Moving houses a part of policing life for Hawke’s Bay couple married 60 years

Ian and Eleanor Holyoake celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary after 60 years of marriage. Photo / Paul Taylor

One of the it-goes-with-the-job aspects of a police career has been highlighted with the diamond wedding anniversary of retired assistant commissioner Ian Holyoake and wife Eleanor in Napier.

The 60th anniversary was marked on Thursday when the couple revealed they had had about 18 homes, most of them during Ian Holyoake’s 40 years as a police officer, from the time he entered the police training college at Trentham in 1959 to the time he retired from the national headquarters job in 1999.

They married on May 11, 1963, at a small church in Lower Moutere, where Eleanor had completed her primary schooling amid the apple growing of the area. It is near Motueka where they met at high school and where he grew up in the tobacco and hop growing area of Brooklyn/Riwaka area on the other side of the Tasman Bay town.

Ian and Eleanor Holyoake on the big day in 1963, when they married at Lower Moutere, near Motueka.

Embarking on their respective careers in policing and school teaching, the early years saw a succession of flats around Wellington and, as well as the birth of two children in the late 1960s. Over the years they transferred to such places as New Plymouth, Napier, Christchurch, Dunedin and four periods of service in Wellington.

It was not until he was posted to Napier as detective inspector covering Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne and the East Coast, from 1976 to 1984 – and head of the Napier CIB at the time of the disappearance of schoolgirl Kirsa Jensen from the Awatoto foreshore in September 1983 - that the couple managed to become homeowners for the first time.

After his retirement the couple returned to Napier and developed a holiday park near Bay View over the next decade, followed by some years living in Parklands and earlier this year a shift to a retirement village, which they think is “about” the 18th home.

On Thursday they marked their 60 years of marriage with friends followed by a family celebration at The Filter Room, near Meeanee.