Hurworth

Today it was my turn to help at Hurworth. We were greeting visitors, talking with them about the history, directing them towards the refreshments and the sales tables, and sharing their impressions of the festival. As you can see it was a fine day, sometimes hot, and there were groups picnicking on the lawn and under the trees. The New Plymouth Orchestra entertained us all, and provided the refreshments.

Blindweek

Setting up for the day

On Friday I was helping with the Blind Week Collection by co-ordinating the collectors at our local Countdown Supermarket just around the corner.

On this page are some photos of our activities during the day.

Ready for the customers

Looks like it's time to pack up!

Our life during the war

Much of my life during primary school was in wartime.  The Second World War started after I had spent one year at school, and it finished towards the end of my last year at primary school.

 

The first thing you would notice about life in wartime would be the blackout. Streetlights were very dim, and half of them were out completely. No-one was allowed to show any lights from their house. Every window had to have blackout curtains that did not allow any light to be seen from the outside, and there were Air-Raid Wardens to check the houses regularly.

 



Catalina flying-boats were regularly out on patrol in New Zealand waters later in the war

My parents were asleep one night when the warden knocked on the door. A light could be seen from the front bedroom window many miles away in the city. Mum and Dad had opened the blackout curtains after they put the lights out, but the full moon was shining on their bedroom mirror and being reflected all that way!

 

At the same time there were always searchlights playing on the clouds at night as part of the defences of the city.

  
 
 

The second thing you would notice would be how few cars there were on the roads. Petrol was rationed. Small cars, like the one we had from around 1941, an Austin Seven, were allowed one gallon (4.5 litres) per month, which allowed us to travel about 50kms. So Dad had to be very careful about how far and how often we used the car.

 

Petrol wasn’t the only thing rationed. Food and clothing were also strictly controlled. So people were very careful about keeping their clothes carefully. Among common foods, butter, sugar, tea and meat were subject to rationing. People had to save their butter and sugar coupons at Christmas to make their Christmas cakes. All this was so that the food saved could be shipped to the UK to feed the people there.

 

And apart from the rationing, some foods were just not available at all. For instance we never saw bananas or oranges during the worst days of the war – in fact for several years; bananas were a real novelty when they became available again after the war ended. Cream was very hard to get. But there was enough other food so we never went hungry. Most food rationing continued until 1948; petrol coupons did not go out of use till 1950.

 

At school, we had special drills about what to do in an air-raid. We had corks around our necks which we had to bite if we had to go into the shelters, and we practised this several times a month. The shelters were just long trenches dug in the playing fields, enough to accommodate all the children in the school if there was an air-raid.

We lined up in the playground in front of the school each morning for the raising of the flag and then marched into school to the sounds of "Colonel Bogey" march.

We were encouraged to learn to knit, and I struggled through creating a scarf for a soldier somewhere, though it turned me off knitting for the rest of my life!

 

Dad built a shelter for air-raids in the empty section next to our house, with a corrugated iron roof and earth steps leading down into it. Most people had one in their back yard.

 

Many parks had shelters or gun emplacements built in them. Along the roads in some places there were tank traps: concrete structures which could be filled with timber or metal beams in an emergency to block the passage of vehicles like tanks or armoured cars. Especially where there was only one road through an area, such as at the isthmuses at Avondale and Otahuhu, such traps were built, and it meant only one lane of traffic could go in each direction at any time.

 

The fact that many men of military age were overseas, meant that women were working in jobs normally done only by men – like crewing trams and buses, or working in shops, or farming, and so on and on. Some little children had never known their fathers, and others, unfortunately, never would. The papers were sometimes filled with long lists of the names of casualties from the latest battle in North Africa or Europe. One of my second cousins flew out on a mission and never returned; the sad feeling in the family I remember clearly.

Dad had a big map of Europe on the wall of the kitchen, so when a new battle was fought we could see where it was, places like Stalingrad, Tobruk and Monte Cassino. 

Families regularly sent food parcels to their members serving overseas, and this practice was extended to the UK; in fact it continued throughout the austerity days after 1945.

 

At school we had a few children who had been “evacuated” from Britain. There was one in my class, a boy my age, and we competed for the position of first in the class every time there were exams. In the last year, the war ended and he went back to the UK so that left the field clear to me!

 

Later in the war, the American forces stationed thousands of servicemen in New Zealand, either in training or rest and recreation, and it became common to see them all over the place.

 

Some of these wartime conditions persisted for months or even years after the war had ended, until the economy returned to something like normal peacetime conditions, but in general the effects of the war wore off pretty quickly for everyday life

Political Thoughts and Activity

My family had always been staunchly in the Liberal camp. My grandmother Julia and her family came from the midlands of England, where non-conformist religion and support for Parliament against Royalists had always been strong. Her father came to New Zealand because he was dissatisfied with the slow pace of electoral reform in the UK.

They were strong supporters of the Temperance movement, which refused to drink alcohol, and campaigned for prohibition of its sale.  Julia Goodwin had tried to convince her grandfather of the evils of drink at home in Kettering, but he still stuck to his ale at dinner time. The Gazes supported the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, not only in its stand against drink, but also in its campaign for women to have the vote.

 

That generation of non-conformists regarded the Labour Party as “soft” on the temperance issue. They considered its leaders to be in the pockets of the beer barons, as they called the brewery owners. And many of their leading preachers had Northern Irish backgrounds and brought from that a fierce hatred of Roman Catholicism, which they saw as backing the Labour Party.

 

So that when the Labour Party won the 1935 election, the Gazes and the Bigelows were dismayed. My grandfather, William Bigelow, had been a special constable in the 1913 Red Fed strike, one of “Massey’s Cossacks”, and on Sundays after church, when he got older, would regale my father with all the sins of the Labour Government, especially its Minister of Works, Bob Semple. He agreed wholeheartedly with the Herald cartoonist, Minhinnick, who pilloried the Labour leadership every day.

 

My mother, however, was not so sure.  She had worked for a Stock and Station Agent, and had seen the misery created when farmers who had bought their land in the boom years of the twenties had had to walk off the farms with nothing during the depression years.

 

My father was something of an expert on the subject of constitutional law, having studied it for his Master’s degree; when we discussed such matters, he explained that he preferred a constitution like the US rather than the Westminster one we had in NZ; which meant, I presume, that he favoured a republic. These discussions, brief as they were, were over articles we were both reading in “Time”, which he subscribed to in the fifties, when I was at University, and worked one day a month on his accounts at his legal practice in Queen Street. Smoko chats!

 

He took me to some political meetings to hear the local National Party candidate in 1954, when I turned 21 the day before the election, and so qualified to vote by the skin of my teeth. Then and in 1957 I voted for well-regarded National politicians, Rae in Eden and Hilda Ross in Hamilton, following the family tradition.

Back to some more memories

Ha'pennies

It is after school, and for some reason I am walking home alone along Owairaka Avenue footpath on the left of the road.  I am alone, but usually I come with other children from our street. It is a sunny afternoon and I am looking at the footpath in front of me. Suddenly I notice a coin on the path.  I pick it up: it is a ha’penny. I turn back to the little shop next to the school gate where, after some thought, I buy a little paper bag with four blackballs from one of the shopkeeper’s big jars of lollies.

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Next to the alcove in our kitchen is the stove, electric, with big black elements on top.  Dad is teaching me to make the porridge: 2.5 spoons of rolled oats, 1.5 of Vimax, and half a spoon of wholemeal, with a pinch of salt. We add water, I have forgotten how much, and turn the element up to full until the porridge boils, stirring all the time to stop it sticking to the bottom of the pot and burning. Then we turn the element down to low and if the plops of the porridge look dry we add a little water. When the porridge is in our bowls we sprinkle brown sugar on it and pour milk around the edge so it is cool enough to eat.

 

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It is late afternoon and I am standing in the bath in the bathroom with the door shut. I am restless and anxious. I am in the bathroom because I have been naughty and when Daddy gets home from work he is going to give me the strap.

 

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School holidays, and we are on the train heading north from Auckland. This morning we caught the Whangarei Express at Mt Eden Station. I can still see the narrow north-bound platform with the huge noisy steam engine pulling in.  Several hours later we look out on bright green grass covering hillsides dotted with black trunks of great trees where the bush has been burnt.

 

At Waiotira Junction we change to a mixed train with one carriage heading along the Dargaville line towards Donnelly’s Crossing. But we get off at Pukehuia by the big iron bridge over the Nothern Wairoa River, where our cousin rows us across the river to their farm, and we meet Uncle Fred with his wooden leg, and Auntie Katy and their three sons, Terence, Laurence and Brian.

 

A day or so later I am on the rocking sledge with several cans full of cream as we travel behind the horse to the farm gate along a rough track. When the time comes to go home, the sledge takes us to Kirikopuni Station, where the line goes round a loop, and I see the mixed train steam past the station to go around the loop and come back so we can climb aboard for the trip back to Waiotira, the express and Auckland.

 

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Another memorable journey is the coach trip from Taneatua, the Bay of Plenty railhead, to Matawai, in the hills above Gisborne, where we are going to spend a week at another farm. More relatives, this time of my dead grandmother.  The bus trip is hot, dusty and very windy.  Both Olwyn and I are carsick, as the vehicle grinds up the twisty road.  Again the musty smell of upholstery is my most vivid memory.

 

 

Hurworth Cottage

Hurworth Cottage now

 

The only property in Taranaki owned by the New Zealand Historic Places Trust, Hurworth Cottage was built in 1856 by Harry Atkinson, who later served four terms as New Zealand's Premier.

 

He had learned how to operate a cross-cut saw, and felled the timber and cut up the planks for the weatherboards himself. You can still see the saw-marks today.

 

We are part of a group of volunteers who help to keep the gardens tidy, publicise the cottage and its attractions, and act as hosts for the Taranaki Garden Festival, which starts today and runs until Sunday 10th.

 

Among other things, we have a 2014 calendar ready for sale for the festival (designed and printed by our son, Matthew); you can order a copy for $20. Send your cheque to us and we will post your copy.

 

Even better, include Hurworth in your itinerary when you are visiting gardens featured in the Garden Festival - you may be fortunate and find Margaret or me hosting visitors at the time! You will be able to buy copies of the calendar ($15), and other handcrafted products made or grown by local artisans.

 

Or offer to join the volunteer group; your copy of the calendar tells you how to apply.

 

When you visit, make sure you spend time exploring the history of the cottage and of the families involved in settling the area around Hurworth: the Atkinsons, Richmonds, Hursthouses and Fells, many members of which played a prominent part in the nineteenth century history of this country.



Political Essay

The Future of Democracy in New Zealand.

 

Democracy in New Zealand has been a vigorous plant. Once women had been given the vote, the Maori seats had been established, and anomalies like the so-called ”Country Quota” had been abolished, it only took the introduction of MMP to move us further down the track.

 

There are still ways in which our democracy can be made more democratic.

 

One of the most glaring to my mind is the whole area of equality.

 

Democratic systems should be “bottom-up” rather than ”top-down”.  In other words, the power, the ideas, the initiative, should flow up from the population to the leaders, rather than down from some single authority at the top.

 

So the symbol of that flow should be an egalitarian one, not the autocratic one we have at present: the Monarchy.  Monarchy is at odds with egalitarian legislation like the Human Rights Act (and the UN Declaration).

 

A change to a Republic is essential to move us to a more perfect democracy.

 

Secondly we need to replace the present confrontational decision making process, of debate and voting, by a consensual process, of discussion and inclusion.

 

Decision-making by consensus works quite effectively in some statutory bodies by regulation (eg Ethics Committees, Restorative Justice Conferences) and is an important part of the legislative process under MMP.

 

Many activities undertaken in any community work best if they include everyone. Researchers have long known that targeted assistance does not work as well as universal benefits. Insurance works best if everyone is insured. Vaccination works best if everyone is vaccinated.

 

I believe that for democracy to work better, education is the same. Education does not just rely on the relationship between the teacher and the student, although that is important.

 

Children are educated, especially in emotional, relationship and social education, by the way they interact with their fellow-pupils. So I believe that the best education can only be obtained in comprehensive schools, that is, in schools where everyone in the community attends together and learns together.

 

Ideally I believe that private schools should be abolished, and home schooling should not be allowed; first to go must be sectarian and class-based (i.e. fee-paying) schools.

 

Parents who send their children to a private school, or who home-school them, are depriving their children of the educational effects of children from other backgrounds, and are depriving the other children of the effects of rubbing shoulders with their own kids.

 

Thirdly we need to make our franchise truly universal by including all citizens: having the right to vote from birth.

 

No party in power is at present forced to take families into its policies, because children do not have a vote. Only when children are entitled to a vote (exercised of course by their guardians until they are old enough to vote themselves, say around 12 years old), will governments be forced to legislate for the real prosperity of families with children. Only then will the democracy include all human beings in our society.

 

There are other changes which would also make our system more democratic, but these will do for a start!