Scabs, bombers and a spider weaving its web

 

Many have compared Covid’s divide to the winter of ’81. On the 40th anniversary of the Springbok tour it is easy to analogise family division, broken friendships and community hostility.

Seldom mentioned however, has been another anniversary of social discord. It's 70 years since the great strike/lockout of 1951. It remains New Zealand’s biggest industrial confrontation, one that created schisms in towns and communities that lasted for decades.

My siblings, Don and Gair McRae were children at the time of the strike and shared some of their recollections of the splitting of a town.

Gair: We were a mining family and we had moved from Puketihi in the King Country to the Waikato coalfield in 1949. Puketihi had been pretty much idyllic for us children. Literally half the families in the village were relatives. We were a big but tight clan, and us kids looked after each other, played at each other’s homes and in the bush.

Dad was already influential in the King Country miners’ union and I think our move to the Waikato might have been at the request of the Communist Party which both Mum and Dad were members of. 

Don: I remember for quite a while, we two kids stayed in Huntly West while our house was being built down Huntly South. Dad was building it with mates, including some bloke from Auckland who was an actual carpenter. Word must have already got out that the newcomers were union activists because when the roof was completed and they raised the customary flag to celebrate, there was all sorts consternation that a communist standard had been unfurled on the fair neighbourhood

Huntly South back then was a predominantly Catholic area. Many of the miners were of Irish heritage and there was no love of communism. For many years, mention of my father conjured images of pitchforks and sulphur.

Gair: I can’t remember the start of the ‘51 strike but I recall the divisiveness in the town, and at school. I was only nine and Don was seven, but we were acutely aware of the split in the town. It lasted throughout the strike itself and spilled over into our lives for years after.

Don: I  recollect the hostility from farmers and businessmen’s  kids in particular. Dad was in charge of the relief. The relief’s job was to collect food and ration it out to the striking miners families. It was a big operation. They had fishing crews who went to Kaiawa and caught fish in the Thames estuary. The fish was delivered to relief HQ which was in the supper room of the old Town Hall which stood over the disused shaft of Ralph’s mine, site  of one of our worst mining disasters. There were people allocated to distribute the food, tick off what was given to whom and record  what the rashions were. Some farmers donated meat. Some of the businesses around town donated such things as tea and sugar. But I don’t think there was enough relief for all of those that needed it.

Gair: There were people whose job it was to go and canvass for relief. It was a tough job to be one of those. Going on to a farmers property, who likely was hostile, was a big ask. But through their efforts they did discover some farmers who were sympathetic and did donate food, even though under the emergency legislation they were forbidden to aid strikers or their families. They could have been in serious trouble. I know too, that some of the grocer shops allowed families to run up bills which reached horrendous levels.

“The National Government, led by Sidney Holland and the Minister of labour Bill Sullivan, introduced heavy handed emergency regulations, and brought in the navy and army to work the wharves and aderegistered the Waterside Workers' Union under the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act. Under the emergency regulations Holland's government censored the press, made striking illegal and even made it illegal to give money or food to either strikers or their families. The proclamations have been described as "the most illiberal legislation ever enacted in New Zealand".~ Wikipedia

Don: I recall sitting on the bar of my Dad’s pushbike as a six or seven year old, being doubled and calling into the relief room. We went in and Dad started talking with a man behind the counter. I noticed that the man began to cry and I found that quite strange because men didn’t do that.

Later on, years later, Dad told me that he’d caught this fellow stealing food, putting a roast and a couple of packets of tea in his bag. He pleaded with my Dad not to tell anyone because he could not have lived in the town if word got out that he had stolen from the relief. Dad agreed not to tell.

Our house always had people coming and going. Some of them were odd characters, one of whom was a bloke called Abe.

He didn’t seem the sterotype of a striking miner and it turned out he was a small-holding farmer who had a job in the mine to help pay his mortgage. Abe was vehemently anti union and a National Party voter who invariably opposed the majority of votes at union meetings. When they went on strike my Dad appointed Abe in charge of driving and transportation for the relief, because of he was pretty adept at fixing cars and trucks. In that role he became very efficient to a point of officiousness and coincidentally, a staunch union man.

 I recall that the wharfies came to Huntly and held a concert. It was in the town hall. I think it was mostly for the sake of entertaining the miners, but it could have been to raise money for the relief as well. There were some excellent singers and musicians who performed but for me as a small boy the sight of large men, some of them quite overweight, dancing in tutus was the highlight.

 There were incidents during the strike that reflected the tensions in the town. I remember late one night a knock on our door and a man coming inside. He told Dad the police were chasing him and were outside. They’d spied him painting the word “scab” on the walls of someone’s house. On recollection I think it was probably a house just down the lane near our home.

I know Dad was not pleased with that sort of activity and none too happy with him taking refuge in our house.

After a while the police headed off and Dad gave this bloke a bit of a dressing down about endangering him and his family.

Most of the scabs were members of the opencast union. I know that in some areas their numbers were bolstered by defence force personnel.

 There was a schism in the ranks of the miners because the opencast union had voted to keep on working and that schism remained for many, many years. Decades later underground miners refused to fraternise with their opencast counterparts from 51.  In fact, I can remember as a young man, going in to the Huntly Hotel and chatting at the bar with an older guy. I noticed as we were chatting a bit of a hush fall over the bar and then I observed that people were looking at me. I didn’t twig to what was going on until I went to the toilet and a bloke said to me “You like drinking with scabby bastards do you?”

Later on I had a chance to talk with the scab and he explained that in ‘51 he was young and newly married and working at the opencast. He’d voted to keep working, not really understanding the wider issues. He said that if he had his time again he would have voted to strike.

Of course, during the strike all the underground mines were closed, but there was still coal coming in on the trains from opencast mines. At the railyard in town, they’d be coupled to goods trains servicing towns on the main trunk line, including Auckland. It was a busy railyard, at one stage handling the second largest tonnage in NZ. Of course, the striking miners resented that the coal continued to make it through.

One night there was an explosion out near Pukemiro Junction. It was a culvert that a coal train passed over. The damage wasn’t huge, but the news made the national press which turned it into a sensational event, conjuring up images of revolutionary bombers. Rumours circulated in parts of the city that the bombers were on their way to Auckland itself to wreak havoc. Dad told me the incident also made the Australian press where passenger trains were said to be caught up in the bombing.

Dad knew who had planted the explosives under the culvert. It was a former coal shovelling mate of his. Dad told him his actions were counterproductive and suggested that if he was going to blow something up, he could at least make it a worthwhile target to make up for the negative publicity.

 Gair: Following that here was chatter and taunting in the school playground that it was our father who had blown up the bridge. I considered them ignorant and said to a couple of them that they were wrong. It wasn’t my father who had blown up the bridge. It was my mother! So that was the new story that circulated for a while.

 Don: There weren’t exactly armed camps at school, but during the strike things were a bit tense. The kids from “out the back,” mostly farmer’s kids, arrived at school on buses. They’d play together and us miners’ kids did the same. There was a kind of avoiding of each other. But there were things said and some fights. Some of the businessmen’s kids made attacks upon me.

 Gair: I was terribly protective of my family, especially Donald.

Don: You needn’t have been.

Gair: I felt I did. You got a lot of flack.

On a couple of occasions I threatened to give kids a hiding if they continued to bully my brother and on a third I had a running battle with another girl who had thrown some treasure of Donald’s off the bridge and into the river. I picked a fight with her everyday at lunchtime and each day she threw me using some martial arts move. Finally after several days a teacher intervened and told us to make up.

 Don: Looking back I realise that the strike and Dad’s prominent role, probably impacted on my relationship with some teachers. There were some who didn’t seem to like me without any reason -and that went on for a number of years because Dad’s influence in the union lasted well after the strike. He became Waikato Miners’ Union President for many years and every time there was industrial strife people blamed him.

Gair: During 1951, the local MP, Hallyburton Johnstone, spoke in parliament of “the spider McRae weaving his evil web in Huntly.”

Don: Such nonsense but of course it made the papers. Anyway Gair, you got the worst of the teacher persecution - and that was at High School, years later.

 Gair:  Oh yes. We had a lesson when all that the teacher talked about was what an evil man Mr Don McRae was. How Mr McRae had once been in the church and turned his back on God and was now doing terrible things.

I just sat listened and let him go on. Soon after that class I was called up to see the Head Mistress.

She said my friends Barbara and Wendy had told her what had happened and asked me what I wanted to do about it. She explained that I could make a complaint but we all had to remember that Mr. F had lots of children and could lose his job.

I said that I had never thought of making a complaint and wasn’t going to.

One of the reasons was that it would have got back to Mum and Dad and I never used to tell them about stuff like that because I didn’t want them to be hurt or upset.

Don: When they did find out stuff like that Dad, in particular, stood up for us.

As well as kids bullying there were some adults who used to pick on me. There was a house on the way home from school where a teenager and his Dad would hurl taunts about the commo kid. Further down the road was another man who used to persecute me verbally and physically. It took me years to get the confidence to stand up to him and of course he backed off, as cowards do.

Then I remember once playing at a neighbours and an adult vistitor, who was in his thirties, started holding his nose and saying me: “Pooh stink! Commo kid! Go home commo!

I got really upset and went home and told Dad. Next thing I saw was Dad marching up the street and soon he had this bloke bent over the fence telling him that if he wanted to pick a fight he ought to do it with a grownup and that he would be only too willing to be that person.

Even when I went to High School my father’s politics and history were still an issue. There were certain brooding, sun-burned lads from off the farm who held some animosity for me, but I was saved by the Māori students. I played league against a lot of them, so there was a bit of respect there, and besides many of their parents held Dad in some esteem because of his union work. The fact that the old man could converse in Te Reo probably helped as well.

 Gair: He was a highly educated man. A formidable debater and speaker. During the strike he ran police blockades to speak to striking miners in the King Country and spoke at the railway workshops in Otahuhu.

Don: While he was in Auckland, the wharfies supplied him a bodyguard and escort called Mitchell, a former boxer.

Gair: From what I recall, as things dragged on, the chances of victory for the strikers declined. The wharves were working in various places with scab labour and the military. A number of wharfies, realising they would probably never work again on the docks, started to look for other work.

In the South Island, miners voted to return to work.

 Don: Dad said years later that the hardest thing he had done in his life was to call an all-up meeting of the Waikato Union and put it to the men that they end the strike. He explained that it was important to do this before members started to scab and before unity was destroyed. They needed to go back as one union, strong enough to fight another day.

After the vote it was Dad’s job to go to Auckland and tell Jock Barnes and Toby Hill the decision.

Both Gair and Donald remember the strike as a stressful time that brought out the worst in many people. The events and the susequent harassment, lasting many years, influenced their political views but also their approach to life well into adulthood. "We were outsiders," said Gair*. "I think that feeling has remained."

* Gair McRae died a couple of weeks after this discussion.