Community Contributed

Chapter 5 - From Head Office Public Service to the Wide Open Spaces of Santoft

Kete Horowhenua2020-03-23T16:57:16+00:00
After graduating from Lincoln in 1948, In 1949 I was selected to join the Head Office of the Lands and Survey Department in Wellington. It was a new position and I was not following in anyone’s footsteps.

I was to set up a statistical record because someone in the Department had a bee in his bonnet over how to value property and it was believed that productive valuation was the way to go. It meant the valuers had to do a budget on each farm and the farm was to be considered to be managed by an average efficient farmer, whoever that might be. But there were so many different circumstances in assessing that person it was virtually impossible to get an even line over different farms under such different conditions.

After the war and up until 1948, properties had been required to be valued for the Land Sales Act on a productive basis and this had not been a successful even-handed basis of valuing. While we were at Lincoln this was pointed out to us and we were told that the only true value had to be comparative sales. However, in my early days at Head Office I was sent around New Zealand gathering up prices of farm produce and farm equipment and putting this into statistical form, or, should I say, attempting to do it, because my heart was not in the work and I did not feel inclined to spend a lot of money in setting up a lot of stationery. I understand my successor, Ed (Hoot) Gibson, did so and gained some kudos for doing so.

I was not being accepted into the thinking of the Department. There were three other men perhaps with some farming experience, and they spent their days drawing up contracts to be used by the Field Officers when dealing with the contractors who were working on the large-scale farm developments on the Central Plateau. I thought they were almost childish in their approach and I said they were wasting their time. The contracts could be abbreviated just saying that a workmanlike job, or a lamb-proof fence, or cultivation up to acceptable standards had been done. But no, they had pages and pages of this stuff. I asked if they did not trust their field officers, The reply was that they did, so I said they should insist that good people were employed and that they should be given their heads. I had the philosophy that with a bad contractor one did not want an agreement and with a good one an agreement was not needed. They were not very impressed with me and I did see on an Inspector’s report that this man (meaning me) would not make a top public servant. Well, if one had any ambition there would be no desire to be a top public servant.

My mind takes me back to when I first went to the Valuation Department. Jack Frost the Records Clerk told me that he thought I was pretty good office boy and he said that if I had been a Catholic he would help me get to the top. But, of course, I was not a Catholic and I could see at that point I did not want to be a public servant. The person who succeeded me as office boy was Wellington educated and when he went to collect the mail it was like a reunion on the steps of the GPO. I was often sent over to hurry him up.

It was at this time I met Marie Snelling. She worked next door in an Office Equipment Head office. I could not make a lasting impression though we corresponded for years. Marie married Stan Painter, a top tennis player

While working in the Head Office of Lands and Survey I learned that the Government had bought 10,000 acres from the Duncan family. A block called “Santoft”. It was on the coast out from Lake Alice or, for those not familiar with Lake Alice, it was out from Marton between the Rangitikei and Turakina Rivers. The people in the office were saying that it had the potential to have more farms than those being administered by the Wanganui Office or the Palmerston North office which were equi-distant from this new block. I pricked up my ears and said why not establish a separate sub-office there which I would be happy to run. It would need a sub-imprest bank account. I would have the cheque book; I could supervise the staff and plan the development. Eventually my idea was adopted. It was proposed that accommodation would be placed on the block but I would have to eat with the manager. It sounded very interesting to me. To provide me with transport I was allocated one of the first Land Rovers which were produced after the war for domestic use. I moved up to Santoft. An ex-army hut was brought on to the place for my sleeping accommodation and another one provided for my office.

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Photo above: The near Land Rover was the one I took to Santoft in August 1949.

Peter Hammond was the manager and his son Maurice was the assistant manager. Peter Hammond had been married before, so had his present wife and between them they had twenty-one offspring. At one Christmas party his wife Millie, called Peter outside saying your kids and my kids are fighting our kids and I believe it was very willing. I also understand that Archie was getting stroppy and alcohol would affect him. Peter stood Archie on a fruit box under a tree and had him strung on the tree by a rope around his neck. Almost unbelievable, but I was told at the time that it was a fact. I soon discovered that all of the fourteen staff on the place were related to Peter, or to Millie. Millie was a Bostock when she first married

I set myself up in the office and then got out on the station. It was 10,500 acres and carried 16,000 ewes, 2000 cattle, 1000 cows. The ewes were bought as five-year-old ewes from the Wairarapa. Generally at the rate of 7000 a year and they lasted two years there, with some of them lasting a third year. The cattle were all Hereford and the steer calves were sold off and the heifer calves were kept for replacements, until they were drafted up and the surplus sold as yearlings.

We followed on from what the Duncan family had been doing and applied 1500 tons lime a year, 500 tons of superphosphate, and the powers that be said that I should be at the gate and sign for each truck load of fertilizer that came in. This was impractical as there were three road frontages and the trucks could come in anyone of them at any time depending on which way the wind was blowing or whether the land in that particular area could carry the trucks as some of it was quite swampy. There were sand dunes along the coast and behind them there were swampy areas and very shallow lakes and that kept the water table high. That actually reflected right back over the station and one of my first observations was that this land should not go into private ownership but remain as leasehold land so that the Government could control the water level. Because, if someone over drained a normally wet section, it could lower the water table of the surrounding land.

As it turned out this is exactly what happened! There were 1000 acres both sides of Nottingly Creek that ran through the station, the land was dry and rabbit infested and when the Lands and Survey Department, in conjunction with the Forestry Department, planted that area in pine trees it was decided the area behind the sand dunes would be drained into the sand dunes and also planed with pines.

One of the jobs we had to organize was the planting of Marram Grass along the moving sand and then over sowing it with wild lupin. When the sand stabilized pine trees were planted. The Forest Department wanted to plant more pine trees so the wet areas behind the dunes were drained and that has had a disastrous affect upon all the sand country right back to the town of Bulls.

I found that whatever I suggested no-one would go along with it and the same applied to the stock policy. When we drafted the lambs off at the end of November we got 8,800 lambs weighing 38lbs.each in the first draft, whereas I believed we could have got 15,000 lambs if we had gone down to 35lbs.. When the lambs were taken away from the ewes, the next morning the ewes would gather round the gate looking for their lambs so we brought those ewes out, culled them for their mouths and, if necessary the culls were sold off to the Works. I said that we should then be able to replace those lambs with store lambs and get two drafts away. But, oh no, that was just too radical for anybody on the Lands and Survey farm and certainly Hammond, the manager, did not want to go along with it as it meant more work and also would deprive him of grass for his cattle going into the winter.

When I went to Santoft the manager was earning £8.0.0d a week and I soon found out that he was dealing in cattle. I told him that in the government one cannot have two jobs; one must be a sole employee of Lands and Survey. Hammond said he could not live on the income so I got him an increase in wages to £13 0.0d per week and that was on a par with what Bill Chisholm was getting and he was the manager of Molesworth and was the top manager in the country. Besides his wage, Peter Hammond was also ‘found’ all the groceries and stores for the house and this included all the cigarettes which the store keeper sent out. I was told we had to accept that, because when it was said “found” everything was “found” for them except alcohol and clothes.

Peter Hammond was virtually an alcoholic and he would spend three days on the booze with his step son, Albert Bostock, ferrying him from the Turakina Hotel, Whangahu Hotel, or a hotel in Marton. The next day he spent sobering up and then three days around the station with a certain number of the staff trotting along behind him acting on his bidding moving stock and, as it turned out, moving his own stock. I soon became aware that there were black cattle on the station and the station only ran Hereford cattle.

I acquired myself a horse and two dogs. One of the dogs was a descendant of the bitch pup that I bought when I went to Maringi in 1941. Neighbour, Don York, lent me a horse that had been broken in before but nobody could ride it. Sid Ashwell broke it in again and said that I could have it if I could ride it, which I did. I made a point of when I put the saddle on it I walked down the road before I tightened the girth. There was a little hill down the road and when I was in the hollow by the hill I then tightened the girth and then got on the horse and kicked it along. By the time it had got to the top it had settled down. I believe when I was away for the weekend the other shepherds on the station used to get it and try to ride it and I believe that it became quite a buck jumper. After I left Santoft they had to have the horse put down because no one else could ride it. That was a shame because to me it was really good horse.

There is a lesson to be learned here. Sid Ashwell, the horse breaker, went up to a Taihape farm and one day he was leading a horse down a hill. Sid was wearing riding boots which do not have any cleats on them. He slipped on the dry grass and his feet went from under him. The horse kicked him in the head and killed him. It was a most unfortunate accident.

There were no internal roads in the block but there were tracks. Tractors were the only vehicles and a Bren gun carrier that somebody had tried out for fun use. When I went there I was able to drive right through the station, but there were no metal roads. It was a pretty primitive access. The station did not own a tractor and the hay making was done by contract. There was another contractor who dug sand tussocks out of the swamp and laid them on the sand blows upon the ridges to stop the wind blowing the top cover away and that same contractor used to carry the marram grass out to be planted on the coastal dunes. So when I came with the Land Rover I was very mobile. As I was still into athletics I often took some of the staff to a Club night at Bulls or Marton but I never called into a hotel in spite of being vocally encouraged.

Whenever I got my horse in to saddle it up apparently the telephone line was busy from the homestead down to the out station where the boss’s son, Maurice Hammond lived, and I soon became aware that there was a scatter of shepherds ahead of me and in the cold weather I could often see steam coming out of the patches of manuka which were in most paddocks. It turned out that ahead of me the shepherds were organized to chase the black cattle into the manuka and if the cattle had been given a bit of a hurry up they were quite happy to stay in the shade until I got out of the way. The government agreed to give Mrs. Hammond domestic assistance in the form of Margaret McConachie, a neighbour’s daughter, and Margaret kept me posted on what was going on.

I became friendly with Norm Shelton and Stan Lawrenceson who were the staff at Hodder and Tolley’s. I had to keep in close contact with them because there were items such as gates and fencing material which had been booked up to them which did not come on to the station but went to Hammond’s relatives’ farms and town houses. Norm Shelton who was eventually to become the Member of Parliament for Rangitikei and the Minister of Commerce, told me I was too young to be mixed up in what was going on out on the station but I could not understand just what he meant

One day Norm rang and asked where my staff was and I imagined they were all on the station, although I knew the 3-ton truck was off the station. He told me to go over to Bonnie Glen railway and have a look and sure enough they were unloading 100 black cattle. I had already been to Wellington to tell the Assistant Director of Land Development that Hammond was running cattle on his own account but they would not believe me. We had a stock supervisor who was in Palmerston North and he thought I was an upstart. He always addressed me as Wright, never Bill, or son, or Joe Bloggs. I suppose he thought he was autocratic but I thought he was just arrogant.

Later that day the black cattle were driven down past my digs and on to the station, so I rang the manager of the Palmerston North Office and said Hammond had brought some black cattle onto the place. The next morning Beachman came out and tackled Hammond about this and told him that it had to stop. Hammond said he had the grazing rights of a property on Jurgen’s family farm and the cattle would not be coming on to the farm. He had to leave them here for a day or two because they were sore footed. Beachman did not tell me anything of this and he went back to town.

I believe that Hammond emptied a bottle of whisky and then he came looking for that detective bastard. He stood in my office doorway and said that he had told me to keep my mouth shut and he would give me 100 quid any time I wanted it. I replied it would not matter if it was £1.0.0d or £1000.0.0d as far as I was concerned he was getting his money dishonestly and I did not want to be part of it. He said “I’ll hang you, you bastard”. He shouted out for the head shepherd, Tony, to get a rope and they would hang me. Tony just wasn’t about and Hammond went out to the stables and I went to my land rover and went into town to Hodder and Tolley’s and told them about this. As I went down the street from Hodder and Tolley’s, Hammond came out of the police station and shook his fist at me and said you f….g detective bastard. It appeared he was off to the hotel as usual, so I went back to the police station and said what was going on. I was told Hammond wanted me arrested for using a government vehicle for private purposes. That was because I was courting a Hunterville girl and at the weekends I used to take her up to Hunterville for the weekend there was no extra running involved because I was permitted to take the vehicle to Palmerston North or Wanganui as I had to work through those offices, but I sometimes went to Wanganui for the weekend early in my courting days.

I used to eat with the staff in the big dining room. One morning Millie was putting chops into the pan when her son, Noel, came in. He complained to his mother that she was always bitching. Millie pulled the front of her dress, exposing her breast, and told him, that if he had eczema as badly as she had, and he was as sore, then he also would be bitchy. The chops still tasted alright and I didn’t get eczema.

When 1500 tons of lime and 500 tons of super were delivered to the station I was supposed to receipt it immediately. This was impractical and I used to go into Wally Thompson, the carrier, each Friday and sign all the dockets. This was just a continuation of my philosophy that with a good carrier it is not necessary to police him, but have nothing to do with a bad bastard. Wally was a very genuine bloke.

In those days it was not possible to buy a bottle of whiskey without also buying a dozen beer, so with Christmas coming I put my order in to be delivered to Wally’s depot. It was coming up to the end of November and a General Election was to be held.

On election day it so happened that my sister Patricia, who was a Karitane nurse, was casing at the Vickers family who lived 5 kilometres north of Marton, I was 7 or 8 kilometres south of Marton . The Vickers invited me to visit with them on Election Night. My uncle, Tom Hayman, was standing for Parliament to represent Oamaru and he was up against Arnold Nordmeyer. It so happened that Norm Shelton, the Manager of Hodder and Tolley, was seeking election as the member for the district of Rangitikei. As the night wore on it appeared that Uncle Tom was going to unseat Nordmeyer and I said to my hosts that should Uncle Tom win I would supply a bottle of whisky and when it appeared positive that Uncle Tom would be elected I was told to go and find the bottle of whisky. So I went to Wally Thompson’s home and knocked on the door and the girl who boarded there answered. I asked if I could see Wally and she said he had gone to bed. I said what I wanted and he agreed to go down to the depot and I got the bottle of whiskey and he went back home. I went out to Vickers and, sure enough, Uncle Tom won it and we cleaned up the bottle of whisky no trouble.

Next time I saw Wally he said to me that the girl who boarded with him wasn’t too happy at him being got out of bed although he didn’t mind. As she was quite new to the town and did not have a boy friend, it was suggested that I should invite her out and let her know I was not such a bad bloke after all. The young lady’s name was Heather Dalziell and I did invite her out. That was over the Christmas and we got to know each other better. Heather and I became engaged on the 4th of July 1950 and were married on the 11th November 1950. After 59 years we are still married and living together.

It was in June 1950 when I had done a bit of riding around on my horse at the weekend probably when there had been a party in town and all the staff were nursing hangovers and I found quite a few black cattle, maybe 200 or 300 on the station. I reported it to Head Office of Lands and Survey and said that with these extra cattle coming on I thought it was time to call a halt because we were going into the winter and we should not be feeding someone else’s cattle and it was beginning to dawn on me that it was why Hammond didn’t want a second lot of lambs on the property because he was saving up feed in the autumn and winter for his cattle.

After the episode with the police I rang Wellington. I said it was not good enough being abused, accused and threatened and asked that something be done about it. I was told that nothing could be done because if the Manager left they did not know what they could do. As no one is indispensable and there was nothing out of the ordinary about managing a farm like this I said I could do it myself. I was told that if I stayed Hammond had told the shepherds not to work for me so I was to be transferred. I refused to be transferred and I was going to clean the problem up before I left the district. I was told Hammond was indispensable, although his son was every bit as good as he was. In that case I said I would leave the Department, the fact that I was under bond would not stop me and so I left.

Hammond was a great stockman, but he was an alcoholic, quite an elderly man and perhaps an overpowering sort of a man. Not of very big stature but very loud voice.

I had telephoned Wellington from the Post Office in town. Afterwards I went around to the police station and was advised that I should not return to the Station considering the mood Hammond was in. I requested a police escort and we returned to the Station where I loaded up the land rover with all my belongings. I took the cheque book, office records and what have you. I could operate the cheque account, I could employ people but I could not sack anybody and I believe it was a loser’s situation typical of public servants. I delivered the cheque book back to the Palmerston office on the Monday morning and felt I was no longer a public servant, except there had to be a stock tally.

Under the terms of the Rural Field Cadet’s course we were bonded to the State Advances Corporation for a term of seven years for a sum of £100.0.0d. I had been on the Course for 7 ½ years from January 1942 to July 1950, but the State Advances still claimed 100 pounds and under protest, Dad paid up.

I had to go back to Santoft the following week because the cattle had to be mustered in and tallied, this I believe, was overdue. Also there were 500 steer calves which were to go to Rotorua and Ross Smith, who I had been to Lincoln with in 1946, was coming down to take delivery of them and he was going to accompany them on the train back to Rotorua. I met him off the Express and brought him out to Santoft. The cattle muster was done the day before and there were two field officers brought from Palmerston North and Wanganui to tally the stock. Ross and I went round the station in the land rover looking at the development work I had organized and the proposals for the roading. There was to be a road to go right through the station with two or three side roads. I had a preliminary scheme of sub-division giving 32 farms, 6 sheep farms on the drier sand hills near the homestead with 26 dairy farms of about 150 acres on the better ground. This development was carried out over the next three years.

When we turned up at the yards one of the checking officers came up to us and said I had to go, if I stayed there Hammond would take all the staff away, they were not going to work with me. We went off and waited until the field officers came out and said that the tally was 100 per cent correct. I said what about those four black cows. The stock return shows that there were four cattle bought last year and I said they were Hereford bulls, but they said, the tally is 100 per cent correct. That’s unknown on a station this big and I said it has probably been always under counted, and those four black cows belong to Hammond. The ownership was not correct but I had finished with them so let it be.

However, the RSA got to hear of this probably through Stan Lawrenceson and, I understand, Norm Shelton, who by this time was an MP. The RSA picked it up in the belief, and correctly so, that Returned soldiers were being done out of profit that could be used to reduce the price of the farms. They forced Hammond in to having a sale in late July early August and there were 800 head of cattle up for sale. He was stood down as Manager and his son Maurice became the temporary manager but then he went off to manage a big farm at Tangawai.

The time coincided with the death of Mr. Willie Duncan. Mr. Duncan had no family so he was able to leave the individual farms that he owned to the managers. The one stipulation made was that the managers had to pay the relevant death duties for their properties. Before Hammond managed Santoft he lived on the Fordell Race Course which Duncan owned, and when he went to Santoft a son-in-law lived at Fordell. When Hammond left Santoft he returned to the Fordell property but had to sell the stock he had run at Santoft because of pressure from the Tax Department. The stock sale was held at Fordell at the end of the winter and cattle sold at a sale held two weeks later brought £10.00 a head more than he realized for his.

Hammond had not been putting in an Income Tax Return. All his dealings had been through cash and when the cattle were advertised for sale at the Fordell Sale Yards the Income Tax Department looked this up and decided that they had to follow it up. It was in the name of Clayton Graham Hammond and the Department investigated Hammond’s trading over the years but could only make an estimate. Hammond was charged with £8,000.0.0d of unpaid tax and he was given eight years to pay it off at £1,000.0.0d per year. Had he been able to defer the sale of his cattle for another two weeks he would have made £10.0.0d a head more and this would have given him the £8,000.0.0d to pay the Tax Department.

Over the years after I left Santoft I used to see Hammond a lot. I worked in the Wanganui district and often went to the Fordell sale and guessing that Hammond would be at the hotel I would go in after the sale to have a drink, not that I needed one, it was more of a tease. Hammond would be there and he would scream out that I was a f…ing detective bastard. It was all part of the fun as far as I was concerned.

Over the years though they had their share of misfortune. One of the younger grandchildren was up a tree cutting off a limb for the Christmas tree and he fell out of the tree and hit his head on a piece of old coal range which was in the ground and suffered head injuries from which he died. I do not know if the Good Lord had anything to do with that.

Archie Ellingham, who was a stock supervisor for the Lands and Survey, had a flat farm on Milson Line just out of Palmerston North. He was driving his little Ferguson tractor angle wise through a shallow ditch and it flipped backwards and he was killed. I do not know if there is a message there or not.

There was a lot of dairy stock needed to stock Santoft two or three years after I left. When the sheds were built there were twenty-four dairy sheds and the stock was bought in the Waikato. I am given to understand that a chap Shannon who was a trader in the Manawatu used to bring a lot of dairy stock down and he drafted them up. The better ones he sold at Feilding and the rest were bought by Ellingham and they were distributed to the farmers on Santoft. Whenever Ellingham was questioned about this he said it is the same price as Shannon is getting for similar replacement stock at the sale in Feilding. I was never in a position to discuss this with Shannon as he was killed when his car hit a power pole on a bend on the Rangitikei Line near Newbury. It was really none of my business but it was something which upset me over the years the way innocent people were being ripped off by unscrupulous traders.

I went down to the South Island to work for my father. He had my elder sister working for him until she left to be married in 1946 and he had two Rural Field Cadets working for him filling in their cropping year, they were Murray Findlater and Kerry Mayo who had been with me on Maringi. Kerry’s progress through the RFC scheme had been upset by war service.