Community Contributed

William John Crighton J.P 1917 -

Kete Horowhenua2020-03-23T16:47:19+00:00
Interviewed by Matt Prescott and Hadyn Butler of 4MC Horowhenua College.
Date of birth19/02/1917

William John Crighton was born in 1917 in a town called Ohakune.

He grew up in Erua, which is between Ohakune and National Park, but attended school in Ohakune during the depression. Erua was one of those small towns which had no shops, not even a general store. If Mr Crighton did not travel to school each day by train, he would board at other peoples’ houses who lived closer to school than himself. Boarding meant that he was deprived of any help with his school work, as the owners of the house where he boarded were often very busy.

Bill Crighton did not enjoy school. In fact it was ‘rotten!. His school was a Primary school and at the end of his primary days he did not want anything to do with college. He felt he had had enough of what he considered to be uninteresting time filler. If he left school he would have time for his only real interests which were rugby, trout-fishing and a spot of deer hunting in the dense bush that surrounded Ohakune.

Following his un-momentous school years, Mr Crighton worked on the family’s market garden. This business earned him some money.

When the opportunity arose in 1946, he and his father moved to Levin, where they aimed to establish an economically viable situation in the sawmilling trade. Mr Crighton and his father bought a small plantation at Waitarere, erected a mill and started cutting from there. When they first began, they worked in the forest for a day, followed by a day operating the mill. With time, the demand for wood increased and the company began to grow.

At the time the business was starting out, Mr Crighton recalls that the nearby town of Levin was not much more than a small railway town of about 3,000 people.

In the early days the company was producing about 2,000 board feet a day (board feet being a unit of measurement for wood, being 12’x12’x1’), but now days they produce up to 20,000 board feet per day. Their mill is now mechanised and they receive their tree logs from all over the country. Even in the early days of business logs came from places, as far a field as Kinleith, Wanganui and Wellington.

Now in the 1990s they mill only pine, but Mr Crighton remembers the years before the 1960s when the demand was mainly for native woods such as rimu or totara. In fact, it seems that hardly anyone even thought of using pine for building. He said: ‘It took them until the 1960s to get used to building in pine’.

The mill still operates and owns about 2,000 acres of native rimu forest near Te Horo which at this time cannot be milled.