The Redstones in Early Kawerau
During the depression at the end of World War I a great number of men were put to work planting trees in the heart of the North Island of New Zealand. The largest of these plantations was the Kaingaroa Forest. It was found that the Pinus Radiata trees in this forest matured quicker than in their native North America and so about the middle of the century a use had to be found for the timber. One projected use was to make pulp and paper and a site was chosen that would be appropriate for this in an area that also had access to geothermal steam. So began the New Town of Kawerau.
Nolan (“Red”) Redstone and his wife Jeanie were among the first people to take up residence in the town and I had the privilege of taking down Jeanie’s story a number of years ago. She said that she looked on her life in early Kawerau as a unique experience. She said it was the first time that she had lived in a town and could see “everything under her feet”. All the pipes, cables and soak holes for sewerage were still open to the sky when she took up residence in the town. She tells her story:
I was born in Westport in the South Island where my father worked for the Union Steamship Company. It was through this company that he was transferred to Gisborne. One of my first remembrances of my father was of him playing the organ and leading a choir. When we came to Gisborne, we joined the small congregation at Knox Church and soon my father had three choirs there, junior, intermediate and adult. My sister and I joined these choirs and sang at weddings, competitions and on the air. Father was a great encourager of young people and enjoyed seeing them have a good time. We had lots of evenings with friends from the bible Class and we would all gather and sing around the piano. It was through this group that I met my future husband. Nolan and I were married in the Knox Church in 1933. He worked for the Power Board and it was through them that we eventually came to Kawerau in 1953.
We came first in September of that year just to have a look at the place but there was virtually nothing to see except acres of blue lucerne flowers on the Lands and Survey Farm. The frames of several houses were going up but none of them was yet completed. Although there were no roads and no shops to give the place some semblance of order, I still felt that it would be good to come here. So the decision was made.
I came to reside on the 26th of October and brought my youngest (11 year old) daughter with me. My husband had arrived about 14 days earlier and had secured a state house in Hobson Street for us. Furniture was just being moved into the first two houses, those of Mr. Hamer and Mr. Goddard, the construction supervisors. I remember getting off the bus at Te Teko and being met there by Red. There was no bridge on the main road then and we had to come round the east side of the river and cross the old bridge at what is now Waterhouse Street. Red said he had forgotten to get butter and we would go first to Barr’s Snackbar, which was close to the site of the present bridge.
There was a great crowd of men in front of the building, discussing the events of the night before. A Dutchman had gone berserk after losing money at cards and had shot up the shop and a nearby caravan, missing a sleeping child by about four inches. I remember the feeling of despair as I looked at the bullet holes and thought, “What possessed me to come to this place with two teenage girls”. However, we settled into the house in Hobson Street and were there eight years until the Power Board built a house in River Road.
In those days there was only work. The men used to average 60 hours a week and work relations were usually harmonious. The first strike was caused by a group of Australians who stopped work because the oranges they were getting weren’t big enough!
The men were fed at the townsite Cafeteria (the building now houses the Library) and three thousand meals a day were served. It was well organised and as the men filed past, the food was delivered on power driven belts. A woman who had been a sergeant in the British WAC’s ran the kitchen and she was tough enough to handle any man who tried to be funny. One fellow complained that he had found a match in his meal. “What do you want?” she retorted, “A cigarette lighter?”
Many men were just there to make money for the wages were terrific. One that I knew of had a job in the kitchen and only washed pots and pans. He was a hairdresser to trade and saved enough to enable him to go to Britain for a course that he wanted to do.
The first school in town was a small prefab building on the site of what is now Central School. This building was later moved to the western boundary near what is now the AOG church. Classes first started in February 1954, with 23 children of all ages. The sole teacher was Mrs. Potter, whose husband, Bill, worked at the Mill.
This prefab also served as the first church but the only chairs available were those made for the infants. However, we made do. The organ was a one hundred-year-old pedal instrument, which had started life in First Church, Dunedin. My mother and Father were visiting us the day of the first church service and went with Red on the Saturday to try out the organ. They made some temporary repairs and father agreed to play it on the Sunday. I remember how funny it was when everyone stood up for the first hymn – the small chairs had stuck to their bottoms! When we rose for the second hymn, there was no organ – the Saturday repairs had broken down! I also remember the first visit by the Rev. Ian Ramsden. He came with Mr. Parkes of Edgecumbe and they arrived late as their car had got bogged down in one of our drains. Later on we sat on the floor eating hard-boiled eggs!
Ian and Ellen Ramsden were tremendous. It was very hard being a new minister in a new town with nothing but needs. The Ramsdens were very quiet and were loved by everybody – you didn’t have to be a Presbyterian to be helped by them. The regard with which they were held was shown when the church roof was painted for the first time. Men turned up from everywhere to give a hand, some of them with no church connections at all.
The church hall was built large enough to serve the community but when it was completed it was very bare. It was used by everybody and lost all sense of reverence as a church. The theatre group used to have it and after one of their meetings I found a cigarette butt stamped out on the communion table. That did it! I wrote to the elders and told them that we were trying to raise our children to respect the House of the Lord but the disrespect being shown to our buildings didn’t help at all. After that “No Smoking” signs were put up and we cleaned the place up and made it more presentable.
I remember when we were raising money to buy the organ, that it was rather a big project but we kept working at it with everyone doing something for the organ fund. One day during this time we thought the Lord had answered our prayers and was raining five-pound notes! I was managing a clothing shop called “Feminette” at the time. It was on the Promenade near where Coburn’s office is now. It was a wet windy morning and Joan Hammond had called in to see me. There were not many people about so we stood in the shop and discussed the organ fund.
Joan was facing the doorway and suddenly a surprised look came over her face. She grabbed my arm and cried, “Look, Mrs. Red – five pound notes!”. We ran outside into the rain and began picking them up. They were everywhere, blowing along in the wind up the road towards the church. Some were in the gutter and stuck on the drain covers, but we picked up everything we could see. I gathered up forty pound and then remembered that I had left the shop empty. I ran back but Joan went on up the road to search the long grass where the telephone exchange is now. Eventually she returned and we were both like drowned rats but we had found ninety pounds!
I rang the police station and told Sergeant Ted Lines that we had found ninety pounds blowing down the street but all he said was, “OK Mrs. Red, now pull the other one!” It took a while to convince him but eventually he came round and picked up the money. At lunchtime I rang the police station but nobody had claimed the mystery notes and our hopes for ninety pounds for the organ fund began to rise. Then, at two o’clock, Ted Lines rang up to say that the money had been claimed and he was sending the owner round to explain.
The person turned out to be an accountant in town. He explained that Mr. Carter who ran the picture theatre had asked him to get ninety pounds in five pound notes and that he would collect it from the office during the day. The accountant had taken the money from the bank and had put it in his brief case but had forgotten to do up the zip. As he walked along the Promenade to his office in Jellicoe Court, the wind had blown out all the notes. By the time we got into the street, he had turned the corner and was out of sight. When Mr. Carter had called for the money, the brief case was found to be empty. That was when the accountant called the police to report a robbery!
I told Red all about it when I got home that night and said I was a bit disappointed because we had found all that money, got soaked and weren’t even offered a shilling for the organ fund. “We’ll see about that”, said Red and he did! Red belonged to the Rotary Club. At the next meeting Red told the Sergeant at Arms and the luckless accountant was fined heavily. Shortly afterwards we received five pounds so the organ fund prospered after all.
I remember the first Guy Fawkes Night in November, 1953. It was held in the open paddock where the Central School now stands and was attended by 31 people. The first Christmas was also a community occasion but it was mostly run by the American contractors. A huge tree was erected at the end of Fitzroy Street and made beautiful with 200 coloured lights. Everyone gathered around the tree and sang Christmas carols. I remember one young man particularly, he had such a glorious tenor voice and often practiced with Red at the organ
There was a good spirit among the early people in the town. It didn’t matter that there were bosses or workers, specialists or labourers, everyone was on the same level socially. There were between twelve and eighteen American specialists who lived on Fenton Street (the houses on Bell Street were built for the second group, the operating personnel). The first group were really our Government’s responsibility and they were well looked after. Their houses were fully furnished for them right down to having their fridges and liquor cabinets stocked up. All this was free of course and when they moved in, they even had their beds turned down in readiness!
Our first garden was really something. Everything had been dug up of course and the end of our section terminated in a twelve-foot ditch. We grew watermelons on the rubble that had been heaped up and harvested several over twenty pounds – the biggest was 32 pounds. The tomatoes were hanging like bunches of grapes and the hollyhocks were 14 feet high. Red had gladioli that were as tall as himself and of course there were no bugs or blight to worry about. But next year was a totally different story; by then all the good in the soil had been leached out. We learned that we had to feed the soil every year.
But I am grateful for being in the town at the very beginning. There were so many things that I can now look back on and laugh about. There was a woman who later became something of a celebrity in the town who was always dressed to the nines – high heels and all. One day when I was at the shops she came up and asked me where to find a certain house. I pointed to the place across the open paddocks and she set off on her high heels which were most inappropriate for the conditions. I watched in amazement as she staggered over to the house, climbing in and out of the ditches as she went. Sometimes she was down so deep that it was only the feather on her hat that indicated her position.
When we first settled in town we had our bread brought to the door. It was made in a bakehouse at Te Teko, the nearby village, and was delivered by the baker who would carry it into the house in a basket. It was good bread and there was great variety in the loaves but he was the dirtiest baker I had ever come across. At the weekend he went out deerstalking and the carcass would be thrown into the back of his van. Next week the unwrapped loaves would lie on the same floor. He always wore a tall floppy chef’s hat which had never seen soap and water and was now greasy and grey with age.
One time he broke his arm, the one he carried the breadbasket on, and it was held rigid and encased in a cast from the wrist to the shoulder. I recall him coming in with the bread and asking, “What would you like today?” And there, stacked up along the rigid, dirty and much scribbled-on plaster, was the day’s offering of loaves!
In the early stages we ran the Power Board office from our house and it was one way of getting to know something about the people. A lot of those who came to Kawerau to make a fresh start wanted a break with old life and sometimes used different names. It was a puzzle at times to have a customer register under one name and to be paying his account under another.
Then there were those who had trouble paying their accounts at all. If it were genuine hardship, Red would try to delay cutting off the power even though it meant getting into trouble with Head Office. One day a woman came in with several children and another one obviously on the way and pleaded for the power to be kept on until she got some money. She said that her husband was in gaol. Despite instructions from the Office, Red agreed to keep her on for another week. The next day he found out that she and her husband had done a moonlight flit. She wasn’t pregnant at all, except with a pillow down the front of he coat, and most of the children with her had only been “borrowed” to make her story look good!
Kawerau was a town in which almost anything could happen – and generally did! One day when I was in my shop talking with a customer, Joe Windley of the Borough staff came in. The talk turned to our various jobs and Joe admitted that his responsibility for the sewage system was not the most savoury occupation. “But I had a find this morning,” he said as he pulled a small bundle out of his pocket and unwrapped a set of false teeth. The very sight of them and the knowledge of where they had been made me feel sick. We wondered where they might have come from when a customer remembered seeing her neighbour minus her teeth. Joe gave her the grubby package to take with her.
I saw her a few days later and asked her about the teeth. She said she had asked her neighbour how she had lost her dentures. The woman said there had been a party a few nights before, and feeling ill, she had rushed to the toilet. When she recovered, she realised her teeth had gone. She then produced Joe Windley’s find and showed them to her neighbour. The woman looked at them and with an excited cry, picked them up and popped them straight into her mouth! She hadn’t the heart to tell her where they were found!