The Dream

“Hey, Williamson, get around the other side of the carriage if the foreman comes.  We don’t want another job today”.

Startled, the young carpenter looked up from the final screw he was tightening.

“But, there’s another hour till knock off time,” he protested.

“Do what you’re told…” growled the older man as he disappeared.

In New Zealand in 1912 the railways were the most important line of communication, and the Petone workshops had a vital role to play in the economy of the country. So thought Fred Williamson and he had been glad to be accepted as a carpenter there. Now he wasn’t so sure.

“I’m hanged if I am going to play peep-oh with any man,” he stormed as he told his family of the incident that night. “God intended us to face our fellow man without fear. I’m going to throw up my job and go farming.”

All that evening his family discussed the idea. “What will Esther say?” asked one of his sisters. In March Fred had become engaged to Esther Priest. Esther had finished Training College and had started teaching at Clareville, near Carterton.

“Esther was bonded to teach for three years so we can’t get married till December 1914. Anyway her father has given up his job to start farming so he’ll approve. Esther and I have talked about it. It’s not a new idea,” Fred said. He was sure Esther would like anyplace where he was.

As he was going to bed, leaving Fred alone by the fire, Alexander Williamson said, “think of it carefully, son and whatever you decide you know I’ll back you to the best of my ability.”

“Thanks Dad,” Fred said gratefully. He knew he would not be able to get a farm near Wellington. Any good land was far too expensive for the money he had been able to save. And it was good to live near Wellington. He thought of his church, St Johns, Wellington had pioneered an exciting idea. A group of young men getting together to study Gods word. Bible classes were starting in all the Presbyterian Churches in New Zealand now, and Fred enjoyed working with his Knox Bible Class and Easter camps. Young men living together for three or four days to learn more of what a Christian’s attitude should be. He’d helped at the first one and every year since. Did he want to give that up, as he would need to do if he went farming? He thought of the gymnasium he had built three years ago with the help of the young men of the group, working on Saturday afternoons, and the classrooms they had nearly completed this year. He couldn’t leave till they were done; should be finished by July, though. And surely there would be churches in other parts of the country, and there would always be something that wanted doing for the Lord’s work. 

A piece of burning wood fell onto the hearth. Automatically Fred picked it up, and as he threw a couple more logs onto the glowing embers he realized that every January since he could remember he had gone with his father to the bush to cut the firewood they needed for the year. Wood for the stove for cooking and heating water, for the copper used on washing days, and for the open fire. They used such a lot. He remembered one year when it had been very wet and the big wheels of the dray loaded with wood had gone over a little rimu tree. Dad had lifted it up and carefully planted it where it could grow safely.

“God gave us the bush to use, not to destroy”, he had said.

Last year Fred had rigged up a wire cable so that they could bring some of the logs from the top of the gully without destroying the bush below. Would Dad be able to get enough firewood if he wasn’t there to help?  Sam would do his best, but he was still only a school boy.  Fred thought about the times he’d tried to make the windmill work the circular saw to cut the logs small enough for the kitchen stove.  He wasn’t sure it could be done; if he went farming he would have time to try those ideas.  He wanted to work with this exciting new power – electricity.  Could he get a farm with a stream on it so that he could experiment?  Though he thought that wind power could be used just as well.  But that would need money, lots of it.  Was it possible?

Very deliberately he thought back to 1903, the year he had turned 15, the year he had started work as a carpenter for Strand Bros.  1903 had started badly.  The school inspector had upset his father completely.  What was his name?  Fred remembered clearly.  Half the teachers in the Wellington area hated that man.

“Everyone knows Mad Billy isn’t all there,” Fred said half aloud, “and the inspector wanted Dad to thrash him, and Dad wouldn’t.  He can use the cane when he thinks it is deserved.”  Fred reflected rather ruefully, “but he always says there are better ways of teaching youngsters.’’  And the inspector wouldn’t even listen when he tried to explain the work he was doing with that red-head who used to stutter so much that no one could understand a word of what she was trying to say.  Dad’s methods can’t be too bad because he doesn’t often have failure when the inspectors came to test his class for the proficiency exam.  Anyway I decided that if a stupid inspector could upset my Dad so much, I wasn’t having that sort of life.  When Epuni School was opened in July and Dad was made head teacher, I left school and started work.  7/6d. a week they paid me, but before I could begin, the tools I needed cost £11/14/0d  – more than I earned in four weeks.

“It was in 1905 that Dad suggested I buy my section and paid the first deposit”, Fred said to himself.  He thought of his first experience of working away from home that year, when he was sent to help build the Dannevirke Hospital.  His wages had gone up a little, but board cost 18/- a week and there was even less chance of saving.  The countryside round Dannevirke was rough, mostly still standing bush.  Beautiful, but no, he wouldn’t look there for his farm.

“It was in August 1906 that I first met Edward Riddiford, King Riddiford everyone called him,” Fred mused, “He looked like the biggest hobo of us all. 

No one would know he was the richest man in New Zealand. We had started working on his stables at ‘Longburn’ and I’d only had a chance to go to Palmerston North once when they brought me a telegram to say I had an hour to catch the train back to Wellington to pack my bluey for a job that would last several months.  ‘Kahu’, lying at the main wharf, was to sail at 2 o’clock on Sunday morning.  Our destination, ‘Te Awaite’, another of King Riddiford’s stations.”

Fred gave a wry smile as he thought of that journey in the little coastal steamer.  He wasn’t a good sailor, and that stretch of sea would never be called smooth.  They spent all day unloading stores at Witrangi and White Rock stations and it was a miserable lot of carpenters who reached ‘Te Awaite’.  The sheep yards could already hold 1,000 sheep but they were to double in capacity.  The carpenters worked ten hours a day, but often in the evenings they went floundering or netting for herrings.  Saturday afternoons and Sundays were free and there were always horses they could borrow.  One week Fred and Bill Manderson took their blankets and tucker and rods along the coastal trail.  The cliff tracks were steep and they knew there were bays that could only be crossed when the tide was out.  They came high up the rugged cliff overlooking Okoroponga Bay.  Fred thought he had never seen anything so wild and so beautiful.  “I want to own some land,” he thought then, “To change some part of New Zealand from rough country to fertile farm land.

As he sat by the fire in his father’s home in Taita he knew it was there that his ambition had been born.

“I’ll call my new farm ‘Okoropong’ he thought. Giving it a name seemed to make the whole idea more possible.  “I finished 1906 with two pounds 11 shillings & three pence (£2/11/3d) in my Post Office account and a section with nothing but a fence.  Not enough to buy a cow, let alone a herd of cows.”

His mind switched to the following year.  He’d been sent to Shannon where it rained for the whole month.  They were sleeping in the chaff room with plenty of rats to keep them company, and cooking and eating in marquees with thick and sticky mud underfoot.

“I wouldn’t like my farm to be washed out to sea,” he decided, “I won’t try that area.”  It was late in July when he was told to go with Dick Thorpe to build a house in ‘Wainui’. They were to batch in a whare about a quarter of an hours walk from the job.  Dick had taken sick and Fred was left to finish the house on his own.  “I didn’t like it a bit at the time,” Fred reflected, But it made me realize I could do it and it gave me courage to hand in my notice at Strand’s at the end of the year and build my own house.  I had to get a bit of a mortgage on it, but I’ve a tenant now and he pays the rent regularly.”  He thought of another of the big jobs Strand’s had done for King Riddiford, the magnificent Orongorongo homestead with its huge ballroom and central tower.  It had been ready for Eric’s wedding in 1907, but there had been work later on homes for shepherds, shearers and inside staff.  One Saturday afternoon he had left Orongorongo at 4.30 and didn’t get home till after 8 o’clock.  He had to push his bike for at least six miles through the mud and water.  On Monday he tried to return to work on horse back but the fords were too deep for even the horse.  He got through the next morning, by kneeling on top of the saddle crossing the fords. There’d been long rides every weekend he had stayed at Orongorongo, but long working days didn’t give a man much time for anything else.  

“King Riddiford died last year and Strand Bros. are not getting so many valuable contracts so I took this job at the Petone Railway Workshops instead of going back, though they wanted me to,” he pondered.

“Orongorongo homestead is certainly a very beautiful house, I can’t offer Esther anything like that and I don’t think she would want it.  I have a steady job at the workshop.  Not bad pay, three pound three shillings a week with Government superannuation and regular increases.  Esther likes my house too.  Security; and being told by other men what to do.”

He thought for a long time.  “God has been with me in the things I have undertaken and there doesn’t seem any reason he should fail me now.  We’ll have to start with something small, but I can work hard and I’m sure I can succeed.  If I sell my house at a reasonable profit I’ll have nearly £900.  I’ll risk it.”

And Fred made up his mind that as soon as he could arrange to get some experience as a farm cadet, he would send in his notice to the Petone Workshop.