Franklin and his friends in the Bible Class to collect quantities of waste newspaper and sell them locally to service stations for the benefit of the Bible Class fundraising for mission work.