The camera never lies

My late father had a wonderful sense of humour. I remember when the young Queen Elizabeth came to Masterton in 1953 she had lunch at the Empire Hotel. Rival butcher Mr. C. L. Neate, who had only recently settled in the town from Britain, served the Empire with their meat requirements and immediately after the lunch, while the Queen and the Duke were still driving out of town to their next destination, he wrote on his shop window in white poster paint: “The Queen ate our meat.” Quick as a flash my father wrote on our shop window: “God save the Queen.” One of the national weekly periodicals at the time, concluding a story on the incident, asked: “Would you buy meat from a man like that?” Fortunately many did.

In 1961 I went to Sydney to work in a butcher’s shop that had won an award that year for the most modern meat market in Australasia, Dick Stone Ltd. at Rockdale. 

Rockdale is one of Sydney’s southern suburbs, back then buoyant and very Australian. A visit there a couple of years ago revealed the butcher’s shop has given way to a lending institution and the population is predominantly South East Asian. In the fifties and sixties the white Australia policy was hugely obvious.

The owner of the shop was Richard Setten Stone. He had three shops in Rockdale; one called Richard’s, another called Setten’s and the award winner, where I worked, called Stone’s. Each was independently managed, mine by a hard taskmaster named Jimmy Blakemore, and each shop had a fierce rivalry going with the others. When I first started at Stones, as I was unknown to the staff at the other two shops, Jimmy Blakemore would send me to spy on their prices and report back. We would then undercut them. This, despite them all having the same owner.

Stone’s had a staff of eleven butchers and we were constantly busy. There was always a sea of faces at the counter waiting to be served. One evening, at around closing time, I managed to assemble everyone behind the counter and take their photo which I sent back to Dad with a letter explaining this was the staff of the shop where I was working in Aussie.

This was too much for my father. He had a staff of about seven back then so he rang up the laundry, asked for all of our white coats and aprons to be delivered back to the shop post haste and then rushed around the neighbouring shops seeking recruits to boost his complement for a return photo. Dad managed to line up 17 people behind our shop counter. Another phone call, this time to photographer Ted Nikolaison, and the shot was taken, processed and sent to me at the shop in Rockdale. A simple note attached said: Dear Rick, thanks for the photo of the staff in the shop in Australia. Here is a recent photo of our team in Masterton. 

I opened the envelope at the shop, saw the possibilities immediately, and soon had all the staff, including Jimmy Blakemore, gathered around me to see the photo. They were all amazed, none more so than the erstwhile manager, who had justifiably been treating me like a serf/peasant type from lowly New Zealand. His attitude warmed markedly when he saw the apparent size of our family business. “What did all these people do?” he was keen to know. He was particularly intrigued by the two Chinamen, Tommy and Charlie Wong. Their fruit shop backed on to ours and they had been Dad’s first two recruits as he had sought help to increase, albeit temporarily, the number of his employees.

Back then I could think quickly on my feet so I told the impressionable manager that they made the smallgoods. I said that they locked themselves in a backroom each morning and produced, with secret herbs and spices, the best sausages in the country. People, I prevaricated, came from far and wide to taste Long’s oriental polonies. Next on his question list was the huge bear of a man in a bow tie and chef’s hat. This was George Bogala, actually the Yugoslav cook at the A1 restaurant, but I told Jimmy that he broke down all our beef. I said he could single-handedly process about six bodies of beef in a day, and that he kept a bucket of cold water on the floor beside him so he could dip his knife in it from time to time when it got too hot.

I found various jobs for the photogenic conspirators including gift shop owner Jack Whiteman, Army Stores proprietor Frank Pool, abattoir manager George Brown, plus two hairdressers, Mel Catt and George Corlett, all of whom had been press-ganged into posing for the photo. Pharmacist Wayne Snowsill had arrived when all the coats and aprons had been used up. In his chemist white smock he looked a little professional to be a straight butcher so I told the boss that he was a window dresser. This was the too much for Jimmy Blakemore. “You employ a window dresser?” he said incredulously, and now saw me in a totally, if unjustifiable, new light.

From then on I was looked upon as something of a guru in the field of meat retailing.

Jimmy would constantly ask me, as we were completing some task, if this was how we would do it in New Zealand. I enjoyed by newly acquired status and milked it for all it was worth. Once I had established myself, about six weeks after the photo had arrived, I admitted the deception. Fortunately, Aussies enjoy a good joke. Although I went back down the rankings ladder, I never descended to the bottom rung from whence I had started.

Wellington’s Evening Post published the story and cleverly captioned the accompanying photo: “Camera proves Masterton Butchery a much larger joint.”

Like my own children today I always thought fathers were of little use, but I was pleased that mine, with his incorrigible sense of humour, had given me the opportunity to excel in a country where New Zealanders had about the same credibility as the Irish have in England.

(First published on March 31st 1999)

“Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else.” - Will Rogers.

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Man's inhumanity to man

The fiscal outlook for the world’s eighth largest economy Brazil looks gloomy with The Financial Times suggesting it has gone from zombie to walking dead.

I spent six weeks in the Amazon region of Brazil in 1986, leading a Rotary Group Study Exchange team. I never really felt safe the whole time I was there. I was physically assaulted on three occasions during the six weeks. I was unscathed - only my pride was hurt - thanks to people around me who came to my assistance, but I vividly remember wanting to do a papal kissing of the tarmac when I got back to Auckland airport. 

The problem with Brazil, and I guess this applies to a great many countries, is that abject poverty resides alongside audacious wealth. The two don’t co-exist and the have-nots, with little to lose, often decide to take what they want. NZ yachting hero Sir Peter Bake Blake was murdered there in 2001 and apparently died for the sake of a couple of watches and some banknotes of the near worthless Brazilian currency.

In 1986 I also found the scale of poverty in Brazil to be frightening, Back then it was claimed the majority of the wealth resided in about five percent of the populous. The biggest city at the mouth of the Amazon is Belem - pronounced Belame - short for Bethlehem, its original name. It has a population of a million and a half souls. From the air it looked like a modern metropolis with high rise buildings in abundance. At ground level it wasn’t quite so splendid. Most of the high rises were tenement buildings; concrete bunkers stacked on top of one another providing the most basic of living amenities. But the ‘favelas,’ corrugated iron lean-to shanty towns, on the outskirts of the city, were far worse and the multi-storey bunker dwellers would have considered they were comparatively well-off.

We were in Belem for two weeks before moving on to other parts in the region and while there I was billeted with a well-to-do Japanese family. They lived in a modest home by our standards, but it was pretty spectacular for Brazil. As it was surrounded by the dwellings of the poor. It was distinguishable by the bars over the windows and every evening at seven o’clock a hired armed guard would arrive, wearing a holster with two six-guns, who would parade around the house all night providing protection for the inhabitants. It was hard to sleep in that heat, despite the house being air-conditioned, and the footsteps going past the window every few minutes were an unhelpful distraction.

The poor seemed never to go to bed. No matter what time of the night you arrived home the whole population appeared to be occupying the footpaths, with the kids invariably kicking soccer balls around. Even at one or two in the morning the suburban streets were full of people. We were told their houses were so hot it was nigh impossible to sleep.

In an area that attracts few tourists we were conspicuous of course and were generally believed to be Americans, for whom the Brazilians have little respect. As you walked passed a group you would hear them say disparagingly: “Americanos Gringos!” whereupon we would hastily turn around and exclaim: “Noun, noun, Nouvelle Zealandia!” which made us much more acceptable. 

Peter Blake probably didn’t have time to make the distinction.

One city we stayed in, just up-river from Belem, was Manaus, which has the sordid reputation of being the murder capital of the world. More murders are committed there than in any other place on earth, and I understand that this is not calculated on a population basis.

There appeared to be no social welfare system in Brazil; if you didn’t have a job the government offered no handout system to get you through. Beggars line the streets, many with severe physical disabilities, and it was explained to us that this was due to polio, still rife in that country. The vaccines of the first world were unaffordable in the third world, although Rotary International programme to immunise the whole world will have meant this will not now be the case.

We visited factories where working conditions were so draconian that it made you sick to the stomach. You’d wonder where the world’s labour organisations were, but it would seem they only operate in the wealthy OECD countries.

Life expectancy was short and life was cheap. I saw a man run over by a bus one day. He died instantly, but no one ran to his aid. They all stood on the crowded footpaths and watched him lying there in a pool of blood. No ambulance came and I was told he would remain there until relatives came to claim him. I asked what the road toll was, but no one knew; no statistics are kept.

Things no doubt will have improved in the intervening 30 or so years. Inflation back then was running at 300 percent and interest rates were 1400 percent! I assume they have got their monetary system back in some semblance of order, but the poor will still be poor and the vast majority of the population will be struggling with their day-to-day living.

There is a lesson in this for us of course. Since 1986, reforms in New Zealand have hardly created the utopia promised and have most certainly resulted in a greater gap between the rich and poor. Not that we compare with the deprivation of the average Brazilian, but the trickle-down theory that didn’t work there, hasn’t worked here either.

Sir Peter Blake and the memories of him, so poignantly encapsulated in documentary films, will be an ongoing inspiration for those who follow on to complete his work which was to save species of the animal kingdom heading for extinction, but now we require some heroic leaders of his ilk to turn their attention to the human of the species.

Homo Sapiens is desperately in need of some new champions to save his own skin.

“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills to prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.” - Oliver Goldsmith 

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Forty years in the wilderness

When I was a youngster we had a wind-up gramophone. My father had received it for winning an event at harriers. The turntable used to revolve at 78 rpm, and you had to put in a new needle every time you played a record. Needles came in little tins of 100 and you bought them at local gift shop Arts and Crafts. I remember my cousin Bill Geary moved the technology forward by building a turntable powered by electricity. He made the pick-up arm out of balsa wood. This marvellous machine played the new ‘long-playing’ records that went around at 33/and a1/3 rpm and had a needle that played over and over.

There were no record shops as such back then - the popular music industry had not yet started and so the selection was limited. I was so enthralled by the electrified player that I was unwittingly exposed to classical music, which I grew to enjoy. My favourites were the Hungarian Rhapsody part 2 and The Waltz of the Flowers.

Films influenced our lives; we called them ‘pictures’ and in my early teens my unlikely hero was Mario Lanza. I saw all his films, bought all his records (our wind-up gramophone had now been replaced by a ‘radiogram’) and I even wrote to him in Hollywood expressing my admiration. I got a letter back from his secretary with an autographed picture of the great man himself. I had this framed and hung it above my bed. My parents watched me quizzically; most of my contemporaries would have had Marilyn Monroe on their bedroom walls. (Later on, when I started to take an interest in the opposite sex, mum and dad yearned for my Mario Lanza era).

I was fickle though. A new hero emerged in the form of clarinetist Benny Goodman. I saw ‘The Benny Goodman Story’ at the Regent Theatre four times. We had a music shop in the State Theatre building back then called the Geoffrey Farrell School of Music. As I recall Mr. Farrell showed a greater interest in alcohol than he did arpeggios, but I espied a second hand clarinet in his window and determined I must have it. Mr. Farrell allowed me to put it away on layby and I was soon its proud owner. I offered myself to the Wairarapa College orchestra as first clarinetist and I’ll never forget the sheer thrill of playing in an orchestra with violins, violas, cellos, and the like.

When I left college my father sent me to Palmerston North to learn the meat trade at an old and well established butcher’s shop in that city. I found myself a clarinet teacher over there and continued my studies in that instrument.

But as Bob Dylan was to later put it: “the times they were a-changing.” A fellow named Bill Haley was making his mark with a new and exciting style of music and I put a guitar on layby at a Palmerston North music shop. My music teacher, sensing the interest was waning on the clarinet said I had to choose one instrument over the other. I sought wise counsel with my landlady. She told me rock’n’roll would soon die and that clarinet music would live on forever. I listened attentively then opted for the guitar. I went to her funeral in Palmerston North seven or eight years ago. It was too late to point out that rock’n’roll had outlived her.

I taught myself to play the guitar; I sold my clarinet and bought an amplifier and when I came back to Masterton after two years in Palmerston North I formed a rock’n’roll band with a friend named Melvin Carroll. We called ourselves ‘The Drifters’ then later 'The Signatures.’ I was the band’s vocalist and alternately played guitar, bass guitar and double bass. We were the only rock’n’roll band in the Wairarapa at the time and played regularly two or three nights a week. I was making more money strumming a guitar than I was stringing sausages.

Marriage, family and business interests intervened but a couple of years ago my wife suggested we go to Wellington to the ballet. I nearly had a fit. Me go the ballet! Then I had pangs of conscience. Hadn’t I dragged her over the years to concerts of my choice, like Neil Diamond and the Shadows? I agreed to make the pilgrimage as long as I could go in disguise in case there were other people from Masterton there. I had a reputation to maintain. I didn’t want anyone to think my pre-pubescent love of Mario Lanza had more latent meanings. In the event I sneaked into the Wellington Opera House without being seen, slunk down in my seat and waited to be bored out of my brain. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was enchanted from the minute the curtain went up. The ballet was The Nutcracker Suite and you can imagine my delight when, the orchestra suddenly burst into Waltz of the Flowers and I saw Tchaikovsky’s imagery as it was intended. I had to choke back the emotion and fight back the tears. Now I knew how the ancient Hebrews felt; I had spent forty years in the wilderness.

It’s not that the rock’n’roll we played was all that bad. The lyrics were simple love songs and the music basic 12 bar blues. As it has progressed, however, the words have got more complicated and somehow twisted in the process. There has been a sort of a darkness emerge that was never there in its infancy. Music can influence us hugely; it has a power that can either enhance or destroy. I peruse some of the lyrics from today’s offerings and can only conclude that they are concocted in depraved drug-induced minds. You hear of teenage suicides and suspect that for many, evil music had dominion over their lives. On the other side of the coin it has been discovered that classical music has healing powers and surgeons are playing it in the background during operations with amazing results.

It’s not for me to preach. I still tend to have a liking for middle of the road popular music and to date The Nutcracker Suite is the only ballet I’ve attended. But I have a belated admiration for my wise old landlady and from time to time contemplate what direction my life might have taken if my clarinet teacher had only been a bit more persistent.

(First published on 30th of September 1998)

“At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it.” - George Bernard Shaw. 

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Endeavoring to hold the peace

There was a good deal of comment that the presiding priest at Prince Harry and Meghan’s wedding asked if anyone saw just cause for the couple could not be joined in holy matrimony. It was a regular feature of weddings in “my day”; I haven’t been to a wedding for some time and it seems the custom may have been discontinued. So I thought it may be appropriate to re-run this column which I wrote back on February the 24th 1999. You may find it hard to believe, but every word is true.

Marion and I tied the knot on Masterton Show day in 1963 at around 5 o’clock in the afternoon, and after the nuptials we were greeted by my butcher’s shop staff dressed as undertakers, complete with top hats, forming a guard of honour at the church door.

They and some friends had also sent off the taxis and had replaced these with horse and gigs. We were then paraded down the main street, now full of people coming home from the show, bagpipers in front, the undertakers next and the horses and two gigs with the bridal party bringing up the rear. My new bride, who hailed from Eketahuna, didn’t know what she’d struck.

I was determined to get even at the future weddings of those who had perpetrated this and I didn’t have to wait long. Lew Milne was to marry Alison Cooke in Greytown. I was to be a groomsman. Lew was a stockbuyer for Borthwick’s and he had organised the horses and carts for our wedding from Tom Hood at Kopuaranga. Retribution was in sight.

It had always occurred to me that it would be exceptionally funny if somebody responded when the minister intoned the words: “If anyone can show any just cause why these two cannot be lawfully joined together, let them now speak or hereafter forever hold their peace.” Mind you, it’s quite difficult to find anyone who will actually make a response.

Locally no one was game.

I had a friend in Wellington named Ian Dawson who owned the Sorrento coffee bar and managed The Libretto’s, New Zealand’s foremost rock band at the time, and I rang him to see if he could find an outgoing Wellingtonian who might be able to assist. He rang back and said he’d found someone, but the price would be quite high. I agreed to pay whatever it cost.

The wedding was at 4.30 p.m. at the Methodist establishment at the north end of Greytown. The groom and we groomsmen were resplendent in white ties and tails and the little church was packed; standing room only. When the minister, I’ll never forget his name, Reverend Hornblow, made the statement I was anticipating “If anyone can show any just cause (etc.) speak now or forever hold your peace.” there was the usual pregnant silence.

Then suddenly a dapper little chap in a dark suit and thin black tie came running up the aisle; “Stop the wedding, stop the wedding,” he cried. The atmosphere was electric (electric atmospheres, pregnant pauses, don’t you just love the English language?) My expensive actor person got to the startled couple, looked them up and down and said, “Oh no. Sorry! Wrong wedding” and ran back out the other aisle.

At this juncture I expected the congregation would burst out laughing, the wedding would continue without further delay, and afterwards I would be congratulated by all and sundry for organising the ultimate practical joke. Not so. Close family members of the bride suffered discomfiture; some quite seriously. Nobody laughed, not the least the Reverend Hornblow, who stumbled through the rest of the ceremony as though it was his first outing. There was a pall over the breakfast and I was sent to Coventry by most of the guests, though I must say the bride and groom took it in good humour.

On the Sunday I sat down and wrote a long letter of apology to the brides’ parents. The Methodist vestry held an emergency meeting on Monday and considered taking me before a church court to discourage other misguided humourists from attempting the same prank. However, they saw the letter I had written to Mr. and Mrs. Cooke, assumed I was repentant, and asked that a similar letter be sent to them, and all would be forgiven. I couldn’t write that second letter quickly enough.

The Sunday News in Auckland ran the story, describing me as having “a curious sense of humour,” whatever that means. They asked for comment from prominent clergy in that city. Most were strongly condemnatory.

Jokes I played at subsequent friends’ weddings were low key and more acceptable all round.

The dapper Wellingtonian who had made the foray up the church aisle was a regular patron at the Sorrento coffee bar, an Argentinean named ‘Chico.’ They never did send me the bill. I’m not sure whether they forgot or if they felt sorry for me for all the trouble I had got myself into.

I’d like to think it was the latter. Though to be fair, I probably didn’t deserve the sympathy.

“Before a marriage a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you. After marriage he won’t even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.” - Helen Rowland.

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