KEY POINTS:
Sir Lloyd Elsmore, who served for 15 years as mayor of Manukau City, was only the second mayor the city had had.
He succeeded Hugh Lambie in 1968, three years after the city was formed and was followed five terms later by Sir Barry Curtis, who stood down from the job only last month.
Elsmore's tenure occurred when Manukau was one of the fastest growing local bodies in New Zealand.
It was also one of its strangest cities, for most of it consisted of rural tracts of the old Manukau county and Manurewa borough.
When the new Manukau City Centre was built it towered out of the countryside, as if placed there by mistake.
If Manukau City has grown greatly in a short span, it also experienced big problems and acrimonious bickering within the council when Elsmore started.
But the new mayor eventually came to be an oasis of stability and calm efficiency, although at one early meeting he told the council: "I am heartily sick and tired of sniping from you people sitting around the room."
Once when the mayor left the room while the council decided whether, two months into his office, he should have a mayoral car, he heard bickering coming through the wall and somebody saying: "If we're going to get a car it had better be a black one because he'll be dead in a month."
While he became known in South Auckland as the "old grey mayor", there was more to the man than usually met the eye.
Asked on his retirement whether he viewed himself as a colourful political leader, the thin, alert man stood stiffly upright while he considered the facts that might allow a positive answer.
"Ah ... well no," he said. "You could say that I have been more interested in the business end of things. More interested in the relevance of statistics."
Even after years in the job, Elsmore was still astounded at the irrelevant squabbling and ego clashes that could go on within a council.
"You work for hour after hour at meetings to very carefully calculate a fair rate increase," he said.
"Then it will come to a full council meeting and someone gets up and proposes an entirely different figure. And it will be seconded by one of his friends. It's this sort of thing that makes me so frustrated."
Elsmore won in the end through his fascination with statistics and figures. It was one of his greatest pleasures to study figures so he understood their every nuance.
During a long career as a grocer he took pride in being able to remember the exact price of every item in his stores.
As a mayor he "always used checked, sound statistics in argument".
"I can look back and say I have never been blown out at a meeting. I study the agendas and I carefully study the results of any meeting. So it is hard to catch me."
His care with figures started young. At 14 he was working for the local grocer in Blackball on the West Coast. Unemployment in the area in 1932 was at 82 per cent.
Elsmore's parents, who had migrated from England, were living off their savings. Then he got laid off, by which time he had thriftily saved £70 (about 20 weeks of a labourer's pay at that time). Eventually he started his own tiny grocery shop, paying 10 shillings a week rent and stocking the shelves with a few packets of this and tins of that. He borrowed scales from a local family, a bacon knife from the butcher and couldn't afford change for the till. Within a year three people were working for him and his old boss had closed his own shop.
From there Elsmore seldom looked back. He eventually bought a grocer's shop in Victoria Ave in Remuera where he did well, and then in Ellerslie, eventually becoming that borough's mayor. After a series of shops the Inland Revenue began asking why this man constantly moved from one business to another and on every occasion sold the goodwill for a lot of money.
He is not a grocer, they decided. He was a speculator and must be taxed accordingly.
Elsmore's masterstroke was to buy about 4ha of swampy paddocks and cabbage trees in rural Pakuranga, next to the narrow highway leading to Howick village. Friends and advisers told him he was mad.
He opened one of Auckland's earliest supermarkets there in 1959, an eye-catching hyperbolic paraboloid design set in an area which then had only about 300 inhabitants. He subdivided the remaining land and eventually sold out to Fletchers, who built the Pakuranga Town Centre, which allowed him to retire early at 52.
Sir Lloyd Elsmore, knighted in 1982, had 29 years in local body politics. Among achievements of which he was particularly proud were the Manukau City headquarters, paid for with ground rents from the nearby shopping centre, and the free swimming pools, libraries and other amenities the council pioneered.
And yet areas like Otara and its social dislocation were beyond the lessons from his background. He noted that Manukau had done just about "every mortal thing" in the way of facilities for Otara.
But that didn't seem to solve its social problems. Sir Lloyd did not view Otara as an Elsmore failing, just a problem beyond analysis and rational solution. It just would not fit on any orthodox chart of assets and liabilities.
Sir Lloyd married Marie Kirk in 1936. Lady Elsmore died in 1994. They are survived by two sons and two daughters.
