The stories of Hawera’s early butchers
‘‘The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker’’ was once a widely known nursery rhyme and now each of those tradesmen are gone from Hawera’s High St.
Yet the butcher and the baker were among the first to open their doors in the infant settlement of the 1870s.
The name Butcher’s Lane is to be given to a new open-air walkway between the Napier St car-park and High St that will make car-parking easily accessible from the retail stores of High St. The name recalls one of the last small butcher shops that have been in business in the Hawera CBD.
William Quin wrote in his 1904, ‘The Story of Hawera’ that in the first days of settlement ‘Messrs John Winks and William Treweek donned the banded apron of blue and white and dispensed steak, chops and sausages to all carnivorous residents.’ The hardworking John Winks baked bread as well.
Those were the times when not only did butchers wear blue and white aprons but were to be found standing behind a butcher’s block, a section of tree trunk, often reaching up to slice meat fresh from one of several carcases of beef, mutton or pork hanging from a rail behind him. Small pieces of meat that fell onto the sawdust covered floor were sold as three pennies worth of cats’ meat.
John Winks built a large two storey home in Victoria St to accommodate his and Mary Jane’s family of eleven children. When they moved to farm, The Falls, at Normanby in 1893 their Hawera home became a boarding house, Clifton House managed by Mrs Nicholson. His partner William Treweek also went farming at Normanby.
Lawford Barraclough arrived in Hawera in 1888 to take up a butchery business; he was another public minded citizen and served on many local committees including the Borough Council. His shop and reputation was carried on by his family for the next one hundred years.
The late Jack Adams, Hawera born and bred, told how his grandfather, a skilled slaughterman, came from Australia to buy a butcher’s shop in Taranaki and when he arrived back home he told his family that he had found the right town.
It was Hawera, a progressive little town where there were seven pubs and seven butcher’s shops. He re-crossed the Tasman bringing his family, who prospered in their new home. Both his son and his grandson Jack in their turn ran the family business, closing only when Jack eventually decided to make a life-style change to sell real estate after a lifetime of early hours and chilly mornings.
In 1903 the Hawera Borough Council set up an abattoir in Fairfield Rd to process all the cattle, sheep and pigs that would be sold in Hawera. It was essentially a public health matter to take all livestock away from the borough and close all the individual slaughter houses to ensure only best quality meat was on sale.
In the first month of operation there were 61 cattle, 214 sheep, 29 lambs and pigs slaughtered; the manager condemned two cattle beasts as not fit for consumption. A government inspector made regular visits to the facility to ensure that the best standards.
Today the production of meat for public has entirely changed; the bulk of meat is now processed in a few large premises and distributed to supermarkets across New Zealand. The days of the friendly local butcher wearing a striped apron, a belt carrying a pouch of sharp knives and frequently a meat cleaver on his hip has now become a rare feature most often to be seen in collections of nostalgic photographs. Puke Ariki cares for more than 110,000 images in the Swainson/ Woods Collection that were generated by the New Plymouth based businesses, Swainson’s Studios and Bernard Woods Studio, between 1923 and 1997.
Many of the photographs are still unidentified.
Check our efforts out online at http://vernon.npdc.govt.nz/ simpleSearch.jsp
If you can help identify this week’s photo, please phone the Taranaki Research Centre, 06 759 6060, or email the team at images@npdc.govt.nz