Marcella (Joyce) Murphy is the eldest daughter of Edward (Ted) Jaques and now the oldest surviving member of 13 siblings. The Jaques family were well-known for their construction business in Pahīatua.
The death of Donald Jaques could be seen as the end of an era.
Born in Pahīatua, he went on to live in the United States, where he died last month at the age of 98. He was the last surviving member of nine brothers.
His sister Marcella (Joyce) Murphy says Don met his wife in Canada and the couple were married in 1953.
It was while he was visiting cousins in Portland, Oregon that he took a trip to San Jose in California.
“He could see the potential of it growing,” she says.
While he returned with his wife to New Zealand, going to work for what was then Jaques Brothers, Joyce says he always had a hankering for returning to California.
He left New Zealand and started Jaques Construction in San Jose in 1959.
“He did extremely well for himself.”
Don was the fifth of 13 children – nine boys and four girls. Joyce was the oldest girl.
The Jaques name is well-known in Pahīatua, with Edward (Ted) Jaques moving from Masterton in 1920 to start up a coachbuilding business.
Joyce believes the name was once spelt with a “c”, but she was told a story that the name was changed when the family escaped the Reformation in France centuries ago.
The Jaques moved to England and eventually Ted’s father, Roland, moved to New Zealand, by way of Australia.
At some point, Ted was in the United States, where he met Dorothy and the couple came to live in New Zealand following World War I.
He would go on to build houses in Pahīatua, including his own, and many of the homes still stand today.
When Ted became ill, his sons, all but one who died at the age of 11, took over the business, going on to build not only houses but also a dam, the water tower at Massey University and the Ballance Bridge in the 1970s.
Known as a bit of a perfectionist, Ted passed this trait on to his sons, all of whom worked in the trades: carpentry, plumbing or engineering.
It’s believed Jaques Brothers closed for good in the 1980s.
Joyce recalls a “fun” childhood.
“I was in amongst all the boys. They dearly wanted a sister but when I arrived, they didn’t know what to do with me.”
She says they treated her as one of the boys and she did everything they did, “within reason”.
The children would often go down to the bakery and get a penny or threepence worth of broken biscuits.
“We’d take them all down the back paddock and eat them. Pick out the chocolate bits.”
The children’s playground was the hills.
“That was all we had, but it was all right. We had a good life.”
Ted, by Joyce’s account, might have been a bit of a hoon in his day.
“My dad had two speeds. Go and stop.”
She recalls him taking a car out and getting it stuck in a rut, turning it over. When he returned home he expected sympathy from his wife, but got none.
One day, he took Joyce with him in an old truck on a trip to Palmerston North.
By the time they made the return trip through the Manawatū Gorge, it was dark, and Ted didn’t know how to dip the lights on the truck.
She says instead of dipping the lights, he would turn them off but keep driving.
“I don’t know how we survived that trip.”
The location of Ted’s coachbuilding business was behind what was once Ford Motors, on the corner of Tararua and Main Sts.
Leanne Warr has been editor of the Bush Telegraph since May 2023 and a journalist since 1996. She rejoined NZME in June 2021.
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