When ‘the end of the world’ hit Napier
‘‘Where were you when it happened?’’ people kept asking each other in the days after Napier’s devastating quake. By Tina White.
Around the country, people stood silent, at the exact time the great earthquake had struck: 10.47am the previous Tuesday.
It was New Zealand’s nationwide day of mourning. It commemorated 256 men, women and children who had died, the 400 people admitted to hospital and two who were never found.
Napier’s centre was a sea of rubble, layered with grimy dust. After five tumultuous days, people were slowly picking up the remnants of their lives.
It was hot and sunny, as it had been that day when the first upthrusting, jolting quake hit, the first of many smaller shakes and aftershocks.
‘‘Where were you when it happened?’’ people kept asking each other – the typical postdisaster question, the answer never forgotten.
There was help – so much help. The seamen from the HMS Veronica, moored at Napier’s West Quay when the 7.8 magnitude quake hit, had sprung into action, organising the crowds, digging out rubble and later, assisting as the dead were buried in a mass grave at Park Island cemetery on the Thursday.
The Public Works Department, Red Cross, health, defence, police, post and telegraph and railways departments had arrived in force. Already, the government was figuring how to finance the town’s reconstruction.
Stories grew out of the mayhem. Geoff Conly, author of The Shock of ’31 (1980), recounted many.
There was the man who told police his wife had lost a valuable ring in the rubble of their hotel room, and asked: ‘‘Can you help me find it?’’
There was Ray Rees, a copyholder in the proof-reading department of the Daily Telegraph, who with reader Molly Monnock had escaped from the crumbling newspaper building, digging their way out with their hands.
At last, out in Tennyson St, they ran into the Telegraph’s managing editor Trevor Geddis. Rees asked: ‘‘Mr Geddis, will there be any more work today?’’
Geddis looked up and down the ruined street. ‘‘No Ray, there won’t be any more work today.’’
Conly said: ‘‘Ray Rees stayed long enough to see a linotype operator, Percy Steele, carried from the ruins, one shoe filled with molten lead from a collapsing linotype machine.’’
He didn’t see the paper’s fiery chief sub-editor, Howard McDougall, holding dead power lines high above his head and calling loudly: ‘‘Don’t touch the power lines – they may be alive.’’
In another story, Conly noted: ‘‘Arthur Giles, passenger clerk in the Hawke’s Bay Motor Company’s office at Wairoa, instinctively headed for open space, dodging drums of oil bouncing off the truck landing. ‘This is too big for an earthquake,’ he thought. ‘It must
‘‘One area of nearly an acre in Mr Reeves’ property across the (Waikare) gorge was thrown into the air, and daylight was seen underneath it by the amazed observers.’’
be a comet from outer space which has thrown the world off orbit. That means the end of the world.’
‘‘At the Wairoa cemetery, the sexton was doubling as gravedigger when the first earthquake thump tumbled him into the grave. Because it was a breathtaking tumble, it was a minute or two before he began to climb out. Thus it was that a horrified woman, a visitor to Wairoa taking a shortcut from the hospital to the town, saw the tombstones begin to dance . . . she saw the cemetery in violent eruption. And horror of horrors, a grave disgorging its body, moving and whole! She waited for no mundane explanation, but ran on screaming, convinced that this was the Second Coming.’’
On February 7, the Wairarapa Daily Times reported that ‘‘one area of nearly an acre in Mr Reeves’ property across the (Waikare) gorge was thrown into the air, and daylight was seen underneath it by the amazed observers, who estimated it must have been forced 30 or 40 feet clear of the surging area. Instead of breaking up, it whirled round and fell back into the hole from which it had been ejected, stones hurtling out of the mass as it fell.’’
Tales both of sudden death and miraculous escapes ran around Napier.
On Friday, February 6, a government announcement denied rumours that it planned a mass evacuation of the stricken town, ‘‘although it is desirable to get some of the women and children away from Napier, because the water supply and drainage system have failed’’.
After almost a week, pretty much every other system had too. People with pre-earthquake pay cheques had nowhere to cash them.
Official visitors turned up. Governor-General Lord Bledisloe, a year into his tenure, took dozens of pictures. A B Hurst, a professional photographer, saved one camera from the ruins of his studio; he’d later turn the resulting photos into earthquake postcards.
In all the horror, the nation’s outpouring of fellow feeling, and desire to give whatever they had to the stricken, brought remarkable comfort and gratitude.
The shock of 1931, Conly wrote, came when the Depression was in full swing, but ‘‘the earthquake which showed the worst in nature also brought out the best in people’’.