Resolute defender of underdog
Janet Franks community activist b August 11, 1931 d April 1, 2019
In her 80s, Janet Franks once delivered a masterful understatement to an interviewer compiling her life story. ‘‘I’m afraid,’’ the great-greatgrandmother said, ‘‘my life hasn’t been very exciting.’’
Many would beg to differ.
She was born on the island of Shameen, on the Pearl River, not far from Portuguese Macau, off the city of Guangzhou (Canton), where her White Russian father, Peter Prokopoff, an exTsarist army officer on the run from the Russian Revolution, had found work as a police sergeant enforcing order in the French trading concession.
By most reckonings, far from being unexciting, that would make a fine synopsis for a book.
Add to the mix that the Prokopoffs survived two invasions, the first by the Japanese, and a second by Americans, while living with Chinese families who had once been their servants, and you might have a sequel.
The Prokopoffs were fortunate – the Soviet Union was not at war with Japan until less than a month before the end of the war in the Pacific.
This meant the Japanese did not bother to round up the Prokopoffs when they captured Canton in 1938. On the contrary, the young Janet played with the children of both Chinese and Japanese families, while the turmoil of war played out.
‘‘They were some of the happiest days we had. We lived their way and saw the Chinese for who they really were,’’ Janet later recalled of her time under Japanese rule.
At war’s end, aged 15, she went to school in Hong Kong for two years. Her life up to that point meant that, while she had not spent much time in classrooms, she could speak English, Cantonese and Russian fluently, while holding her own in Portuguese, German and Japanese.
Accordingly, she was able to start work as an interpreter in St Mary’s Hospital in Hong Kong. At the time, the British colony was filled to breaking with refugees and she remembered kilometrelong queues of people waiting for medical attention.
At the age of 20, she emigrated to New Zealand in 1951, with her new husband, marine engineer Gerald Wagstaff.
‘‘I wasn’t nervous at all. I was looking forward to it – everyone was looking for a homeland,’’ she said.
Newly married, she arrived in New Zealand not just with a new surname. Originally known as Jeannette, her name was changed to Janet in her British passport. (To complicate matters further, she was christened Anna Prokopova in the Orthodox Church.)
The couple settled in Palmerston North, where Gerald had landed the position of chief engineer at the Longburn freezing works. The couple had three
children but, once again, life turned tough when they separated. Gerald, who returned to marine engineering for the New Zealand Steamship Company, died at sea of appendicitis some years later.
Janet married Gordon Gilbert Franks, an electrician in the New Zealand Army, in 1965, and they bought a dairy farm near Hikurangi, Whangarei. When this marriage failed, she returned to Palmerston North and her secretarial job at Massey University.
She threw herself back in to the Palmerston North community, working as secretary for Volunteer Services Abroad, the Japanese society, and other welfare organisations.
She applied to teachers college but was rejected because of her lack of formal education. Never daunted, Franks, who was working as a secretary in the veterinary science department at Massey, enrolled in adult classes and then in a BA, majoring in education and manpower development.
Her experience at Massey had been mixed, she told a reporter, as not all teaching staff had welcomed her, with one professor advising she stick to washing nappies and minding babies.
‘‘This put my back up and I tried harder. The younger students were extremely helpful and went out of their way to assist me.’’
Franks moved to Hamilton with her youngest child, Michael, to take up a position as a vocational guidance officer for the Department of Education, and went on to complete a masters in social science at Waikato University.
The higher degree allowed a career change, and she worked at Tokanui Hospital for 25 years as a psychiatric
social worker, until the institution’s closure in 1998.
From her earliest days in Hamilton, she was active in the Waikato community. A justice of the peace, she was president of the Waikato Ethnic Council, spokesperson for Grey Power on consumer affairs, helped out at a women’s refuge, and was heavily involved in the NZ Russian (Waikato) Friendship Society.
City councillor Martin Gallagher said she was a strong and passionate believer in a multicultural Hamilton. ‘‘She was very pleased that, during her lifetime, the city became a much more diverse community.’’
Gallagher said she loved to promote the Russian community but was very happy to celebrate with other communities. ‘‘There was an incredibly wide cross-section of people from different communities at her funeral.’’
It was as secretary of the NZ Russian Community Trust that Franks led the project that would culminate in Hamilton Gardens’ beautifully constructed replica 17th-century Russian log bell tower. It was this work that earned her a Hamilton Civic Trust Award in 2002.
Son Richard Wagstaff said she had started off the project with a more modest ambition.
‘‘Twenty years ago, I walked through the gardens and thought it would be nice to put a park bench there,’’ she told the Waikato Times. ‘‘Now we have a massive bell tower.’’
Her work for the trust and society was not forgotten. Russian ambassador Georgii Viktorovich Zuev, in a letter read out at Franks’ Orthodox Church funeral, commended her as ‘‘an outstanding community activist’’ who strengthened cultural relations between the two countries.
Daughter Margaret Maddaford said the funeral recognised the strength of the multicultural society of the Waikato and its combination of spiritual values by the presence of people and song from the Te Kotahitanga Society.
In the years after the construction of the bell tower, Franks stood unsuccessfully for the Wel Energy Trust and for the Hamilton City Council.
A passionate defender of the underdog, and an inveterate writer of letters to editors of the Waikato Times, she regularly held forth on topics as disparate as immigration, respect for school teachers, city councillors’ pay, aerial spraying, and the role of the Russian army in capturing Berlin.
She praised the excavator and truck drivers working on the city’s roads, took on the Family Court for separating families, and worried about the plight of Ma¯ ori, Pacific Island and other ethnic minority women.
Franks was the daughter of Peter and Agrippina Prokopoff; mother of Margaret Maddaford, Richard Wagstaff, Rosemarie Mackenzie, and Michael Franks; motherin-law to Raymond, Christine, and Patricia; grandmother of eight; greatgrandmother of 12, and great-greatgrandmother of Belle. –