Days of future past
Easter trading laws are a source of perennial debate.
In earlier eras, what could or could not be done on a Sunday was of even more bother to a populace not always as given over to religious observance as the law supposed or dictated.
Aviation was an activity that if not formally forbidden on the Sabbath, then was widely disapproved of. In this, New Zealand was, as ever, decades behind the mother country. As early as 1913, a test case against four pilots in Hull, England, collapsed when local magistrates established that Britain’s Sunday Observation Act did not apply to aviation.
With its customary rigour, the NZ Truth waded into the issue in January 1922, observing that "the flying machines were busy here on Sunday, and many good people were pleased and many pious people offended". With tongue firmly in cheek, it was suggested that "the flying men displeased the puritanical persons by getting nearer heaven than the church does". Religious objection was seen as being grounded in "petty jealousy".
Eight years later, a longer and more serious piece in the same publication expressed outrage that Dunedin aviators and their mechanics had been tried and found guilty for the crime of flying of a Sunday. The law - naturally enough deemed "an ass" was standing in the way of both commercial progress and the nation’s security. Pilots were, by this reasoning, patriots.
The good Methodists of South Auckland were of a different opinion. Meeting around the same time in Hamilton, their synod passed a resolution objecting to Sunday flying. Leading the charge was the Reverent W Sussex of Te Puke, who reported that aviation was rife on the Sabbath in his Bay of Plenty town.
Sussex had been busy corresponding with constabulary both near and far, only to be told by the Commissioner of Police that "flying was likely to be a means of transportation in the future".
Undaunted, Sussex stated he would take direct action the following Sunday.
As further flights were then planned above Te Puke, "it was his intention to hold an indignation meeting and lay an information against the pilot".