The war bride who blazed a political trail
Eve Poole brought more than glamour to her role as Invercargill’s first female mayor. A new biographical memoir reveals a complex woman deeply committed to enriching a city where, deep down, she knew she’d always be a ‘bloody foreigner’, writes Michael Fa
Nazis couldn’t sever Eve Poole from her Jewish German family. It took falling in love with a Southlander to do that.
Young Eve Aeurbach’s parents struggled to flee with their children from the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. They were separated, but eventually reunited in Palestine where they were visited by a constant stream of refugees.
A quiet but acutely attentive child, she’d listen, observe and understand the adult talk and what it revealed about the horrors of the time. It made for a troubled, frightening childhood. She was no stranger to nightmares.
When war broke out the 17-yearold, with her parents’ consent, inflated her age a tad and joined the British army, serving as a driver in Egypt. It was actually a vibrant, exciting time of youthful independence.
‘‘Call me Kiwi,’’ the rather dashing Captain Vernon Poole, 28, told his uniformed young chauffeur.
Eve was fluent in German, Hebrew and Yiddish but had only a smattering of English. Even so, she knew what Kiwi meant. It was a brand of boot polish.
The captain told her that back home he was a woodman. So, she gathered, he’d cut wood and sell it in a local market. (In truth the family business was a tad more substantial than that.)
They soon became engaged but her family, dismayed at the thought, sent a brother to prevent the ceremony going ahead. He arrived in time for the reception.
Vernon’s parents were altogether more supportive and in time their son, (wit that he was) sent a pithy telegram.
EVE EXPECTING, STOP. EXPECT EVE.
(However, the message was imperfectly transcribed and the puzzled parents were left to peer at a message that read EYE EXPECTING. STOP EYE.)
Granted an honourable discharge due to her pregnancy, Eve arrived at the Invercargill railway station in 1944, a stranger in a strange land, but found a loving wider family network awaiting her.
Leading Lady: Eve Poole – A Life in the Spotlight, written by one of her daughters, Vivienne Allan, combines disciplines of a biography and the personality of a memoir.
It is rich in finely detailed descriptions of post-war Invercargill life, through the perspective of a newcomer who initially strove so hard to be a good wife, mother and daughter-in-law to Arty and Maud. To assimilate into this new society, but not be confined by it. Anonymity wasn’t her style.
The lack of English that marked her as different was rapidly replaced (courtesy of Catholic nuns) with an educated eloquence that also made her different from the mainstream. She briskly became a well-qualified speech teacher, teaching deportment at Southland Girls’ High School.
She was a striking, well-dressed young woman around town due to the discounts offered for her modelling work at the Thompson and Beattie department store, and found wider recognition again as both an actor and producer in local repertory productions.
Unabashedly the work of a proud daughter, Vivienne Allan’s book is clear-eyed nonetheless.
‘‘She had her faults, good heavens. Of course. We all do,’’ Allan says in a phone interview.
The book’s first page describes her mother as vital, lovely, charming and disciplined . . . but also sometimes unforgiving, condescending and inclined to expect the worst. She was possessed of a quick temper that could flash on occasion to quickfire slaps on either side of her children’s face. But, as Allan attests, never snobbish.
Both Eve and Vernon, who knew his home province so well, raised their four children to understand it didn’t matter where you came from; it was strength of character that was important.
‘‘They always taught us to make friends with porters, receptionists, train conductors and so on . . . They were the ones who will so often help you when things get tough.’’
Allan’s eye for comedy is also present, such the adventures of a running-late mother trying to get her children to school on time, employing driving skills more suited to her training in the North African sands than the streets of Invercargill.
‘‘She wasn’t an early riser and would take to the wheel in style with her dressing gown over her pyjamas, cigarette in hand, slippers on her feet and lipstick applied. She would approach corners at speed and brake hard with her left arm sweeping across the child in the passenger seat to protect them from flying through the windscreen.’’
Later, the children would sometimes be called upon to operate the gears and clutch themselves. Great fun for them, and wildly inappropriate of course, but it was a result of living as best she could with the arthritis that struck her early and that she, as much as possible, kept hidden.
Eve Poole’s distinction in the public record is partly as a member of the QEII Arts Council, a member of the New Zealand Committee on Women, and a star of the television agony aunt show Beauty and the Beast with Selwyn Toogood in the latter role.
But in Invercargill she is chiefly memorable as the city’s first female councillor and first female mayor, elected to that role in 1983 and retaining it until she died in office in 1992.
Many’s the city councillor still among us who might open the book with interest tinged with nervousness. It’s not a scoresettling tome. Particularly. But, yes, there were times when the mayoral beauty did encounter some old-boy beastliness.
Some of this was lightheartedly invoked by the doggerel poetry of journalist Fred Miller:
What’s this?
A woman standing for
A City Council seat?
The thin edge of the wedge it is A sign of male defeat
Allan merrily recounts the complaint – and at the time it was – that purely on the aesthetics of it, the mayoral robes suited a man better. And the fussing about if she was elected, who would be the mayoress? And councillor Norman Jones hurrumphing that all she ever had to contribute was art and culture. (The pair, for all their sparring, actually became quite chummy as time progressed).
Not that we should portray her as a victim in this. At times Her Worship was perfectly capable of becoming Her Warship.
Though not really a politician red in tooth and claw, she understood the extent to which the tools and dynamics of theatre were applied in council settings, and in this respect she could be a formidable presence.
‘‘Absolutely commanding,’’ agrees Allan, ‘‘when she needed to be.’’ Below the surface, however, it was tougher.
‘‘You’ve got to be as hard as nails in politics and many respects she wasn’t. There were often times when she was terribly hurt by some of the things said, whether deliberately or spontaneously.’’
Eve Poole was widely admired, politically popular, and had both a wide circle of friends and a smaller, tighter group that figured importantly in her life. Most central, of course, was family.
But at times she would remind her children that they were born here, whereas she would always be ‘‘a bloody foreigner’’. She generally scorned swearing, but this was one time she used such a word because that was, after all, the quote.
In that respect, Leading Lady is unassailably a book well-timed.
The Southern Regional Development Strategy agreed upon by local government, business and community leaders is emphatic in its conclusion that Southland needs migrants in their thousands – not just as workers, but as citizens making their lives here.
To that end, Eve Poole’s is a story replete with significance and encouragement.
Allan says: ‘‘I get quite distressed when I hear negative views about migrants and the propensity for parts of the Government to try to stop [migration]. Communities need that level of vibrancy, that mix.
‘‘If we don’t have it we become paupers, really.’’