The Waikato colours to which they once rallied
As Anzac Day approaches, Sam Edwards shares the tale of a piece of Waikato military history that survived battle, only to face destruction at home.
The first time my dyed-in-thepeat-bogs wife and her equally Presbyterian husband went to Hamilton’s Cathedral Church of St Peter, it was less for the sermon than the music. We had heard about the choir and been told that Evensong felt like a free Baroque concert.
As we entered the nave, the first thing to catch my eye was the setting sun illuminating two flags hanging from a cross beam. Unfurled since their arrival, they were the colours of the 16th Waikato Regiment, and they looked as though they had been there forever.
Mouldering away in the gathering dusk, fragments picked out in the rich gold rays, they were set to hang there until the last stitch gave way and the final piece of fabric disappeared on a wayward cathedral draught. That was the expectation.
Tradition, and military regulation, said their ultimate resting place should have been in the cathedral. It was from there that they were blessed after the regiment was formed in 1911 and there that they were returned in 1936.
That was not to be. In the dead of a vandal’s night in 1983, they were ripped from their horizontal staffs by a senior member of the congregation, who buried them in unconsecrated ground just outside the cathedral boundary as if they were any unholy human criminal or sinner.
It was the ultimate desecration, as the flags were, indeed, the regimental colours of the 16th. When the regiment was reorganised, the original 16th Colours, as military protocol required, were returned to the church from whence they came.
The ceremony occurred at the close of a traditional presentation of new colours to the 1st Battalion of the Waikato Regiment at the Hamilton High School grounds on May 24, 1936.
Made of the finest silk, emblazoned with the greatest care, consecrated by the church, for 25 years proudly borne and carefully guarded by the sons of the regiment, honoured by all, and then returned to the church as a memorial of selfsacrifice, heroism, honour and the regiment’s dead.
The colours are guarded with the greatest care, they are treated with the greatest reverence and respect. Every individual, whether soldier or civilian, must pay homage to them and thereby to all that they represent: the Crown, the empire, the regiment’s honour, to all who have passed through the ranks and to the regiment’s dead …
What that member of the congregation did was the ultimate sacrilegious rejection of responsibility accepted by the cathedral.
Somehow, the next day, a younger member of the congregation, armed with a remarkably prescient insight and, clearly, an inquisitive and sensitive listening ear, had got wind of the act and, incredibly, even miraculously, located a freshly dug patch of soil on the cathedral grounds.
He investigated carefully, digging with the sensitivity of an archaeologist, and found that, indeed, he had uncovered the colours. He retrieved the unique artefacts and carefully took them home – on the back of his bike. He cleaned them, contacted various authorities, and, over a period of several months and several moves, was finally able to see them relocated to Waiouru’s National Army Museum.
The physical removal of such sacred, iconic, spiritual artefacts, such historically significant relics, from the cathedral was heartbreaking for many. They were then so fragile that after their rescue they needed to go into what their curator, Pip Harrison, calls deep storage, where they now still live.
Without that relocation, they would have rapidly ended up as a dusty melange of disparate molecules sent into oblivion by the winds of a lack of interest and wilful neglect.