Harold Jenks, Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Surveyors, was a member of the Tauranga Historical Society.
A lot of
effort went into the mapping and measurement of this country. A lot of it still goes unnoticed or ignored, although
among the processes of colonisation the work of nineteenth-century surveyors
was both intrusive and consequential[1];
they knew their work would have practical, permanent effect. They were also, perhaps, of all colonisers the
most aware of their own shortcomings.
Surveyors like Harold Jenks were modest characters.
By the
twentieth century, when Harold arrived in New Zealand, a seventeen year old
youth, occupation “fitter”, who had embarked at Southampton in 1924, he still found
a quite astonishing scope and scale for physical challenge, intellectual
adventure, and – it has to be said - error correction. Even after twenty years of painstaking study
and challenging fieldwork, he had to adapt his project, the Waikato Hydro-Electric
Scheme, to the fact that a 7.65 foot discrepancy in the assessed level of Lake
Taupo had been established[2].
Harold was
equal to this. In his memoir he says he
“has forgotten now” how the construction plans for the “hydraulic structures” were
adapted to the new, “identifiable and acceptable” [3]
datum. For him the great thing was
confidence. Plans could be made; great
works could be engineered. Fundamental to
these plans and works was an accurate survey.
As a very
young man, with few-to-no formal qualifications, on his own in a new country,
Harold showed considerable confidence. His
long life (he was 101 when he died) saw his chosen profession change from one
where a would-be surveyor took a cadetship, “serv[ing] under articles to a
qualified surveyor”[4] to
a time when only a university qualification would do. But his experience as an articled cadet, “a
rather rough school”[5],
linked him more closely to the nineteenth-century surveyors. They became the subject of his first book, Forgotten
Men: The Survey of Tauranga and District 1864 – 1869[6],
published by the Tauranga Historical Society in 1991.
Harold had
joined the Society shortly after his retirement, when he and his wife Gwen left
Wellington to re-settle in Mount Maunganui.
He was an active member: on the debating team that went to Rotorua to
argue “That photographs are the best means of recording history”; leading a
Society members' outing to see the Waikato power sites; distributing the Historical
Review in Mount Maunganui; and eventually becoming one of three Vice-Presidents
in 1990. He thus came into contact with Alan
Bellamy, who, like Harold, had made his way up the ranks of his chosen
profession (rail transportation) and, on his retirement, joined the THS. Alan had developed an interest in old
photographs and printing work; his Society task at the time was to collate
articles from Tauranga for eventual publication in the Review. The two men
had a lot in common.
Harold had
already contributed a couple of well-crafted articles for the Review[7]. His next effort, a comprehensive account of
the men who undertook the first surveys of Tauranga, had however grown well
beyond the limits of a magazine story. In
1988 Alan Bellamy got the Society’s approval to publish the manuscript,
carefully illustrated with photographs and fold-out maps and documents, as a
monograph costing $12 a copy: “pre-publication orders would be sought”[8].
Thus encouraged
by Alan, Harold’s pride in his chosen calling found a means of impersonal
expression:
But who were these men, the Kai-ruuri Whenua
who first measured this land, appraised it, considered its access and ran the
road lines; who planned and marked out the boundaries of the town lots and the
farm areas; who laid down a pattern of development which still shows through
clearly after the passage of 130 years?
What brought them to Tauranga, what experiences
befell them while here and what became of them when their work was finished?
Very little has been written about them and
only a few are known by name.
Local
historical scholarship owes much to inquiries of this kind. Writing from his perspective as an English-born, New Zealand-trained professional, the links Harold provides to the past evoke a
sense of landscape that, as it was measured, confined by a history of chains
and links, so became man-made, and subject to human error. He also offers some account of older, equally
human, understandings of topography, distance and land use[9].
Local historical
researchers often find that these overlap each other. They are not only linked; they invite us to
consider the need for correction and a more reliable datum. Harold would, I think, approve.
[1] See, for instance, https://maorigis.nz/ for a website intended to
assist contemporary Māori researchers working with both historical and current land
surveys.
[2] Jenks, H. J., The Wind in the
Tussocks, New Zealand Institute of Surveyors Inc, 2002, p. 45
[3] ibid
[4] Jenks, H. J. Recollections of a Surveyor,
Historical Review, Vol. 34,
No. 1, May 1986, p. 1
[5] ibid
[6] I am indebted to John Coster for the
gift of a copy of this book
[7] Recollections
of a Surveyor, Historical
Review, Vol. 34, No. 1, May 1986, and The Maraetai Ferry, The Story of Waka
Mahi – A Versatile Craft, Historical Review, Vol. 46, No. 1, May 1998
[8] Minutes of the Tauranga Historical
Society, 8 September 1988
[9] See, for example, Chapter 2.16, Maori
anitquities, at pp. 156-164 of The Wind in the Tussocks
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