Chapter 6 - Table Hill

Above: Marriage of Heather Dalziell to Bill Wright on 11 November 1950 at Hunterville Presbyterian Church. From Left: Tom Lees, Joan McPhee, Murray Findlater, Sally Heyward.

The Reverend Dyason conducted the service. Joan McPhee and Sally Heyward were bridesmaids and Murray Findlater and Tom Lees, both Rural Field Cadets, were best man and groomsman respectively. We borrowed Heather’s parent’s 1937 V8 motorcar which had a sleeper seat and set off on our honeymoon through Taupo to the Central Plateau. We returned to Hunterville on 16 November, my birthday, and the following day packed Heather’s luggage into my parent’s car which they had left behind for our use. I cannot recall how my parents returned to Waimate but they probably travelled with Norma, my elder sister, and her husband Tom Rolfe. My younger sister Patricia was on her O.E. There was no drive-on ferry back then. The car was put on a platform and slung into the hold where it was parked for the overnight journey to Lyttleton.

Hunterville. Hunterville Presbyterian Church HWe lived at Table Hill in the homestead which was a very attractive old colonial villa. My father had leased the property from Ray Borrie whose wife and three daughters had moved to Oamaru to enable the girls to attend secondary school. Initially Ray lived in a caravan adjacent to his engineering workshop. He had not farmed the property of 318 acres for three years during which time my father had leased it. After Heather had unpacked our belongings she asked me where my cheque book was as she could only find a Post Office Savings Bank book with £25.00 in it. Before being married I had bought twin beds and a dressing table, second hand of course. We used what furniture Ray Borrie had left in the house. I think it was left there until Dad bought the farm and together with Mum they moved their own furniture in. Ray then completed his move to Oamaru where he established an engineering workshop on the Main Street.

Dad wanted me to buy Pinegrove but I knew they had had a struggle for 30 years and he was offering it to me at a price that gave him a 10/- (ten shillings) an acre gain after 30 years. Eventually he sold it to a neighbour Thompson, at £28.0.0d per acre. There was no grid electric power.

The first ploughing I did at Table Hill was a 20 acre paddock ninety percent infested with Californian thistle as high as the top of the radiator housing on the TD6. The plough buried the thistle and we presumed the paddock had not been sown to pasture after a cash crop of wheat or barley.

Ray Borrie owned a tin mill which he operated during the harvest season otherwise he repaired machinery for local farmers. There was no electric power so he used an All Days and Onion motor to drive an overhead shaft that drove a double ended grinder, power hacksaw and drill press. He also had a gas welding plant.

Ray put the farm up for auction Brian Sutton, the father of Jim Sutton the past Minister of Agriculture, was very interested. He had sold his Southland farm the year before when ewes were worth about £12 each, but this was the year of the Korean War and resultant wool boom when the ewes were worth £50 each. Dad outbid Sutton senior, paying £42 per acre, but Dad already owned the 500 ewes that Sutton would have had to purchase to stock the farm. Vic Ritchie manager of PGG, told Dad when leasing a farm always farm it as if you owned it as that will always help you if you get the chance to buy it.

Waihao Downs is limestone country and was a renowned wheat growing area. In the early days Hunter and Dreadnought were the popular varieties but they were subject to wind shake. If there was a strong North West wind when the grain was ripe most of the grain would scatter onto the ground. Coinciding with the introduction of header harvesters and the development of Cross 7 Wheat by the Wheat Research Institute at Lincoln, the Hunter variety went out of circulation. Dreadnought was still popular because it yielded much higher than Cross 7, though it had much longer straw it had bigger heads and plumper grain.

Most farmers accepted the Cross 7 because of the ease of harvesting because it could be direct headed – no reaper and binder, no stooking, no carting the sheaves to the stack or mill, but my father retained his love for the high yielding Dreadnought. This meant it had to be cut and laid on the stubble before it was able to be wind shaken and then left to dry and the moisture content lowered so that the grain did not crack as it passed through the header harvester.

For the 1949 harvest my father had a Case Hillside Header Harvester imported, but while it was being assembled in John Chambers’ workshop in Timaru, there was a major fire which destroyed the machine. Undeterred he had a bigger one imported which had a five metre cutter bar and weighed five tons. He also bought a TD9 which also weighed five tons with a 50 hp diesel motor to pull the header around the wheat growing hills of Waihao Downs.

Above: Header Harvester at Table Hill. Above: TD9 on Table Hill 1952.

The TD9 and header, cost £9,000.0.0d in total, and were displayed at the Waimate A and P Show on the 16 November 1950. The two ton had been displayed at the same show in November 1928.

Because of the idiosyncrasies of the Dreadnought wheat, Ray Borrie made a windrower to cut the long straw and place it on top of the stubble. Before the windrower the cut material was dropped in a wheel mark where the stubble had been rolled down by a tractor wheel. This happened in a 27 acre paddock. It was a wet year and I had to lift the lot with a fork and place the cut crop on standing stubble to dry. A better method had to be found so we turned to Ray Borrie and were grateful for his ingenuity and engineering ability.

After Dad bought Table Hill he and Mum moved into the homestead with Heather and me. After a few weeks of shared living conditions I was contacted by a group of disgruntled lessees of Maori owned land at Hawera. The lessees were disputing the increased rentals being asked by the Maoris and it was necessary to collect data to establish a basis for valuing the properties, similar to the work I had done when I first went to Lands and Survey Head office in 1949. I agreed to undertake this work and spent almost six weeks in Taranaki. During this time Heather returned to her parents’ property near Hunterville.

Towards the end of my work Clem Trotter, the manager of the Farmers Organization (Stock firm), asked if I would take over the Farm Supervision Department of his firm. He had lost Len Newall to the Guardian Trust and the other man, Lyn Bremer, wished to retire. I agreed without talking wages.

As I knew I would get a car and help with housing. I went down to Waimate expecting to pack up our furniture and return to Hawera. That was in 1952, we eventually moved to Hawera in 1959.

The journey to Waimate was tedious. I took the bus from Hawera to Wellington; caught the overnight ferry to Lyttleton; travelled by train to Studholme Junction and finally boarded a bus which took me to Waimate. Dad met me at Waimate and told me he had bowel cancer and had to have an operation but he would be recovered in six months and asked us to delay our move to Hawera for that length of time. Clem Trotter was not agreeable to this and gave the position to Tom Molesworth, an ex RFC who was a classmate in the VFM graduates in 1948.

Staying at Waimate to help my father raised the problem of where Heather and I would live. The adjoining farm, Sheddans, consisting of 106 acres of Crown lease, was for sale at £2000, but we only had £400. Dad suggested that Uncle Ken from Roxburgh might be able to lend us £500 and we could get a mortgage to bridge the gap. The next day I drove to Roxburgh and Uncle Ken agreed to give me the loan. When I said that I should return home, Uncle Ken said that I needed a day off and as he and his wife Mary were going to Invercargill the following day I should accompany them. Aunt Mary came from Invercargill and we had lunch with her father who had commercial property as well as a business which crushed oyster shells into grit to be added to poultry feed. On asking me what I was doing Mary’s father agreed to lend me £1000. I should have asked for £1,100 but I thought my father would let me have the £100 pounds I needed but he did not do so. I approached the stock firm Pyne, Gould Guiness and they agreed to loan us £100. But that was the limit of my credit. With this financial assistance we were able to purchase the Sheddans farm. It was a low ridge running north from Dad’s farm boundary, fronting Ritchie Road on the east with about 10 acres of flats and another 10 acres of flats along the west boundary. The Sheddans had a clearing sale of a Bristol Crawler tractor, limited plant and the herd of cows, but I did not buy anything.

The house on our farm was quite attractive. It consisted of three bedrooms and a lounge but the rear service areas were shocking. The first night there we had rats running around the house. When we lit the coal range – there was no electricity – the stench was horrific. The rats had stockpiled goose gizzards behind the hot water cylinder.

Above: Sheddan's Farm House - the first home we owned in the South Island.

To use Dad’s tractor on our farm I used to fuel up from his fuel supply at 5 pm. drive the tractor through the boundary gate and work, often to 2 am. Then, after 5 hours sleep, I would drive the tractor back often to be greeted with a cold look, particularly if there was sheep work to be done as my younger sister Patricia had assumed the position of farm manager.

On our farm there was a creek running inside the road fence the full length of the property. It had been allowed to spill out of its bed and the flats were rather boggy. The first job was to hire a dragline and operator and reinstate the creek to a narrow channel and that enabled us to grow potatoes and carrots on the very fertile flats.

We did not have a telephone so I bought silver pine poles, insulators and wire from the Post and Telegraph Dept and within two days work we had a telephone. There was no electric power only a kerosene lamp and candles until we rebuilt the service area. The original three rooms were quite tidy but with scrim linings and kauri panel and batten ceilings. To say the rest of the house was jerry built was an understatement so I sent Heather back home to her parents at Hunterville and I demolished the poorly built part of the house. Previous to us taking over the farm the pigs and poultry had free range of the section just outside the kitchen windows which was very handy for dispensing with the kitchen scraps. We did not have pigs and I built a hen run and house. The area outside the kitchen was turned into a vegetable garden.

I built a new kitchen and installed as new sink and six ft bench. The laundry had been a concrete tub and copper on the concrete outside the back door. There was a bathroom which had a bath but no hand basin or vanity and the kitchen sink did not have a bench on one end. I also built a new bedroom.

Dad did not have the operation for cancer for three years he always said he would have it done “after lambing; after shearing; after the wheat was planted; after harvest.” Because of his reluctance to face the surgeon I began looking for properties elsewhere. I put in for Ballot farms in Central Plateau of the North Island at Reparoa and Rerewhakaaitu, but was unsuccessful.

Then I saw 800 acres with 12 miles of sea front for £12,000. I believed my equity was £4,000 by this time. The property ranged from Martins Bay out on to the Whangapora Peninsula. I asked if the vendor would leave two-thirds of the purchase price on first mortgage. He verbally agreed but there was no signed agreement. I booked my passage by rail and ferry and was waiting for the bus opposite the two-storied Post Office in Waimate when the telegraph girl saw me from her upstairs room and brought over a telegram advising that the property had been sold to a cash buyer. Years later we went and had a look at the property. It was a magnificent panorama and would now be worth millions as it is now Auckland’s playground and so close to Gulf Harbour, Snell’s Beach, Arkles Bay and Omaha Beach.

So I settled back until a 2,200 acre farm called “Rockwood” north west of Timaru went to auction. I discussed the prospect with a stock agent friend and he said that his mother-in-law wanted to get back on the land. I went to the auction and could not believe they had trouble getting a bid. I offered £5.0.0d an acre and had it knocked down to me. My friend or his mother-in-law had a change of heart and I was left holding the big baby.

My father wanted me to hang in as he believed we could finance the development which would have meant a new house but we would have to share a house with my parents which did not work out before. The auctioneers found a buyer at £5.0.0d an acre so I got out at no cost. Afterwards Uncle Ken asked why I had not asked him. It was a great opportunity missed but Heather wanted to get back to the North Island as she was not overly happy with the cold winters.

One day I was using a fork to load threshed straw on to a wagon to use the straw to thatch the heap of baled hay and I inadvertently put a prong of the fork through Dad’s hand. He was on the wagon building the load. The spear wound did not bleed. Soon after he went to Dunedin to have the operation for bowel cancer. It was touch and go as his veins had atrophied so much the operating team had difficulty giving him a blood transfusion. That was in May 1954. Afterwards he had difficulty in finding a diet to suit him and finally settled on bread and milk for breakfast and mutton and spuds for most other meals. Yet he was playing tennis by October. He gave up playing tennis when his grandson, Allan Rolfe, my elder sister’s second son, beat him. Dad would have been 60 years old at that time.

My sister Patricia came back from her O.E about this time. She had been a Karitane nurse-nanny in England for a number of years. She had been an early member of the NZ Pony Club and when she came back to the farm she started breeding and training race horses. My working relationship with my father deteriorated as he was able to discuss all farm and business matters with her.

While Dad was in Dunedin Hospital I started to build a hay barn as I was very conscious that we did not save an abundance of feed in a good year to provide for a drought year which was fairly regular, as much as three years out of five. Allan Meyer helped me plan it and showed me where to get the 18 railway irons for the poles.

Above: Table Hill Hay Barn

That hay barn was a joy to behold as in a good year they were able to make more pasture hay. Lucerne lay was then included as it was necessary to improve the diet of the stud sheep in the dry years and in the winter we always grew turnips and chou mollier which a heavy snow fall would bury. During my school days when I lived at home and helped out on the farm we grew mangols which my mother and I would hand hoe and at the onset of winter would lift and store in the open covered with straw to stop them from freezing to the point that the sheep could not eat them until they had thawed out.

Table Hill farm had no electric power, but there was an aerogen lighting plant similar to the one at Pinegrove. The lighting plant was activated by weights suspended on a high tower. These lighting plants were rarities and I know of only one other which was near Levin. I took one plant up to Levin and the engineer whom I asked to repair it dumped it.

There was an aerogen lighting plant which used vapourised benzolene which was piped to lights in each room and to a Bunsen burner which was used to boil the kettle if the coal range was cold.

When Dad was able to do the required farm work and younger sister Patricia the stock work, I asked him to buy the 106 acres for $4,000 and I bought the farm at Hunterville.

AEROGEN:::SAFETY GAS

Aerogen Gas is an absolutely uniform mixture of air and petrol vapour, the ordinary motor-car spirit being used. The gas is non-explosive, can only be consumed through the proper burners. It is perfectly safe and has been so endorsed by the Victorian Fire Underwriters' Association.

Aerogen Safety Gas will do everything that coal-gas will do - lighting, heating, cooking, power - and is a great deal cheaper. It gives a better, cleaner, and healthier light than acetylene at about one-third the cost.

The Aerogen Machine takes up little space, is easily installed and requires very little atttention. The absolute safety of Aerogen Safety Gas, its cleanliness, its pure bright light are some of the reasons why Aerogen was selected as the illuminating power in Military Camps

Extract from: Progress - i July 1910 - from PapersPast