Backbreaking work and tough times
After a lifetime of interest in local history, I think the 1920s-30s period is my favourite place to research.
Hardship struck most families severely as jobs thinned and pockets tightened.
Many striking workers wanting better conditions in the workplace were forced into work on the roads, coal mines and railways and the many government projects requiring sheer manual labour.
Unlike the unemployment benefit today, you had to go where you were told to work or you received nothing and went hungry.
Many got into a life of crime and ended up in jail, having a dry bed and food to eat. No colour TVs in the jails in those days.
My parents spoke of the hardships they faced as teens.
Born in 1913 Mum worked for a farming family out in the backblocks of Stratford, working six and a half days a week housekeeping. She got Sunday afternoon off to try and get home to see her family and had to be back that night.
For house cleaning, cooking, washing and looking after the children, she received a shilling (10 cents) or a block of chocolate a week.
Who would do that today? Her father told her, you are fed, you have a roof over your head, and you are warm and dry. How true that was in tough times. He was happy she was being cared for.
My father worked on the roads when dirt cart tracks were being formed into metal roads and narrow concrete bridges were being built across the many creeks and streams on the Stratford to Opunake roads.
He told me they scoured the local farms in the area for any steel they could use for reinforcing in the bridges being built. Model T Fords found in old barns, old motorcycles, steel pipes – anything that was suitable was sought. These were thrown into the foundations for strength.
Streams were cleared of boulders and stone by hand, with workers loading them onto wooden horse drawn carts and drays.
Taken to a nearby crusher, the boulders were split by workmen wielding sledge hammers.
Before the steam-powered crushers, stone was knapped by hand until small enough to fit through a mesh screen grading the size.
If not small enough they were knapped until they fitted through. Contractors were paid by the yard.
It’s hard to imagine the hardship faced by families.
Many men were forced to leave home and scour the countryside looking for work, any work that was available.
Wives at home with the kids did odd jobs for neighbours such as washing or mending clothes and struggled through. Many husbands away from home gambled or drank their money away, leaving little or nothing for their families – many women had it hard.
Veges were grown and fruit trees provided jams and fresh fruit and pickles. A house cow was milked daily if you had one.
So many characters appeared in our small towns. Waitara was no exception, and I’ve written at length of them many times in my articles, and what characters they were.
I saw an old movie once of the building of the Civic Theatre in Auckland which portrayed the hardship of the era.
Men lined up for a job as far as you could see. They had to shift so many hundred bricks a day by wheelbarrow or they were sacked. A man was walking past the line of unemployed prospects with his head hanging down, as a new man was hired at the gate. Very sad to see!
The road gang on Mt Messenger in the early 1900s, when the road was put in, lived in calico tents on the side of the road.
Imagine that in winter. They were away from home for months at a time, or if they were single they lived there, following the job. None of this ‘‘I don’t want to do that, or I don’t want to go there’’ like it is so often today.
It was the era of steam, the traction engine, the road roller, the steam train, and trams, steamers and the demise of the sailing ship. Waitara’s last sailing ship to leave the port was the lovely Aratapu who headed out over the bar in 1932, never to be seen again.
Through cheap labour during the depression, dams were built, railway links installed throughout the country, lakes were dug by sheer manpower to propel electricity generation plants.
Kerosene lamps made way for electric light. Wood stoves, although still widely used up into the 1960s, were gradually being replaced with electric stoves – at least by those who could afford them.
Harvesting on farms was still predominantly by horse power with larger machines driven by traction engines, and the Fordson Tractor made its mark on many properties.
The 20s also saw Sir Charles Kingsford Smith land the Southern Cross at Ha¯ wera and at Bell Block Aerodrome, and aviation pioneer and megastar Jean Batten arrived here too – huge events in aviation.
The 1920s are long gone and times have certainly changed. Our money-driven, consumer world with the powers that be wielding the stick over us to keep us in suspense or fear, is here to stay until there’s a worldwide revolution that says ‘‘Enough is enough.’’
We must all do our bit to save the planet, and perhaps reflecting back in time is a way of remembering what we’ve fought for all these years that’s slipping away from us.