Remembering the council workers

Wanganui City Council yard staff, their vehicles and one horse in 1939. PICTURE / WHANGANUI DISTRICT COUNCIL ARCHIVES

After a lifetime of working in the streets of Whanganui former council worker Stewart Gray remembers the people who shared his vocation.

Twice weekly, sometime in 1952, I attended Miss Hilton's Kindergarten at St Peter's Church.
One day, while walking alone, when I approached the building, I observed a group of Council workmen near the church's lych gate. Among them was my father. Abandoning my usual reserve I announced my father's presence to a nearby woman. I remember the adult amusement when she told him of my reaction. I guess I felt I had reason to be proud and excited that he was part of a group of workers doing stuff in the wider world.

Sixty-seven years later, two or three months ago, at St Andrew's Church, while giving a Founders' Society promoted lecture as part of Heritage Month, a local historian, in a gratuitous attempt at humour, presented a photograph taken in the early part of last century (staged, I think), of council workers obviously shirking on the job. Amid laughter, "Some things," he said, "never change." The audience enjoyed the joke. The man behind me shrieked his approval. Decorum demanded I temper my response. I remained silent.

That representation of the council worker is one I challenge. I have a more positive impression, because as a child growing up in the 50s I got to know many. Among them were some clever and able people whose array of abilities were born of various life experiences. They endured the rigours of the 1930s depression and some, the experience of World War II. Sometimes their work habits may not have borne scrutiny but you can be assured they did the work as well. Dirty work sometimes, above and below the ground, maintaining services and establishing infrastructure. They interacted with the community and a few died as a result of accidents on the job, four in my father's time. The value of their work was not glorified in the boast of any CV, but in the performance of functional duties.

Although people from that era had been through some hard times, genteel conventions were still evident. This meant that on the job street gangs could expect householders to offer morning tea which was, occasionally, I think, (I know) accepted more than once in the course of a morning. Job work sites were run by the leading hand with little foreman intervention (their role was more organisational) and work level performances were usually achieved without the stricture of time or confined by unnecessary managerial edict. It was a system that allowed for the expression of individual skills but depended on the competency of the leading hand.
The apparent casualness of such an approach often disguised its achievements. An element of that approach is probably in the tomes of today's theoretical management manuals.

It was usual in those times for outside and office staff to engage in combined social events — Christmas socials, picnics at Pauri lake and alongside the Mangawhero River, golf tournaments, and children's Christmas parties where the kids would meet Santa Claus at the Drill Hall. There were inter-departmental cricket matches and I can remember watching a screening of The Yellow Rose of Texas at the council chambers when it was situated adjacent to the Opera House.
Those functions must have assisted management and worker relations but my impression was that there was always a natural tension between the two groups — which is as it should be.

All workers at that time were union members and the union could confidently assert the worth of any claim they made in negotiation with council management. Monthly union meetings were held and as part of its social functions it had a cricket team and, at one stage, a soccer team as well.

Names I remember of the 1950s cohort are Bunny Winter, a worker who rose though the ranks and by study became an engineer who the workers really respected; Stuart Lett; Reg Olsen and his canine workmate Pluto; Matt Hill; Alf Burg; Titch Collins; Tommy Bristol, who later became a movie projectionist; Fred Robb; Tom Barnes; Albert Charles; Ron Comp; Ivan Dellow; Henry Horne; Jack Nagel; Sid Abbot and two others, Tom Doyle and Jimmy Dixon, both of whom worked in Victoria Avenue on the "Night Cart".

Also among those workers were family friends Cairn Copley, Bill Parkes, Jack Bing and George King. Cairn became a foreman at the Parks and Reserve Department. Bill managed the Cooks Gardens Clock Tower, Jack was a highly respected and clever workmate who was the operator of the paving machine when it was first introduced in Whanganui, and George was an entertaining raconteur.

My father's work life exemplified that of those workers. Having passed his matriculation exams at 13 he elected to go to work in preference to further schooling, starting as an apprentice mechanic. At the time of his first employment the horse and dray were still in use alongside the big, solid-tyred English trucks such as Leyland, Dennis, Denby, and Thornecrofts, as well as the American Internationals, Whites, Reos and Stewarts. Since some of the trucks were too heavy for the main roads it was not uncommon for the vehicle to go through the road in certain places and with no doors on the cabs, in the winter, it could be cold and wet.

At 18 he was New Zealand's youngest dairy factory manager and later he became a market gardener. A family man during the depression he worked on a council-run employment scheme planting trees at Westmere Lake. His early experience as a full-time council employee was working at a council pit shovelling base course metal on to trucks. At one stage he helped construct a groin in the Whanganui River where he witnessed the drowning of a workmate. Subsequently he was a machine operator, a truck driver and in the later part of his employment he became a foreman.

To be continued ...