by Michael King
Uppermost in Lehmann’s mind when he wrote this was Frank Sargeson, a North Islander but also one of Tomorrow’s regular contributors and Caxton’s ‘star’ authors, whom Lehmann himself would publish in London. And Sargeson was in many ways typical of the Caxton stable. He had been born in 1903 in Hamilton into a middle-class Methodist family. His father would go on to become the town’s longest-serving town clerk. Sargeson, chafed by what he regarded as his parents’ bourgeois values, left home in the mid-1920s and, after qualifying as a solicitor in Auckland, spent a year in England and Europe.
When he left Auckland in 1927, he said, he felt like a European in New Zealand; he left London a year later feeling like a New Zealander in Europe. An intensive spell of reading and study at the British Museum in Bloomsbury had served only to remind him of ‘the intolerable weight of so much civilisation … I knew that I was only indirectly part of it all … [For] better or worse, and for life, I belonged to the new world.’ So he returned to New Zealand where, after a short spell in the Public Trust Office in Wellington, followed by nearly two years on his uncle’s King Country farm, he became a full-time writer at a time when possibly only one other person, Monte Holcroft, was making the same attempt. From 1931 until his death in 1982, Sargeson lived a monastic life in a bach at Takapuna, writing in the mornings and tending his garden and entertaining friends in the latter part of the day. He became the first person in New Zealand since Edith Lyttleton to try in a sustained way (Holcroft had retreated to journalism) to earn a living primarily from writing fiction.
And he succeeded. His earliest stories were published in Tomorrow and later in a Caxton collection, A Man and His Wife. His full oeuvre would eventually total 20 books of stories, novels, plays and autobiography. He became the first New Zealand writer other than Katherine Mansfield and G. B. Lancaster to be published widely outside New Zealand. And he did what those earlier writers had not attempted to do: introduce the New Zealand vernacular to world literature in English. Equally important, he became an active mentor to the two generations of fiction writers who followed him: A. P. Gaskell, Greville Texidor, Maurice Duggan, John Reece Cole, David Ballantyne, C. K. Stead, Kevin Ireland, Maurice Gee and Janet Frame.
Frame, who would eventually – like Duggan and Ireland – live in Sargeson’s backyard army hut when she emerged from psychiatric hospitals in the mid-1950s, spoke of her surprise and delight at discovering New Zealand writing in three seminal books published by Caxton in the mid-1940s. One was A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–45, edited by Allen Curnow, the second was Beyond the Palisade, the first volume of poems by the precocious eighteen-year-old Dunedin writer James K. Baxter, and the third was Speaking for Ourselves, a collection of stories edited by Sargeson. ‘It was almost a feeling’, Frame wrote, ‘of having been an orphan who discovers that her parents are alive and living in the most desirable house …’
Hundreds of other New Zealanders had a comparable experience as they discovered the work of Caxton authors in beautifully designed and cleanly printed books in the 1930s and 1940s; and, later, in the work of these and other writers published by Blackwood and Janet Paul and the Pegasus Press in the 1950s and 1960s. It would be true to say, however, that the writing of the cultural nationalists did not begin to make an impact on New Zealand at large until teachers and academics began to feature it in secondary and tertiary curricula in the 1960s. From that time such work became one of a number of influences that made it more likely that subsequent generations of New Zealanders would have a ‘New Zealand-centred’ view of the world in place of that which had preceded it – which was characterised by Curnow as being, for Pakeha, redolent of the ‘great gloom [that] stands in a land of settlers with never a soul at home’.
For less exquisitely sensitive people than writers, of course, there were ample ways of keeping gloom at bay – and, indeed, of abolishing introspection altogether. New Zealand men were still avid followers of rugby football and horse racing: ‘That we may worship in the liturgical drone of the race-commentator and the radio raconteur’, Michael Joseph prayed in his poem ‘Secular Litany’, ‘Saint Allblack, Saint Monday Raceday … Pray for us.’ And many more of them, men and women, were still regular church-goers.
Just how high church attendances were during this period is difficult to calculate. Anglicans were still by far the largest Christian denomination, reflecting the fact that they were both the first group to evangelise in New Zealand and the majority of immigrants. In 1936 they had 625,618 nominal adherents, almost 40 per cent of the total population of more than 1.5 million. Of these, the church itself calculated that around 45,500 were active participants. Presbyterians made up 23.44 per cent, a continuing reflection of the substantial minority of Scottish immigrants; Catholics 13.13 per cent, a position they had held steadily for six decades and would continue to hold for the next six; Methodists 8.05 per cent; and Baptists 1.57 per cent. There is evidence that the larger Protestant denominations were experiencing a slow decline in attendances at this time, but Catholics and the smaller churches were not. Catholics were still obliged to send their children to Catholic schools, which meant that most of them were locked more tightly into a parish structure than non-Catholics.
Church historians Allan Davidson and Peter Lineham note that the major denominations had by this time ‘settled into a particular role in New Zealand society, accepted and even respected by most people … [Most] New Zealanders were in some senses adherents of the Christian faith.’ Oliver Duff, who cheerfully described himself as ‘heathen’, reinforces this view in one of the country’s centennial publications in 1940:
We still go to church to get married. We go to get buried. We have our children christened. We swear by God and the Bible. We turn back to religion in sorrow and in trouble … [Religion goes on] building churches and schools and hospitals and orphanages, maintaining through all its lapses and failures the dignity of man, preaching (and generally practising) charity … although the pace [has] slackened, there [is] no indication at all that the impulse [is] coming to an end.
One factor which may have affected church attendance but did not signify a decline in conviction was the growing popularity of radio in the 1930s – and church services had quickly become an established feature of broadcast programmes. ‘A number of churchmen held regular services “on the air”,’ Davidson and Lineham reported, ‘most notably “Uncle Scrim”, C. G. Scrimgeour, who with “Uncle Tom” Garland formed a “radio church”, the Church of the Friendly Road and drew very large listening audiences.’ Another popular sermoniser on Sunday morning programmes was the Revd Harry Squires, Wellington City Missioner from 1939. To the modern ear, much of this radio evangelising sounds shallow and trite. But it was effective in its day. Listen to ‘Uncle Scrim’, for example:
No one knows more than I that we all strike trouble along life’s road. No one appreciates more than I that it is easy to give advice, but really we meet so many along the road who need encouragement … and practical sympathy, that I never tire of entreating travellers of the Friendly Road to keep their eyes open for those less fortunate travellers who need just that little act of kindness, that kind word of cheer, which puts new heart into those who find the road heavy going … Look up! It is when the lights of earth are dimmest that we can see the most stars.
Scrimgeour was, in fact, far shrewder and more worldly than these sentiments suggest. He became Controller-General of Commercial Radio in 1936, fell foul of the Labour Government with his forays into political and social comment, and proved himself to be anything but reverent and avuncular when he stood unsuccessfully against Prime Minister Peter Fraser in the 1943 general election, the same year he was dismissed from his broadcasting post.
Scrimgeour had done early ‘home mission’ work among the Maori and, as he himself observed more than once, religion and spirituality permeated Maori life more intimately than it did the life of non-Maori, even though their formal church attendance may have been lower. Services were held frequently i
n the course of hui and tangihanga, Maori committee meetings customarily opened and closed with prayers, and the very status of training for the ministry or receiving ordination tended to confer kaumatua rank in the Maori world.
As with non-Maori, the Anglican Church had the strongest following throughout the first half of the twentieth century: over 30 per cent of declared Maori affiliations. The Ratana Church had increased its membership spectacularly through the 1920s to claim second place and a proportional peak of 20 per cent in 1936. In the 1940s it would drop back to third place behind Catholics, who remained steady on 13 to 14 per cent. The other major affiliations in order of size were Methodist, Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) and Ringatu.
Of the specifically Maori churches, Te Kooti’s Ringatu was the strongest behind Ratana with around 6 per cent in the 1930s. Numbers for the smaller denominations – Pai Marire, Wairua Tapu and the followers of Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi at Parihaka – fell away sharply between the 1930s and 1950s. Statistics for Maori religious adherence can be misleading, however. They do not show that many people belonged to a Christian denomination and a Maori church. Declared affiliation would usually depend on whether the circumstances were judged to be taha Maori or taha Pakeha, and the collection of census information was decidedly Pakeha.
If church organisation reflected the fundamental separation of Maori and Pakeha domains before World War II, rugby football did not. Apart from warfare, in fact, the one national activity to which Maori contributed was rugby. The first Maori to represent New Zealand overseas had gone on a tour of Britain and Australia in 1888–89 as the ‘New Zealand Native Team’ (they were not all Maori; New Zealand-born Pakeha also qualified as ‘native’ in this context). Other specifically Maori tours followed from 1910. Within New Zealand there were Maori clubs, internal Maori tours, a Maori Advisory Board of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union from 1922, and from 1928 the country was divided into four Maori districts to compete annually for a trophy donated by the Prince of Wales.
Maori were also welcomed into the country’s national representative team, the All Blacks. Those who distinguished themselves, such as legendary fullback George Nepia of Ngati Kahungunu, acquired the status of national heroes in their playing days. In this sphere there was little reluctance to recognise or accept Maori talent – except in New Zealand tours of that other great rugby-playing nation, South Africa. On such occasions Maori players were stood down, the first time from a New Zealand Army team in 1919, the second from the All Black tour of 1928. These exclusions created some ill-feeling throughout the country, although not among Maori players themselves, if Maori rugby administrators are to be believed. Change, when it did come in the 1970s, was forced by the wider New Zealand community, not the New Zealand Rugby Union.
For New Zealand men as a whole, Maori and Pakeha, playing and following rugby was the great common denominator they could share as players and supporters and as a sure-fire topic for socially bonding conversation. In most New Zealand schools before the war it was the only male winter sport available, and in many of them participation was compulsory. And, as Jock Phillips has noted, rugby was, along with drinking in public bars, one of the twin pillars of New Zealand male culture. Interest in the game embraced people from every class and occupation, and from both town and country – ‘urban professionals right through to farmers and working class … it became a universal experience for nearly all New Zealand men’. Cricket too had a following, local and national, but nowhere near as large or as socially diverse as that enjoyed by rugby. Consequently New Zealand’s international cricket performances were usually memorable only for the dimensions of the defeats.
Interest in horse racing, again largely but not exclusively among men, was almost as high, and outstanding horses – Carbine, Kindergarten, Desert Gold and Gloaming – acquired the status almost of rugby heroes. The greatest of them all, Phar Lap, was born in Timaru in 1927 but never raced in New Zealand. His great triumphs were in Australia and the United States, where he died unexpectedly in 1932. News of this catastrophe displaced accounts of the Depression riots in many local papers. New Zealanders had followed his fortunes like those of a favourite son. After his death, Phar Lap’s heart and hide went to Australian museums and his skeleton to the Dominion Museum in Wellington.
Racing, however, with its ranks of owners, trainers, riders and club officials, was not as demotic as rugby. As Graeme Dunstall has said, ‘the private bar and the Members Stand pointed to a continuing distinction between the respectable and the rough …’ Although support inevitably dropped during the Depression, broadcasts of race meetings on commercial stations eventually ensured a continuing wide following for racing and trotting, and almost every public bar in the country had ‘bookies’ operating illegally to take bets and reward those who backed winners (by the mid-1940s, bookmakers’ turnover, untaxed, was estimated nationally at £24 million). Betting at race meetings was administered by local totalisators, which had been operating in New Zealand since the 1880s. Not until 1951 would the system be centralised through the national Totalisator Agency Board, known as the TAB, which became one of the institutions of New Zealand’s recreational life.
The number and frequency of race meetings were drastically reduced with the outbreak of war in 1939. In many local communities the race courses themselves were taken over for military training. But there was no reduction in the popularity of the sport, nor in the number of horses kept in training. Eventually, after considerable public agitation, the New Zealand Racing Conference allowed meetings to be run again in the later years of the war with the excuse that such meetings were for the collection of ‘patriotic funds’. The war would represent, none the less, an inescapable interruption in almost every feature of national and community life.
[1] Homosexuality per se ceased to be formally a ground for declining security clearance in certain jobs in the Public Service in 1989, three years after the passage of the Homosexual Law Reform Act. What then became unacceptable was ‘heterosexual or homosexual behaviour, such as deviant or promiscuous behaviour, which may provide susceptibility to blackmail or exploitation or indicate personality instability’.
[2] Painters too – Colin McCahon, Rita Angus, Christopher Perkins, Lois White – were undertaking a comparable rejection of romanticism: ‘clarity and harshness now dominated the genre’.
Chapter 24
At War Again
Despite the carnage that had occurred on the battlefields of World War I, imperial feeling had remained strong throughout New Zealand, even if its expression would never again be as jingoistic as it had been in 1899 and 1914. When a crisis at Chanak threatened the Dardanelles in 1922, the New Zealand cabinet took three minutes to decide that the country would go to war again if necessary, and over 13,000 New Zealand men enlisted virtually overnight for service in another expeditionary force. No war eventuated on that occasion.
The election of the Savage Labour Government in 1935 did not indicate a change in direction, even though the cabinet wanted to put whatever weight it had behind the League of Nations. The Labour movement as a whole had long declared its doubts about the value of imperial policies and its dislike of war as an instrument of national politics, and, of course, four Labour ministers – Peter Fraser, Bob Semple, Paddy Webb and Tim Armstrong – had been imprisoned for sedition because of their opposition to conscription in the previous war. From the time of their elevation to government, however, Labour spokesmen, including Prime Minister Savage, had declared that Britain’s interests were New Zealand’s interests – in trade, economics, defence and culture. ‘When Britain is in trouble, we are in trouble’ was one of Savage’s mantras (along with his trademark, ‘Now then …’).
The Government created a Council of Defence in 1937 and prepared a ‘War Book’ or dossier on the administrative changes required to put the country on an immediate war footing. When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and New Zealand declared war on Germany on 3 September – this time, independent
ly of Britain – the country was prepared politically, bureaucratically and in spirit, even if the armed forces had been allowed to run down badly in the previous decade. The attitude of most citizens was articulated in a quavering voice by the dying Savage in a radio broadcast on 5 September:
With gratitude for the past and confidence in the future we range ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go; where she stands, we stand. We are only a small and a young nation, but we march with a union of hearts and souls to a common destiny.
This was no exaggeration. Only one political party opposed participation in the war. This was the tiny New Zealand Communist Party, which had just begun to publish its national newspaper, People’s Voice, and was, according to one historian, ‘faithful to the false promise’ of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939. This source of opposition, and that expressed through the left-wing journal Tomorrow, largely collapsed after Germany invaded Russia in June 1941. There would also be a small number of conscientious objectors, around 800 of whom would be detained, most of them after the introduction of conscription for Pakeha males in June 1940. Some who spoke out against the war from the outset, however, such as Methodist minister Ormond Burton, were arrested in September 1939.
In addition to the calmer expressions of loyalty to Britain and the Empire than those heard in 1914, there was one other major difference in the Government’s approach to the coming conflict. The cabinet was determined that New Zealand should retain its national identity in Allied policy-making, and insisted that its expeditionary force remain a discrete unit and not be dispersed throughout the British Army. A British officer with close New Zealand family associations, Major-General Bernard Freyberg, was appointed commander of the New Zealand Division and secured a charter that stressed that his primary responsibility was to the Government of New Zealand.