‘I thought everybody’s father didn’t have thumbs’
THERE are two human thumbs in jars on a shelf inside Waihi Museum, and they point to a macabre chapter in New Zealand’s past.
The thumbs were formerly attached to the hands of a miner, or miners, who had them removed deliberately between the 1920s and 1940s in order to make a compensation claim.
According to Waihi historian Doreen McLeod, the going rate for a thumb was $400, a finger $150.
To put those numbers into perspective with today’s currency: in 1920, a thumb would get its former owner the equivalent of $38,583.48; a sum that rose to $40,400.57 in 1940.
McLeod admitted to some doubts about the thumbs being on display as they are human remains, but concedes they are a ‘‘big talking point’’.
‘‘Kids love them, or hate them.’’
She dismissed any notion these acts of self-mutilation were conducted by men driven to desperation by poverty wages.
‘‘Some people will say they weren’t paid enough, but if you look at the wage books you’ll see it’s pretty much the same, in fact more, than most people were being paid.’’
She said it was relatively common for a digit to come off before Christmas, and while ‘‘a lot of men did lose digits in mining accidents, a lot were done on purpose as well because they were big drinkers, and they also had gambling bills, and pub bills’’.
McLeod said that growing up in Waihi, the site of men with missing digits was not unusual.
‘‘Some people in our area, there was a pride thing. You’d have it in a jar on the mantelpiece.’’
One Waihi resident who spoke to Sunday News on condition their name was not used recounted their father’s missing digits.
‘‘I thought everybody’s father didn’t have thumbs,’’ they said.
They said while their father was ‘‘a bit of a tall tale-teller’’, he told them one story that spoke to the culture among the men at that time.
‘‘If you even thought you’d like to lose your thumb, next day you woke up without a thumb.’’
Asked specifically about their father’s missing thumbs, they said: ‘‘I wouldn’t call it an accident’’.
‘‘They’d squirt blood on the rails, then you’d go and pay your booze bills.’’
McLeod also provided Sunday News with an extract from an interview she conducted with a former miner called Richard Spurr in 2005, about his firsthand experience of seeing a thumb removed.
‘‘Usually when a man decided that they were going to take a finger or thumb off it is because they have a gambling or some other debt to pay,’’ Spurr said.
‘‘One night this man decided to take a thumb off. He rigged up a tomahawk and blocks of wood and another hammer and took off his thumb. I happened to come out of the drive and saw the trail of blood to the shaft.’’
According to Hazel King, lawyer and author of Workplace Safety and Accident Compensation, it got to the stage where insurers refused to pay out for ‘‘neatly severed thumbs’’.
‘‘So the miners began to use detonators, sometimes with horrific effects.’’
The thumbs began their posthand journey to the museum at the Martha Mine first-aid dressing station where they remained until its closure in 1952. They later went to Waihi Hospital, where chemist Gordon Haszard displayed them in his window, then sometime in the 1960s they were transferred to the museum.
While McLeod’s ambivalent about the thumbs, she’s a strong believer in the role provincial and small-town museums play in safeguarding New Zealand history.
‘‘Waihi has a unique mining history and a lot of innovative ideas were developed here. To preserve that history, and the social history, is so important.’’
Tamsin Evans, deputy chief executive at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, said museums outside the main centres played a crucial role in keeping heritage accessible.
‘‘Not only do they safeguard and share community knowledge, but they create shared points of memory.
‘‘Their collections can also hold material that is familiar, quirky or deeply personal.’’
‘They’d squirt blood on the rails, then you’d go and pay your booze bills.’ THUMB-CUTTER’S RELATIVE