Three cheers for family

Four Square grocery money was pretty safe when 60 years back the company offered a new Vauxhall motor car to the first New Zealand family welcoming triplets on the day it was celebrating its birthday: July 4, 1958.

Southland farming couple Derek and Pat Turnbull looked close to the money with their due date close.

But their triplets tumbled out on June 30, two beautiful girls and a gorgeous little boy, four days early, eager to get on with life.

The Turnbulls had anther little girl, Jane, born 14 months before the triplets, and many would see the three little girls and decide they were the triplets. (Jane furthering this by referring to the girls as triplets and little boy Kenneth as the other one.)

Good looking, sporty, clever and sociable, the Turnbull triplets had a large following and a nation grieved at the untimely death at age 27 of Kenneth, drowned when a fishing boat went down off the coast at Bluff.

Right through childhood, local newspapers, the Auckland-based Weekly News and Australasian women’s magazines delighted in tales of the triplets, as toddlers at play, starting school, becoming teenagers, growing up, eventually vying with their dad Derek, a record breaking runner at every age, for public attention.

Their parents did not court Pat Turnbull this attention, being busy with two later additions to the family, fourth daughter Fiona and then second son

Guy.

Derek has passed away and Pat, a leading genealogist, lives in retirement at her town house in the Rowena Jackson village, its rooms filled with memories and the walls with pictures.

When that 60th anniversary, their big 60 birthday, came round Stephanie and Philippa, each with a first born daughter, met up in Tambourine, Australia. And Te Anau-based Fiona came south to take her mother to Bluff where they said goodbye again to Kenneth across the unforgiving sea.

And Pat, mother and keeper of family records, said suddenly I am a great great grandmother, with the birth in Australia of Kenneth’s great grandchild.

Fiona said it was a moving moment realising the lad they still mourned was now a great granddad.

He and his wife Margot, had children Jason and Maia and they had in turn married and the family had gone on.

A great great gran, that’s about as good as it gets, said Pat, acknowledging a gift from that precious boy triplet they’d called Kenneth.