Hot time in the old woolshed
Revisiting the day a world shearing record was set at a Horowhenua farm. Tina White
Tuesday, January 6, 1953. It’s stifling-hot in the woolshed on Akers Station at O¯ piki. Shafts of summer sunlight light up a stocky, cherub-faced man shearing one sheep after another, hands moving quickly, gently and methodically, soft white wool falling in drifts to the floor. Hour after hour.
He doesn’t glance at the sweating crowds jammed inside, intently following the shearer’s every move. Outside, people who can’t get into the five-stand shed peer in the windows, climb anywhere they can get a glimpse, or mill about, waiting.
It was a unique event, and everyone knew it.
Godfrey Bowen, 31, was aiming to beat Taranaki shearer Percy de Malmanche’s 1944 feat: 409 sheep sheared in nine hours.
Later, Bowen would say: ‘‘I went down [to the woolshed] at a quarter-to-five in the morning, and there was a queue of three or four hundred people waiting to get in.’’
He wasn’t fazed. He and his brother Ivan had, over years, worked out a far superior way of shearing than the rougher oldtime tradition, and Godfrey had refined it into an art form all his own.
At the time, Molly Akers, 28, wife of Alan Akers, owner of the generations-old farm property, was three months pregnant, and also had two small children aged 2 and 5.
Now almost 93, she remembers that historic day vividly.
‘‘Godfrey insisted that we put on a gate charge,’’ she says – for the curious hordes who were arriving. The five-shilling-per-head payments would eventually grow to about £404 – a tidy sum in 1953 – enough to pay off the newly built community church.
Unexpectedly, 2000 people had turned up, with hundreds eventually cramming into the woolshed.
‘‘We couldn’t do much about [managing] the crowds,’’ says Molly. ‘‘The church guild put up a tent near the woolshed, and supplied cups of tea all day.’’
Inside, the shearing went on . . . and on, watched by the judges, JPS Stuart Oxenham and Jim Aitchison, Godfrey’s brother Ivan Bowen, and shed hands Don Hawke and Bob Voss, shearers from Julie Schwamm’s shearing gang. Julie was pacer for Godfrey.
At last, when the word went out that it was over, the place erupted with cheers and shouts.
Godfrey Bowen had set a new world record – 456 ewes shorn within nine hours. He was now a New Zealand celebrity, and would be for the rest of his life.
Amazing though the day had been, Molly adds ‘‘we were very glad to have it over’’.
Godfrey and Ivan stayed for two or three nights with the Akers, before and after the shearing.
‘‘Godfrey kept us up until two in the morning with his stories; he was fascinating. Ivan wasn’t the talker that Godfrey was. He was the quiet one.’’
The family has a neatly documented collection of photos and clippings from the occasion, as with everything that has happened in their family and on the farm.
‘‘Akers never throw anything away,’’ smiles Molly, nursing a large scrapbook.
Much later, in 1984, the story was revisited when a television crew came back to the woolshed with Ivan and Godfrey Bowen to film a Country Calendar documentary.
A biography written by Maurice Shadbolt, in the 1976 book Love and Legend said of Godfrey Bowen: ‘‘A man who methodically remade an ancient and clumsy craft would be marvel enough. To have made it at the same time into a spectator sport and a tourist treat is three times more remarkable.’’
And yet the Bowen beginnings were humble.
Godfrey Bowen was born in Hastings in 1922, to Catherine and Walter Bowen. His brothers were Ivan, Eion, Ken – and Colin, who died at 15 in a bush accident.
When the Bowens moved to Te Puke, father Walter established a sawmill. Godfrey had learned to work hard as a schoolboy; now he studied accountancy and business administration by correspondence, worked in the mill office, and joined Eion and Ivan in shearing for local farmers.
He would sometimes shear 60 sheep before breakfast, then go on to a full day at the mill.
Maurice Shadbolt noted: ‘‘Godfrey travelled around New Zealand watching good shearers of the old school in action while he worked alongside them. Bit by bit he began to put the ‘Bowen style’ together. It took nearly five years of patient observation, then regular practice alongside brother Ivan, to whom he would pass on new ideas. Ivan was, he insisted, ‘the best natural shearer in the world’.’’
In 1946 he also got married, in Palmerston North, to Mavis Telford. They would have two daughters and two sons.
When the challenge came to try for the world record in the Akers’ woolshed, Godfrey was ready.
An Open Brethren lay preacher with a calm, measured voice, he was a non-smoker and non-drinker who prided himself on his fitness.
That day, in January 1953, was the start of a brilliant career in which he would become chief shearing instructor and field director of the New Zealand Wool Board, be awarded an MBE by the Queen and be invited to many countries.
He even topped his sensational feat at O¯ piki by shearing 559 Welsh mountain sheep at Llangurig, Wales, within nine hours, in 1960.
Godfrey Bowen, maestro of shearing, died in 1994, aged 72; his brother Ivan, former chief showman at the Agrodome, died in 2008, at 92.