Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  It is a litany of disaster, and the long unpunctuated sentences suggest a man speaking at speed in heated and vehement complaint. It did not end there. The piles began to split and Rochfort came out in the evening and ordered the pile to be taken out. Then, a further disaster: the winch broke, so they had to wait for another one to be sent from Napier. And just when the contract appeared finished, ‘the provincial Engineer pointed out some Extra work that required to be finished before my original contract could be completed’. (Note how Days seems to be speaking entirely on his own behalf here; he does not mention his business partner.)

  This opened up into his main complaint, what he described as ‘Trafic’, the constant use of the bridge under repair by people passing over. This meant that the two contractors and their labourers had to stop working. Rochfort saw the situation was bad and told Charles Days that he ‘would See the Superintendant about Sending a Constable out, No Constable ever came and we had no means ourselves of stopping the Trafic, the Engineer himself in one or Two Instances asked me to stop the works in order that a carriage might pass with Ladies in it.’ These delays caused ‘Expense for which we get no return. Another instance a native cart loaded with Firewood got Jammed with the piledriving Machine, the Horse took Fright & Fell on the Bridge, we had partly to unload the Cart File some of the Chains to get the horse clear and was obliged to Pull the cart off the Bridge ourselves … We had also to knock off work Twice a day to Make room for the Mail Coach passing we might say that the Stopages were hourly and that it was not in our power to prevent it … We are Sir your obet Servts, Days & Northy.’

  I have reproduced so much of the groaning burden of this letter because of its use of language and the images it creates. There are workmen stopping under the direction of the engineer so a carriage with ‘Ladies’ in it can pass by, the implication being that the ladies were Rochfort’s acquaintances or that he wished to impress them with his gallantry (workmen be damned). There is the ‘native’ cart loaded with firewood which jammed on the bridge and had to be unloaded; the panicking horse lifted out of the space into which it had fallen. (There is no sense that a Māori-owned cart was treated any differently from the way a Pākehā-owned one might be.) Then there is the all-important progress of the mail coach, at a time when mail was the sole means of communication — apart from telegraph which was expensive and hence used only in emergencies. The workmen had had ‘to knock off’. In one way, it was as if all the northern traffic into Napier passed by and obstructed the men’s progress. Their imagining of the cause of the delays was visceral, and not without its pathos. Even the letter’s poor spelling and rat-a-tat rhythm summon up the sense of a genuine person who does not know or understand persiflage.

  Letters like this from the past tend to be rarities, given that the well-educated generally dominate conversation about what the past looked and felt like.6 The oversupply of documents from the prattling genteel and literate class leads to a distorted view of what the majority of people thought and felt, let alone what they wrote. Most working people felt ill at ease with writing; arcane rules of grammar would slyly catch them out. It was not their natural mode.

  The clear implication of this letter is that not only were Days and Northey fighting for their financial lives but they were also demanding to be treated fairly, ‘as is an Englishman’s right’. John James Northey and Charles Days were backing into public notice by claiming costs against the most powerful unit of government in Hawke’s Bay, the provincial council. If this amounts to a rare mention of the Northes in public discourse, it also reflects a nascent sense of power.

  The Hawke’s Bay Herald would later comment superciliously that the ‘yeoman’ type of Englishman of which ‘we hear so much’ did not seem to exist in the colony. (A yeoman was an honest free Englishman of integrity.) There was much more evidence of rampant alcoholism, trickery and theft. Newspapers in 1871 reported an epidemic of shifty male settlers horse-stealing, house-breaking, committing assault and forging false cheques. Female migrants got drunk and disorderly. (Abortion and prostitution, however, seemed to pass under the radar if the newspaper reports are anything to go by.)

  In fact, Days’ complaint seems to represent a kind of plain honesty which was part of the fable of the sturdy English yeoman. Here he is advocating for his ‘rights’ — the rights of honest dealing in an appalling situation, part of which involved working under an autocratic superior, James Rochfort, Provincial Engineer.

  Ormond, ever the micro-manager, read Days’ letter of complaint, and two days later, on 23 July 1871, wrote a memo, passing the information on to Rochfort for comment: ‘For the Prov Enginner’s report. Messrs Day & Northy make no specific claim but ask for … consideration on ground set forth; the main points urged are that the material was not on the ground at time appointed — that their work was obstructed by passers by.’ (Note the misspelling of Days’ name, which implies that Ormond did not know either man and did not consider it important to get this basic fact correct.)

  James Rochfort did not reply for two weeks. When he did, he made it clear he would not give an inch. His response breathes entitlement. On 11 July 1871 he wrote: ‘This statement is in several instances incorrect. The contractors were not kept waiting for material or plant — But have been allowed both in time and money for putting plant together and for any delays which they could fairly claim although strict reading of the contract would include the putting of this plant together in contract time … The contractors agreed to keep the bridge open for traffic. James Rochfort.’

  Days and Northey now had to obtain the help of a lawyer to advance their case. They chose Gerald Lee, a duty solicitor in the Napier courts. He was a Londoner by birth, relatively young and probably restricted from going further by the fact his legal qualification was ‘colonial’ — he had trained in Auckland rather than Temple Bar, London, where so many of the colonial lawyers who became judges did their training. Lee had been in practice for fourteen years. He was also a passionate Catholic, and to be Catholic in colonial New Zealand placed you on the back foot. But he was used to arguing small-scale cases on a daily basis, and would have been an inexpensive choice for young working men. (In the near future, Lee would be called to an impossible task: defending Kereopa Te Rau on a charge of murdering Carl Völkner. Perhaps this was a deliberate assessment of his talents on the part of the government. But as we shall see, he had a sly intelligence.)

  Lee begins his letter with a little kow-towing to Ormond: ‘Days & Northy are very reluctant to take any proceedings in this matter as you will be the defendant.’ He then presents his argument that the case could be held before a resident magistrate. This meant it could be heard soon, essentially while Rochfort was still the engineer. (Rochfort was leaving his job.) A resident magistrate was always a local, while trial before a District Court judge (who would have to sail up from Wellington) would mean a delay. But the problem was that cases involving amounts above £20 were nearly always held before a higher court and a Wellington-based judge. ‘By consent however the whole matter may be tried in one action before the Resident Magistrate … I write this that you may think over it & I will see [you] at eleven tomorrow.’ He then signed the letter with a startling informality, ‘Yours truly, G Lee.’ Being local was everything in a colonial town.

  Ormond now tried to spur Rochfort into taking a closer look at the merits of Days and Northey’s case. ‘W. Lee Solicitor has called on me acting Messrs Day & Northy … W. Lee has deferred any action in the matter until he hears from me but he informs me he will go to Court on behalf of his Clients if claim unsatisfied.’ In other words, the Superintendent wanted a clear steer from Rochfort, otherwise the case would end up in court.

  Rochfort dourly replied on 25 July, four days later: ‘I have passed vouchers for Messrs Days & Northy for all the money that can be fairly claimed by them both for the (two) bridges and if they are not satisfied I cannot help it.’ Rochfort signed his name, but on re-reading the note he added a further sour
note: ‘To pay them more money would be giving a premium to contractors for not carrying out their contracts.’

  Rochfort may well have been feeling generally vindictive. He was exiting provincial government after a scheme he had spruiked — a railway from port to town — had been turned down flat. Small towns were full of fantastical improvement plans, coincidentally lining the pockets of their spruikers. Rochfort was on the way out. He was not feeling generous.

  Four days later (29 July 1871) Ormond wrote to Wilson, the provincial government’s lawyer: ‘This note refers to an action to be taken by Messrs Days & Northy contractors to obtain payment of sums which Mr. Rochfort Prov. Engineer refuses to recommend. Mr R’s memo is attached. I have no objection to Mr Lee’s proposal [for it to be held in a magistrate’s court] unless you think it will prejudice case. Be good enough to communicate to Mr Lee so that the case can come on at once as Mr Rochfort is leaving office.’ Ormond wanted the case heard while Rochfort was still engineer.

  The political football — which court to hear it in, what sum to settle for, should the provincial government, as Rochfort advised, not settle at all — was kicked from one person to the next. In the end the case was heard on the morning of Saturday, 12 August 1871 before Resident Magistrate Henry Sealy, a Napierite. (The Herald, in an editorial noting the peculiarity of using a resident magistrate in a case involving more than £20, described the position as ‘a sinecure’: ‘There must be some cause to make the litigants prefer the decision of an unprofessional gentleman to taking their cases before a Judge of long legal practice and experience,’ the paper noted. In fact there was.)

  All the Hawke’s Bay newspapers reported on the case, and all gave John James’s surname as his father’s — Northe — despite the spelling in one headline as ‘Northy’, which was Charles Days’ understanding of how to spell Northey.

  Having the case heard in a magistrate’s court turned out to be a shrewd move on Gerald Lee’s part. Justice Johnson, who was the usual Wellington judge, was almost brutally severe and might have delivered an entirely different verdict. Lee must have calculated that a local magistrate would be more sympathetic to the cause of natural justice implicit in Days and Northey’s case (and perhaps more critical of the unpopular and peremptory Rochfort). The magistrate said that ‘the terms of the contract were so precise … that the Provincial Engineer’s decision should be final’. However, he also went on to say that ‘the delay was caused by the Government … and after that date the work was impeded by the passage of vehicles … The penalty against the contractors for the delays therefore could not be enforced’. Sealy judged that the substantial sum of £68 8s 6d was owed by the provincial government to the contractors, with court costs of £2 15s added.

  It was a victory. But only of sorts. They had asked for £86 8s 4d and received rather less. They may well have still been in debt. And the experience of working together in unendurable conditions, probably also taking on a task that was beyond their capabilities during a boom, strained the relationship of these two men who started out as mates but ended up yoked together in a failed enterprise.

  Somewhat surprisingly, they went on to form a firm which the newspapers advertised as ‘Days & Northe shipbuilders and boat builders’ — ‘boats from twelve to 25 feet built at 18 shillings per foot’ — but from 28 September 1871 they were no longer in partnership. Days even took an advertisement in the Hawke’s Bay Times on that date to say ‘the said John Northe having circulated reports detrimental to my character, I am prepared to prove, from books kept during our partnership, that John Northe has received over and above his share of all Monies received during the time we worked together.’ The disputatious John James Northey would go it alone.

  A court case like this is a prism illuminating a particular time and place. Nineteenth-century Napier was fiercely unequal in a great many ways. Rochfort used his literacy much as a man might use a horsewhip. Charles Days advanced his case bluntly, disregarding what might be regarded as his illiteracy when he saw his rights had been infringed. As it turned out, this was correct. But it could have gone another way entirely.

  Looking through the papers of the provincial government of Hawke’s Bay, I came across a number of barely literate letters to Superintendent Ormond, petitioning for friends or family members to be brought out in the new immigrant scheme (by which migrants were assisted so long as they stayed in Hawke’s Bay and worked, hence paying back part of the costs of transportation). What resonates most with these halting, almost genuflecting letters is the way illiteracy — the inability to write (and probably speak) a received form of English — worked against working-class people, making it difficult for them to articulate what was in their best interests.

  Hawke’s Bay has always been famous (or infamous) for its class structure in which a ‘squirearchy’ of ‘sheepocrats’ sat at the very top tier of Pākehā society. As Richard Halkett Lord, the London-educated editor of Napier’s Daily Telegraph, commented in 1871, ‘There is a growing tendency, upon the part of many run-holding families, to assume to themselves the lofty position that is accorded to county families in England. The assumption is, unfortunately, very one-sided.’ He himself derided ‘such presumptuous ambition’, commenting that these self-elevated families offered little ‘beyond a few invitations to eat badly cooked dinners, and to listen to inferior music played on ill-tuned pianos’. They were ‘a mere handful of parvenus’, in his view. The Hawke’s Bay Club he pilloried as a ‘Hospital for Decayed Sheepfarmers’.7

  Toxic levels of colonial snobbery in Hawke’s Bay were clearly visible in the 1870s, when wool was beginning its relatively long economic reign in the region. Yet this court case showed there was another world entirely alongside it. Working people sought opportunities for mobility. Townsmen and women, drapers, cabinet makers, shop owners, worked hard in drab jobs. When Halkett Lord covered a fire in what he described as a ‘rookery’ of squalid cottages in Shakespeare Road, he laid bare a life of deprivation. A widow owned the property but she survived by letting out her upper bedroom to a woman — a recovering alcoholic — with two sons, all of whom slept in the same bed. The widow herself shared her bed with a young girl escaping an abusive, drunk father.

  There was a clear suspicion the fire had been deliberately lit to obtain the insurance. The widow was deeply in debt. There was no fire brigade, no source of water apart from tanks. The conjoined wooden cottages burnt to the ground. There was no safety net apart from charity, and charities themselves had a punitive edge to encourage the penitent (or failures) to move on and find some salvation in hard work. (As J. D. Ormond himself said: ‘To the deserving poor he would render every assistance; but would have it rigidly withheld from the undeserving.’8 It was a chilly world outside the drawing room — and probably even within.)

  But in Charles Days’ passionate diction we find another voice from the past: ‘we took it down to dark’ (we worked until it was night); ‘we done so as directed’; ‘the weather came over bad’; ‘we worked Extra at night Trying to make up Time, on the 5th weather very bad, but done all we could’. It’s hard not to think that these words would be spoken in a distinctive New Zealand accent, though the development of this crystallised a little later. I do not know about Charles Days, but John James Northey was antipodean-born and knew only this part of the world. Was this how he would have sounded? ‘We had also to knock off work Twice a day to Make room for the Mail Coach passing we might say Stopages were hourly and it was not in our power to prevent it.’ If the letter ended up in the format of the time, ‘We are Sir your Obet. Servts,’ there is a distinct feeling Days and Northey were saying they were prepared neither to be obedient nor to spend their lives as servants.

  The case showed both doughty young men had failed at the first hurdle of capitalism. Yet in the way of a free-market economy, they were ready to try again in another form. Charles Days had his separate boat building company, and John James Northey, now resigned to living in the same town as his father, set up
his own shipwright company on the slip at Westshore. In time this came to be known as ‘Northey’s slip’, built on land he leased from the Harbour Board for a peppercorn rent. He and his wife, Jane, began to develop their own separate branch of the Northe family — they had twelve children — who forever after went under the surname of Northey.9

  BIOGRAPHY TENDS TO CREATE A false persona in giving a uniform direction to a person’s life, as if the end point of a shipwright company on Westshore in Napier was where John James would inevitably end up. Yet, as the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik has commented, biography is ‘inevitably double, and full of the tensions and contradictions that touch any real life’. He goes on: ‘The narrating self doesn’t replace sense with story; it makes a story that makes sense.’10

  So who was John James Northey, outside of the story I have created to make sense of his life? A photograph of him as a young father shows a darkly handsome man, well built, bearded, and wearing shiny new American boots as if to advertise his prosperity. He looks proud of who he is, what he has achieved. He had some success as a shipwright. In October 1879 he built the first steamer ever to be constructed in Napier, 60 foot in length, weighing 23 tons and called Maori. (It traded between Wairoa and Napier.) He signed the building certificate in a clear and flowing hand, ‘John Northey’.

  It’s impossible to say at this distance why he called the ship Maori. Was it part of the philo-Māori sentiment that came into popularity just at the point that Māori culture was being swarmed by a robust Pākehā culture? In other words, now that Māori as a people were no longer seen as a threat, they could be perceived more sentimentally? Or did he have respect for Māori? That unloading of the wood cart points to a feeling of democratic equality. Besides, Wairoa was a more profoundly Māori town than Napier. But who was he?