Iain Gillies, playing for Gisborne Thistle against Eastern Union in 1964, gets up for a header. Photo / Gisborne Herald
Iain Gillies, playing for Gisborne Thistle against Eastern Union in 1964, gets up for a header. Photo / Gisborne Herald
Iain Gillies - July 29, 1935, to April 16, 2025
Iain Gillies was the longest-serving editor of a daily newspaper in New Zealand, played football for his adopted country, had a season on the books of Scottish giants Glasgow Celtic, and won seven national journalism awards.
But what pleased him above all these achievements was his ability to take a team of underdogs and beat a team of stars.
Gillies, 89, died on Wednesday last week, surrounded by family. His last few years were blighted by dementia.
Gillies liked to bet on horses, and when it came to football, he loved the art of the calculated gamble. He would devise simple but effective strategies to nullify the strengths of opponents and catch them off guard.
“He says you lot are a load of rubbish and if they don’t put five past you they deserve to walk home, to Wellington.”
Subtle, he was not; cunning, he most certainly was. And pragmatic.
If he could use a player’s qualities, he would put up with his weaknesses, while working to eliminate them.
Iain Gillies was born in Mallaig in the West Highlands of Scotland on July 29, 1935, to railway signalman Ronald (Rogie) and May Gillies. He was the eldest of four brothers and a sister.
In 1949 the family emigrated to New Zealand, where May’s sister Margaret and her English husband Charlie Old were living with their two children in Devonport, Auckland.
The two families lived in the same home for the best part of two years then, frustrated by their inability to get a house, Rogie and May took their family back to Scotland.
Their old home had been sold, so they spread out among relatives and friends.
Iain’s two-year absence from the Scottish curriculum meant he was well behind the class pace-setters and he decided to leave school and get work in the village.
But a teacher he respected urged him to go all out for a scholarship that would enable him to attend secondary school in Fort William as a boarder.
He won the scholarship and, about the same time, a place in the Nairn County Highland League football team. It meant weekly bus travel from Fort William in the west to Inverness and beyond in the east.
They played him mainly on the left wing to develop his weaker foot. He also played for a Fort William team, Argyll Rovers, mainly as a centre-forward.
But he felt he was at his best at centre-half, and while playing in that position he was spotted by a Celtic scout and offered a trial and then a contract.
In his season at Celtic – 1954-55 – he never got a run in the first team. The first-choice centre-half was Jock Stein, who as manager later guided Celtic to nine championships in a row and, in 1967, the European Cup.
Given a free transfer at the end of the season, Gillies left Edinburgh University – where he had studied geography and history – because he no longer had his football income to support him.
He joined the air force for his two years’ national service and was posted to an underground station near the English city of York, as a clerk.
By this time, childhood knee injuries were causing him trouble, so he played as a goalkeeper in forces football.
He caught the attention of Crewe Alexandra, who arranged to sign him when his national service was over.
In the meantime, he had met Flora Appleby at a dance in York.
Both members of five-sibling families – four brothers with a sister in the middle – they were the children of railwaymen and had grown up in working-class families.
They married in York on November 19, 1957.
At Crewe, coaches discovered the player they had signed as goalkeeping cover had played centre-half for Celtic reserves for a season.
They put him in their reserve team at centre-half, cover for former England international Neil Franklin, whose career had been derailed by a spell with a rebel league in Colombia, South America.
The knee problems that prompted the shift to goalkeeper had eased, but the strain of regular football on heavy grounds meant that, in the end, Gillies was playing only one game in three at Crewe.
A specialist said he could not be certain an operation would work and, if it didn’t, the knee could be worse.
Around this time, May Gillies came by train from Mallaig to visit her son and his wife, and bought a newspaper to read on the way. In it she saw an advertisement from newspaper publishers Thompson and Leng, seeking university-educated trainee reporters who had done their national service. She showed it to Gillies, and he applied.
His twin ambitions always were to be a professional footballer and a newspaper reporter. One dream had just died and the other sprang into life.
After training in the company’s Dundee headquarters, Gillies was sent to help in the Inverness office. Soon he was joined by Flora and their newborn son John.
In a North Sea-whipped winter, Gillies returned from an assignment with a motorcycle-mounted AA breakdown responder. On the way back to the office he bought a copy of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly .
“Play football in the sun,” the advertisement said. Gisborne club Eastern Union wanted British players with professional or semi-professional experience to fill the gap left by departing English international Ken Armstrong and Scottish international John Aird.
Gillies knew from boyhood experience he could shine in New Zealand football, on its firmer grounds, even on one leg.
Iain Gillies blocks an Eastern Union player's shot while playing for Gisborne Thistle in 1964. At left is his brother Archie. They returned to Eastern Union the following year but rejoined Thistle in 1973. Photo / Gisborne Herald
The club organised a job at The Gisborne Herald for Gillies and got him and his mate Tony Moynihan berths on a boat arriving in time for the start of the 1959 season. Flora and son John joined him in October that year.
Gillies and Moynihan were in the Poverty Bay team that won the EFA (English Football Association) Trophy, the symbol of provincial supremacy, from Auckland in 1959.
Over the next few years, with help from The Gisborne Herald’s Muir family and a big win on the horses, Gillies got the rest of his family to Gisborne – first Ronnie, then Andy and Veronica, and finally, in 1962, Archie, May and Rogie.
In his early years with Eastern Union, Gillies was used primarily as a centre-forward.
He and his brother Archie had a year with Gisborne Thistle in 1964 then returned to Eastern Union when Iain Gillies was asked to be player-coach.
He shifted back to centre-half, and for a short time the Eastern Union first team had all four Gillies brothers in the line-up: Iain, Ronnie as captain, Andy and Archie.
In 1967 Eastern Union won the Central Districts League, a precursor to the Central League formed in 1968, the year Eastern Union became Gisborne City. Also in 1967, Gillies was selected as vice-captain of the New Zealand team to New Caledonia.
He stepped down from the position of Gisborne City coach in 1969 to concentrate on playing, with the prospect of a national league starting in 1970. Ructions in the club towards the end of the season meant he filled in as coach, and he guided the team into one of the qualifying places for the inaugural season of the national league.
He played his last national league game in 1972 at the age of 37, and the following year took over as player-coach of Gisborne Thistle.
They won the Eastern League in 1973 and ’74, and qualified for the Central League third division.
Flora and Iain Gillies at the Gisborne Thistle 50th jubilee celebrations in 1974, the year Iain Gillies coached them to a second successive Eastern League title and promotion into the Central League third division. Photo / Gisborne Herald
In 1977 he rejoined Gisborne City as assistant to coach John Hill, and took over when Hill decided to concentrate on playing.
After the 1978 season, with funds running low, Gillies advised the club to hire Kevin Fallon.
Eight years later, Fallon moved on having guided Gisborne City to the Central League championship in 1979, the Air New Zealand Cup and national league title in 1984, and Chatham Cup finals in 1983 and ’84.
For much of that time, Gillies was Fallon’s sounding board.
Later he helped Martin Ryan with a composite Gisborne side in the Central League and Thistle in the Hawke’s Bay league.
Gillies played Eastern League football in Campion College teams with his sons and his grandson Iain-Patrick, and had his last competitive game in a beach football competition when he was 70.
In 2010 he was awarded the Jim McMullan Trophy for contribution to New Zealand football.
His career at The Gisborne Herald had progressed apace. In 1969, for the Cook Bicentennial celebrations, he wrote a supplement based on James Cook’s journals, and it won him the Cowan Memorial Prize for historical journalism.
He received two other Cowan awards, one for a six-part series on the Williams family, and another for a three-part supplement on the centenary of local government in the Gisborne district.
He was also a member of the editorial team who won the Cowan award for a supplement marking the centenary of The Gisborne Herald in 1974.
Gillies wrote the text for the local illustrated history Baskets Away, and was the lead author for Cook: The County and its People, East Coast Pioneers and a history of the Turihaua Angus stud.
He won four awards for sports journalism, and his book The Class of ’84 is regarded as a classic of New Zealand football writing.
Soon after his first Cowan award he was made deputy chief reporter, then chief reporter in 1974 and editor in 1980. He stepped down from the role in 2010 after 29 years but continued to write about sport. He retired in January 2013 after his wife broke a hip on Christmas Eve and had it replaced on Boxing Day.
As a reporter, Gillies was a fast, prolific writer who could produce running reports from city council evening meetings. During debates he would summarise – in handwriting on copy paper – the comments of councillors as they spoke. When the council went into public-excluded business, Gillies would go back to the office, write opening paragraphs for all the stories being used the next day, and leave them on the chief sub-editor’s desk.
Key Gisborne Herald staff celebrate the paper's 130th birthday in 2004, back (from left): Editor Iain Gillies, chief reporter John Jones, chief photographer Paul Rickard and chief sub-editor Dave Conway. Front: 40-year staff member Trevor Petterson, farming reporter Barbara Scott, managing director Michael Muir and circulation manager and former printers' foreman Graeme Miller. Photo / Gisborne Herald
His mentor for council coverage was veteran reporter, railfan and compulsive fact-checker Cecil Steere, while chief reporter Jack Jones was a friend as well as taskmaster. When Gillies arrived in Gisborne, Jones showed him the view from Kaiti Hill and advised him to introduce himself as being from Scotland rather than Britain. That way he would avoid being cast as a Pom.
In sport, he covered cricket and football, but also any other sport to which he was assigned, and even had his wife Flora phone rugby stories to the Sunday press while he was away playing football.
For feature-writing, Gillies used the techniques of a novelist to bring bald facts to life, following the advice of a seasoned Scottish reporter who told him it was vital in historical writing to engage the emotions of readers.
In his time as editor, Gillies – a committed Roman Catholic – courted controversy by arguing for the right to life of the unborn child.
On the economic front he had the distinction of having an editorial printed on the cover of then-Reserve Bank Governor Don Brash’s annual report. He continued to cover football and, for several years when his children and grandchildren played the sport, basketball, and helped lay out the sports pages.
Sons John, Angus and Duncan, daughter Elaine and niece Amanda Gillies followed him on to the editorial staff of The Gisborne Herald. Another daughter, Catherine, was company accountant, nieces Angela Evans and Lisa Gillies were on the printing and office staff respectively, his mother May was a proof reader in the 1960s, and foster son Jason Matenga was a driver.
When hiring reporters, Gillies trusted his hunches. He gave siblings Karen and Paul Thompson, daughter and son of family friends, a start in journalism. Karen has had a distinguished career in publishing and communications and Paul is Radio New Zealand chief executive.
When J Wattie Canneries closed its Gisborne operation, Gillies hired newly available football mate and 1982 World Cup All White John Hill as a sports reporter and made him cover rugby . . . to the clubs’ delight.
Gisborne Herald news editor Chris Taewa got his start after sending in golf reports. A Bachelor of Arts degree behind him, he was working in his dad’s fish-and-chip shop when Gillies phoned to tell him he’d got a job as a reporter.
After Gillies stepped down from the position of editor, he wrote a weekly feature on sportspeople of the past – They Did it Their Way – as well as reports on lawn bowls and football.
He is survived by his wife Flora, children John, Elaine, Catherine, Angus, Duncan and Marianne, Jason Matenga (whom he regarded as a foster son), 16 grandchildren, 22 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandson.
