Undertaker was islands’ Mr Fixit
George Hough undertaker b June 29, 1931 d October 16, 2019
When death came calling on a Chatham Islander, George Hough was never far away. As the undertaker for more than 60 years he took care of all those who shuffled off this mortal coil on that small archipelago 800km off the southeast coast of mainland New Zealand.
A talented carpenter, Hough built his first casket in 1953. Sometimes they were unorthodox creations. He once made them out of cow bail boards because the necessary materials for a standard box could not be found.
Known as the local Mr Fixit, Hough was a jack of all trades. There was not much he couldn’t repair.
Perhaps his most remarkable salvage operation was of a piano that had tumbled into the sea during a perilous unloading at the wharf on Pitt Island.
When the call came in, he packed up his tools and half a dozen cans of an aerosol rust preventative from the local hardware shop and hitched a ride across to Pitt on the next available fishing boat.
After several days’ effort, the piano was re-assembled. There was only one problem; a number of the hammers had lost their felt facings. Ever the improviser, Hough commandeered a couple of women’s felt hats and cut them up to prove ideal replacements. His final act was to take out his tuning fork and tune the piano.
‘‘When you live in the Chathams you can’t just go around the corner and buy something you need, or engage someone to do a job. You have to have a go at it yourself,’’ he said in a 2010 interview.
A descendant of a runaway Irish convict, James Coffee, and his wife Wikitoria Patea, Hough numbered among his ancestors some of the earliest European settlers, including Joseph Dix from the Azores and his wife Ngahiwi, Frederick Hunt from England, and the American whaler William Grinnell.
One ancestor, Nga¯ ti Tama chief Ngatuna, was among Chatham Island Ma¯ ori accused of the sacking and loss of the French whaling ship Jean Bart in 1838. He was arrested and taken to be tried in France but, shortly before the French ship anchored at Talcahuano in Chile on its return voyage, Ngatuna committed suicide. He was buried on the nearby island of Quiriquina. Despite Hough’s great efforts, his grave has never been found.
Hough himself was born and raised in Owenga, a small fishing village in the south of Chatham Island. Both his parents were islanders.
The family moved to Waitangi in 1936 when his father lost his job at the local fish factory. His mother raised the young George and his four siblings while his father, who had fought at Gallipoli and in France before being invalided home, worked as a fisherman and at the fish factory at Waitangi.
‘‘We had no money but plenty of ideas, plenty of get-up-and-go, plenty of energy,’’ Hough once said.
He showed a flair for carpentry early on in life.
He was a sickly child – influenza, pneumonia, measles, mumps, chickenpox – and music and crafting instruments kept him sane. He played everything he could lay his hands on, including the mandolin and the harp, and built his first instrument out of a floor polish tin and line from his brother’s fishing tackle.
He never learned to read music but could tune a piano and play any instrument he came across by ear.
He finished his schooling at year 9 when he moved to Wellington. At 15 he took work as a cabin boy on the government steamer Matai in 1946, and later served on the Richardson Line vessels loading wool off the beach with surf boats at sheep stations on the east coast of the North Island from Te Awaiti, in Wairarapa, to Hicks Bay, near East Cape.
His experience of crewing surf boats on the Chathams coast with the ship standing well out to sea stood him in good stead.
During a stint as a shearer on the islands, he met his wife Ada (nee Goomes), who was cooking for the gang.
They married in 1959 and bought a farm near Waitangi. Ada, who died three years ago, worked the farm while he continued shearing, fishing and building.
He was a renowned hunter and gatherer. In the 1960s, while working as a commercial fisherman, he regularly used a hand-held cotton line to catch blue cod from his small boat at Kaingaroa in the north of the island.
Rowing ashore with a dinghy piled up with boxes of fish one day, he was startled to see a great white shark with its head out of the water following his boat. He later claimed he made the shore faster than any Olympic oarsman.
A storyteller par excellence, Hough was a natural raconteur.
One of his favourite yarns was about an evening spent with the Duke of Edinburgh during the royal visit to the islands in the 1950s, involving a bottle of whisky behind a locked door.
The duke showed a keen interest in the activities of the islanders, and while the bottle emptied he asked one islander: ‘‘What do you do for a living?’’ The answer was: ‘‘Nothing.’’
The duke then asked a second man, ‘‘Now, what do you do?’’, to which the man responded, ‘‘I help him.’’
Aside from all his various jobs, Hough was a regular at the Hotel Chatham, where he would be seconded to indulge his flair for storytelling about the island for tourists. Because of his unparalleled knowledge of the island’s geography, he was a particular favourite with visiting scientists and geologists.
He was one of three foundation trustees appointed by the Chatham Islands District Council to oversee the transfer of the island museum from council administration to a community trust.
Over the years he contributed much from his own collection of artefacts, but even more important was his memory of past events and his deep interest in the islands’ history that set the context of particular museum exhibits.
Over the last six years he suffered several strokes that lessened his physical ability but not his powers of recall or his storytelling with fellow residents of the Waikanae Lodge on the Ka¯ piti Coast, where he spent his final few years.
He is survived by children Rena Mae, Andrew, Geoffrey and Claraleigh. A fifth child, Stephen, died at birth.
His long life is now part of the islands’ history. –
Sources: RNZ
‘‘When you live in the Chathams you can’t just go around the corner and buy something ... You have to have a go at it yourself.’’