Golden Bay families tell their war stories
No matter what you think of war, you can never deny the ultimate sacrifice made by our loyal servicemen over many conflicts.
At this year’s Anzac Day in Tākaka, the mid-morning parade through town, starting 9am outside Golden Bay Pharmacy, will incorporate a tribute to the Tākaka Mounted Rifles, their presence to be recreated by six local horsemen and women riding in WWI period costume.
Residents along Patons Rock beach may have seen the team practising since midFebruary. On the day, Tākaka Citizens Band will accompany the parade down through town to Memorial Park, after which the riders will put on a display at the former Junction Hotel site.
A 1915 photo of a 37-strong Tākaka Mounted Rifles, assembled on their horses in front of the Tākaka Grandstand just before riding off to war, would have been a moving sight.
The photo is taken from the grandstand which would have been full of families and friends waving their tearful goodbyes, for some the last time they would ever see them again.
Initially established in 1900 with a strength of 86 men, in response to the Boer War, the Tākaka Mounted Rifles was one of many such regional regiments set up under the Defence Act of 1886. Its first commanding officer was J.J. Langridge and it became the third company of the Nelson Mounted Battalion (C Squadron).
Golden Bay lost one serviceman in the Boer War, 44 in WWI and 15 in WWII. Not to forget the loss of all those faithful horses too.
Of our 10,000 horses that went overseas with our troops during WWI, only four returned, all the rest ordered shot at the end of the war for lack of ship space to bring them back. War is cruel on every front. A de facto memorial to those horses near Bulls is virtually all that remembers them today.
Born 1888, in Tākaka, Herbert (Bertie) Edmondson was the sixth of Thomas and Eliza Ann Edmondson’s eight
children. The family farmed at Motupipi. Bertie served two years with the Tākaka Mounted Rifles before enlisting for the NZ Expeditionary Force in August 1917, posted to the 2nd NZ Entrenching Battalion which arrived in Europe in early 1918.
After only two weeks in France, Bertie was thrown into the effort to halt the ongoing German offensive near Flanders. But in the ensuing battle, 210 men of the 2nd NZEB were surrounded and taken prisoner, the most New Zealanders captured at one time during the war. Twenty-nine-year-old Bertie was among them.
Bertie was initially reported as missing and presumed to be in a German prisoner of war camp. This was confirmed on June 6 when he managed to send word that he was being held as a prisoner.
Established later by a court of inquiry was that he was kept for two and a half months in complete darkness in an underground castle dungeon known as the Black Hole of Lille.
Bertie would later be sent to a German labour camp but died soon after of pneumonia so far from his beautiful valley in Golden Bay. He is buried at Marfaux
British Cemetery in northern France and is remembered on the two war memorials in Tākaka.
Cruel too how so many Golden
Bay families lost more than one son, proportionately higher than any other rural region in the country.
The list is long – mostly ‘killed on the battlefield’ or ‘died as a result of wounds’. Never to return were bothers Alan and Cuthbert, the two sons of BG Whitcombe of Collingwood.
Then there were the two Parry boys, John and Henry. Otto and Emma Hasse of Tākaka lost their two sons, Frederick and Owen. Walter Edwards died of wounds in France in 1918, a year after his brother Charles was killed in battle. Both were the sons of Alice Moore, formerly Edwards of Tākaka.
The Riley family out at Collingwood lost sons Harry and Walter, while the poor Newlove family lost three sons – Leornard, Edwin and Leslie – all over one week of Passchendaele.
Youngest Leslie was just 22, and had been married one week before he left too. The McNabb family also lost three sons - Cyril at Walkers Ridge Gallipoli April 30,
1915, Roy again on Walkers Ridge on 16 May, and Vincent killed in action at the Somme.
But nothing beats the misfortune of Fred and Fanny Harvey of Ferntown, who lost all their four sons to war.
Their eldest, Private William Frederick James Harvey is one of five servicemen buried in the war graves section of Collingwood Cemetery.
He managed to return to New Zealand, but later died of his war injuries. His brothers - Percy, Frederick, and Charles - were all killed in action in France.
All were well known and loved in the area, William and Percy both played rugby for Collingwood.
Their father had worked for Johnston’s United Mine up in the Aorere Goldfields where the kids were virtually raised before the family shifted first to Bainham opposite the store, then out to Ferntown.
For those sons, life was an unfolding adventure, no wonder they all volunteered to fight overseas, that was the promise of the biggest adventure of all.
Father Fred ended up dying in 1919 over the grief of it all, his wife losing all her four sons and husband in a four-year period.
Charles Harvey, right, one of four brothers from Collingwood who went off to fight for king and country.
Tākaka historian Jane Sparrow is greatgranddaughter of the Harvey parents and says the loss of their sons one by one was huge for the family. ‘When yet another telegram got delivered to their farm, Fanny would run down the lane to her daughter’s Emma and husband Walter Solly’s house, crying out; ‘Another one down, Em’.
As time went on, they felt robbed that their sons had not had the chance to have children of their own. Jane Sparrow still today keeps 140 handwritten condolence letters to Fred and Fanny sent by Tākaka settlers.
William Harvey had enlisted early, embarking in mid-October 1914 as a private in the Canterbury Infantry Regiment, bound for Egypt.
He saw action at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, got wounded in June
1917 before getting shipped home with a ‘fractured leg’ and shellshock, arriving home in August.
But not long after the death of his father,
William died suddenly at Collingwood on 5 November 1919, the day before his 32nd birthday, and was buried two days later. The Colonist of 8 November 1919 reported the tragic story:
“A young man named William J. Harvey died suddenly at Iorn’s Boardinghouse, Collingwood, on Wednesday morning. He had been receiving medical attention for heart trouble for some time past. The deceased was single ... and had resided in Collingwood practically all his life. He had long and honourable service in the Expeditionary Force ... and after over three years’ active service was badly wounded and invalided home. On the widowed mother the hand of misfortune has fallen heavily in recent years. Three sons were killed in France, her husband, the late Mr. Fred Harvey, died a few months ago, and now her eldest son has been taken from her.”