Mike Crean – master of words
For many years my father’s life revolved around Mike Crean’s articles and obituaries in The Press and he would often cut them out and include them in his weekly letter to Sydney.
I met Mike a few years ago and immediately fell for his gentle unassuming demeanour, terrific sense of humour and excellent line in conversation.
Mike and I even went out on the road together presenting a show called Great Cantabrians. Mike would have the audience in the palm of his hand with his fascinating stories and I would intersperse these with musical interludes.
On one occasion, for a posh dinner at the Christchurch Club, the audience sat in rapt silence while Mike talked. As soon as I started to play, they took this as the cue to greet their friends on the other side of the room. As we left, I smiled at Mike and said “another career highlight”.
International lockdowns intervened and I was stuck on the wrong side of the Tasman, so Mike and I didn’t see anything of each other until recently, but happily we’re very much back in touch.
Interviewing Mike was a strange experience for both of us, as in past times our roles would most certainly have been reversed. I hadn’t prepared any questions as I wanted Mike to roam through his fascinating life experiences.
Mike’s earliest memory was when he was just 3. His family had to leave the farm and everyone was rushing around and he was getting in the way. He was tired and started bawling and he remembers walking across the road to a big boulder in an empty section. He sat on the boulder and cried his eyes out.
His lovely big sister Margaret, who was 20 years older than him, came across, sat down next to him and asked, “what’s the matter?” He sobbed that he wanted to go home. Margaret said in a kind voice “this is your home now”, but he said no, it’s not!
The reason Mike’s family had to leave the farm was that his parents were what they used to call a ‘married couple’, which meant they ran a farm for the owner. The farm was at Masons Flat, just out of Hawarden, and they had to leave because his father’s skills had been superseded by technology.
His dad was born in 1900, and he was great with horses – there was nothing he couldn’t do with a six-horse team pulling a plough.
But when the soldiers came back from World War II, the farm owner decided to sell up and there was no work for a horse specialist. His parents moved into Hawarden to a new state house in Quinlivan St and his dad managed to pick up a job at The Farmers Cooperative. The Farmers in Hawarden was the biggest store between Rangiora and Kaikōura and sold everything, including food, children’s clothing, hardware and boots. It was also a stock and station agent, so carried all the farming side of things as well. His dad drove the Farmers Bedford delivery van.
Life for the first five years in Hawarden was a little easier for the Creans, but then Mike’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was in and out of hospital and Mike can remember waking up at 5am one day as an ambulance backed up their driveway.
One Friday evening he was at home, sitting on the floor making plasticine trucks and he remembers looking up at his mum and “she was gone”. His sister Margaret was in the room, but was so engrossed with her knitting that she hadn’t noticed. When Mike exclaimed, Margaret gasped and said “go and find Dad”.
Dad had stayed home every Friday night for months as he knew his wife was dying, but he happened to be out that particular evening. Mike rushed out in the cold and dark July evening to find him.
There was no pub in Hawarden so on a Friday evening all the farmers would come into town and talk in groups around The Farmers store. Mike went straight there and searched through all the clusters of people, but couldn’t find his dad. He rushed around to the post office, the dairy and the garage, but his father wasn’t there either. Mike was only 9 so understandably was getting pretty distressed.
He started heading home, then suddenly his brother Pat pulled up and said “hop in”. They saw their dad running, someone having got a message to him. The local priest came roaring through town at a speed never witnessed in Hawarden then or since and when they got back to their house everyone was inconsolable. When his dad walked through the door the priest said to him “you’re too late, Tom old man” – those were his exact words and Mike says he will never forget them.
“My life changed forever at that point.
Dad had always been a pretty outgoing sort of guy and in the past he would always go around singing I’ll Walk Beside You,” Mike says.
The singing stopped and Mike’s dad became very difficult for quite a long time. He had no money and everything was pretty tight. Mike’s sister was engaged by this time to a local chap called Clarrie, who drove a truck for a transport company.
Mike says: “Clarrie became my second dad and he looked after me fantastically. I used to travel with him in the truck every chance I got, especially in the school holidays. I would be up and down to the freezing works once or twice a day and I would help him unload the sheep. He would always buy us an ice cream on the way back at Mitchells Dairy at Woodend.” Mike says he found life pretty difficult and by this stage his dad was the caretaker at the school. He had to leave the house early to light all the fires and then would have a couple of hours off in the middle of the day before heading back in the afternoon to clean out all the fireplaces and set them up again for the next morning. Because of this, Mike was always on his own and it was his job to get dinner ready every night. For dinner they ate only tinned lambs’ tongues and corned beef – it was pretty rough.
It was decided he should go away to boarding school – he doesn’t know how his father managed to pay the fees but thinks he knows who might have chipped in. Mike went to St Bede’s College for Form 2 and says: “That year was bloody hell – I hated it. I was trying everything to be a good kid. I was playing rugby and cricket and I wasn’t much good at either at that stage.
“All the other boarders were from rich families and they got dropped off in flash Humber Super Snipes and had visitors on the weekend – I never had a visitor all the time that I was there.”
Iasked Mike if this experience scarred him and he replied that he thought it made him stronger. He says in his later years at St Bede’s he got on pretty well and in the final year, much to his surprise, was even a prefect.
On the last day of school he and a group of friends jumped in a car and went down to Springston to have lunch at a friend’s farm. After lunch they went to the pub and, although they were obviously schoolkids, the publican turned a blind eye, especially as it was their last day of school.
They got back to school just in time for the prizegiving. The rector announced the runner-up for the good conduct medal was Michael Crean, who was sitting in the back row, not quite sober.
Mike took jobs every school holiday, which really helped, and he thoroughly enjoyed the work. He was employed by Quill Morris, the wine and spirits merchants, and as soon as he got his licence he asked if he could drive the delivery van. Mike travelled all around Christchurch in the Ford Trader. He loved driving and being out and about.
Mike always says he went to Teachers’ College not because he wanted to be a teacher but because he wanted to drive school buses and coach athletics and rugby.
In his second year at Teachers’ College he met a young lady called Margaret and two years later they were married. Mike sailed through Teachers’ College and returned to Hawarden for his probationary year.
Towards the end of that year he received a letter from the Education Board asking him to name which area he would like to be posted to. Mike put Southland last on his list. But where did they post Mike to? – Southland.
Mike says this posting was the best thing that could have happened to him.
“It was bloody marvellous. I’d never been further than Dunedin and the only time I’d been there was for a sporting event.”
Mike drove his 1954 Hillman Minx all the way to Invercargill in one day. He taught at Mataura for three years and got to know a lot of Māori workers, who Mike says were the greatest guys you could ever meet. He coached a junior rugby team on Saturday mornings and in the afternoon played senior rugby – Mike says life was good.
Mike was then promoted to Lawrence and not surprisingly loved being there too. He says it was such a fantastic town and that’s where he got to become a senior referee. One evening the TV reception was so bad that Mike sat down and wrote a story about a country kid who was crazy about rugby – Mike says it could have been about himself.
The next day he sent the story off to the School Journal in Wellington and soon afterwards learned the journal would publish it. Apart from editing the St Bede’s College Magazine and the Teachers’ College student paper, this was the first time anything of Mike’s had been published.
From Lawrence, Mike moved to Becks in Central Otago, a sole-teacher school. While he was there it became a twoteacher school and just as he was leaving it became a three-teacher school. There wasn’t such a lot to do there, so to fill in his free time he did a couple of history papers through Massey University – this turned out to be very useful later on.
He played first five-eighth for the local team too and, boy, did he love that.
By this stage Mike and Margaret wanted to move further north, so he took a posting back in his home town of Hawarden. What unfolded over the next few years there was to have a huge bearing on Mike’s professional life.
For his first year back Mike taught a primary school class and he couldn’t help but notice that his secondary school colleagues tended to look down their noses at him and the other primary school teachers who hadn’t done a university degree.
At the end of his first year, John Pilkington, the supportive principal, asked Mike if he’d teach fifth form history the following year. Mike says he didn’t know much about history teaching but by the end of that year two things had happened. First, all 15 of his students passed their School Certificate history and now all of his secondary teachers had a new respect for him.
Then, John Pilkington asked Mike if he would also teach economic studies. Mike says he knew even less about that subject so John explained there was no actual syllabus in third and fourth forms.
Mike could do whatever he wanted.
So at his first class, he told his students they were not going to be a classroom but a family. They had to look at the family budget and every week would tackle a new problem in it. Mike reflects that it was a wonderful time to be a teacher.
The next year Mike added Form 3 English to his teaching skill so he was a little anxious when it came time for the inspectors’ visit to Hawarden School – he thought “this is when I’m surely going to get found out”.
The history inspector was ex-cricketer Peter Sharp, who had captained Canterbury. When the inspector came into Mike’s classroom he told the students to get on with what they were doing as he needed to talk to their teacher. Mike and Peter sat down the back and proceeded to talk cricket for the whole period – Mike got the much-needed tick of approval.
It was time for a change, so when Mike saw a job advertisment for principal at St Mary’s School in Christchurch, he applied and was subsequently appointed.
Mike says they shifted to Christchurch and it was a challenging year of teaching. He had a Form 1 and 2 class and, while the girls were OK, there was a group of boys who’d had a tough time earlier with their schooling. They made Mike’s life hard.
The previous principals used the strap too much to discipline them, so Mike announced to his staff on day 1 that there was to be one rule – no corporal punishment in this school while he was there. The staff all clapped and said they really wanted this change, which indicated how bad things had got.
Mike’s second year improved but he didn’t know whether to go for another job or not. He then saw an interesting advertisement in The Star newspaper. It was setting up an initiative called Newspapers in Education and wanted someone with teaching experience to run it.
Mike wrote in his covering letter that he felt he had a unique teaching background as he’d taught from Primer 1 in a solecharge school right through to Form 5.
He spent the next eight years working for The Star but during the fourth year the newspaper had to lay off a lot of staff as things were going down the gurgler.
Mike was sitting in his office thinking “oh no, I’m going to have to go back in the classroom”, and then the phone rang. The editor wanted to see him. He went into the editor’s office to find the deputy editor there as well. Mike thought, this is how the goodbye works. To his surprise they said “we’re wondering if you would like to take up a job as a feature writer?” He couldn’t say yes fast enough.
Soon after this Mike started travelling out from Christchurch every second week on the search for good feature articles. He would file multiple stories a week. Sometimes, he would have particular stories in mind to investigate; other times he would just go out hoping. He says if the word got out that he was in the area, people would want to talk to him about their pet projects and particular gripes.
But he preferred to see an old geezer sitting there and then just sit down and start chatting to him. He found he was more likely to get a more colourful local story that way.
Eventually Mike left The Star as it wasn’t the paper it had been and by this stage he was acting chief reporter. He didn’t think of himself as chief reporter material – modest Mike says “there were far more experienced people capable of leading than me”.
Mike’s biggest challenge when he arrived at The Press was that, in contrast to The Star, it was completely computerised. Waiting for him on his new office desk was a computer but he had no idea how even to turn it on. Colleagues were generous with their time, helping him to adjust, but Mike tells me he is still a two-finger typist.
It wasn’t long before Mike was again travelling out to country areas, gathering stories, and this was the start of the Heartland column. This popular column started featuring in other newspapers so the next thing to happen was that Mike was given the North Island to explore and write about. He didn’t really know much about the North Island as he’d been there only a few times but was thrilled to be given this opportunity.
Mike’s time at The Press was a very happy period in his life and during this time he wrote and compiled several books, including First With The News, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of The Press. His last book was Tales from the Back Roads, which was based roughly on his Heartland columns.
In 2015, after 21 years, Mike retired, a move that coincided with Margaret’s retiring from the Christchurch Library.
Mike now writes for Keeping On, the informative paper produced by Age Concern Canterbury. Instead of the 4pm and 8pm deadlines that ruled his previous life, he now has a three-month deadline, which he found remarkably difficult to adjust to. Mike also keeps himself busy researching and writing for the Catholic Diocesan Archives.
Whenever Mike passes through Hawarden he drives past the family home to check that it’s still there. Mike says: “I’ve lived in Christchurch for 40 years but Hawarden will always be home.”
Former Cantabrian Mark Walton, an internationally recognised clarinettist and saxophonist, has an enduring fascination with New Zealand history.