Hayman’s Hall and Tauranga Jazz

Ken Hayman, c. 1990

Beverly Brasting met her husband-to-be Ken Hayman at Hayman’s Hall when she went there on Anzac Day 1950 to audition as pianist for his band. “It was a large bare open space, but it was a dance hall after all” she reminisced during a recent interview.

She was already the only girl in the seven-member ensemble at college, and her father was so pleased that finally she was able to use her talents after all the lessons he had paid for. However, many years later she heard her husband say to a friend that she actually was the only applicant for the vacant position in the dance band.

Bev and Ken Hayman

The Saturday night dances always finished by midnight and she had to be home by 1 am, or else. After patrons had left, there was cleaning up and meticulous sweeping to be done in preparation for the dance lessons held there during the week.

Hayman’s Hall had been built by Ken’s father Charles. Ken and his talented friend Morrin Cooper played in the Tauranga Municipal Band but were asked to leave by the conductor because they warmed up their trumpets with snatches of popular jazz. George Mockler was an employee of the Tauranga Borough Council, in charge of the Strand gardens, and he often persuaded the band members to help hand weed the floral ship/botanical boat there, a very time-consuming task.

L to R: Alistair Clark, Cyril (Cy) Grigg, Ken Hayman and Tom Morris (Mibs)

Typical of musicians, Ken soon formed his own band and the Hayman’s living room at 21 St John Street became their practice room. When Dad Charles asked when he was likely to get it back for the family, some bright spark suggested they pool resources to create a purpose-built venue for the band members’ talents. The site chosen was right opposite the high school on Cameron Rd between 13th and 14th Ave. Ken, his life-long friend Alistair Clark and Charles were all builders and another band player Keith Bracey was able to supply the concrete blocks. This was in post-war building material shortages.

Hayman’s Hall
Image courtesy of the Rendell family, Tauranga Heritage Collection Ref. 27957

The door to the left (photo above) was a cloakroom, while the main hall was accessed from the entrance to the right, but there was an internal connecting door. Supper was served every dance night after the “supper waltz”. A sought after move for the guys was to ask one of the young girls to join him for the supper. Bev recalled, “I can still see the white saucers set out by Mr and Mrs Graham with one savoury and one sweet cake on each.”

The dance floor was “absolutely the best” and had so much use that it had to be replaced in later years. The writer’s mother went to many a dance there and her sister-in-law to the ballet classes with local teacher Undine Clarke. (see previous article)

A quick search on Papers Past gave 502 entries for the phrase “Hayman’s Hall” and scrolling through these gives a much fuller idea of how valuable this venue became during the 1940s, when public amenities of its size were not so prevalent.

Children's Fancy Dress Party, Hayman's Hall, c. 1961
Courtesy of Tauranga City Libraries, Gifford-Cross/NZME Collection, Pae Korokī Ref. gca-1608

It was used by several bands and orchestras, the Scottish Society for their monthly Inglesides, two Lodges, an Evangelical church, as a meeting hall for local political candidates, a polling booth, display area for several horticultural/flower societies, Young Farmers Club, St John’s training, CWI, Fruit Federation, Pro-Rex Club, Acclimatisation Society, and many sports organisations’ social events, even as the venue for a baby competition and the nurses’ ball.

In addition, it was regularly used to teach different types of dancing, including ballet, tap and national. It became the first introduction place for many a young couple and the reception venue for many local weddings.

Beverly and Ken married in 1955, he built them a home in Greerton, and by 1963 their family consisted of four girls under five, so days were very busy. One of their later homes was in 17th Avenue, so as to be close enough to look after the hall.

L to R: Jim McShane (bass), Tom “Mibs” Morris (drums), Ken Hayman (trumpet), Russell Stevens (trombone), Warren Stevens (clarinet) and Jack Cricket (piano)

Another “muso” Ken White knew a fellow countryman who had conducted a big band in England — Stan Farnsworth — and so in due course the Tauranga Swing Band was formed. When the film “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” was due to open at the Regent Picture Theatre, the manager Pat McBrearty asked them to perform on stage during the movie. After seeing it for themselves, there was much discussion amongst the musicians, including Dave Hall and Dave Proud. They could not see why, since we had the sunny weather, the sea, yachting, the band and a hall in which to have the inaugural get together, that a jazz festival (see previous article) could not be held here. A luncheon was supplied by the wives and girlfriends, the locals kindly lent some flat-bed trucks, so that all the musos were seated on the trays and played all the way into town via Cameron Road. That night was the first Jazz Concert at the 20,000 Club Soundshell in Memorial Park.

The Silencers at Hayman's Hall (publ. 27 April 1967)
Courtesy of Tauranga City Libraries, Gifford-Cross/NZME Collection, Pae Korokī Ref. gca-15704

Sometime in the early 1960s, Hayman’s Hall was in need of minor repairs and Charles was getting on in years, so the building became the property and temporary premises of local second-hand dealer Don Maclean. The building was demolished in the early 1970s and Hillsdene Wines now occupies part of the site.

Sources and Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the Hayman family especially Bev for information and images. I hope this article fills in some gaps and does justice to the memory of your husband and father Ken.

Thanks to Fiona Kean, co-author of “Rendells Tauranga” where I found the image of Haymans Hall, and to the Rendell family for permission to use it.

Papers Past Bay of Plenty Times 1942 -1947

Shapeshifter: Our Landscape and the Te Puna Quarry

Te Puna 1954

When David and Shirley Sparks came to start farming in Te Puna the year after this 1954 photograph [1] was taken, the Quarry that lay on the hill to the south-east of their farm was a merely noticeable, rather than a noteworthy, feature. The metalled road that snaked up to it was little different in surface quality to any of the roads in the vicinity – their pale dustiness stands out in this image. Te Puna Road runs up the middle, Borell Road is off at centre right, even a pale streak of Te Puna Station Road is discernible at upper left. The rhyolite used to make and maintain them came from the Tauranga County’s quarry, at that time run by the Smythe quarrying company. The Quarry, in this picture just a background smudge on the dark Minden ridge at top right, had by that stage been a source of roading stone since 1911.

And that, it seemed, was all it would ever be. Rhyolite is not commended by most roading engineers – it is highly crystalline and degrades quickly in comparison to andesite, often called ‘blue chip’ and familiar to all of us who drive on tar-sealed roads. It is what Brian Robbins, who took over the Quarry from the Smythes in the mid-fifties, described as a “woolly” rock [2], good for the first course at the base of a roadway, and for creating a quick slurry in preparation for a firmer, harder-wearing surface, and not much else. But it was handy, and it was cheap.

By 1975,  however, this local source of rock had become a landmark that could be used as a navigational aid from well out to sea around Tauranga Moana. Here’s a closer shot [3], taken from the (now sealed) intersection of Quarry Road and State Highway 2.

Te Puna 1975

While some of the pastoral landscape typical of early twentieth-century Te Puna remains upland, and new kiwifruit and citrus orchards are coming to occupy the flats, the Quarry itself now looms as an industrial behemoth over this benign countryside. What were the reasons for this extraordinary expansion of rock mining activity on the Minden?

The answer has to do with both navigation and Depression-era forestry.  As economies recovered from World War II, new stirrings of ambition for the development of shipping, and the export of logs from mature radiata forests in and out of the Pilot Bay wharves at Mount Maunganui came to the fore [4].  (It seems odd, now, to see that the immediately alternative contender for a major port in the Bay of Plenty was Whakatane [5]. This is not the place to discuss the debate that ensued.) Outcomes, however, were to be seen in a range of 1960s reclamation projects that extended all around the Tauranga Harbour edge and, eventually, out into its depths [6] - and (as a sidenote) even contemplated eliminating the Waikareao estuary entirely [7].

Waikareao Estuary reclamation proposal

The image is of a print block, showing (in reverse) a map of the planned project, which did not proceed beyond the proposal stage. It illustrates, however, the scale of thinking that exponentially increased demand for exactly the sort of rock that came from the Te Puna Quarry.

Here’s where some of it went [8].

Strand reclamation

Anyone familiar with the present Quarry Park will recognise the useful lumpiness of rocks that settle and lean into each other, creating an inelegant but useful mass that could cope with the sea swirling through below and the pressure of cars parking above. The Strand reclamation was finished in time for two royal visits over 1962 and 1963 [9], glamorous occasions for a workaday material.

Most of the Quarry rock went into the water. Huge quantities were required for port development.  Trucks rolled out for twenty years, making a new shoreline beyond the Mission House. This 1969 image [10] shows the start of the Sulphur Point causeway, not for a harbour bridge but another purpose entrely.

Sulphur Point causeway

The causeway was part of the maritime enterprise that became the Port of Tauranga.

Training wall heading north

The astonishing “training wall” [11] in the middle of the water was designed by hydrological engineers in London, working with a tank that modelled Tauranga Moana’s tidal flows. It was the flows that were being “trained”. The line of rhyolite boulders intercepted the moving sand and built it up in sufficient quantities to enable, eventually, the advent of container cranes and a new wall of stacked containers. 

This phase of port work was completed by 1976 and the Quarry operations ceased. Here’s what it, and Te Puna, looked like in 1982[12]:

Te Puna 1982

My mother Shirley’s caption to this photograph reads: “The Te Puna Quarry showing signs of weed re-growth during … years of closure. Land development for subdivision of the Sparks farm in the foreground.” In truth, the actual foreground is occupied by clumps of Quarry rocks, features for a new garden my mother was making, in existence still.

In 1997 Shirley created, from Council records, a hand-drawn map (she chose to orient it to the south) of the effects of other subdivisions. Forty years after she came to live underneath the Minden, and twenty years after Don Thwaites’ 1975 photograph, the area shows a close-packed jigsaw of lifestyle blocks.

Shirley’s map 1997

From the hills to the sea. Quarry rhyolite underlies an emphatic story of rapid infrastructural growth and development in Tauranga Moana. The one constant is the Quarry reserve’s shape and extent [13], which has remained unchanged ever since it was gazetted in 1912. The same cannot be said of the landscape around it.

section of SO 13702

References

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[1] Pae Koroki, https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/2074

[2] Conversation with the author, December 2017

[3] Image courtesy of Don Thwaites, by permission

[4] Bay of Plenty Times, 23 January 1950, p.2

[5] Bay of Plenty Times, 24 January 1950, p.3

[6] A relative term.  Local wisdom described the average depth of Tauranga Harbour as “eighteen inches”.  Dredging and the hydrology of the training wall exploited harbour channels to the full.

[7] https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/76448

[8] https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/20653

[9] Visiting monarchs were King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit of Thailand and Queen Elizabeth II

[10] https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/91062

[11] Image courtesy of Brian Robbins.  The explanation is also his – from a conversation with the author, December 2017

[12] Image courtesy of Shirley Sparks

[13] Section of SO 13702 TePuna Eastern Grazing Run 1906 SAK33VIII, cadastral map courtesy of LINZ

James Farrow and his Boat, 1829-1838

Tauranga's Early Traders, Part II

‘I came to Tauranga in 1829’, recalled James Farrow, the district’s first permanent Pakeha settler identified by name.¹ Sometimes referred to as Farrar by later missionary arrivals who did not approve of his musket trading, the former merchant seaman with an entrepreneurial flair was born in London in 1800. Farrow originally landed at the Bay of Islands in 1825, with the object of exchanging muskets and gunpowder for cargoes of dressed muka (flax or Phormium tenax) for a Sydney trading house.² As the Tauranga iwi were not yet fully armed with muskets, in January 1829, he voyaged there in own his sailing craft, which appears to have been a schooner rigged ‘boat’, with a quantity of muskets and general ‘trade’.³ On arrival he was ‘claimed’ by the Ngai Te Rangi people at Otumoetai Pa as ‘their’ Pakeha.

A semi-indigenised pre-Treaty Pakeha-Maori

In the interests of protection and profit, Tauranga’s pre-Treaty flax traders like Farrow lived among the different Ngai Te Rangi hapu around the harbour, becoming in due course a semi-indigenised Pakeha-Maori.
Artist unknown ‘A Pakeha Maori’, in Knox, Thomas W; The Boy Travellers in Australasia, Harpur and Brothers, New York, 1889: 203

Alone among Ngai Te Rangi, Farrow was, not unwillingly, assimilated by his tribe as a semi-indigenised Pakeha-Maori or ‘white man gone native’. Known as Hemi (James), he married an unidentified, high-born Ngai Te Rangi woman and became fluent in Maori but, while honouring a range of customs, retained his European dress and basic values. Farrow enhanced the power and mana of the Otumoetai people by fully arming them and, as the intertribal musket warfare swept the Bay of Plenty, ensured their survival as an entity. As with subsequent Tauranga flax trader arrivals who also became semi-indigenised Pakeha-Maori, Farrow lived in a superior house – in his case within Otumoetai Pa, built and decorated inside and out Maori-style by his whanau and hapu – accommodation befitting his value and status as a valued Pakeha rangatira or white chief and a conduit to European muskets, munitions and general trade goods.⁴ 

Arthur Thomson, a British military surgeon and historian who encountered many former trader Pakeha-Maori during his North Island travels (which included Tauranga) during the 1850s, said of first arrivals like Farrow:

[E]very inducement was held out to white men to settle in the country; houses were built for them, land was given them, they were allowed to select wives from among the daughters of the chiefs and were not required to hew wood or draw water. In return for these royal privileges Pakeha Maoris were required to barter pigs, potatoes, and flax, for guns, blankets, tobacco and other articles.⁵                                                                                         

The house of a rangatira at Otumoetai Pa

Taylor, Richard, ‘Chief’s house, Otumoetai Pa, March 1839’. Richard Taylor’s Sketchbook, Auckland War Memorial Museum, Tamaki Paenga Hira. Ref: MS-302. PD-1961-14-p167-1

In 1829 Farrow, who found the Tauranga flax trade commercially viable, was joined by his brother Daniel. Both were associated with Otumoetai Pa until the 1860s, but little is known about Daniel who, while assisting his brother, lived in his shadow. The harbour offered sheltered anchorages where vessels could be easily unloaded and loaded. Ngai Te Rangi’s leading rangatira at Otumoetai offered protection from hostile tribesmen and guaranteed regular and substantial cargoes of dressed flax. Smaller vessels arriving from the Bay of Islands were loaded directly while beached on the sands below Otumoetai Pa at low tide, where Farrow later had a jetty constructed. Any larger Australia-bound vessels anchored in the Otumoetai channel or at Waikorere (Pilot Bay), where they were loaded from waka.

James Farrow’s years in pre-Treaty Tauranga were adventurous ones. In November 1830, the former privateer and whaler Phillip Tapsell sailed for Maketu, where he established himself as flax trader for the Arawa iwi. Farrow agreed to work as Tapsell’s Tauranga flax agent, a role with many attendant risks. Soon after, when Farrow voyaged to Maketu and uploaded a fresh cargo of trade goods, he and Tapsell retired to the latter’s house for refreshments. Seeing the opportunity, the Arawa rangatira Haupapa and his warriors seized the cargo and carried it off into the bush. Tapsell at once sent for Haupapa, who entered the house with young chief named Pipi. While Farrow blocked the door with his body, Tapsell placed a loaded musket to the head of Haupapa, who, calling out, ‘gave the necessary orders, and the goods were all restored’.⁶

During the early 1830s, James Farrow, while only in his 20s, exchanged muskets, powder, lead, tomahawk heads, rum and blankets with Ngai Te Rangi for huge quantities of dressed flax, pork and potatoes, which were shipped to New South Wales on vessels contracted by Tapsell’s employer, the Sydney merchant house Jones and Walker. The Tauranga flax trade initially proved profitable for all parties. By December 1830 for instance, the British Admiralty in London was purchasing cargoes for Royal Navy lines and rigging at £43 per ton. ⁷

Farrow’s cargoes were often loaded aboard vessels beached at low tide near Otumoetai Pa.

Ilene Stichbury, Unloading on the shore, Auckland. 1920s, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, The Ilene and Laurence Dakin Bequest, Accession no. 1990/30/2

On another occasion, when Hakairo, another Arawa rangatira, invited Tapsell to establish a flax trade to Rotorua, he sent Farrow, his most trusted agent, with a quantity of trade goods pikaued or backpacked by a long line of Maori porters. After Farrow had purchased ‘80 or 90’ baskets of flax, he sent a message to Maketu informing Tapsell that Hakairo’s people had stopped scraping flax ‘and had begun to look upon the goods sent there as their own, which they could take when they pleased’.⁸ On Tapsell’s instructions, Farrow, his Maori wife and an American Negro assistant ‘very cleverly’ packed the remaining trade goods within the baskets of of flax they had purchased (average weight, 60 pounds apiece) which were then pikaued back to Maketu. The trio were fortunate, as Cabbage, a former Tauranga flax trader who later attempted a similar stratagem at Rotorua, was found out and killed. Hakairo vowed vengeance for the ‘theft’, but nothing came of the affair.⁹

Between 1830 and 1833, Farrow also traded with the rangatira Te Waharoa and his Ngati Haua iwi at Matamata Pa. Although the trade was intermittent, when it did occur, it involved large quantities of flax. Ships’ cargoes up to 70 tons in weight were distributed in back packs, borne by long lines of women and slaves by way of the Wairere track, over the Kaimai Range and down to Tauranga. The cargoes were shipped directly to Walker and Jones in Sydney by large vessels anchoring at the Te Puna (Wairoa) River mouth.¹⁰ Farrow recalled:

 

I had been in the habit of supplying Te Waharoa with guns and power among(?) other things… I used to go to Matamata. The N[gati] haua were supplying me with flax. They carried the flax from Matamata to Tauranga. They were cutting flax about Matamata, at Paparahi, and on the Waihou River at Waiharakeke (the main canoe landing on the Waihou River for parties of Maori visiting or attacking Matamata Pa]. Maori set great value on guns in former times. They would work day and night to get them.¹¹

Farrow’s stock in trade included cast off military flintlock “Brown Bess’ muskets

Flintlock musket, Tower Armouries, circa 1800, London, DM000109 Gift of the Wellington City Council, National Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa

By 1832, Farrow had been joined by several competing flax traders at Otumoetai and in 1833, Tapsell appointed the former ship’s mate Edward Clementson as his flax agent at Matatmata Pa. Thereafter, Farrow increasingly used his ‘boat’ to collect dressed flax from tribes around the Bay of Plenty.¹² In 1836 he was trading with Arawa at Maketu Pa, when it was stormed with great slaughter by Ngati Haua under Te Waharoa. Rescued by Ngai Te Rangi warriors who had joined the besiegers, Farrow emerged unscathed, but without his ‘trade’.¹³ Matamata’s Edward Clementson featured in another of Farrow’s adventures - a near drowning when his whale boat was swamped in heavy seas off Matata around 1838. Phillip Tapsell described the incident in his reminiscences.

He [Farrow], his wife and [Edward] Clementson, with a young man named Jenkins, set out in a whaleboat for Matata, with a view of meeting Mr. White there [a trader and ship builder], and when off the latter place, were overtaken in a gale of wind. It would have been easy for them to have run under the lee of Whale Island [Moutohora], where they would have had smooth water, and there to have waited till the storm subsided; but their young companion, being inexperienced and very confident, was strongly desirous that they should at once land at Matata, which he was of opinion they could easily do.

Yielding to this opinion, they pulled for the mainland, on approaching which, they found a very heavy surf breaking on the bar. Appearances were so threatening that, when near the entrance of the river, they lay on their oars to deliberate on the best course to pursue. They consulted so long that, before they were aware, the boat drifted into the breakers, and was capsized. Jenkins, not being able to swim, went down like a shot. Clementson was a good swimmer, but so encumbered with heavy boots, and buttoned up to the throat in a pea jacket, that, after a few strokes, he sank also, not to rise again. Farrow, though, also a good swimmer, would have given in from fatigue, but for his wife, who swam by his side, encouraging him continually with the assurance that the people were coming down to the beach, till he reached the shore in safety.¹⁴

A Pakeha trader bargaining with Maori for pigs and baskets of dressed flax and/or potatoes

Williams, John, Maori bargaining with a Pakeha, A-079-017 National Library of New Zealand, Wellington.

As the demand for muskets and Tauranga’s flax export trade declined, James Farrow prospered from the booming provisions trade in salted pork, potatoes, maize and wheat, which were sold directly to visiting vessels. Having acquired a degree of respectability as ‘an old hand’ or pioneer, he joined the Te Papa missionaries and fellow Tauranga traders in signing James Busby’s 1837 petition to the Colonial Office requesting protection from lawless Europeans.¹⁵

Farrow’s loyalty and service were recognised by Ngai Te Rangi on 10 January 1838. The leading rangatira Tupaea, Tangimoana and Te Omanu, permitted Farrow to purchase half an acre of land for his trading store at the western end of Otumoetai Pa, close to the foreshore. This acquisition was the earliest authenticated land purchase in the Bay of Plenty for which a Crown Grant was later issued.¹⁶ Unfortunately for posterity, no known image of James Farrow exists, but as we shall see, he also continued to play an important role in Tauranga events in the post-Treaty era.

Endnotes

¹ Matheson, A.H; ‘Otumoetai Pa and the Early Times in Tauranga’, in Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society (Inc.), Vol. 52 December 1974: OT 14.2

² James Farrow (c.1800 - 1880) - Genealogy - Genihttps://www.geni.com › people › James-Farrow. See also New Zealand, pre-1846, Person Page 567 - Early NZ History, http://www.nzearlyhistory.com › Avery, Max, Maritime Tauranga, 1826-1970, Max Colwill Avery, Tauranga, 2013: 7.

³ Daily Southern Cross, 15 September 1869: 6.

⁴ Bentley, Trevor, Pakeha-Maori: The Extraordinary Story of the Europeans Who Lived as Maori In Early New Zealand, Penguin, Auckland, 1999: 142-164.

⁵ Thomson, Arthur. The Story of New Zealand, Vol. 1, John Murray, London, 1859: 300.

⁶ Daily Southern Cross, 15 September 1869: 6.7

⁷ Cited in Wigglesworth, Roger, The New Zealand Timber and Flax Trade, 1769-1840, PhD in History, Massey University, 1981: 82.

⁸ Daily Southern Cross, 4 August 1869: 6.

⁹ Ibid. 

¹⁰ Tapsell, P. ‘Reminiscences, 1777? – 1873’, -1/2005486, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. Early Tauranga – Toanga Tu / Heritage Bay of Plenty, https://www.taongatauranga.net › early-tauranga

¹¹ Māori Land Court Minute Book (No. 3, p. 336, transcribed by Stephanie Smith), Cited in Debbie McCauley, Author, James Farrow (c. 1800-1880) - https://debbiemccauleyauthor.wordpress.com 

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Matheson, Vol. 52, 1974: OT 12.

¹⁴ Daily Southern Cross, 15 September 1869: 6.

¹⁵ Hinds, Samuel, The Latest Official Documents Relating to New Zealand, With Introduction and Observations, John W. Parker, London, 1838: 44.

¹⁶ Early Tauranga, https://www.taongatauranga.net › early-tauranga