Chances created and seized: Roy Skuse obituary

Roy and Colleen Skuse at daughter Bronny’s home in Christchurch at Christmas in 2019. Picture supplied

Sports champion, businessman and Gisborne city councillor Roy Skuse extolled the attractions of his home town, but loved getting out to see the world.

For 28 years until 2019, Roy and his wife Colleen organised and accompanied groups of masters athletes going to overseas sporting events.

Roy Alfred Skuse died in Gisborne on December 15 at the age of 82.

“Travel was our great love,” Colleen said.

“It was a dream job for us both . . . hard work and quite stressful, but a dream job all the same.”

Many of the people they helped with their sporting holidays had been in touch to offer their condolences.

“We had quite a lot of Australian clients,” Colleen said.

One Australian who appreciated the Skuse touch was Gold Coast resident Stan Perkins, who completed his time as World Masters Athletics (WMA) president in 2018.

“Our last trip was to Poland for the 2019 WMA Indoor Championships in Torun,” Colleen said.

“Stan Perkins was travelling with us, and on the way back to the airport he stood up in the bus and said that Roy had opened up the world to people who otherwise would never have done the things they did.”

Born in Raetihi on March 9, 1941, but raised in Gisborne, Roy Skuse attended Mangapapa School and Gisborne Boys’ High before doing a wool-classing course at Massey College.

His father George, a government building caretaker, was keen on farming and good with animals. Roy’s mother Dorothy (nee Ashwell) was a school teacher, and all four of the Skuse children — Rosemary, Roy, Edward (Ted) and George — learned to read before they went to school.

Roy worked for Gisborne Sheepfarmers for five years as a wool classer before going to Australia on a working holiday. He was there 18 months and in the boxing ring was runner-up to the national middleweight champion.

Back in New Zealand, at Christmas, 1963, he went scrubcutting because he thought it would be good “toughening up” work for boxing. Although it took him well out into the back country, he travelled into town to work with trainer Dick Cook on a reasonably regular basis.

The training paid off. Roy won the New Zealand middleweight boxing championship in 1964 and was a member of the High School Old Boys rugby team that lifted the Poverty Bay title that year.

At around 1.8 metres tall and 76 kilograms, he was a bit lean for his position, tighthead prop. But coach Jack Ferguson reckoned it gave his side a psychological advantage to have a recognised boxer in the front row, even if he never hit anyone.

Roy didn’t box from 1964 until 1966, when he made a comeback with the aim of making the Commonwealth Games team to go to Jamaica. A knockout at the hands of Kahu Mahanga, a fighter who later turned professional, put paid to that ambition.

“I always said I would retire if I ever lost two fights in a row or got knocked out, so I gave it up,” he said in a 1988 interview.

He was still only 25 at the time of that disappointment, and was doing well in the scrubcutting business. In all, he ran three scrubcutting gangs, using mainly local but also Fijian labour.

In 1968, while still running the gangs, he bought a farm in the Whareratas — Ruapuni Station. He described it as “about the worst farm in New Zealand, about 2000 acres (800 hectares) of pasture and scrub with a lot of country so steep you couldn’t take a horse over it”.

On February 21, 1970, Roy married Colleen Moore and over the next few years they added son Matt and daughters Bronwyn (Bronny) and Rochelle to the family.

Roy sold Ruapuni for forestry in 1973. He and Colleen had just moved on to the hospital farm, which Roy leased from Cook Hospital Board. The sale of Ruapuni enabled him to buy another property, in Harper Road, Waerenga-a-Hika.

He ran sheep and cattle and did mixed cropping on both properties, and converted the cowshed on the hospital farm into a workshop, from which he operated the Echo chainsaw franchise for three years.

Don Crafts, one of the staff at Gisborne Markets and Roy’s former Scout master, reckoned a fruit and vegetable shop would do well at the hospital farm, and he urged Roy to try it.

They set out together in business in 1976 and put their first names together to form the trading name Roydon. Don Crafts took another job soon after, but the business name stayed the same.

Three years later the hospital farm lease expired and the business moved into town. Alan Webb was thinking of moving to Australia; Roy suggested he stay in Gisborne and “have a crack at veges” on the site that was then Alan’s builders’ yard in Wainui Road.

In 1980, Roy sold all but a fifth share of the Harper Road property and the following year the family moved into town.

Roy’s decision to run for a seat on the city council in 1983 was influenced by his belief that Gisborne’s water needs could be met at a much lower cost than what was being proposed.

The 1982/83 drought brought into sharp focus Gisborne’s vulnerability to water shortages. First the council plumped for a dam at Puninga, near the existing reservoirs at Mangapoike, along with renewal of a pipeline between those reservoirs and Waingake.

In 1984, consulting engineers brought in to review the council’s findings reported the cost of a Puninga project would be four times the $10 million-plus estimate of 1983. They proposed a scheme at Pouarua, near Lake Repongaere, that would cost about three times that initial figure.

Roy, elected to the council in 1983, came up with a scheme to take water from the Waipaoa River, store it in holding tanks for settling, and feed it into the system. The consultants evaluated the proposal and decided that while it had merit, the Pouarua scheme was still preferable.

Then came a Ministry of Works and Development review, and the Waipaoa featured again.

Gisborne’s water supply could be given enough of a boost by the provision of facilities to draw and treat water from either the river or the Matokitoki aquifer, the review found.

The Pouarua scheme was put back on the shelf and study focused on the cheaper alternatives, eventually resulting in construction of the Waipaoa treatment plant.

Roy served on the city council until the 1989 election, when Gisborne District Council came into being as a unitary authority.

Roy’s willingness to line up against professional engineers in the water debate could be seen as part of a pattern.

“He was willing to take a risk,” Colleen said.

“We were pretty green in the travel business.”

The idea came from a friend, Chris Spence, who had left the position of Waipaoa Station manager and wanted to get into inbound tourism.

“We saw that Gisborne Shipping and Travel was up for sale and we thought if we bought that it would be a base for Chris. We started with Gisborne Shipping, then it became Holiday Shoppe. Roy and I were Online Sports Tours, mainly for masters track and field athletes and golfers.

“We hired Dawson Hardacre as our manager. We did the hotel bookings and Dawson did the airline bookings.

“We took our first tour in 1991, to Finland. We had 29 people.”

Roy and Colleen had gone to their first world masters event in 1989. It was at Eugene, Oregon, in the United States, and they made a habit of going every two years after that until 2019.

From 1991 to 2003, Roy competed in the decathlon, but knee trouble restricted him to throwing events after that. He also competed in masters swimming, and was a handy golfer in open company. He and Bill Allen won the Barns-Graham Cup men’s pairs title at the Poverty Bay course twice, in tournaments 36 years apart. (Roy’s golfing accomplishments were covered in more detail in Golf Roundup on December 28.)

One trip Roy and Colleen organised was to the Oceania Games in Rarotonga.

“We took 210 people that time,” Colleen said.

“Our travellers were very independent. We’d just go around the accommodation, check everyone was all right and from then on they were pretty much on their own.

“And we always did a ‘before’ tour and an ‘after’ tour. People could just go to the games if they wanted, but most of them wanted to trip around as well.”

Colleen described the business path Roy took: “Scrubcutting was where he made enough money to buy a couple of houses. He sold the houses to buy the farm in the Whareratas, and then he was fortunate to sell the farm for forestry before it took off here. Then we bought the property in Harper Road. He sold it to a group of businessmen and bought back a share.”

The hospital farm, Roydon vege shop and the “dream job” in travel were only a hop, step and jump away for a couple who could see an opportunity and had the nerve and diligence to make it work.

Roy Skuse is survived by his wife Colleen, children Matt, Bronny and Rochelle, seven grandchildren and four “bonus grandchildren” (from a blended family). — by John Gillies