Gundry's Grumbles with Simon Gundry
Wonderful Memories, but…
Growing up in Devonport, as I did in the 1950’s and 60’s, was a wonderful adventure and a memorable childhood.
My parents lived on the side of Mt Victoria, and the mountain in those days was home to several hundred sheep that were looked after by the Devonport Borough Council, it was the same on North Head. The adventures to be had on both these mountains for young kids were varied and many.
I attended Devonport Primary School, which in those days were Victorian type kauri buildings right on the corner of Kerr and St Aubyn Streets. The Junior school was across the road, and I used to collect the school milk daily from the milk shed right on the lower corner. On warm summer mornings, the milk would often be “on the turn” and there weren’t too many takers.
At the far western boundary of the school, on the lower slopes of Mt Victoria, was the manual training block. The girls were taught baking and cooking and boys were introduced to the arts of wood work and metal work. This was not just for the Devonport Primary School, but for all the other Primary schools in the area, and their pupils were bussed there for their weekly manual training lessons. And of course down the hill was the dreaded Dental Clinic, “the Murder House”. Not a pleasant place to be summonsed to in those days.
The sheep on Mt Victoria often escaped through some hole in the fence and would wander down the main street of Devonport, sticking their noses into various shops before being rounded up and driven back up the mountain. The fence would then be fixed.
North Head was a wild playground, it was only just over a decade after the end of the second Word War, and barbed wire fencing still cut off the lower side of North Head from the southern end of Cheltenham Beach. The mountain was covered in huge fennel plants and uncontrolled milk weed plants with huge vines producing the large seeds we called “milk weed bombs” which were ammunition for the vicious battles on the mountain. Nobody wore shoes and feet were often ripped apart by either broken beer bottles, scoria or assorted rubbish left there. The tunnels were there to be explored, dropping dozens of metres into the bowels of North Head and various steel ladders to be climbed down. Often grazing sheep would fall down these tunnels, or wander in and not be able to find their way out – there would be a terrible stench of rotting sheep for a while. These days of course, the many tunnels that we explored have been blocked off and “sanitised”, by supposedly well meaning authorities who wish to keep our children safe and wrapped in cotton wool.
The houses of Devonport were basically old villas, somewhat run down and on large pieces of land. Many villas were converted into flats to accommodate the naval population, who lived in Devonport in those days. This was before infill housing and the trendy villa doer uppers arrived in the Borough.
Between North Head and Mt Victoria was another playground – Mt Cambria. The Devonport Borough Council had their yard there; the quarry was still operating to produce roading metal for the Borough. There was a huge collection of old broken down machinery to be played on, before being chased off by the Council hierarchy.
Living in Church St, the highlight of our shopping experiences were in Church Street, on the site of the present 5 Loaves Café. There, in that small block of shops were a dairy, butchers, a fruit shop, a drapers and a toy shop. Many a Saturday morning was spent with my sisters, grasping my pocket money, in Mrs Nightingale’s toy shop where there was a mind boggling array of toys.
Down at the end of Church St was our marine playground where all the local families learned to sail, the Willis’s, the Parlanes, the Elliott’s, the Ferryman’s, the Stirlings, the Gundry’s. We would race around the bay, down towards Torpedo Bay and out to the green buoy that was known as the Coffee Pot, in our various classes of yachts – the Z class, the Idle Alongs, Cherubs, Moths, Sabots, P Classes all racing together with some improvised handicap system to make every race fair. We all learned to swim off the skids of the Rowing Club before venturing out to the piles which the Yacht Club would use to put the boats on at high tide and clean and paint the antifouling on the low tides, before the emergence of fast ferries that saw the demise and removal of the carooning piles. While waiting for the tides to drop, the owners would invariably gather at the Masonic Hotel and enjoy a couple of jugs before going back to scrub down their boats. The Masonic in those days had a great collection of Kelleher Art award winning paintings that were owned by the then owner of the Brewery, Sir Henry Kelleher. These seem to have disappeared over the last few decades; I wonder what happened to them?
I was extremely upset recently to read the decision from the Environment Court with regards to the Masonic Hotel, which went against the Save the Masonic movement. How sad it will be to lose such an iconic piece of Devonport’s history. To me, the plan for this corner is a bit like putting a bow tie on the Mona Lisa. The Hotel was built in 1866 at the foot of Church Street, which was then the commercial hub of Flagstaff as the area was known in those days. This is a Hotel where so many decisions in the local community were made. The talented local bands who have played their first gigs there, the yacht designers and yachtsmen who saw reality come out of dreams over a beer on a warm Saturday afternoon overlooking the Waitemata Harbour. It was there that Peter Blake first mooted the idea with Martin Foster of the Devonport Yacht Club of putting an entry into the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race in 1979. It was there that the North Shore Rugby Club was established in 1873. It was there brilliant yacht designers such as Farr, Woollacott, the Logan Brothers, Wilson’s and Robertson’s, these talented people who continued the historical thread of boats and seamanship that began within the Masonic Hotel some 100 years previously.
I believe that people have the right to use their land as they wish, but I also believe that people who buy historic parts of our country have the responsibility to either preserve that history or sell to someone who will preserve it. Otherwise we will end up with no historical buildings at all, and a landscape bare of where we have come from as a community.
Years ago in Devonport, we may have lost the Esplanade Hotel which was badly run down and demolition looked like the easy answer. However some party bought the Hotel, and transformed it into the boutique establishment it is today. It is now a proud feature of Devonport. This is only one man’s opinion, I suppose.
It will be interesting now to watch the progress of this development. I don’t know whether this is a great spot to build apartments, this is a very cold part of Devonport, facing due South. I don’t know whether the people who could afford this kind of apartment would want to live in a 2 level apartment, as I know how bad stairs can be for old knees. Do people want to live across the road from a beach the Council never cleans?
I wonder how much the Reserve Fund contribution to the Council will cost, and I wonder how much the development costs will be? Is this really the economic climate to be building apartments that people will buy supposedly off the plans? Are there the financial institutions around that will fund developments like this in this current economic climate? Is the neighbourhood prepared to put up with two years of solid construction work on the Church Street corner? The excavations in the rock formation for weeks on end, combined with the trucks taking it all away may drive the neighbourhood to the brink. Maybe just winning the Environment Court decision was a small victory in this ongoing battle. But, as I said previously, that’s only one man’s opinion.
Next month, I may get onto the Parking Warden Gestapo in Devonport.
Simon Gundry is a Devonport and North Shore identity, and character, who is known for calling a spade a spade. He is a director of contracting company Gill & Gundry, is an enthusiastic and active sailor (past crew-member of Ceramo New Zealand and Lion New Zealand in Whitbread Round The World races and Shockwave in Admiral’s Cup) and is a life member North Shore Rugby Football Club.
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