Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  TO READ THE MINUTE BOOK is to get a feeling of how small-scale R. Northe & Sons was. At the very back of the book is a list of the company’s Clydesdale horses: Guv’nor, Massey (after Massey’s Cossacks in 1913, which gives some sense of where the Northes lay in the political spectrum), Floss, Dolly, Trooper (after 1914). In one sense the firm never outgrew its Victorian and Edwardian origins as a horse-drawn, family-owned company. Draught horses were valuable commodities; the cost of each was approximately ten times the weekly wage of a labourer. The firm bought its first lorry in 1915. Ern, as the brains of the family, sought to diversify, buy property, consolidate, lend at advantageous rates and generally leverage the business so it looked to the future with confidence.

  I spent a day or so looking through the minute book, and when I closed it at its end — the company was liquidated in 1968 — a feeling of sadness washed over me. It was partly seeing the evidence of a man in his prime, working with agility for a large and seemingly inert family. In the 1920s Ern was in his forties and at the peak of his career and the amount of detail about the deals he was doing — lending and borrowing, developing land deals, buying and selling, calling in book debts — is notable. In the early 1920s the firm recorded record levels of profit. He promptly bought a block of shops in the main commercial street. It was by a tram stop, and went right through to the Parade. There’s a sense of gusto here, an appetite — not exactly for risk, but for the excitement of opportunity. You sense he is enjoying the possibilities. But all the time he is chained to his brothers, the elder three of whom did manual work around the yard and probably resented his abilities even as they depended on him for a good yearly profit (which he always misspelt ‘proffit’). It’s not a neutral statement that Ern encouraged his three younger brothers to find employment outside the drudgery of the firm. He pushed them out into the world towards white-collar work.

  By 1929 the company started feeling the headwinds of the Depression. Rents could not be paid, mortgages were foreclosed. Profits fell. Men had to be laid off. I remember Bess telling me it was ‘the worst day in his life’ when Ern had to ‘let go’ the elderly crippled clerk who had been with them all along. Then two years into the worst Depression of the twentieth century came the 1931 earthquake.

  The annual meeting of the company’s board did not take place until eighteen months later, such was the personal disarray of the family, the city, the province. It is, too, probably a statement of enduring shock that Ern, this man for whom numbers were key, put the wrong year when he wrote that ‘the disasturous [sic] earthquake of Feb 3 1932 destroyed all buildings in the Firm’s Hasting Street property all the wooden Building on the Emerson St property & did severe damage to all rented Cottages owned by the Company’. The company went from a much-diminished Depression-period profit into a loss of almost £6000.

  Yet the effect of the earthquake, once conditions stabilised and rebuilding began, was to provide work and opportunity. Each house in Napier received a £200 subsidy to replace drains and rebuild chimneys. With the Northes as one of the few suppliers of bricks and pipes, business was brisk. Their work teams built banks around the river which surrounded the old Napier racecourse. It had been turned into an open-air hospital and camping ground during the emergency.

  By May 1932 ‘all the rented houses have now been repaired & substantial assistance granted by Earthquake Relief reduced the cost very considerably,’ Ern wrote. A tender had been accepted to rebuild one of the destroyed shopping blocks in concrete; the shops had been re-let and the flats above tenanted. The Rehabilitation Commission offered to lend the firm ‘£3500 at 5% repayable principal and interest in fifteen years with half yearly payments of £334/8/10’.

  The company endured and slowly returned to health. The same could not be said for Ern, who was visibly aged by the trauma. His hair reputedly went white with shock after the quake. His wife and daughters were evacuated, but he stayed on in Napier. He just went on working. And working.

  Certainly, after 1931 the minute book no longer indicates his almost playful sense of enjoyment in the adventure of small-town capitalism. He had needed not only to take care of his own family’s physical survival, but also to take responsibility for the wider family’s economic survival at a time when the city’s existence as a mercantile entity seemed in doubt. Everything the family owned was in Napier. The quake provoked other, more subtle, changes that would put the firm on the back foot, too. When kitchens were rebuilt, homeowners usually chose a gas oven as a ‘clean, modern alternative’ to a coal range. The writing was on the wall for the coal business.

  If the minute book is to be relied on, there is an almost palpable loss of energy in the yearly records after 1931. Ern’s minutes are more sporadic and elliptical. He was having to run faster just to stand still. There is almost no evidence of future investment or creative attempts to increase capital. Perhaps this is a reflection of a change in perspective. Ern was looking elsewhere: he realised he had to construct his own financial future, separate from the family firm, if he wasn’t always to be pulled backwards by yanking his large family along. He began creating his own personal fortune.

  Then on 18 July 1949 he died. A Labour government was in power and had instituted high death duties. The meeting of R. Northe & Sons after Ern died was an explosion of family tensions. There was an immediate call to sell the firm they had, to varying degrees, depended on all their lives. There was criticism of Ern for not separating the wood and coal arm of the firm from its mortgage lending/property arm so that they operated independently. One of the brothers who wanted to become the new company secretary said he couldn’t possibly run the firm on the wage that Ern had accepted all his life. Everyone wanted more money. By 1949, most of them were old men, so in one sense this was understandable. More controversially, given the family nature of the firm and the fact that most of its members did manual work, the new company secretary asserted that clerical work should be paid more than manual.

  It was a tinderbox of emotions — perhaps not unusual after the death of a patriarch. But there’s something sad about it all — the decay of a family firm that drifted on until its extinction in 1968. You get the sense of a man who had worked hard all his life for the betterment of the company but was never greatly recognised or acknowledged. The wider family wanted to get their hands on the capital and couldn’t wait, in a way, to dismember the corpse. But this is his grandson talking, and I am not an impartial witness.

  I understand now why Ern’s family was regarded as snobs. They needed to separate themselves from the rest of the family for survival. To ‘get ahead’. If you didn’t assert this, you’d be pulled back to the family mat. I can see now why my grandmother used to shepherd her husband and children away when their visits to their grandmother, Polly, coincided with those of other Northe family members: ‘Your father sees enough of his brothers during the week. He doesn’t need to see them on the weekends.’

  Bessie told me how her elder sister Jean, who had always regarded her as spoilt, once indulged in a subtle piece of sideswiping. In front of Bessie’s Point Chevalier friends — to whom Bessie gave the impression she was a Hawke’s Bay aristocrat — Aunty Jean took pleasure in announcing that Ern was ‘just an ordinary working man’. This touched Bessie on a really sore point. Bessie, presenting her case to me as if I were a member of a jury, ran her finger down the index of her father’s accomplishments: he was a managing director, he owned property, he was a wealthy man. The fact is, he was probably all those things — and an ordinary working man who spent his life creating financial security for his wife and children. He was possibly a man without any snobbery at all. Unlike his wife and daughter.

  THIS IS AS GOOD A time as any to look more closely at the few surviving letters Ern sent to Bessie. In them we can catch the flavour of his voice, especially his humour. It’s probably also fitting that three of the four letters that survive are about money — or, to be more specific, Ern giving his daughter advice on property and how best to acq
uire a house. (This is most likely why these letters survived. They were important documents.)

  He also models behaviour that Bessie in her turn modelled for Russell: lending money to a family member to purchase property by offering a lower rate of interest than that offered by banks. In other words, it was not an outright gift that would encourage profligacy. Ern was encouraging caution as well as emphasising the importance of property for a family’s stability. Unknowingly, he was also seeding a dispute between my parents that continued to rankle with my father all his life.

  The transaction is captured in this sentence: ‘I note you have £600 of your own so would suggest you take the house in your own name & I will find the balance required.’ Bessie did just that, and her name was on the purchase agreement of the first house my parents owned.3 In truth, the £600 she had was money from Dad’s army pay which she had set aside while he was overseas. (She lived off her own earnings as a clerk.) In one way this strongly implies she was always going to go back to Dad when he returned. She was preparing for the future, and for the children she assumed she would have. At the same time it is possible to live, and function, holding two diametrically opposed possibilities in mind. One might be a fantasy, the other a reality; but just holding on to a fantasy at a time of an unacceptable reality gives comfort.

  But the fact was the purchase of our first family home was made in Bess’s name, and when she said airily, in Dad’s hearing, ‘When I bought the first house at the Point,’ his face would pincer shut, his lips vanish and his eyes grow bitter. She was diminishing him in public — a shadow play, I see now, of what she did during the war. It also implied that she was, if not a woman of wealth, from a family of substance. Beside this, Dad was almost see-through. Was my grandfather unaware of the implications of his actions in lending Bessie money to buy a house, or was there an element of cool assessment of his son-in-law’s ability to do what a son-in-law should do: aggregate wealth and property, provide security? I do not know.

  The three letters about purchasing the property are relatively straightforward, as befits the important business of cash and property. This was Ern’s area of expertise, you could say, and the advice he gives Bessie is practical. The house ‘should be sound if only built 27 years of good materials. When you go through jump on the floors & see if the foundation are sound if they are not the floors will shake.’ He laid out clearly how an offer on the property had to go through the Byzantine land court procedure set up to stop profiteering during a time of property shortages. (The market was flooded by returned servicemen and the housing stock was static as a result of wartime shortages and, before that, the Depression.)

  Ern’s second letter is set out just as he would have a letter to any business partner: ‘You intend to put £500 of your own into the purchase & require £500 from me. Well I suggest term 5 years interest 3% with quarterly … & right to pay any amount off the principal at any time, with corresponding reduction of interest on amounts … paid from next interest date.’ He would have written out sums like this all his life. ‘If you like you could make regular monthly payments in this way it is surprising how the amount comes down.’ The rest is similarly business-like. It is signed, ‘Yours aff[ectionately] Dad’.

  But Ern added a note along the side explaining why the letter is all about business: ‘Mother writes all the news. She is like Rusty has a damn bad cold. I told her she would have to give up bridge if she allows all windows at the club to be open & then sits in a draught.’ This captures a little more of his character: he was always making fun of his wife’s obsession with bridge, her race over the steeplechase of class. ‘Rusty’ refers to my brother — the first male grandchild, a potential heir to Ern’s knowledge of the world, of finance, of property (which Russell seemed to inherit almost by osmosis, since he was only one when his grandfather died). Was this Bessie’s role, however? To transmit some essential knowledge, to pass a torch from one generation to the next?

  The final letter to do with finances was written just three months before Ern died. It was written on different paper from the others, a cheap lined pad which perhaps adds to the letter’s immediacy. (Whatever lay at hand?) It shows surprisingly high spirits, opening with: ‘It is just as well you broke that mirror your luck is right out (of the box). Last night you drew £800 free of interest on your Starr-Bowkett shares.’ (Starr-Bowkett was a co-operative non-profit financial institution that provided interest-free loans to its members. It operated by having lotteries. Ern was director and chairman of the company. The fact that Bessie won a lottery so close to Ern’s death seems a remarkable piece of timing — or one could perhaps look at it in a more critical light.)

  Ern then lays down various schemes for how Bessie could best utilise this stroke of luck. The information is detailed down to the last penny. In one way it is a further illustration of Ern’s financial skills, with various alternatives clearly offered. He plumps down on one in particular: in twelve and a half years’ time ‘your position would be 1/house free of encumbrance 2/fully paid up Gov Stock £300 bringing 3% 3/Credit with StarrBockett in shares’.

  The glance into a future twelve and a half years distant is typical of a period when people thought in terms of decades. This was not a world for the quick fix. At the same time, Ern knew he had little time left: ‘Make up your mind what you want done … & let me know immediately. I will not [bother] you with any news I will leave that to Mother.’ Then he edges out of the letter with another piece of high-spirited nonsense: ‘I am sorry Gordie has a stiff neck no doubt he got this trying to beat the new Look dresses. Your aff-father, WE Northe.’4

  THE ONLY NON-FINANCIAL LETTER THAT Bessie saved was written two years before Ern died of cancer of the throat. (He smoked roll-your-owns — ‘the meanest man in Napier’?)5 It’s probable that Bess already knew that her father was ailing, and she may have subconsciously selected the letter to keep as a memory of the sound not so much of his voice, perhaps, as of the way he thought, joked, made sense of the conundrum of life.

  It was April 1947 and he had been on a very rare holiday to Wellington, visiting his two older daughters, Jean and Patti. Jean already had a daughter aged three — Suzanne, Ern’s only grandchild at this point. But there is a ghost of mortality about this letter which, towards its close, indeed deals with sudden death.

  His illness can be read almost in reverse in the letter: first in the fact he had even taken a holiday, and second that he records lying in bed in the mornings. Even his mention to Bess that ‘Mrs Kutz’ — his nickname for Jessie — is nervy could be read as a comment on the dread she felt at seeing her husband ail and begin to falter. Nobody knew what lay ahead.

  Looking back on his holiday in Wellington before this, Ern reflected on a period of unaccustomed rest and recuperation. He stayed in bed most mornings until ten or eleven o’clock ‘& one day stayed in bed until lunch time & had breakfast & lunch together. Patti had the car & we went somewhere every afternoon.’ He was in that space of knowing he would die sooner rather than later, and he was spending what came to be called ‘quality time’ with his children and one grandchild. There is of course not a single direct mention of any of this in the letter. Rather he concentrated on a wry sense of humour and the pleasure he took in three-year-old Suzanne.

  ‘One afternoon I took Jean, Tuppence [Suzanne] & Patti to a vaudeville show it was excellent a Kerridge Odeon [a theatrical and cinema distributor]. My word didn’t Tuppeny enjoy it. There was a funny man trick riding on a byke [sic] & it fell to pieces & he fell off on the stage & Tuppeny roared with laughter … There was a lot of gaggs [sic] put over but I failed to hear them. In the evening when George came home he said “I hope you have been a good girl” & Tuppence said to him “do you know what happens to good girls?” & George said no but as quick as you like Tuppence said “nothing” not bad for a 3 year old.’

  This had obviously tickled his fancy. But he moved on quickly. ‘Maggie Northey [his cousin Jack’s wife, and approximately his own age] died Sun
day she did not live long after Jack did she.’ He went into considerable detail about the rather surreal death scene. Maggie was in ill health but ‘insisted’ on going for a drive. ‘Young Jack’, her son, rang the doctor who said ‘it would do her good’. Maggie’s daughter arrived and tried to put a coat over her mother’s dressing gown but ‘Mag she insisted on being fully dressed.’ They got her into the car, propped her up with pillows ‘& she said she was very comfortable. Jack got in to start the car & before he could do so Maggie threw back her head & expired without another word. It was a terrible shock to them all. It only goes to show,’ Ern wrote to his daughter, ‘you never know when your number is up.’

  The letter has something of the quality of a stream of consciousness, because Ern suddenly changes back into humorous mode by writing: ‘I sent mother a cheque for 30 pounds for her teeth I suppose she got it allright [sic] I made it payable to Mrs Kutz I hope she was not offended.’ This was typical of the sly deflating wit that he used against his wife’s attempts at social pretension, a little in the modus of the Marx Brothers kidding Margaret Dumond. It would have also, incidentally, invalidated the cheque. I am sure ‘Mrs Kutz’ was not amused.

  But then he moves on to what was probably a confidential part of the letter — his concern about his wife’s health. Jessie and Ern were married in 1910, so by 1949 they had lived together for nearly forty years. Jessie’s Type 1 diabetes had had a serious impact on her overall health. She had written to Jean saying she was ‘not too well & was going to see a doctor’ — this is the private business of letters — but Jean then told Ern, and Ern now took the matter up with Bessie: ‘I do hope he give [sic] her something to strengthen her up a bit she was very nervy before she left Napier. The trouble is she tries to do too much if she took things easy & let some of the work go it would be much better for her.’ This was not going to happen.