Mrs Ruth Mander (1915–2015)

 

Left to right: Ruth Mander, Ina Bathe, Mary Parker, and Nancy Snodgrass admiring the rose "Remember Me" at the Tauranga Rose Gardens, Robbins Park, 1991

Image: Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Ams 382/4/5

After several years working with the Tauranga Museum collection, I pondered on a number of donations made by Mrs Ruth Mander (née Prescott). Curious to learn more about them, I visited Ruth at her home on Ōtūmoetai Road in June 2011, where she shared memories of her life and the transformation of Ōtūmoetai from a rural district into a suburb of Tauranga. [1]

Ruth’s path to Tauranga began in the late 1930s after her mother became seriously ill with a goitre.[2] As the eldest daughter, she left her job in Hamilton to care for her younger siblings while her mother spent an extended period in hospital.[3] In 1937, seeking a healthier climate, her father, a First World War veteran, sold their Waikato farm and moved the family to a citrus orchard in Ōtūmoetai. 

Ōtūmoetai and Hinewa Roads, looking over Cherrywood and Bureta towards Mauao and Motuotau Island, c1950. 

Image: Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Photo 12-575

At that time, the area was still largely rural. Work on the orchard, along with caring for poultry and a house cow, formed part of everyday life. Social life centred on visiting neighbours, swimming in the harbour below Ōtūmoetai Pā, and attending local dances. It was through these connections that Ruth met the Mander girls, Betty, Dot, and Nola. They would often bike together to attend films in town, taking the long way around as Ngatai Road had not yet been formed. These friendships would ultimately change the course of her life. 

Ray Mander, the older brother, had returned home for a holiday but stayed after meeting Ruth, and the two quickly became engaged. They purchased five acres on the Ōtūmoetai ridge and were among the first in the district to plant Chinese gooseberries, later known as kiwifruit. In a practical move to secure a government loan, they married quietly at the newly opened Tauranga Post Office in December 1938 - the first couple to do so - marking the beginning of their life together. Ruth recalled that afterwards they went to Rendell’s Photography and had a wedding photo taken and then to the only restaurant in town for a meal. 

Te Puke Times, Volume 26, Issue 52, 2 July 1937, Page 3. Papers Past.

With the help of a State Advances loan, they built a Beazley bungalow on their land, designed by Ruth herself. Construction was slow, and they did not move in until September 1939, but the house would remain their home for the rest of their lives. Over the following eight years, they had four children, bringing both busyness and energy to their lives, and it was clear that Ruth took great pride in them. While the orchard developed, Ray took on various jobs, later running a hardware shop in Ōtūmoetai and keeping bees on the property. Ruth managed the household, sewed much of the family’s clothing, and maintained strong connections within many communities.

A wicker pram purchased in the 1940s by the Manders from The Mart in Willow Street.

Image: Tauranga Museum 2005/84

Ruth became involved in numerous organisations, serving for decades as treasurer of both Forest and Bird and Rural Women, and participating in local garden clubs from the 1950s onward. Over time, the landscape around them changed. Ruth recalled that after the Second World War, orchards and farms across Ōtūmoetai were subdivided into residential sections. Roads such as Lemon Grove replaced rows of trees, and the rural district she had first known gradually became the suburb it is today.

 When I met Ruth, she was living alone, Ray having died in 1995. Despite being nearly blind, she was fiercely independent, able to stay in the home she had lived in for more than seventy years with the support of her family and her deep familiarity with every corner of it. She was particularly keen for me to identify some of the objects she had donated to the museum, and I was pleased to do so while hearing the stories connected to them - her memory remaining very sharp.

A 1930s ‘Airzone’ wooden mantle radio purchased for the Mander’s new home.

Image: Tauranga Museum 0038/95

References

 

[1]       At the time of our meeting, it felt only right to address her as Mrs Mander, so I hope she would forgive me for referring to her here as Ruth.

[2]       A goitre is an abnormal enlargement of the thyroid gland in the neck, often visible as a swelling at the base of the throat.

[3]       Ruth initially worked as a technician for Glaxo Laboratories and later took a position in the office at the New Zealand Dairy Company while waiting for an opportunity to move into their laboratory.

Marie Stewart and TEMCO

(continued from Part 1 published 2 July 2021, by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous)

"More eggs for housewives" BOPT 20 Aug 1949
Courtesy of Papers Past

During the War years there were serious shortages of many things, and one was eggs for city dwellers. Marie Stewart was one of the initiators of the Tauranga  Co-operative Egg Marketing Society Ltd in 1943. She was assisted and encouraged by an English friend Joyce Laurence (Lorrie) who lived in New Zealand during the war.  Farmer’s wives could bring their baskets of eggs to a rudimentary egg depot near the Railway Bridge on the Strand extension and have them put under a light to check their quality. Any that passed were purchased and went into the pool of eggs to supply American servicemen, hospitals and urban households. At that time eggs were fetching 4d a dozen and often were bartered for other items. Poultry food was also in-ferior and very expensive.

Marie and Lorrie and the 1930 Model A Ford coupe
Image courtesy of Mackersey Family

In most centres these egg pool initiatives were under the wing of the local dairy co-ops but in Tauranga it was very soon set up separately. Marie also gave talks at var-ious meetings of the CWI in the mid 40s on ‘Egg Production.’  Marie sold the stock and plant from Cheriton in Waihi Rd around 1951 due to poultry disease problems, and travelled to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to help her old friend Lorrie on her poultry farm.

In the early 50s a levy of 1d per dozen was imposed by the Tauranga Co-operative Egg Marketing Society Ltd which financed the Society’s new premises. Profits were made, bonuses were paid and the Department of Agriculture began to recommend the area for intending poultry farmers.

Temco advertisement showing new building
Bay of Plenty Year Book, 1955, Astra Publishing
Image courtesy of Julie Green

A new building was opened ten years to the day after the formation of the society, helping business to grow tremendously. They ended up with twenty trucks delivering eggs from Thames to Opotiki and the eastern Waikato. In 1965 a mash plant opened at Mount Maunganui for the manufacture of poultry food, and there were TEMCO (having become the Tauranga Egg Marketing Company) branches in Rotorua, Taupo and Whakatane.

The TEMCO fleet in front of the mash plant at Mt Maunganui, 1960s
Image courtesy of Tauranga City Libraries (Pae Koroki Ref. 02-117)

Many readers will remember the TEMCO processing plant situated on Cameron Road between 16th and 17th Avenue from the 1960s. I believe it was closed in the 1980s and the building was repurposed. Latterly it was an organic food outlet.

Packing eggs at Temco, 1963
Image courtesy of Bay of Plenty Times and Tauranga City Libraries (Pae Koroki, Ref. gca-5360)

By 1964 the city growth had squeezed Marie and her day-old chick enterprise out into the country. She moved operations to Taniwha Place next to the Wairoa River. Her niece Margaret remembers that in earlier times the newly hatched birds were careful-ly packed in octagonal boxes and transported to the Service Car (a forerunner of buses) depot from whence they were distributed rapidly all over the country. Eventually she produced 250,000 chicks annually and some even traveled as far as New Caledonia.

Marion was the first woman to serve on a primary producer board (1969-1973) and was awarded an MBE in 1974 for her services to the poultry industry and other com-munity organisations, such as the Plunket Society and the local Hospital Board.

Miss Stewart (at left) leaving Government house with her MBE
Image courtesy of Mackersey Family

She contributed to the New Zealand Farmer magazine for five decades and in the year of her death was given the poultry industry’s highest award.

Her last book ‘Keeping Chooks, Ducks, Turkeys and Geese?’ was published in 1979, dedicated to “My humble hens that have sent me to many more parts of the world than most are privileged to see.”

References

Anon (1949) “More Eggs for the Housewives,” Special Committee is Appointed, Bay of Plenty Times, Vol 77, Issue 15059, 20 Aug 1949, p20, from Papers Past https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz
Anon (1955) Advertisement, Bay of Plenty Year Book, 1955, Astra Publishing
Anon (1962) Beautiful Bounteous Bay of Plenty, Stanton Smith & Co., Wellington, for Tauranga Branch of New Zealand Travel & Holidays Association
Anon (1971) Short History of TEMCO, Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society, No. 43, August 1971, p33-34, courtesy of Pae Koroki https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/23941
Anon (1975) Bay of Plenty Times, 26 Aug 1975
Elizabeth Cox. 'Stewart, Marion Watson', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 2000. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5s46/stewart-marion-watson (accessed 4 December 2021)
Mackersey family reminiscences

The Life of the Mind at Brain Watkins Hall

Any historical researcher must at some stage ponder when what might be loosely called ‘stuff’ becomes, in a more dignified term, ‘the stuff of history.’ The Tauranga Historical Society Committee conferred on the subject during a recent tidy-up, when the first Register of those who made bookings for meetings at its, relatively modern, Hall in the grounds of Brain Watkins House came to light.

This unassuming notebook, it was agreed, was not to be discarded – its listings provided a unique outline of how a new building closely adjacent to one of Tauranga’s oldest houses was incorporated  into the activities of a few, apparently disparate, groups. In due course, we wondered, the activities of those groups might possibly come to be of historical interest? Thus, we also agreed, the first Register is arguably the stuff, as well as something of an accident, of history. Justifiably, therefore, the subject of a THS blog.

The Hall Register, dated “Nov 1998” on its back cover, came into use on 1 February 1999. Under the supervision of Sue Ferguson, then the live-in caretaker of Brain Watkins House, the door was opened and the lights turned on for the Tauranga UFO Information Group. This group seems still to be active in Tauranga – in 2020 its meetings were being held monthly at the Senior Citizens Club [1] – but for the first decade of the new millennium their monthly gatherings were regularly noted in the Hall Register.

Other early adopters of the new venue were the Tauranga Embroiderers Guild, who left a nice comment about the excellent light [2] and the fee, and the Tauranga Hearing Association Social Club  who got together to consider a wide-ranging series of practical topics – the Road Code, the Citizens Advice Bureau, stroke rehabilitation and other therapies, Search and Rescue; in May 2000 a happy overlap delivered a talk from Harvey Cooke of the UFO Information Group … the list, fascinating to anyone researching the history of deaf culture, goes on ….

As well as the establishment of a venue for the Historical Society’s own meetings, much appreciated after many years of ‘camping’ in a variety of rented or borrowed rooms [3], the Hall became an early base for Tauranga’s Aviation History Society, eventually to become the Bay of Plenty Classic Aircraft Trust [4]. It is good to know that their ambitions for a museum of aviation came true.

The Hall’s simplicity and serene garden location seems to have been attractive to several religious groups.  The first such to use the Hall was Unity on the Mount, which had become an approved organisation for the purpose of the Marriage Act 1955 on 21 June 1999 [5]. Two months later, on Sunday 5 September, Mr George Watson organized two hours of worship, the first of many weekly gatherings that came to an end in September 2004. A Catherine Ruby Watson was among the list of marriage celebrants published in the Gazette of 26 April 2001 [6]. (The Hall Register does not reveal that any of the bookings actually involved a marriage ceremony.)  In August 2000 Unity on the Mount’s Sunday services were complemented by the Thursday meetings of the Sri Sathya Sai Group of Tauranga [7]. When Unity stopped using the Hall, their Sunday slot was filled from October 2004 by the Society of Friends, aka Quakers, an arrangement that continues to this day.

Tauranga Historical Society’s Annual General Meeting in April 1995
Tauranga Historical Society Collection

In the middle of the decade Hall bookings spread out across a wider range of organisations – the Soroptimists had met there over the latter part of 2001, then went elsewhere, but two years later were back and soon joined by Tauranga branches of the University of the Third Age, the NZ Association of Medical Herbalists, the Herb Society, an association of kinesiologists, one of homeopathic therapists, and the Theosophical Society. The Yoga Centre, another present-day user, makes an appearance in the records for in July and August 2009. But it seems that over the next summer months – the first Register ends in January 2010 – only the Quakers were using the Hall.

What does this small body of information amount to? Might I hope that some researcher of the future, seeking evidence of ‘alternative’ social networks in Tauranga at the turn of the twenty-first century, would find this list as intriguing as I do? Based on the example of the Hearing Association and the UFO Information Group, there was at the very least an exchange of ideas, a distinctive life of the mind, among those who came and went from the Hall. The Register is not evidence of overlapping membership, of course. That is something for my researcher of the future to explore. What is evident, especially in 2004, is that, among themselves, word got around. (This was after the World Wide Web [8] but before Facebook [9].)

It comes to this: even if these groups’ commonality derived only from the circumstance of their regular meetings at this small, simple and low-cost (then hired out at a flat rate of $20 per session) venue, I feel I have made a case, even from this short distance of time, for the historical importance of the first Register of bookings for the Tauranga Historical Society’s Hall.

References

[1] https://www.cab.org.nz/community-directory/KB00024578

[2] The writer is aware that even better light, as well as space for an expanded group of embroiderers, was eventually found at the Tauranga Rowing Club’s Clubrooms in Memorial Park, Tauranga.

[3] Such as the downstairs lounge of the Baptist Church Centre, cnr Cameron Road and 13^th Ave: https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/23916

[4]  https://register.charities.govt.nz/CharitiesRegister/Search.  See also https://www.classicflyersnz.com/aboutus.html

[5] https://gazette.govt.nz/notice/id/1999-go4540

[6] https://gazette.govt.nz/notice/id/2001-go2895

[7] This group, too, seems still to be active: https://www.sathyasai.org.nz/Tauranga

[8] “The Web began to enter everyday use in 1993-4 when websites for general use started to become available.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

[9] “Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006 to everyone aged 13 and older with a valid email address.”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook