Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  This chapter is about a decision, made at a time of public celebration, which sped a human to his death. It arose in a tumult of patriotism that today seems inconceivable. (Though these days major sports events arouse a similar descent into unreality, as larger-than-life individuals take on seemingly heroic roles.) For one moment in time Trooper Sidney Northe, the first-born son of William Henry Northe, nephew of John James Northey and grandson of Sergeant John Northe, blended into this heroic figure: he became less himself and more a substitute for all the other military figures of yore. He became, in fact, that unstable being — ‘a local hero’.

  AS POLITICS CHANGE, SO TOO do names change. What was once called the 1857 Indian Mutiny (an event which provided so many of the place names in Hawke’s Bay) is now called by some Indians ‘The First War of Independence’. Pākehā New Zealanders once unselfconsciously called the land wars the ‘Māori Wars’ as if Māori had caused the wars by their acts of resistance. In a similar way, what was once called the Boer War (for a similar reason) is today rightly called the Anglo–Boer War.

  Two series of events conditioned New Zealand’s first rush into engagement in international affairs. One was Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. This was a global spectacular, a highly managed media event in which the vastness of the multicultural empire preened itself on the world stage. Imperial fervour rose to hitherto unknown heights. New Zealand had sent troops to march in the procession, along with loyal Māori who rushed to be included in an apotheosis of British imperialism. Prime Minister Seddon appeared, his vast bulk draped in a gilded palace uniform. There was a sense of pride in being part of the largest empire the world had ever seen.

  This was followed, in December 1899, by three devastating defeats, when Britain lost 2776 men killed, wounded or captured in a fight they had expected to win easily against the Boers in South Africa. Britain’s essentially eighteenth-century understanding of warfare — formations, highly coloured uniforms, a rigid hierarchy based on birth not competence — contrasted with the Boers’ knowledge of the local terrain and their use of sustained and highly effective guerrilla warfare. It was in this context that hardy little New Zealand raced to the defence of the home country.

  The Anglo–Boer War thus marked an important moment in New Zealand’s self-identity: the very first appearance of New Zealand troops in an international conflict. And how they performed was critical to the nation’s sense of itself. (Two hundred mounted riflemen were initially sent, but this was merely the beginning of what was expected to be, as always, a short war.)

  The Colonial Office in London had insisted that Māori not be allowed to serve: this was, they said, ‘a white man’s war’, and their presence would complicate difficult racial issues in Egypt and India. Nevertheless, kūpapa or loyalist Māori enlisted by using or adopting ‘English names’. As Sir James Carroll, member for Eastern Maori and later acting prime minister, observed, there was ‘a yearning in [Māori] hearts … to add whatever they can towards upholding the military glory of the Empire’.5

  It is not too much to say the first appearance of New Zealand troops on the international stage led to a virtual orgasm of nationalist feeling: Dick Seddon read the national mood like a seer, and announced New Zealand’s involvement before Great Britain officially declared war on the Boers. Then New Zealand’s troops became involved in ‘a friendly rivalry’ with Australia about which nation could get their troops to South Africa first. It was a race, a rash of madness, an explosion of nationalist energy. This poem, one of many, is based on Conan Doyle’s idea of Britain as ‘the old Sea-Mother’.

  The Old Sea-Land is calling, and the New Sea-Land replies:

  We are coming, Mother, coming. Every Man

  You expect to do his duty. Well, we know

  the good old plan,

  And each will do his duty if he dies.

  We are bred on farm or station, very peaceable and free,

  Mind the shop or mind the sheep, but we are men;

  We are the youngest of your children, and the

  furtherest from your ken,

  Yet a willing little nation oversea.

  Take our gold and take our produce — it

  was grown while that flag flew —

  Horses, corn in plenty, food for man and beast;

  We are children strong and sturdy; we will not be last or least

  When the old Sea-Land is calling to the New.

  Take the best we have to offer; take our

  sons and never fear;

  They shall not disgrace their forbears in the fight.

  We are yours, and you are Justice, you are Freedom;

  There is naught we think worthy, Mother dear.6

  Here we have it all, the clotted mixture of pride and loyalty, of assertion and subservience. Britain is called ‘Mother dear’, as if she were indeed a mother to a son (and just as Britain was always conceptualised as female, a motherland, the gender of the child that is New Zealand is always male, emphasising the peculiarly intense relationship between mother and son). But there is also pride here. New Zealand now has plenty — ‘horses, corn in plenty, food for man and beast/ we are children strong and sturdy’. And there is that interesting recognition that New Zealanders were not merely rural workers but also shop workers, town as well as country dwellers.

  But the poem is essentially about maleness — they are the ‘sons’ of empire who are called into service. It’s about the burden of masculinity and its relationship with war. A warrior tradition has its obligations, of proving fearlessness or bravery in combat through trials of strength. The downside, the remorse or emotional deadness — what we recognise today as PTSD — is overlooked in the rush to prove one’s masculinity. As another anonymous poet expressed it, in a poem called ‘Our Colonial Troops’: ‘The Empire’s awake and her people are ready / To come at a moment’s call/And our foes must learn that a blow to one / Is felt as a blow to all.’7

  So the stage was set for a series of wars that would affect future generations, scything through the male population of New Zealand during the First World War and on to the Second, when my own father went away to Europe to fight. War is inseparable from New Zealand’s sense of itself, its concept of masculinity, just as it was part of its maturing, and part of this maturing was coming to terms with war’s terrible price.

  But at the beginning of the Anglo–Boer War all was mad enthusiasm. The call went out for volunteers. So many young men rushed to enlist they had to be restricted to those already in the armed services or part-time Volunteer forces. District commanders could then pick and choose who they wanted in terms of fitness, height, age and ability to ride and shoot. This was to be the last war in which horse charges were used.

  It was regarded as great good fortune to secure a place in the contingent — each of the five command areas in New Zealand could contribute twenty men only. On 14 October 1899 Napier’s Daily Telegraph reported that along with three other men, ‘Private Northe of the Hastings Rifles has been accepted for the Transvaal and … will join the New Zealand Contingent in Wellington at once.’8 Such was the heated competition that a Captain J. Gethin Hughes, honorary member of the Napier Guards, had been told no commission was available for him and he ‘immediately wired back that he would be glad to serve in the ranks’.

  Further down in the same issue of the newspaper it was reported that the Steele-Payne family of bell-ringers and musicians used the intermission at that night’s concert at the Theatre Royal in Napier to announce ‘the official declaration of war between Britain and the Transvaal’, at which point everyone stood and sang the National Anthem (‘God Save the Queen’) ‘with spirit and enthusiasm’.

  Naturally, acceptance into the New Zealand contingent for South Africa had to be celebrated and captured in photography, but as in all photographs of men sent off to war there is a barely visible but still perceptible shadow attached. Would they come back? In a group photo, their ‘sacrifice’ is even captured officially: they are ‘Memb
ers of the Hastings Rifles, Volunteers to the Transvaal War, October 1899’. The three young men, their faces as yet unformed by life’s harsh experiences, look slightly taken aback as they pose in their fresh, slightly too crisp uniforms. Sidney Northe, whose name has been incorrectly spelt ‘North’, appears especially thin-shouldered and stiff, as if aware of, or at least uncertain about, the weight of importance invested in him.

  Our next photo is the beating of the big drum as the Volunteers march through Napier’s streets on their way to the port. The heady march into war has to be seen as a form of psychological displacement, because how else would you get people gladly marching off towards an uncertain and violent future in which a good number will be killed? You need the heightened madness of cheering and applause to ease humans off to what may well be a final farewell.

  The farewell from Wellington on 21 October 1899 was a climax of colonial patriotism. The town was so crowded that not a single hotel room could be found. Crowds estimated at fifty thousand, made up ‘of all classes’, lined the streets; bands played, mothers wept. But the Hawke’s Bay Herald on the same day printed a small item which may have been overlooked except by an anxious mother: ‘Dr Chapple has given each member of the contingent a box of opium and quinine pills’. This was a more sobering reality.

  SIDNEY NORTHE FOUND HIMSELF CARRIED along in this tidal wave of emotion. He was a twenty-eight-year-old carpenter, five feet nine inches in height, a crack shot with the Volunteer force of the Hastings Rifles, of which his father, William Henry Northe, was colour sergeant.

  He was very much his father’s son (and grandson of Barrack Sergeant John Northe). He was a private in the same Volunteer unit as his father, always a slightly equivocal position. Does a son grow more independent sharing his father’s space, or regress into a more infantile one, with buried hurts and antagonisms?

  W. H. Northe was a formidable man. Napier’s Daily Telegraph of 15 July 1884 carried a sample of his forthrightness in its coverage of his clash with the Hawke’s Bay grandee, William (later Sir William) Russell. Russell was head of the Conservative Party, and the clash took place during an electoral meeting. The following day ‘An Orangeman’ wrote a letter to the newspaper saying he had been afraid to ask questions ‘for fear that [Russell] might treat me in the same overbearing and aristocratical manner as he attempted to evade the legitimate questions of Mr Northe. See him [Russell] on the Hastings stage, with contempt and scorn in his every feature, his massive body rocking to and fro, exclaiming with passionate vehemence, “How dare you, Mr Northe, question W.R. Russell? Did I not give you employment … and by that act did I not buy you and the rest of you who did work for me? What right have you to think for yourselves?”’

  W. H. Northe did think for himself. The newspaper reported his reply: ‘You were in Parliament a long time: did you ever advocate anything more important than a parcel posts of beetroot sugar?’

  But there is an element of ambiguity here, given that William Henry and his wife were also guests at two of the most fashionable Hawke’s Bay weddings of the period, one of which was the wedding of William Russell’s daughter. How did a highly vocal ‘working man’ — a carpenter no less — end up under the marquee on the lawn of Fernhill, sipping French champagne alongside the members of a self-appointed squattocracy with names like Beamish, Carlyon and McLean? (The Northes gave a present of ‘silver teaspoons’, which sat alongside the more magnificent gifts of diamonds from family friends and antique salt cellers from the future King George V). The bride wore a gown by Worth of Paris and ‘a magnificent spray of diamonds in her hair’.

  Sitting beside William Henry Northe at the wedding is his wife, Elizabeth, who is sister to Matilda, who is married to John McVay, the mayor of Napier and a highly successful saddler. Is this the reason for W. H. Northe’s unlikely elevation into the company of Hawke’s Bay gentry? Perhaps. As we shall see, the manufacture of his son Sidney Northe into a local hero was helped along by the fact he was ‘the nephew of the mayor’. (The mayor and his wife had ‘no issue’, so it is very likely they saw Sidney as their adopted son.)

  Who was Sidney Northe? What kind of man was he?

  Our local hero is first seen in the public record as Master S. Northe, a boy soprano, singing at a Grand Templar event. He later sings in the choir at the Hastings Presbyterian church, where his father is superintendent of the Sunday School. Could anything be more respectable? Sidney is also intelligent. At the age of twelve he is the top male pupil in Standard Five at Hastings District School and is awarded a prize by Captain Russell. Then he emerges as a crack shot in competitions among Rifle Volunteers. This excellence at shooting begins to define Sidney Northe — he becomes, at age twenty, the second-best shot in the North Island in 1891 — until we come across a surprising fracture. In 1895, at twenty-four years of age, he is adjudged bankrupt.

  The cause of the bankruptcy can be traced back to a morally ambiguous incident. We have to go right to the bottom of the South Island, to Otago, to get a report in the North Otago Times dated 22 January 1895 (meaning it had been sent by telegraph): ‘An important case was decided at the Napier Magistrate’s Court, when Police-Constable Gordon obtained judgment against S. Northe for £100 damages, with costs, for injuries inflicted through a collision while a servant of the defendant’s was driving [a buggy] without a light on the wrong side of the road.’

  The silence in Hawke’s Bay newspapers was broken by an outraged letter in the Hawke’s Bay Herald — by the anonymous ‘Viator’ (‘messenger’ in Latin) of Hastings — headed ‘Driving without Lights’. The writer applauded the awarding of ‘substantial damages to a constable who is deservedly respected, and who has been maimed owing to the parsimony or carelessness of a man who drove without side-lights; and it vindicates that constable’s character from the false and cowardly aspersion cast upon it by the defendant’. This ‘coward’ was Sidney Northe, who had asserted that the constable was drunk. The magistrate threw out this defence as ‘trumpery’ and ‘a cruel insinuation’.9

  Sidney Northe declared himself bankrupt after the case, but in an appeal for discharge from bankruptcy in November 1895, Constable Gordon claimed that Sidney Northe ‘absolutely refused to work, objecting to earning money to pay a man whom he had maimed for life’. Sidney Northe’s counsel ‘took exception to these reckless statements’: Constable Gordon was on the wrong side of the road, ‘not in a proper condition to be in charge of a horse’ and was ‘riding furiously’.10

  The judge decided against Sidney Northe again: ‘[T]he bankrupt was a young man, quite capable of earning his living and paying something towards his debts.’ Sidney ‘ought to do something’, and the judge ordered him to pay £45 to Constable Gordon, plus costs of the case.

  What kind of person is it who refuses to work, as alleged, because his money will go to a man he (or his servant?) effectively crippled? And how, in any event, does a young carpenter have a servant? It appears not only disagreeable but also dishonourable, one of those little insights which does much to dent the later assumption of the glamorous armour of ‘local hero’. In court Sidney is reduced to being simply ‘the bankrupt’. But everyone in Napier knew who he was. The newspaper’s editor took advantage of an old trick: while ‘Viator’s’ letter does not specify Sidney’s identity, only several inches away is an advertisement for the coal and wood firm of his up-and-coming thruster of an uncle — Robert Northe. The name is there for all to see.

  Four years later Sidney Northe is no longer bankrupt and has won a ballot for one of the most hotly contested pieces of land following the break-up of the big estates: he wins the possibility of owning a not inconsiderable 623 acres in the Ngapaeruru block in Wairarapa. Did he ever take it up? Was it all a speculative venture, a wheeze by which he obtained the right to land, then onsold the right to ownership? We shall see soon enough that Sidney Northe’s conception of himself was as a free agent who did whatever he wanted.

  So here we have a conundrum: on one hand, the local hero, th
e patriot, the one who goes off to war accompanied by poems and song, the beat of big drums and the echo of crowd applause; and on the other a rather more ambiguous individual with a tougher kernel of self-interest.

  WHILE HE WAS FIGHTING IN South Africa Sidney Northe became a media sensation. This may be overstating the case, but his very ordinary letters home to his mother were seized upon by the press and printed in both Wellington and Hawke’s Bay newspapers under such headlines as ‘WITH THE FIRST CONTINGENT. A Letter from Trooper Northe’. It’s hard to say how these essentially private letters were leaked to the press, but a mayor in a small town is more likely to be in touch with a journalist than a private citizen like Sidney’s mother. (Did she share the letters with her sister, the mayor’s wife?) Another way of saying this is: in any war on-the-ground information is priceless, and Sidney Northe’s unselfconscious letters provided just the dash of up-to-date, grunt reality that is nectar to a newspaper editor.

  The war had in any case been providing sensational news. The New Zealand troops had been performing well, even superlatively well. ‘The distinguishing feature of the skirmish on Monday [15 January 1900] was the pluck and indomitable courage of Captain Madocks and the New Zealanders,’ reported the Cape Times on 15 January 1900. The troops had fixed bayonets and charged down a hill just when British troops were wavering. Two New Zealanders and forty Boers were killed. The following day, General French, leader of the British, ‘addressed the men in very complimentary terms, telling them their conduct merited the highest praise’.11 The Boers, who were trained in guerrilla warfare, were confronting soldiers who had also been trained in guerrilla warfare against Kīngitanga forces. Both were colonial forces hardened by combat on the ground and used to difficult conditions.