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Biography of Oscar Peter Broederlow Senior

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Oscar Peter Broederlow

aged 89-90 talking to

Claire Hill, biographer 2003 – 2004

The Laban family is my paternal grandmother’s family. The original Laban’s living in Fiji and

the Pacific was my great grandparents. The first Laban, Peter Laban came to Samoa in the late

19 Century.

My Grandfather, Johann Ernst Oskar Broederlow was a German who married Emma Laban.

Like many Europeans in Fiji the Broederlow’s were plantation owners. Copra, which comes

from the coconut palm, was the main crop for most of the plantation owners. Copra was

extracted from the coconut and the oil was used for many things. These German owned

plantations dominated Fiji until the war, when the English started moving in and taking over.

Johann Broederlow was one of the first Europeans to live in Fiji; I think that it must have been a

hard life for him back then. I don’t think that I would have liked it, he was out there to start a

new life and start a business and sometimes they would have terrible problems.


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They were amazing people, the ones who came to the Islands and established businesses there.

Johann Broederlow was a sea Captain and he sailed all over the world. While based in Samoa he

would sail to New Zealand, Fiji and England amongst other places.

Now the Samoan people have never been cannibals but their close neighbours the Fijians

certainly were. There is a famous story that my father told me about my Grandfather when he

was living in Fiji, this was in the early days of Europeans living there. The churches were

sending people over to teach the local people and at this time, there was a missionary called

Baker. Now this missionary Baker was a very brave fellow and he would go off right into the

deepest heart of Fiji. He believed that because he was a man of God the Fijians would leave him

alone.

There was one area of Fiji, which was considered very dangerous, and Missionary Baker was

warned by many of the local people that he should not venture there. But he took no notice of

the advice of these people, went off, and wasn’t seen again. Well, time passed and people began

to wonder if something had happened to him so my Grandfather and some others organized a

search party to go and look for him. They went in a big mob because they were all worried

about the cannibals in the area.

When they got to the area they found out that Missionary Baker had come to a sticky end, he had

been killed and eaten by cannibals. There was nothing that my Grandfather and the other

members of the search party could do, all that was left of poor Missionary Baker was his boots.

Now the thing is that to this day there is a saying in Fiji, cana vava. This is a Fijian phrase, cana

means eat or eating and vava means shoes. So of course it means ‘eats shoes’ and for Fijians this

phrase is a terrible insult. This insult comes from the incident with Missionary Baker.

What had happened to Missionary Baker was that the Fijians had cut him up and eaten him. But

they thought that he had very tough feet because when they had cut him up they had left his

shoes on thinking that his shoes were part of his feet. They had eaten the rest of him but the

shoes and his feet had been passed around from family to family and from cooking pot to

cooking pot. They had boiled and boiled his shoes and feet but still found them too tough to eat.

And that was the story of Missionary Baker.


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These Fijian cannibals, they were fierce people and they would eat people all the time. There

was one chief who was a famous cannibal, he would send out people from his village to scout for

fresh people to kill and eat. Of course he wouldn’t eat all of them, after he had chosen the

choicest bits he would share round the rest of the victim with the people of his village. When he

died they marked on his headstone the number of people he had eaten in his lifetime. The

marker is there to this day, it states that this chief ate 999 people in his lifetime.

My Great Grandfather Peter Laban he came to Samoa to work as an industrial chemist for the

Whaling Company. When he arrived he worked on the Ellice Islands and whilst he was working

there he met a girl called Samila. It happened that one day he was down on the beach and he saw

a girl sitting there crying. When he talked to her he found out that she was weeping because she

was pregnant and alone. The pirate Bully Hayes had taken her husband away and she did not

expect to ever see him again. The pirate had been searching for fit, able-bodied young men on

Ellice Island and her husband had been one of the men that he had kidnapped to sell into slavery.

Captain 'Bully' Hayes notoriety was well known around the Pacific Ocean, Australia and New

Zealand in the period 1850 to1877. He began his seafaring life by cheating, stealing and

swindling. Later, he joined another American pirate named Captain Ben Pease and his cutthroat

crew. He and this crew pillaged and plundered among the Northern Pacific Islands. Bully

rapidly became notorious. He was involved in blackbirding (the kidnapping of South Seas

islanders to work on Australian and New Zealand farms/stations) in the 1860s. Supposedly, those

involved would be paid a stipend at the end of their commitment and returned to their home

islands. Many never saw their homes again.

Because Samila was part English she was able to tell her story to my Great Grandfather Peter.

He felt pity for her and decided to help her, he took her under his wing and eventually he married

her. She bore him three children, Luke, William and Emma. William Laban’s son William was

the nephew that my Grandmother Emma became so fond of, he was the one whom she spent her

last days with.

One story that I remember being told about my Great Grandfather was that he buried his wealth

in a secret place. He was growing old and whilst my Grandfather and Grandmother were away

in Germany one time, he took it into his head that he needed to bury his wealth. Whilst they were

away he buried some money in a secret location, but he died before they had returned from


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Germany and never told them where he hid the money. Although they searched for a long time,

they never found where he had buried it. At the time, their manager was helping to build the

foundations for a new house and the story goes that my Great Grandfather blinded him when he

hid his treasure. But I don’t know if this story is true or not.

When the children were still young Great Grandfather Peter Laban decided to move back to

Apia, Western Samoa with his family. They took with them their maid from the Ellice Islands.

Not long after they had arrived, Great Grandmother Samila took ill; as she lay on her dying bed,

she made my Great Grandfather promise that if she died he would marry their maid. She asked

this of him because the children were very young and she wanted them to be cared for by

someone that knew and loved them. My Great Grandfather agreed to this and after Samila died,

he married their maid.

My Grandmother Emma Laban, who was the youngest of my Great Grandparents three children,

married a man called Johann Ernst Oskar Broederlow. He had come to Fiji from Germany.

When he arrived he established and become a plantation owner. Johann Broederlow was a

retired mariner and he owned and ran three plantations in Fiji. During the German occupation he

decided to pay a visit to Samoa as some friends of his had migrated there from Germany. Whilst

he was in Samoa visiting his friends, he was introduced to my Grandmother Emma Laban. They

later married and had five children: Peter (my father), Helene, William, Sophie and Mariah.

My mother Valasi was from a very important Samoan family. My maternal grandfather Asomua

Sa’i, was a Matai (chief). This is a position of status and responsibility. He was a ceremonial

tattooist too, which is an important position in Samoan society. My grandfather died when I was

about 4 years old so I have few memories of him but I do remember some of the stories that my

parents told me about him.

I remember a story my mother told me about how my Grandfather Asomua Sa’i treated me as he

was very fond of me and he would look after me sometimes. She said that when the High Chiefs

were having meetings children were not allowed to be present but my Grandfather used to take

me along and allow me to run around while the meeting was going on. Because he was so

respected in the village, nobody ever said anything to him at the meetings. Some of the other

women in the village went to my mother and complained that it was not the right thing to do.

My mother said that there was nothing she could do about it; her father would do as he pleased.


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Nobody ever dared to tell my Grandfather that he was not allowed to have his Grandson with

him.

The great tragedy for my mother’s family happened in 1918, like many other families and

villages in Samoa my mother’s family was touched by the great Influenza epidemic. Thousands

of people died in Samoa, it was a very bad time. People were dying like flies. Because of his

responsibilities, my Grandfather used to have to travel around a lot and at the time that the

epidemic swept through the islands he and his eldest son (my Uncle) were away from home.

They both came down with influenza and died from the disease.

Many of my mother’s family died during this epidemic, it was a terrible time not only for my

village but also for the whole of Samoa. Besides my Grandfather and his eldest son who died

early in the epidemic, his youngest son also died later. My mother’s side of the family were

more or less wiped out, only my mother survived.

My father was a very kind and caring man, during the time of the influenza epidemic he used to

try and help people who had come down with the virus by providing them with food. He would

take me with him out into the bush, where he would shoot birds such as the big native pigeon and

I would retrieve them. After he had killed and cleaned the birds, he would make huge pots of

soup and take it round to the sick families who could hardly care for themselves. It was a bad

experience.

Sometimes when we were taking the food around, we would find that the people whom we had

come to help were already dead. I was so young that I did not know to be afraid and mainly

enjoyed the fact that my father was taking me around with him on his travels.

Once when we were taking food round we found a little boy who was sick and suckling at the

breast of his mother who had already died from the disease. We took him home to my mother so

that she could care for him, as at the time she was still breastfeeding my younger brother Fulu

who was around the same age. It was very sad because both the young boy and my brother Fulu

later died from influenza. Although I was so young I still remember that part of the tragedy,

Fulu was the third child in our family and my first brother. I guess that bringing this small baby

boy home with us was a bad mistake, but it is the type of mistake that you cannot avoid making.

What else could we have done, there was nobody else who could have cared for that little boy.


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I was so sad when my little brother died. After that when my mother was pregnant again I

wished that the next baby would be a new brother for me. When the baby came, I found out that

it was a girl and I cried and cried because I had wished so much for another brother to replace

Fulu whom I had loved so much.

My father wanted us to leave Samoa although my mother really didn’t want to leave. There was

still not a market for many of the things that he was trying to sell and even though he had several

plantations he was not achieving everything he wanted. This is one of the reasons that he sent me

away to college in Fiji. Our family still has a big home in Samoa and one of my nephew’s lives

there.

My mother was originally a member of the London Missionary Society. She used to do a lot of

community work helping people. Later, as part of her church work for the Relief Society, she

would visit people who were sick or needed help around the house. She would help families

who were struggling with young children or because they were old. She would help them by

doing housework or cooking for them.

My mother was a very kind woman and I know that she loved me very much; I know this

because she treated me very well and whenever I cried she would cry also. One day when she

was crying, I couldn’t have been more than 10 years old, and I said to her ‘Don’t cry mum, when

I grow up I will look after you’. I will always remember those words.

My father died a few years before my mother; he died in 1954, whilst she died in 1970. My

mother had converted to the Mormon Church some years after marrying my father. After my

father died she went away on a Mormon Church mission for about 3 years, it was the best thing

that she ever did. She went to another part of Samoa and helped people in the same way as she

had for the London Missionary Society Church by caring for people in their homes.

My Grandmother Emma Laban, (my father’s mother) was a darling old lady; I loved her very

much. I used to spend a lot of time talking to her about all kinds of things; she was somehow

different from anyone else that I knew. She was living in Lami with my Auntie Emma when I

was sent there to attend St Felix’s College so I got to spend a lot of time with her.


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My Grandmother Emma Laban was 65 years old when she died; I was away working in Mau

(which is towards Navua) when I got a message that Grandma Emma was very ill. It had taken a

while for the message to get to me as there was no telephone where we were working. It was

about 25 miles to the nearest shop and we didn’t even have any means of communicating with

headquarters. I found out because I was sitting listening to the radio one night and a message

came through for me from Suva saying that she was very ill.

My grandmother was living in a little batch behind the big house in Lami. The firm that I

worked for said that I could go back to see her so I quickly returned. Once I arrived, I found my

Grandmother pining away from loneliness. She had all the comforts of the earth, but she said

that Aunty Emma, her daughter was not caring for her. During the day when the boys and

Emma’s daughter Annie went to school that only left the two of them at home together.

Poor Granny was stuck in this place without any help and she was lonely. When I arrived back

in Lami I went straight to see her and said ‘Granny, what’s the matter?’ She said ‘I want to go to

my nephew Willie (William Laban). William Laban was the son of her only brother Bill Laban.

She was very fond of her nephew who lived in Nasese, which is right at the other end of Suva, a

distance of approximately 7 miles from where she was staying with Emma.

I went and spoke to my Aunty Emma to see if I could persuade her to let Granny go and stay

with her nephew. I said ‘Why don’t you let Granny go to Uncle Willie and Uncle Bill?’ But my

Aunty Emma wouldn’t be moved; she said ‘No, she stays here’.

My Aunty Emma and I got into an argument over this because I could see that Granny was

lonely and needed to be with some people during the day. She was left on her own until my two

brothers returned home from school. Aunty hardly ever sent a servant girl to see her, only when

she sent food out for her. This was the reason that my Granny was so anxious to go and stay at

my Uncle Willie’s house.

When I went to talk to Aunty Emma about moving Granny to Uncle Willie’s she got very angry.

She told me that if I took Granny away that day then she would never allow her back in her

house again. I said to her: ‘Aunty, if that’s the way you feel then let it be’. I didn’t think that she

was being serious when she said that, I thought that she would calm down later.


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I got Granny and my two young brothers and took them over to Uncle Willie’s place in Nesese.

Uncle Willie and his wife were the most kind-hearted people that I have ever come across. My

boss had told me that I could have a few days off from my job whilst I got my Granny and the

boys settled so I stayed with them for a few days. Because I was earning better money in my

job, I arranged with the local shopkeeper to let the family have whatever they needed.

At that time, I didn’t realise the bitterness that Aunty Emma had over my taking Granny away to

Uncle Willie’s. From that day she more or less disowned us, but Granny was happier and I

thought that I had made the right decision. Granny was a darling old lady, she and I used to talk

often and one of the things that she used to say to me was: If I ever die, I don’t want you to go

back to Aunty Emma. Aunty Emma doesn’t love any of us except her own children’.

It was not long after I returned to work that I got another call telling me that Granny had died,

my boss had sent a radio message telling me to return home immediately. I was broken hearted

when I heard the news and after I had been told I went straight back to Fiji and up to the hospital.

My Aunty Emma was sitting there beside my Grandmother and knowing the bitterness that had

been between them I felt full of fire at the sight of her. But I respected my Grandmother lying

there dead and said nothing to my Aunty.

As the eldest son of my Grandmother Emma’s eldest son I felt that it was my responsibility to

organise the funeral. My Aunty did not like this idea at all but I insisted that was the way it was

going to be. I went off and brought and paid for a coffin from Patten & Stork who were the

undertakers there, the coffin cost me six pounds and ten shillings. The undertakers gave me a

receipt for the coffin and I have kept that receipt to this day.

Childhood in Samoa

I have had a wonderful life and I feel that I am very fortunate to have been able to do some of the

things I have.

I was born in Samoa in 1914, the eldest child and first son in my family. I had ten brothers and

sisters who came after me. Quite a number of my brothers and sisters are dead now although I


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am the oldest. I still have another younger brother, Harry, living in Otara. Some of my brothers

and sisters went to America and some came to New Zealand. I have a brother called Peter who

lived with my parents until he was quite old.

As a child growing up in Samoa, my life was quite nice in many ways. My father had strict ideas

about how I should be brought up and decided that I would be brought up in the European style.

This meant that I was not allowed to associate with the other Samoan kids who lived in the

village. If I tried to play with them, I was always called back for something. I used to be a bit

rebellious about that, they always seemed to have a lot of time for play and I would long to go

off and join them. When he wanted my brothers and sisters and I to come back home, he would

stand outside the house and whistle. We would all come running back; the local people would

say ‘there go Peter’s dogs’.

Now when I look back on how he treated us, I know that my dad was only trying to do what was

best for me. He was very strict but I miss him terribly now and wish that he could be here so that

I could thank him for all that he taught me. I think that if he hadn’t been so strict with me I

would not have been so ambitious. Without him pushing me I would have been happy just

mucking about there in the village and would still be there today.

My mother’s family had passed on a lot of land to her, at least 100 acres. This land used to be

covered in bush however my father had the land cleared and converted into a plantation. He

planted banana palms and cocoa trees on the land. Besides the plantation, my father had several

other businesses including a bakery and a general store. He tried many different enterprises on

the island and because many of them had never been trialled there before, not all of them were

successful.

My father built a bakery on our land, this worked well and he used to sell a lot of bread. I would

help him with getting the yeast ready everyday and he employed local people to help him prepare

the bread. Every day he would deliver fresh bread using our horse and cart. He also built a

general store, which he ran successfully for many years with my mother’s help.

My father was the first person to try running sheep on the island; he brought some sheep for the

plantation in the hope that they could provide wool and meat. But they found the climate very

hot and the sheep were not very happy. They didn’t last long on the island, they were slow from


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the heat and the local dogs started worrying them straight away. Before long the dogs had killed

the whole lot, my father never tried keeping sheep again.

My father also kept cattle for a short while; these were also a novelty in our area. He kept about

20 to 30 head of cattle, he used them to slaughter for meat for the family or sometimes he would

kill a whole cow for special occasions in the village. The cattle were able to tolerate the heat but

there was no established market for them. He was hoping to sell their meat but didn’t have much

luck. The local people also used to kill the cattle; they would chase them outside the fence and

then kill them. After a while he gave up on keeping cattle, leaving us with just our milking cow.

When I think about it now I don’t think that he was running things the right way, there was no

market for some of the things that he was trying to sell and this made it very difficult for him to

succeed.

My father used to order everything we needed from a company in America called Montgomery

Ward. It seemed that they were able to supply just about anything you could imagine. Besides

all our linen, furniture and household supplies, I remember my father buying boat engines, riding

gear and even rifles. Each year Montgomery Ward would send out a thick catalogue and my

father would pick out everything he wanted to buy from that. When I finally went to America as

an adult the first thing that I did was search out the Montgomery Ward building. I had imagined

it must be a huge building to be able to supply so many things but when I saw it, it was actually

quite small.

Once my father had the general store, the plantation and the bakery running smoothly, he started

doing contract work building houses for other people and businesses. My mother would go

down and mind the store, whilst he took me off to the building site. He would have me there as

his helper to help him as he was building. As he was working he would give me tasks, showing

me how to do them as we went along. In this way I learnt how to build houses, a skill that I have

been able to use all my life. Every time I go back to Samoa I can still see houses that I helped

my father to build.

Although my father was strict with me, he also gave me a lot of responsibility in our family. If

he and my mother had to go out, I would be the one who was left in charge and all the other

children would have to do as I said. If they didn’t do as I told them then I would tell my parents

when they got home and they would be told off. So being the eldest child has its advantages and


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even though my father expected a lot of me he also trusted me a lot. Most of the time I was a

good son and lived up to what he expected of me but sometimes I did get up to mischief.

One day when I was about seven or eight my parent's went out for a while. It was a Sunday and

my mum and dad had told us that we were to stay quietly inside whilst they were away. But my

sister Mabel and I decided to go out into the yard anyway. There was a big fruit tree in the yard

and we wanted to collect some of the fruit to eat.

I climbed up the tree to gather some fruit and everything seemed to be going well for a while.

But whilst I was up there I slipped and fell out of the tree, it was quite a long way down to the

ground and when I landed I hurt my left arm badly. Although the pain was terrible I was more

worried about what my parents would say when they found out that I had disobeyed them. My

sister and I went back inside and I got into bed and tried to pretend that nothing was wrong.

When my Mum and Dad came home they expected to find us all fast asleep in bed, but when

they got inside they could hear somebody moaning in pain and soon worked out that it was me.

They found that I had dislocated my shoulder when I fell out of the tree, but I had to wait until

the next day to be taken to a doctor to have it fixed. The pain was terrible and I will never forget

it.

I remember that my father had a friend called Dick Aspinall, who was a trader like my father.

When I was about 8 years old I remember him coming regularly to visit my father and when he

did they would sit together and talk for a long time. My father didn’t drink alcohol but as a

European, he was entitled by the government to one bottle of whiskey a month. Whilst he was

visiting my father, his friend Dick would sit and drink most of my father’s bottle of whiskey.

Dick had a bay horse that he didn’t feed very well. He would go about the island on horseback

visiting people on business and whilst he was inside talking he would leave his horse tied up to a

post with nothing to eat. As most of his days were spent this way, the horse never got much of a

chance to graze. It was very thin and sad looking; my father must have felt sorry for the poor

animal. Whilst Dick was there my father would go and get leaves to feed the horse. By the time

Dick had finished talking to my father he would have polished off most of the bottle of whiskey

and he would be very drunk. Once he got on the horse he would drift off to sleep and the horse

would take them home.


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One day when he was visiting Dick asked me if I would like to have the horse, I was very keen

and my father who was listening pulled 5 pounds out of his pocket to pay for it. Once the horse

was ours it had a much easier life, we kept it in the paddock and it soon became plump and its

coat grew glossy.

My father wanted me to look good when I was riding and decided to buy me a new saddle, bridle

and spurs for the horse. He ordered them all from America and when they arrived he dressed me

up in all my riding gear, put the new saddle and bridle on and then helped me on the horse. But

as soon as my spurs touched the horse he started bucking and I was thrown off. My mother was

so mad at my father for getting me spurs, she took them off me and I never saw them again. But

I kept the horse for many years and rode it often.

My father had a twenty-four foot launch called the Faasaleleata and he used to have to use it to

go and pick up supplies. When I was only about 14 he decided that I was old enough to take on

this job. When he used to send me on the run on this boat to get sand for the concrete (to build

another house) he made me go all by myself. He said that I was not allowed to take anybody

else because it was his feeling that if there were other kids on the launch we would play around

and someone would fall overboard and get chopped up by the propellers.

To go across to pick up the sand was a trip of about 6 miles and I hated the thought of making

this trip all by myself but he wouldn’t change his mind about letting me take a friend along.

Well I used to cry most of the time going over to pick up the sand but by the time I was on the

return journey I would forget my tears and laugh most of the way coming back. But I thought

that my father was the cruellest man on earth for making me go all that way by myself, but

actually I didn’t appreciate what he was doing at the time. Because when I think about it now I

realise that he must really have trusted me to send me off like that on my own. It’s funny but

when you think of your childhood sometimes it makes you wonder how you survived.

My father not wanting me to play with the local kids didn’t stop me from sneaking out and

playing with them when he wasn’t looking. Sometimes we would go and play in the bush where

we could play cricket. I would be away for a long time and when my parents questioned where I

had been I would say that I had been sitting watching the cows eat. I was very cheeky.


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I used to have to milk the house cow as one of my jobs and I was always trying to take shortcuts.

To make the milk flow, I would have to bring Molly’s calf to her so that it would butt at her

udders for milk. This seemed to take an awfully long time and one day I thought of another way

to make the milk flow. I decided that I would just butt her side myself and that would be enough

to make her think that her calf was there. So I leant over and punched her in the side, which

gave her a real fright. The result was that the cow kicked out and knocked the bucket over.

Again one day when I was in a hurry, I had to milk the cow and the cow kicked the bucket of

milk over when it was half-full. Anyway I filled it up with water and when I got home my dad

said ‘What’s happened to the milk?’ I said ‘Nothing. Why?’ He asked if I had left some water

in the bucket before I started milking and I said that I couldn’t remember. That was a big lie.

My father had a very good fishing net that he had purchased from America. We would set it

every night and the next morning there would be many fish in it. If we ever caught a turtle or a

really big fish like a shark then my father would give it to the village to eat. These were too big

for us to cook however my father used to give them to the Matai and they would all meet

together and have a feast. After feast they would go to sleep.

Sometimes I used to go pig hunting in the bush; I think that I was about 14 at the time. These

were ordinary domestic pigs that had gone wild but because they were eating different food they

tasted quite good. There was a nice old chap who used to take me with him and we would take

dogs with us, which would find the pigs and then we would kill them and carry them home to

cook.

My father used to wear special boots because he had a problem with one of his feet; he used to

have to order them from America. One time I wanted to make a shanghai and I needed

something to make the pocket. So I got one of his boots and cut the tongue open and used this to

make the pocket. After I had done this it suddenly hit me that he would discover what I had

done and that I would get into a lot of trouble. I looked around for somewhere to hide the boot

and the more I thought about how angry he would be; the better I thought the hiding place must

be. After a while I thought of somewhere he would be most unlikely to look, I took the boot and

hid it in the ceiling amongst the rafters, right away in the far corner.


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Poor dad, he looked everywhere for his lost boot, but I never did confess what I had done with it.

He couldn’t work out what had happened to his boot and in the end he decided to blame the dog.

He thought that the family dog must have carried the boot off and chewed it up; he didn’t like the

dog much after that. Every time he walked past the dog he would kick it because he thought that

the dog had taken his shoe. I don’t know if anyone has ever found that old boot, maybe they

would if they pulled the house down. But when I left Samoa it was still there. Some of the

things you do as a kid come back to haunt you later on. But that is all part of growing up.

When I was growing up there were a few cars on the island but people still used horses and carts

as well. We had a horse and cart and we used it to deliver bread from the bakery. I was only 11

or 12 but sometimes I had to go out with the bread delivery cart because the people who worked

for my father used to steal the bread or give it to their friends.

There was never any time wasting in my life. School would begin at 9 o’clock and end at 3

o’clock and then I would have to get back from school by half past three so that I could do my

chores. The school was several miles away and we would travel there and back by horse and

cart. My chores included making the yeast for the next day’s batch of bread, which I had to do

straight away on getting home.

If I thought that I was going to be late back after school I would play a little trick on my father. I

thought I was so clever, my father loved watercress and I would stop on the way to school and

pick some from a creek by the side of the road that was just full of it. Then I would take it home

with me after school, when I approached my father I would put it behind my back so that he

couldn’t see it. When he asked where I had been, I would present it to him. He must have

known that I was trying to outsmart him but he didn’t say anything.

My dad kept me busy all the time. Whilst the other children were playing I would be hard at

work. I thought it was bad at the time but now I think that it was the best thing that could have

happened. It made me realise what life was about before I had grown up.

My brothers and sisters started to grow up in a different atmosphere from the one that I had

known. After I had left home they began to rebel a bit against dad. I too changed a bit after I

had been sent away to school; I began to think more about which career would be best for me in

the future rather than accepting my father’s plans without question.


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My father really did a lot of work on our land in Samoa; beside the bakery he also built a big

home. It was all right living there in the islands but it was hard for him to get ahead. My mother

didn’t want to leave because she came from an important family and she didn’t want to lose the

status that came with her title. I myself have no time for that sort of thing. I am the oldest in the

family but I am not interested. It is a lovely country but I would not to live there.

My father and mother stayed in Samoa for the rest of their lives. He would have liked to come

away but my mother really did not want to ever leave her home in Samoa. Being one of the

chief’s daughters was an important position for her but she also loved her home and would have

missed it terribly. She had her family living around her and would have missed them if she had

to leave.

I was about six years old when my father was offered a job as the manager of a store in Lago,

about 60 or 70 miles away from our village. He already had the store on my mother’s land but

decided that this would be a good opportunity for us and agreed to move there. The firm that he

went to work for was called Nelson and we stayed there for several years, I was about twelve

years old when we returned to our village of Iva.

My father decided that we should move there because it had a large whaling station, the whaling

station had been there for some years and had a lot of equipment for ship repairs. They stocked

anchors, chains, and all sorts of things to cater for the whaling ships that came in.

When my dad started working as a manager in the store in Lago, they stopped stocking supplies

for whaling ships and changed over to an ordinary general store. They had a lot of copper nails

left over in stock because the demand for them from the whaling ships had dwindled away. My

father, with his great store of general knowledge, saw an opportunity in this and decided to build

a launch.

My dad knew about so many things, I was never told about how he had been educated, but I

think that he was one of the wisest and most honest men that I have ever met in my life. He

decided to order kauri timber from New Zealand to build the launch while the engine and

hardware he ordered from Montgomery Ward in America. This launch lasted us for many years.

I don’t know what has happened to it but it may still be used somewhere in Samoa.


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My father was a man of principal and he taught me things that I would never forget. I have

strived through all my life to follow his directions because every bit of advice he gave me was

something to do with integrity. He was honest, he claimed that his word was his bond and he

taught me that I should follow in his footsteps. I have always tried to be honest in my own life; I

stay out of trouble with the law and try to help people as my father did.

When I was old enough I was sent to a school run by the Catholic nuns. Every afternoon at

midday, the priest would come there and he used to call me out and ask me if I wanted to join

their church, but I always said that I couldn’t do that. He knew that I belonged to the Mormon

Church but he used to try and convert me anyway. At that time schools in Samoa only went up

to a certain class and anyway I wasn’t getting very far at that school because there were very few

people who spoke English. The nuns were very good teachers but if you wanted to go further you

had to go to the other island.

My father wanted to send me away to another school because he wanted to make sure that I was

educated properly. He arranged for me to go to school on another island, which meant that I had

to board away from home. But I didn’t fancy being sent away and kept on running away and

finding my way back home. I would catch a boat back home and when I arrived; my parents

would have very different reactions. My mother would say ‘Oh my son’ whilst my father would

say ‘what are you doing? Get back.’

My running away from school helped my parents in their decision to send me to Fiji to school

because they knew that I wouldn’t be able to run away from there. This was the event that

initiated the separation from my parents. When I was 17, I was sent to Fiji to go to school at St

Felix’s College.

George Tuioti was a relation of mine from my mother’s side of the family, he was a little

younger than I was and we grew up together in Samoa. He and I went to primary school

together. But we were to different secondary schools as I went off to school in Fiji whilst he

stayed in Samoa.

George did well at secondary school and when he had finished school he decided that he wanted

to be a doctor. Samoa didn’t have a medical school at that time so George moved to Fiji to do


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his training. He trained as a General Practitioner. The Samoan Government paid for a few

Samoans to do specialized training and after they had completed their training they were

expected to go back to Samoa to practice their skills and help out the people in their community.

I used to have a motorbike in Fiji and sometimes I used to go to the place where he lived. When

I arrived there would always be all these other medical students. They were from all over the

Pacific: from Nuie, from Tonga and other places, I would give them all rides on my motorbike

and we would whiz round in front of the building.

I remember that whilst we were both living in Fiji, George came to see me one day. He was

upset because he wanted to get married but he didn’t have any money. So I gave him all the

money that I had at the time, it was only four pounds but I gave it to him anyway. He was only a

poor medical student then, so he had no money but he was in love and couldn’t wait until he

graduated to get married.

Although I was just a boy my father had taught me a lot about running a business and when I was

about ten years old I made my first business deal. I had this little ukulele that I used to play but I

didn’t like it so much. I decided that I was going to trade it with some of the local kids for

something of more value. I persuaded these boys to swap this ukulele for two little piglets; they

were very young and tiny. We made the trade and I took the piglets’ home and began to care for

them. I fed them and looked after them until they grew big and when they were full size I sold

them. The first pig that I sold I got sixty pounds for and the second pig, which was not quite as

big I got fifty pounds for.

I remember that after I made all this money I decided that I would spend some of it. So my

cousin and I went off and bought a guitar. Well that guitar didn’t last very long at all. One day

soon after I had bought it, we were playing outside and we had the guitar out there with us. After

a while we put the guitar down and forgot about it. One of us threw down a mat that covered the

guitar up completely. Of course it didn’t take long before we started playing around and I was

jumping here and there. Before you know it I had jumped right on top of that guitar and

flattened it completely. So that was the end of the money that I had made from raising and

selling those pigs.


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I was very restricted in the things that I could do when I was a child. As I have told you before,

my father did not let me go off and play in the same way as the local children were. They were

allowed to spend a lot of time playing but my father did not want that for me, he believed that I

should be taught to work hard whilst I was still young.

If my father were building a house he would always want me to be with him. I used to take my

turn working in the store; my father would make me work down there sometimes. He really

taught me all the things that I know now.

My father used to have a big garden outside the front of our house in Samoa. That garden must

have been about the size of this house in Church St and it used to have all sorts of vegetables in

it. Dad would fertilise this garden with horse manure, which was an unusual thing to do in

Samoa in those days. The Samoan people used to look on what he did with horror; they thought

that he was a fool for eating vegetables that had been grown amongst manure. They did not

realize that it was a type of compost you see.

I remember that there were big mango trees out the front of our house that had the most delicious

fruit. On the other side of our trees were some more mangoes that belonged to someone else.

Most of the fruit from these mangoes would fall from the trees at night and I could hear them

from my bed. Some of the local boys used to collect the mangoes from their trees and of course,

they would also take the mangoes that had fallen from our trees at the same time. I didn’t like

this of course; I wanted those mangoes from our trees for us.

One day I got an idea about how to put a stop to these boys who were taking the fruit from our

trees. There was an old grave in amongst the Mango trees and I soon thought of a way to put my

plan into action. I took a white sheet and lay down upon the grave with the sheet covering me

completely. That night when these boys came along to collect the fruit I stood up with the white

sheet covering me. Well these boys got the fright of their lives when they saw me and they took

off as fast as they could run. You couldn’t see them for dust.

After that night those boys went around and told everybody in the village that the man who was

buried underneath the Mango trees had come up out of his grave and chased them. That prank

certainly scared them away from our trees for a while. They thought that they had been chased


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by a devil and that they had been eating devils food all that time. I never let on to them that it

was me under that white sheet; I just let them go on thinking that for as long as they wanted.

I remember one time when I was still a child and some people had been lost out at sea. They

were people from our church who had gone to another island on a mission. When their friends

realized that they had been lost they came to my father because they knew that he had a big

reliable boat. I think that I must have only been about twelve years old at the time.

My father agreed to take out the boat to look for them and he took me with him so that I could

help. These other people came with us and they huddled in the bottom of the boat, as the seas

were rough. The women were crying and wailing because they didn’t believe that we were

going to find these people safely. The boat was crashing through these huge waves and the wind

was whipping up the water and flinging it into our faces.

It got so dangerous out there in the wild seas that my father had to go and work on the engine the

whole time. The reason for this was that if the engine failed in those high seas we would have

been lost because the waves that we were riding in front of would have started crashing down on

top of us. I stood up front and steered the boat whilst my father was down with the engine, I was

an experienced boatman then even though I was so young. But the other people in the boat were

amazed that someone who was as young as me could be in control of the boat in a situation like

that. I always remember that, because it made me feel proud to have people praising my skills

like that.

Anyway we continued to search for these people for some time. We went out to the area where

we thought the boat could have drifted to if the people who were in it had lost control of it. Their

boat was only a rowing boat so in those seas we were fairly certain that they would have been

out of control. After a lot of searching we found them and got them safely onboard. After that

we turned around and headed off home.

I was always making shanghais and when I had one I would go out and fire it off at anything. I

remember that I used to kill birds with it, just for the fun of it. When I think about doing that sort

of thing now, I feel terrible. Those poor birds had a right to live and there was I killing them for

no reason. A terrible thing to do, but I didn’t know any better at the time. I suppose that I was

just a child and that I didn’t understand that other living creatures could feel pain and could


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suffer. I just used to think that it was something to do to pass the time. It is strange because now

when I see people doing that kind of thing I feel very uncomfortable about it. That is funny in a

way because I was one of the worst offenders.

My brothers and sisters

I am the oldest child in my family. All the children in my family, apart from my brother Willie,

were born in Iva, Savai’i, Western Samoa.

Mabel (Tapasi)

The second child in my family was Mabel. Tapasi is her Samoan name; she was born on the 2nd

of September 1916. When she grew up she married and had children. She died on the 1st of June

1977.

Fulu

The third child in my family was a boy, whom my parents named Fulu. He was born in February

1918 but unfortunately did not live long. He had been born during the time of the great flu

epidemic and died whilst he was still a baby.

Faith (Faatuatua)

The fourth child in my family was a girl; she was born on the 30th

December 1919. I remember

her birth very well because she was born at home late at night. After the death of my brother

Fulu, I had been hoping that this baby would be a boy. When my father told me that Mum had

given birth to a girl, I started crying because I had longed for a brother.

My parents named my sister Faith, meaning Faatuatua, a name that is well known in Samoa. She

was married and lived in Samoa. She had three sons and one daughter. The middle boy died a

few years ago but the other three children are still alive in Samoa. Her husband passed away


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some years ago. Faith died a few years ago, she passed away whilst she was holidaying with us

in New Zealand. The family had her body shipped back to Samoa for burial.

Emma

The fifth child was another girl, my parents called her Emma after my paternal grandmother.

Emma came to Fiji whilst I was there and married my brother-in-law, Harry Lobendahn. Emma

and Harry had four children, three sons named Bryan, Elliot, Alexander and a daughter, Irene.

Emma is now living with Irene and her family having moved in with them after her husband died

a few years ago. Emma’s youngest son, Alex, qualified as a teacher in Hawaii. He later taught

at the Church College in Fiji.

Alex is married and he has children. He was recently called as a Bishop of the Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter-day Saints. All three boys served full-time proselyting missions in Fiji. At the

end of their missions they all went to Hawaii to attend school there. Elliot now lives in

California.

Samila

The sixth child was a girl and my parents called her Samila; she was named after my

Grandfather’s Great-Grandmother. She was born in about 1923, just before my parents moved to

Lago. Samila died many years ago.

Willie

The seventh child who was born was a boy and my parents called him Willie Poe Broedelow.

He fulfilled my dream of having another brother when he was born on the 20th

August 1925. He

was a lovely person and I feel blessed for the time that I knew him. He was only 21 years old

when he died but I still think about him all the time.

Arthur

The eighth child that was born was a boy whom my parents called Arthur Tipi Broedelow. He

was born on the 9th

August 1927 at Iva, I remember that very well. When we went back to Iva

my father re-established his old businesses, the bakery, the store and the plantation.

As with most of the other children born in my family, Arthur was delivered by a local midwife.

Her name was Solega. She lived very close by, only about half a mile away from our home. I


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was at home at the time and I remember Arthur being born early in the morning, at around

3.00am. My brother Arthur passed away a few years ago.

Peter

The ninth child that was born was a boy whom my parents named Peter, he was born on the 12th

August 1929. He was born in Iva, Savai’i, Western Samoa. Peter lives in Mangere.

Rex

The tenth child to be born in my family was a boy whom my parents called Rex. He was born on

the 6th

March 1933. I was away from home when Rex was born. Rex is married to Talai Hunt;

he has two daughters and a son. At this time Rex is living in New Zealand but he has also spent

a lot of time living in Western Samoa. Whilst he was there he took care of the plantation that my

father had established many years ago. In memory of my maternal grandfather he took his name

of Asomua. Rex has also passed away.

Adolph

The eleventh child to be born in my family was a boy whom my parents called Adolph. He was

born on the 6th

June 1935. Adolph lives in Salt Lake City, America with his wife and seven

children, he is doing very well over there. Their oldest child was a boy, after that they had four

daughters and then another two sons. All the children have been married in the temple with the

exception of the youngest girl. My wife Hilda and I went to Salt Lake City in April of 1995.

Part of the reason that we went was to see the sustaining of the Prophet Gordon B. Hinckley.

Whilst we were there we stayed with Adolph and his family. What an enjoyable time we had,

especially when staying with people who have devoted their life to the gospel.

Harry

The twelfth child to be born in my family was a boy whom my parents called Harry. Harry was

born on the 11th

February 1939. Now Harry was my sister Tapasi’s illegitimate child. When

Harry was born our parents and Tapasi decided that it would be best if my parents adopted him.

At that time my sister intended to get married to Alofi Seve, who was not Harry’s father. They

thought adoption would be the best thing for young Harry.

Harry lives in Manurewa in Auckland; he has two daughters and three sons. Two on the boys

and one of the girls have served full-time missions. The oldest daughter in the family served her


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mission in Canada. The oldest son served his mission in England, he now lives in Australia.

They both served their missions at the same time. The youngest son served his mission in

Australia; he now lives in Provo where he received a scholarship. The youngest child is still at

school. Harry has served as a councillor to the Stake President, in the Manurewa Stake.

Life as a young man

When I grew older, I was sent away to school on another island because the Marist Brothers

School that I had been going to didn’t go up any further. We lived in Savai’i and the nearest

secondary school for me to go to was on Apia. That was a boat trip away but I knew how to get

back home from there and I used to run away from that school all the time. I would catch the

steamboats back to Savai’i and go home.

Because I kept on running away from the school in Apia, my parents decided to send me to a

school that I couldn’t run away from and I was sent away to school in Fiji. I was 17 years old at

the time, My Grandmother Emma Laban, my Auntie Emma and Uncle Ronald were living in

Suva, Fiji, and they had said that I could stay with them. I went there to train to be an accountant

because that was the career my father wanted me to follow. But I was so keen on sports that I

more or less forgot about my accountancy studies.

Uncle Ronald was my Aunt Emma’s second husband. He was a New Zealander. They met

whilst he was working in Fiji and got married. He was a boat builder like me and he was the one

who helped me to get started in the trade. A few years after they had married, they decided to

move back to New Zealand, they returned there and lived there on a farm north of Auckland.

My Uncle Ronald was a kind man and I liked him very much, he was not as strict as my Aunt

Emma who was a very strict woman indeed.

My Aunt Emma always used to give me plenty of chores to do. She was pretty strict but she did

not make me work as hard as my father used to. This was partly because I was smarter than she

was, so I used to manage to get out of some of the work that she wanted me to do.


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They had a big place that they lived in; it was a big compound of about six acres. When you

have that amount of land there are many things that you can do with it. I planted a vegetable

garden whilst I was living there. I also helped them to build another house in their compound.

The second house was built for Uncle Ronald’s parents who were quite old. They were a very

nice couple and I used to go over there and help them around the house sometimes. I would help

them out by cutting firewood and things like that.

Violet and Samila

I had two cousins, Violet and Samila. Samila was the oldest of Aunty Emma’s children. She

was the daughter of Aunty Emma’s first husband. She married a Frenchman from Tahiti and

moved there with him. Her husband was killed during the Second World War but she stayed

there in Tahiti. She is younger than I am by about 11 months. She was a nice girl; she was in

boarding school for quite a while. When she was home, she and I would sometimes get together

and work out ways to get past Aunty’s rules. We would trick her into thinking that we were

doing one thing and then we would sneak off together and have fun.

Violet was Aunt Emma’s second daughter and the child of her second marriage to Uncle Ronald.

Violet also got married and lives in Browns Bay in Auckland.

Being away from home was hard for me at first, I especially missed my mother and she missed

me too. She used to cry because she missed me so much. She would write letters to me at school

and on the letters she would mark the places where her tears were falling. I was the oldest child

and in many ways I was her favourite.

My Aunty Emma and I didn’t always get along; whilst I was living with her I often used to feel

that she was too hard on me. She was a strict Aunty and she and I fell out over the way she

treated my Grandmother Emma Laban. I was angry with her for many years but in recent days I

have thought more about her and the way she treated me. Now that I look back on it I feel

differently about some things.

Lately whilst I have been thinking about my Aunty Emma, I have decided that she was really a

good Aunty. In my younger days, I used to think that she was too hard on me but now I find


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myself wishing that she were still alive. I think that some of the time when I was thinking that

she was too harsh, it was because I was young and didn’t understand that she was trying to help

me. I remember a few stories about my time with her.

Aunty Emma had a friend who offered to give her two ducks and a drake, we had to fetch them

from him and she told me to bike over to collect them after work on Saturday. I arrived at the

house and her friend put the ducks in a basket for me so that I would be able to carry them back

on the bike. He used a type of Island basket, the ducks were inside but their heads were sticking

out.

I was about 18 years old and without a care in the world, I rode home at top speed singing away

happily. The next thing I knew one of the ducks heads flew off. It had stuck its head out too far

and been decapitated by the spokes of the bike. I picked the head up and looked at it, but of

course there wasn’t much that I could do so I walked along for a way wondering what I was

going to say to my Aunty.

After a while I hopped on the bike again and rode along again, the next thing I knew another

ducks head flew off. Now there was only the poor old drake left with his head still on. I was

really worried about what my Aunty would say now so when I got home I put the bike back in

the garage and tried to keep out of her way. She kept on coming up to me and asking me what

had happened to the ducks, I didn’t answer her and kept on changing the subject. She would

leave it for a little while and then she would ask again ‘Where are the ducks?’

In the end I told her the whole sad story and I tell you that my Aunty didn’t forget that incident

in a hurry. Every time the drake would walk past the window she would call me over to see him

walking slowly and sorrowfully around. She would say to me:

‘Here Oscar, look what you have done to the ducks, look at that poor lonely drake.’

I thought that my Aunty Emma was a hard old lady at the time but I realise now that she wasn’t,

it was me that was causing her trouble. But that is life when you are a young boy, you have your

own ideas and you think that you know better than anyone else. Now when I think about her I

realise that she was a good lady. I didn’t appreciate her very much then but now I wish that she

were still alive so she could hear what I am saying, she would be very proud of me.


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My Aunty Emma can’t have thought that I was too bad a nephew because sometimes I would

hear her praising me in front of other people. She used to get about four boys around my age

over to help clean up the yard every school holiday. They would work for about three or four

weeks and sometimes I would hear her telling them off by praising me up. She would say: ‘my

nephew Oscar can do more work in one hour than the four of you can do in a whole day.’ Then

she would tell them to get on back to it and work harder.

One of the things she did that I thank her for was that she made sure that I didn’t get my hand

amputated when it had poison in it. I had got a splinter of wood jammed down in the fleshy part

between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, some of the splinter had come out but a piece

of it was stuck in there and my whole hand became infected and poisoned. It was so painful, I do

not remember anything as painful as this and in the end I couldn’t stand it any more. The pain

had been going on for weeks, it was New Years Eve and everyone else was having a good time

but I was sitting there with this terrible pain. It hurt so much that most of the time I was just

sitting there crying.

In the end I couldn’t stand it any more and I went on up to the hospital and asked them to cut my

hand off. Because of my age they said that I had to get my guardians permission before they

would amputate it. Well my Aunty Emma outright refused to let them amputate my hand, she

told them that if I was going to die then I was going to die with my hand still attached. The

Doctors at the hospital gave me a shot of something and sent me on my way.

When we got home from the hospital, my Aunty Emma and one of my friends sat up all night

with a kerosene primus so that they could draw out the poison from my hand. By the time the

sun came up the next day my hand was white and I couldn’t feel a thing. But my hand was

cured, I don’t know if what they did drew out the poison or simply killed it but it was better.

My Aunty Emma died when she was 96 years old.

Once I was settled at the house in Lami in Fiji I used to play all sorts of sports, cricket was one

of my favourite games to play but I also used to play football and hockey. There was a wider


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variety of sports to play in Suva. Besides team sports, I also used to do a lot of boxing which is a

good sport because it is a really good form of exercise. I was involved in professional boxing

and played in the heavyweight division.

We used to have public boxing matches and a lot of people would come along to watch the

games. Once I played the heavyweight champion of Australia. He was a very nice chap; he

didn’t hit me too hard.

Once when I wanted to go and see a boxing match I got into a lot of trouble. At the time I was

about 17 and I was back home at my parents for the holidays. I knew that there was a boxing

match that was going to be held on one of the other islands and I decided that I would go. I had a

friend who wanted to come with me, it was a distance of about 30 miles and the only way to get

there was by boat. My father was against it as he thought the trip was too dangerous but my

friend and I were determined.

We waited till about 3pm, which was the time that the winds usually dropped and then we took

our outrigger and set out. We sailed out to the reef but it was rough and the big ocean waves

were crashing on the reef. I tried to time it so that we got over safely but we capsized in the

ocean. The other boy was not as experienced as I was; it is very important that you balance the

outrigger when it starts to rock but he didn’t know how to do this properly and the boat flipped

over. It was right out in the ocean and very dangerous; I felt that death was right there with us.

We were fortunate this time because the tide and the wind drove us back from the open sea and

we slowly drifted back towards the reef. By then it was growing late, we had left at about 3pm

and had been at sea for many hours. My feet got shredded on the sharp coral as we crashed over

the reef; it was nearly midnight by the time I limped home. My mother cried like mad when she

saw me but my father said that it served me right.

I remember another time when I was back home in the village; there was a young doctor who

asked me to help him with a terrible task. A man who lived near us in the village had died

suddenly and the doctor wanted to conduct and autopsy on him to discover what had caused his

untimely death. The deceased man had already been buried but the doctor insisted that he had to

try and find the cause. He was unable to conduct an autopsy alone and asked me to come along


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and help. Now this was the last thing that I wanted to do, but I felt that I had no choice in the

matter and agreed to come along.

To make matters worse there were no facilities in the village for conducting an autopsy and the

doctor had decided that we would have to conduct the autopsy at the grave. The doctor opened

him up right there and I had to assist him. It was the first time that I had ever seen the inside of a

person and for some time after that I would have disturbing dreams. Unfortunately the man’s

grave was right opposite our house and I would dream of the autopsy often.

I went back to Samoa often, even when I was working and had left school I would get homesick

and miss my mother above all things. One time when I visited home towards the end of 1935 I

found that my brothers Adolph and Harry had been born. When the time came for me to go back

to work I talked to my parents about taking my brothers Willie and Arthur back to Fiji with me.

I had two main reasons for wanting to take them with me, one was because I was homesick and

missed the company of my brothers but the other reason was that I wanted them to have the

opportunity of getting a better education.

At the time I could hardly afford to keep myself, I was earning very little from my wages and

making more money with other things such as fishing. I was determined to make a go of it with

them. Initially I was only supposed to be taking Willie as he was my favourite brother and the

closest to me in age, but Arthur began talking wistfully about Willie and I going away. He had a

pitiful way about him and I felt sorry for him so I asked Dad to let me take him too. I told my

Dad that I would find a way to manage with the both of them and I did.

When we first got back to Fiji we went and stayed with my Auntie Emma and I put the two boys

into St Felix’s College where they did very well. We lived about five miles from the school and

my work was about four miles from where we lived. Willie and Arthur went off to school each

morning and I would set off to work on my bicycle. We got ourselves a milking cow and I

taught the boys how to milk it, once I had done that I left the bicycle for them and walked to

work myself. There was a bus that went my way but it cost about a shilling each way and I

decided that we couldn’t afford it, it was a bit of a hard slog but we managed.

When my Grandmother Emma left my Aunties house Willie, Arthur and I left as well. We went

and got a flat right in the middle of Suva, it cost me about eight shillings. The flat had a kitchen


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at one end and dining and bedrooms at the other end. Because there was just the three of us we

all had different jobs to do around the flat. Arthur’s responsibility was to collect all the dirty

washing and take it to the Chinese laundry; Willie’s responsibility was to do the cooking.

Willie was a wonderful, obedient boy and I always knew that I could rely on him to look after

the flat if I had to go away for work. Sometimes I would have to go away for a few weeks at a

time and the two of them would look after everything whilst I was gone. Arthur was a bit

younger than Willie and he was still a bit disobedient.

Willie tried really hard at school, he was very reliable and at the end of his five years at college

he received a certificate that said that he had never missed a single day of school in that time.

Arthur was more of a reluctant scholar, he would often sleep in, one day Willie and I hung all the

blankets up to blacken the house and left Arthur sleeping there in his bed. When Willie arrived

back home from school, there was Arthur still fast asleep.

When Willie was just a baby he had a lucky escape one hot summer day. There are two types of

houses in Samoa, European and Samoan, and sometimes when it is very hot it is only the

Samoan houses that are cool enough to sleep in. It was just such a time when this boy Willie

was still a baby; he had been laid down to sleep in one of the Samoan houses that stood close to

the beach. Whilst he was sleeping a coconut tree came crashing down on top of the house. The

whole structure collapsed and we were devastated because we were sure that he had been killed.

But when we went inside and investigated, he was still lying there fast asleep. He had been very

lucky because some of the supporting beams had fallen beside him and they had kept the rest of

the debris from falling on him.

Willie was such a good boy and he was the brother that I had longed for, so we were very close.

When I was living at home he used to follow me around wherever I went, I had a little hut that I

had built outside and he would follow me out there. Sometimes when it was hot I would go and

sleep out there and he would always want to come with me.

When I came to New Zealand to live with my family, Willie decided that he wanted to move

over here with us. Once we were settled here he got an apprenticeship as an electrician and

began his training. Tragically he had only been working for a short while when he was

electrocuted and died. I was away at the time and didn’t get the cable till well after he his death.


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He had died on the Friday and I didn’t get the cable till the Sunday, so by the time I got back he

had already been buried. It was very sad, I still think of him a lot. He had missed me when I

moved to New Zealand and would have followed me over here.

My Army training

In Fiji when you are 18 years old you have to undertake compulsory military training. Once a

week you have to go along to the camp for training and then once a year you go away on training

camp for two weeks. This goes on for about three years.

When boys are all young together like this they tend to play pranks on each other and I played a

few. Sometimes we would wait until one of the boys was asleep and then we would carry him

down to the end of the wharf still asleep and drop him into the sea. We would be so quiet and

careful with the sleeping boy that he wouldn’t even wake up when we were carrying him. He

would only wake up when he hit the water. It was a stupid trick to do but it was also very funny

and because we were young and foolish, we never worried about anything bad happening. I

think now about what would have happened if there had been a shark or anything down there.

Nobody ever managed to pull that trick on me. The others tried a few times because they wanted

to get their revenge. But I was too smart for them; I always used to wake up when they were

creeping around trying to take me by surprise. Anyway, I think that I was a bit too big for them,

the one time they did manage to pick me up whilst I was still asleep I woke up and put an end to

their plans. It is amazing that when you get 300 or 400 boys all together the things that can go

on.

Because I was a deep-sea diver I was in a special class and I would get a chance to get away

from camp when the navy needed me to do work. I would take advantage of the fact that they

didn’t know exactly what I was doing sometimes, so when I came back from working for the

Navy I would sometimes tell them that I had been ordered to rest and they would let me go off to

bed.

One time I got ordered by a Colonel Whale from the New Zealand Army to come to where they

were stationed because one of their soldiers had been drowned in the river and they wanted me to


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dive and retrieve his body. Well I got to the camp and took one look at the river where he had

drowned and I knew right away that we weren’t going to find him. The river was fast flowing

and the soldier’s body would have been washed out to sea long ago. I explained to the Colonel

that with the flow of the water the soldier’s body would already have been washed out to sea, he

eventually understood what I was saying and called off the search.

So I had a day off at the New Zealand camp and then when I got back to my own camp the

Sergeant Major called out to me that I would be on duty that night patrolling the camp. Well I

wasn’t going to have any of that and I told the Sergeant Major that Colonel Whale had told me to

tell him that I was to have the night off as I had been working all day. He wasn’t happy but he

told me to get out and go off to bed, which I happily did. It was good fun but it was also foolish

fun sometimes too. I think that it is good to be young but that it is also good to get out of being

young as well.

Sometimes we would go to an island and camp there for two or three weeks and then all sorts of

things would happen. Once there was a soldier in our division who was very tidy and always

used to clean and clean his bayonet, he was a quiet boy and we played some tricks on him. Just

before parade one time we got hold of his bayonet whilst he was elsewhere and stuck it into the

mud so that it was all dirty. When the parade came along we were ordered to fix bayonets and of

course he got the shock of his life when he saw that his nice shiny bayonet was all covered in

mud. Of course he got into trouble for this as well and was punished.

We used to play all sorts of tricks and even though our Sergeant Major knew that we were

pulling the wool over his eyes he couldn’t catch us out. But eventually he left and was replaced

by a new man, Sergeant Major Elliot who was a tough man who was wise to all the tricks you

can play in the army. He had trained in a bigger army than ours, he had seen every trick in the

book you could imagine, and we were all scared of him. When he yelled we would have to

move quickly and we did.

Sometimes the army makes some crazy decisions. There was one time when the army had a

report from someone on the other side of the island that they had spotted a boat that might have

been the Japanese scouting round our island. So the army drove me and another chap all the way

across the island to this remote spot and told us to stay there the night and watch in case the boat

came back. Well the boat didn’t come back but I don’t know what we would have done if it had


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been the Japanese. We had no way of telling the army what was going on and I don’t think that

we could have done much good if the Japanese had landed there. But anyway all of this was in a

good cause and it was a war that had to be fought.

When I was still living in Fiji, I began to think seriously about taking a wife. My father had sat

me down and given me a serious talk when I was younger about what I should look for when it

came to choosing a wife. His advice had been sound and I have always remembered it. He had

told me that I should look beyond a girl’s face and not just think about whether she was pretty or

not. He said that I should also look beyond her to where she comes from, what she has done and

who her family is.

I thought of my father’s advice when I first met my wife Hilda; I saw that she was the backbone

of her family. She was the only daughter amongst seven brothers and she cooked and cleaned

for her whole family. She was also a kind person, her family had a girl who worked for them in

the kitchen and Hilda treated this girl very well, giving her things and looking after her. I look

back now and think that my father was a very intelligent man and gave me good advice.

The first time that I met Hilda was when I went to her 16th

birthday party. I already knew her

father Vincent Lobendahn, who worked as the Editor of the Fiji Times and I bumped into him

one Saturday down town after work. He told me that they were celebrating his daughter’s

birthday that night, and invited me along to her party. I said that I wasn’t sure whether I should

go as I had never met his daughter but he said that I would be welcome and encouraged me to go

along.

In the end I decided to go along to the party. When I got there I found that most of the people

were Hilda’s age. I was 24 years old at the time so I felt a good deal older. I spent some time

talking to Hilda’s father, then after a while I said to him that I had better show my respect and

have a dance with his daughter Hilda. I took her out on the dance floor and she wouldn’t talk to

me at all, so after a while I said ‘don’t be like that, you might be my wife one day’. Well she

took offence at that and walked off, leaving me standing on the dance floor alone.

That first meeting of ours was not a promising start, but I thought about Hilda a lot after that.

We got past that first meeting and became closer as time went on. Something must have gone


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right for us, because four years later we were married in the Presbyterian Church in Suva. We

married in this church as Hilda was still a Catholic at the time.

Napoleon’s inkwell

On our wedding day an interesting thing happened to us that I will never forget. Reverend

Stevenson, who happened to be the cousin of the world-renowned author, Robert Louis

Stevenson, married us. This priest had an inkwell that his famous cousin had given to him. It

came into his possession when he became a parson, I suppose as a gift to congratulate him.

This inkwell had a long and interesting history, Robert Louis Stevenson had received this

inkwell as a gift from Queen Victoria, and she in her turn had been given the inkwell by

Napoleon Bonaparte when she was in France. When this priest married us he showed us the

inkwell and let us hold it, he said to us that many famous people had held and used that inkwell

and he suggested that we hold it and think about the many famous people who had held it before

us. So that was what we did, it was carved out of a piece of rock and was quite big and heavy.

Soon we had our three beautiful children, Walnetta, Oscar and Matson and our life as a family

had begun. Now I look back and after all these years we are still married with three lovely

children and many grandchildren. It has been over sixty happy years and with the wonderful life

that we have had I feel that we must have done something right when we decided to marry all

those years ago.

I remember that when Hilda and I were first married and living in Fiji I decided that it would be

good for us to have a launch to use. As I was going to be the boat builder, it was just a matter of

getting the materials and finding the time to build the boat. I spent my spare time on weekends

and after work building this launch and made sure that it would be something that we could use

as a family.

The launch was a beautiful boat when it was finished. It was 24 feet long and was well fitted

out. It had proper sleeping accommodation and a galley so that we could go away on it for

weeks on end. Walnetta was only a little girl at the time and the three of us used to go away


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together on it. Because it was a well-built launch, we were able to visit many of the islands

around Fiji.

Walnetta had an accident when she was only 20 months old. We had some visitors that day and

when they were leaving everyone went outside to say goodbye to them. The car was parked on

the other side of the road and everyone crossed over to the car. Nobody realized that little

Walnetta was following along behind, they crossed over to the side of the road and just after they

had crossed a big truck came along. Little Walnetta had followed and was standing on the

roadside of the car, unseen by the other people. The truck went past and as it did, she was struck

by the rear wheel of the truck and thrown away from the truck. In a way, she was lucky because

if she had been hit by the front of the truck she would have been killed, I can’t even bear to think

about that. As it was, she was knocked badly by that truck.

It was the saddest day of my life; Hilda phoned me when it happened and I came straight home

and took little Walnetta up to the hospital where they found that she had a broken leg, which they

set in plaster. They wanted to keep her up there in the hospital and I left her there that night but I

could not rest easy when I got back home.

I couldn’t sleep that night because I was worrying about Walnetta so much. At about 3 o’clock

in the morning I gave up on trying to sleep and decided to go down to the hospital to see how she

was doing. When I got there, the nurse on duty tried to turn me away. She said that I wasn’t

allowed to come in because it was so late at night.

I said, “Who says so, that is my daughter lying in there”.

I told that nurse that I was going to see my daughter Walnetta no matter what she said. I was so

fired up the nurse went off and got the matron to stop me from going into the hospital. Well that

didn’t work either, so then they went off and got a Doctor to come and talk to me but I still

wouldn’t leave.

I said to the Doctor: “What do you think you are doing telling me I can’t be here. My daughter is

all wet. Why haven’t you looked after her?”

I told them that I was going to take her home then and there. They sent for the head doctor who

managed to cool me down, I was so mad. This head Doctor, he realized that I wasn’t going to

take no for an answer and he said that I could take her home as long as I brought her back every


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morning before eight o’clock and at five o’clock in the evening. Well I agreed to that and I took

little Walnetta home where I could keep a good eye on her.

The only lasting injury that Walnetta had in the end was a broken leg; I think that she was very

lucky. Still it upset me so because all I could think about was how bad the accident could have

been. When she had the plaster on it never seemed to worry her too much, she would hop

around with her broken leg in plaster and recovered quickly but I never could forget about what

could have happened.

Kuru

Whilst I was working in Fiji, the government decided that I could have an assistant to help me

out. They hired a Fijian boy called Kuru whose job it was to run errands and assist me with my

work. He was turned out to be a good boy and he ended up working for me for ten or twelve

years. He was only young when he first started working for me but he was very reliable and we

got along well. He became a good friend and I was sad to leave him when I left Fiji.

When I was working, I would send him off to get my lunch or to do errands for me. Sometimes

it would be a long time before he came back and I would ask him where he had been. He would

say to me that he couldn’t come any sooner because my daughter Walnetta had been getting him

to do things for her. This was because part of Kuru’s job was to take her to the kindergarten in

the morning and then at lunchtime he would return to pick her up and take her home.

After he had been doing this for a while, it would be a long time before he came back and I

would say: ‘Where the heck have you been?’

He would explain to me that Walnetta had made him take her to one place and then another place

on the way back from the kindergarten and before you know it, it would be one o’clock already.

There was a park just over the road from our house and she always wanted him to take her there

to play on the swings before they went home. When I left Fiji to come to New Zealand he

missed me terribly, all the people in my gang did.


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Hilda learning to drive

When Hilda first got her drivers licence she was so nervous, she set off to drive into town one

day and instead of driving out into the road she hit the front gates. It happened that I was sick at

home that day and Hilda wanted to go out and pick up her sister to have lunch. So off she went

and I stayed there in bed, now about an hour or so after Hilda had left I heard her voice crying

out to me. ‘Oscar Oscar’.

I came out of the house and saw her; I said ‘what the heck are you doing there?’

She was off the road and the car was wedged between the fence and the lamppost, positioned so

that Hilda couldn’t open either of the car doors and couldn’t move the car. She hadn’t hit

anything but she was in such a tiny space.

I had to stand there and direct her until she could slowly move the car out of the way, when she

could, she opened the car door and I got in and moved it out of that tight spot. You would think

that this would have put her off driving for a while, but she kept on driving and in the end

became a more confident driver.

Morris Cowley van

I had a 1923 Morris Cowley van, which I converted into a station wagon. I built the cab for the

Morris out of timber. I was already experienced at working with cars because I had been trained

through my work and I enjoyed doing it well.

I had a motorbike that was hard to start and sometimes I would have to run the motorbike along

to get it going. It would be a big task when I was trying to go out sometimes. It wouldn’t start

when I kicked it and so I would try to get it up on a slow sloping hill so that I could have a good

run down to start it up.


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I owned this motorbike when I was living in Fiji. It was a BSA motorbike and the way that I got

it was this. There was a company in Fiji that had an ice delivery business and they had this big

BSA motor bike. It was a huge thing with a sidecar that they used to transport the ice around.

There came a time when they didn’t need the motorbike anymore, I can’t remember exactly why

but I think that it was because they had bought a van for deliveries. Anyway I bought it off

them, I had had my eye on this bike for some time and I had a plan to do something unusual with

it. In the end I only partially completed the conversion. It was a lot more work than I expected

and I decided to sell it on so I sold it to someone else who completed the work on it.

War years

During the war there were many many soldiers from overseas living in and around Fiji. There

were around 60,000 soldiers and although some of them were out patrolling the Pacific there

were always plenty of soldiers in Fiji. It was a funny thing because at the beginning of the war

there were mainly New Zealand soldiers stationed in Fiji. I would always see them strolling

around with the local girls, they had a great time and the Fijian girls wouldn’t leave them alone.

Those New Zealand soldiers were having a great time of it, but it didn’t last for them.

As the war progressed and the Americans started coming into the Pacific everything changed.

The American soldiers started coming to Fiji on leave and once they were there the local girls

only had eyes for the American soldiers and the New Zealand soldiers didn’t get a look in

anymore. The poor New Zealanders, they were terribly underpaid compared to the Americans

and they just couldn’t compete.

Some of the American used to stay at our place. We actually didn’t have a choice because if we

didn’t agree we would have been shifted somewhere else. There always used to be a superior

officer there to control them though, because some of those soldiers could be quite wild. There

was quite a lot of drunkenness going on. They would have a Major or a Sergeant Major staying

there with them who would be in charge and make sure that they behaved themselves. They

made sure that they behaved and if they did cause any trouble, they would be sent straight back

to camp.


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Because we had a big house that was near the centre of Suva we were able to have quite a few

soldiers staying with us, usually there were about six or seven of them at a time. They would

come over from the other side of Fiji on leave and they would stay with us. There was a big

veranda running right around the outside of our house and we used to have beds laid out all along

it. That’s where they would sleep when they came back in the evenings. We didn’t have to feed

them or anything, all they would do was stay with us and sleep there.

I remember a story about one of these soldiers who was billeted with us. It was early on in the

war and we hadn’t had many soldiers to stay so we were still new at it. He didn’t have any

money when he came to stay with us and asked me if I would loan him some money. I felt sorry

for him so I lent him $10.00 (which was quite a bit of money then) to tide him over.

When he left at the end of his leave, he promised me that would return to repay the money that I

had lent him. I was sure that he would come back and do as he promised because he seemed to

be an honest person. Time passed and this chap didn’t turn up to repay the loan. After many

weeks and months, this soldier still hadn’t returned and I began to think that I had been wrong in

trusting him. It was very disappointing for me.

Finally, the time came when the unit that he was in was going to be leaving Fiji and I gave up

any hope of his returning the money. Their convoy went past our house on the way to the docks

and as they were passing, I saw this chap travelling with them. He had stopped the convoy so

that he could get off at my house for a moment. He ran up to me and quickly gave me the money

he owed me. I was so overwhelmed that I just cried, I couldn’t believe that he had made that

effort to return the money. I cried because he had justified the faith that I originally had in him

and because I had felt so hurt when I thought that he wasn’t going to return the money. He was

really an honest person.

I didn’t mind having to billet soldiers on leave because the New Zealand Army and Navy was

always good to me. The New Zealand Navy men, in particular, used to come to our house quite a

lot. I had quite a lot of contact with them because of my diving work. .Whenever a ship would

come over from New Zealand with supplies for their men they would always bring over an extra

sheep for us.


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My career as a deep sea diver

My father had great plans for me to have a career as an Accountant once I had finished

secondary school, but by the time I was 17 I knew in my heart that it was not the path for me.

Although I was still attending school my interests lay elsewhere. I loved playing sports and the

range of sports available in Fiji was far greater than in Savai’i.

My family had a friend called Alex Bentley who worked as the foreman in the Government Boat

Building yard. He was the cousin of my Aunty Emma’s husband so I had been introduced to

him since I had been staying with them whilst at school. He was a very kind man and he offered

me a job there so that I could earn some money for myself. It was a good opportunity for me, I

had been falling behind in my accountancy studies and had already decided that I needed to

change my career plans.

I started an apprenticeship at the Boat Building yard along with seven other young men. Five of

them didn’t last long and left early on, but the rest of us stayed and got stuck into the work. The

wages were very poor; it was one pound a week when we first started. We worked 48 hours per

week, Monday through Friday we started at 7.30am every morning and finished at 5.30pm. On

Saturdays we would work a half-day starting at 7.30am and finishing at 11.45am.

Alex Bentley treated me very well; I feel that I owe my life to him because he gave me the

opportunity to be a deep-sea diver. There were about six or seven other employees there who

were around the same age as me but I was the one who was chosen to train as a diver. I think

that I had a different attitude to the other young people that were working there; I was always

respectful and carried out the work that they wanted me to do. I think that this is because of the

discipline that I had learnt from my father and I appreciate him for this.

The Fijian government had to have a qualified deep-sea diver working at their Boat Building

yard because they had no facility for docking ships. If the ships were damaged the insurers

required a report on the damage, so to fulfil the requirements they would have to send a diver

down. The Government diver was also responsible for maintaining the slipways and inspecting

the wharves and bridges around Fiji.


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When I first started working at the Boat Building yard the deep-sea diver they had working there

was an Australian man, but he soon resigned from his post, as he wanted to return to Australia.

There was nobody qualified to replace him in Fiji so the opportunity came up to go through the

training programme and take up the position he was leaving.

This was a well-paid job and when Alex Bentley offered me the opportunity to undergo training I

accepted, by then I was 18 or 19 years old. In addition to the physical training, there was a lot of

study involved and I learnt it well because I knew that my life would depend on my knowledge

of the safety procedures required when diving.

A deep-sea diver wears a full canvas suit, brass boots, brass breastplate, a big helmet and a big

load of lead to weigh you down. It can get very hot down there because of the thick suit you are

wearing and you are also wearing that ton of lead that keeps you on the bottom.

Air is piped down to you by a team of men using a wheel pump who work away in a boat

anchored above the diver. There were no other deep-sea divers in the region, I always worked

alone down there under the water but I could communicate with the team up on the boat through

a telephone in my helmet.

Because the air supply doesn’t run out, you can stay underwater for long stretches of time. I

would sometimes stay down for five or six hours at a time if there was a big job that I wanted to

get done. Because of all the gear you wear and the precautions needed to stop the bends, it was

easier to stay down there than go back up to the surface to take a break. If I got tired after I had

been working for a long stretch, I would lie down on the seabed for a few minutes and have a

nap before starting back to work again. The poor guys up on the surface would be turning the

wheel and pumping away, not knowing that I was resting down there.

When you are diving you can get the bends if you are careless. I studied very hard to be a diver

and they trained me to be aware of the dangers, I learnt that if you go down gradually the

pressure changes and you can adjust as you go. But if you start to feel anything wrong you need

to stop and stay there for a few minutes. The bends is a bad thing but it mostly only happens

because of the divers themselves making poor decisions.


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The only time I really had trouble with the bends was when I was diving during the war. A New

Zealand airplane, which had been out on a training flight, had crashed into the sea with six

people on board. We went out to the crash site to confirm what had happened and inspect the

wreckage. Along with us on the boat was a friend of one of the passengers; this man was sitting

up on top crying whilst I went down. The poor chap was especially upset because he was the

one who was supposed to go on this flight but he had wanted to go out on a date and his friend

had agreed to take his place.

The plane was sitting in about 100 feet of water and it was very murky down there. I landed on a

flat surface and assumed that I had reached the bottom so I signalled to the team up on the

surface to let me off. But I was actually standing on the tail of the plane, which was sitting

above the seabed. When they released me I fell down through the water to the bottom.

The fall was only a few feet but at that depth it was still a dangerous thing. There would have

been 60lbs change in pressure and the pain in my head when it happened was terrible. I felt

really sick and had to sit down on the seabed until the pain decreased and I was able to move

around again. When I felt better I got up and inspected the plane. I found the people who had

gone on the flight all still sitting there, dead inside the plane. It was sad, some of their

parachutes were hanging outside the aircraft, but none of them had managed to escape the plane.

The English and New Zealand navy didn’t have their own diver so they, as well as the Fijian

government, used my services. Sometimes I had to go through ships when they had been sunk.

During the war I once had to go and examine a huge American ship that had been bombed by the

Japanese. The Williams was a type of cargo ship called a liberty ship that had been specially

built for use during the war. There were about 60,000 American soldiers stationed in Fiji and

this ship contained all their supplies and a load of valuable equipment such as jeeps.

We had to travel almost as far as the Solomon Islands to reach the ship; this was close to where

the Japanese were and was in a very dangerous position. The Japanese were not bombing right

where we were at the time, but intelligence knew they were close. However they needed to

know if the ship could be repaired and if any of the equipment could be salvaged.


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When we arrived at the ship, we found it sitting were it had been hit, perched on a reef. The

bomb had gone right through from one side to the other tearing a huge hole that you could have

rowed a boat through. The ship had gone straight down, but had stopped sinking when it reached

an angle of about 45 degrees. This was fortunate because the navy were able to get all the crew

off.

I spent about a week at the site of the shipwreck; whilst we were there we were under the orders

of the local British command. At 9am on the first day we started planning what to do but it was

difficult because of the position that ship was lodged in and by the end of the first day we had not

done as much as I had hoped.

The British Commander wanted to know first whether the ships engines were still in good

working order. When I finally dived down to the wreck I found it so damaged by the bomb that I

had to go right down to the propeller shaft to examine it properly. It was dark inside the ship and

whilst I was hunting around I lost my way, which was very frightening, as I had nobody to guide

or advise me.

But when I first began doing this type of work I had trained myself as to what I should do if I got

lost whilst I was inside these huge sunken ships. It was very important not to panic, so I did as I

had always planned and sat down there in the hull of the ship and waited till my heart had

stopped racing. You must remember of course that I was doing this without a partner, so I could

rely only on myself.

After I was calm I managed to work out where I was in the ship and made my way on through

towards the aft. When I finally reached the engine room I inspected it and found that it was still

in good condition. After that it was easier to trace my way back out using my air hose to guide

me. When I think about how dangerous the assignment was, with the added threat of being

attacked by the Japanese, I still get a bit scared but I was only young and didn’t worry the same

about those things.

Once the engine room and the hull of the ship had been examined, the British Commander

decided that the next step was to salvage the millions and millions of dollars worth of equipment

that was stored on board. It was a difficult job and after about a week of hard work we had little


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to show for our efforts. I felt that some of the equipment just couldn’t be unloaded but the

British Commander insisted that we continue.

After about a week the American Commander came out to see how the operation was going. He

was not happy with the length of time the job was taking, considering the dangerous position that

we were working in. He decided to call in an American diver, who had worked on the salvage

operation on the Oklahoma to assist us. When the diver arrived he inspected the wreck and

confirmed what I already believed. He said that the salvage operation was too difficult and he

told us to end the whole operation.

The American diver told his Commander that the salvage operation was too difficult and that we

would have to abandon the equipment. The American Commander had final say and he ordered

us to stop work and leave the ship and its cargo where it lay. So the whole lot, millions of

dollars worth of equipment, was left sitting on top of the reef and we made our way back to Fiji.

The Americans knew me already because they had used me on other diving jobs before. All the

American soldiers seemed to know me by name and they would call out to me in greeting when

they saw me. They found it very strange that I was working as a diver and yet had been drafted

into the Army rather than the navy. But that was not my doing, when the war came I was drafted

into the Army because at that time in Fiji any European or part European had compulsory Army

military training.

As we were approaching Fiji after one of our long trips I could hear all the soldiers greeting me.

As we approached the wharf they called out ‘Oscar, Oscar you have a daughter’ and that was

how I found out that my first child had been born that day. As I made my way towards home

they cried out ‘She’s a girl’, I hurried closer.

My daughter had been born that day, I got home and there she was; my first child, Walnetta. She

was born 11 December 1942. I knew that I was likely to be away at the time of the birth because

I was being called away for diving work so often. As a consequence I had made arrangements

with the doctors and nurses to be present at the birth.

Walnetta’s name is unusual and I will explain to you how she came by it. We had a friend, a

Colonel and his name was Wallace. We told him that we were going to name our first child after


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him and he liked the idea. Now of course Walnetta turned out to be a girl so we couldn’t go

calling her Wallace. Then our friend suggested that instead we call her Walnetta, so that’s what

we did.

Deep sea diving was very pleasant work but it was dangerous now I think of it. I was much

younger then and it didn’t seem so dangerous to me. Once when the Army were unloading some

equipment they dropped a depth charge into 150 feet of water. They had to get it back up, so I

went down there and retrieved it. I was surprised that I found it at all because it was so deep in

the water. When I think about it now, I tell myself that I was stupid to do something so

dangerous.

On another occasion the Army were unloading 6” bullets for the cannons and they dropped a

whole load down into the ocean, I had to go down and pick them all up. That was in 1942 and I

was only 28, I still didn’t have enough brains to know better.

Another part of the diver’s job was to maintain the slipway, boats of around 500 tons needed to

be able to use the slipway safely. It was important that there were no accidents and I used to

travel round the country inspecting and maintaining them.

I also did some work building and maintaining the wharves around Fiji. There was a wharf in

Vitia, which was being built by a man named Williams who was an engineer from England. His

work habits on this job had been influenced by his foreman. Mr Williams was a single man and

was always off at parties whilst his workers carried on alone. A man called Arthur Groom had

been brought to Fiji to work on the wharf and I was loaned to him by the boat building yard.

This wharf had already been built about 100 yards from the shore outwards, and then there was a

cross-section of it at the end. The workers had already driven piles on the end of the wharf and

they were now carting rocks to build up the lead on to the wharf.

The wharf was about 200 yards to the deeper water, the trucks kept on coming and unloading

tons of rock until they got out to where the piles were. As the trucks continued unloading rocks,

Mr Williams and his foreman Cuthbert (whom I knew very well) were off partying. When they

came back and discovered that the rocks the trucks were dumping were pushing the wharf out to


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sea, it was too late. The wharf had gone too far and it was too late to do anything. This was

when they brought in Arthur Groom, a very clever man who worked as the third or fourth

engineer on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Although he was clever Mr Groom was very careless in Fiji, as far as his workers were

concerned. He decided that the piles had to be pulled back and they tried to do this from above

but couldn’t because so many of them were broken. To be successful they needed to employ a

diver and as the only diver in Fiji, they needed my help on the job. This was why the

Government decided to loan me to them.

My job was to be underneath the wharf directing the rack. The rack that they had built, with one

winch pulling from one side, was too large to drag the big rocks that had been dumped against

the piles. They had one anchor on one side and one winch that pulls it back whilst the other one

pulls the rocks out. In this way they tried to pull the rocks out the way, clearing the way so that

they could pull the piles straight.

Sometimes when I was down below the wharf I couldn’t see a thing. There was a lot of silt

being thrown up and the water was very murky. As I was coming up from the bottom one time, I

saw a huge octopus that had been disturbed by our work, all the mud that had been stirred up

down there must have blinded it. It must have been down there on the bottom the whole time I

was working and I was very glad that I had not seen it whilst I was down there. The creature

must have been at least 18 feet across, I felt that if he had got me whilst I was down there I

would not have been able to get away and he would have been able to keep me down there for

company. The workers hauled the giant octopus in and they had a huge feast that night.

This work was very dangerous and I told Mr Groom this, but he was so reckless with his workers

that he didn’t care to listen to anyone. After about 3 or 4 weeks I decided that I couldn’t put up

with the working conditions any longer so I packed up and returned to Suva. My boss Mr Saben

said ‘what on earth have you done?’ when I told him that I had left because it was too dangerous.

He blew me up and said that I should have stayed because there was nobody else to do my job. I

refused to go back, saying that I believed that someone would be killed there, though I hoped

that I was wrong.


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Not long after I had left this job one of the foremen, a man called Tom Stewart, was killed on the

site. He had been standing on the barge and a man called Derek was shifting something. He was

using some equipment with wire stays, which I had already told Mr Groom needed repairing, the

wires snapped and the load came down onto the end of a board. Tom was standing on the other

end and the impact threw him up into the air. As he was coming down he was hit by some of the

load and died instantly. It was a sad story.

The message of Tom’s death came to us through reports in the early morning newspaper and on

the radio. The first thing that I did was go straight up to Mr Saben's office and wait till he

arrived at 9.00am. When he arrived I asked him if he had heard about the tragedy at Vatia

Wharf. He said that he had been saddened to hear the news and was very glad now that I had

walked off the job. That was another feather in my cap.

People always wanted to work on my diving team. Once we went to do a long job on a big barge

that had sunk and they put up a little house (about one bedroom) for my wife, our first child and

me. There was another separate house for all the other workers to sleep in. We also had a big

pontoon. At that time any gang that worked with me used to call me chief.

When we arrived the people at the nearby village invited us to a party, which was a Fijian

custom. I said to the worker who passed on the invitation to go with his people and take some

tins of biscuits, give them to the village and say that I am sorry that I couldn’t come because I

was tired. They went over to the village in the next bay but next thing I heard the launch come

back. The worker came in and said that the villagers wouldn’t start the party without me so I

decided that I had better go.

Hilda and I found a boy to baby-sit Walnetta whilst we were away and we made our way over to

the village. Once we arrived we found that there was a Fijian man there who was always a

spokesman at important occasions. He told us that he had been asked to report on what we were

doing to the President of the United States. He said that he was going to tell the President about

us and the work that we had been doing. I was amazed that the President could be interested in

the work we did.

One sad occasion that I remember well happened one day when I was back in Nadi. I was in

town and happened to bump into a friend of mine called Bill. He was a good tradesman whom I


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knew well, he was on his way home from work and stopped to talk to me. It must have been

early afternoon; he told me that he had finished work early so that he could take his kids out for a

ride in their launch. I wished him well and carried on my way.

The next morning some people came and asked me to come out and dive to look for him as he

had disappeared. It turned out that when Bill was out in the launch, one of the kids fell

overboard while the boat was still going. Bill had jumped straight over the side to save the boy.

He was in such a hurry that he forgot that the launch was still going. The two children who were

left in the launch were under ten and it took them a while to work out what to do. Finally the girl

managed to stop the engine but by then they were some distance away and out of sight of Bill

and his child.

When Bill and his kids did not return, searchers went out and finally found the girl and boy who

were drifting in the launch, but there was no sign of the other two. By the time they came and

got me they had already searched the land and the sea, they knew that all hope of finding Bill and

the child alive had gone but his family wanted me to try and find their bodies. I tried to tell the

searchers that we wouldn’t be able to find Bill or the child because the tide would have taken his

body away. Also there were many sharks around that could have eaten them.

Even though it was hopeless I had to dive to satisfy the family. It had been almost 24 hours

since Bill and the child had gone overboard and there was really no hope. When you are up on

the top in this stretch of water you can see that there are two colours of water, and when there are

two colours it means the tide is pulling in different directions. It was very sad; it is not easy

going to look for the dead. I searched around for some time but I never did find the bodies, in a

way I was glad because it would have been terrible to come across their corpses.

Even though there were many sharks around the waters that I dived in, I never saw a shark in all

the years I was diving, only other fish. When you go down the colour of the water changes, first

it turns grey and then the next thing it is so bright and the colours change all the time. So it is

very hard to pick up any floating thing in the water. The other fish that is dangerous is the

barracuda. It is always looking at you, wherever you move there it is looking at you, it moves so

fast you don’t see it. It is a very unpredictable sort of fish, always facing at you and watching.

Sometimes these fish can grow as long as my couch. One never attacked me but I didn’t want to

give them too much chance.


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One of my other jobs was to be in charge of rigging radio masts so that the military could send

signals to each other. It was strange because some days I would be up in the air 100 feet rigging

masts and then next thing I would be diving 100 feet under the water. We would have to build

the masts on different islands but sometimes we would be heading for islands that were still

being fought over with the Japanese.

Once we were on our way to Nauru to rig a mast, whilst we were waiting to get there we got the

message that the Japanese had already taken the island. They had installed a big cannon and as

the Allied ships approached the island to pick up supplies of phosphate they would bomb and

sink them.

After I left Fiji at the end of the war I took a job with a boatbuilding firm and left my diving days

behind me. The only time that I had to work as a diver in New Zealand was when one of the

Harbour Board dredges sunk out here and they were trying to raise it. The divers that they had

hired were using aqualungs. The Harbour Board wanted them to brace the barge back together,

as it had been broken in to two halves. After that they planned on being able to raise it up from

the bottom. The divers had been cutting the wood that they needed to use up on the surface and

couldn’t get the measurements right so the job had been taking a long time. This was when the

Harbour Board called me out and asked me to go down and inspect the barge. Once I had got

down to the bottom I found that there was a huge pile of discarded timber bigger than a house

beside the sunken barge. The divers had never been able to stay down long enough to get the

measurements right and because of this most of the timber that they had brought down had been

the wrong length. The pile of timber was the waste pile from when they had got the

measurements wrong.

Life in New Zealand

By 1946 the war was over and it was becoming easier for people to travel, I was still working in

and around Fiji as a deep-sea diver but I was restless for change. I had been anxious to leave Fiji

when the war had started but had not been able. Now I was due for three months leave on full

pay and I decided that I would take my family to New Zealand. The terms of my job meant that

I could have taken Hilda, Walnetta, Oscar and young Matson to New Zealand, Australia or


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England but I chose Auckland because Hilda and I both had family there. Hilda had a sister

living here and I had my Aunty Emma and her husband Ronald who had stayed with us recently

in Fiji. Whilst he was staying with us he had encouraged us to come over saying that we should

stay with them.

When I was due for a 3-month holiday overseas we decided to spend the time in New Zealand. I

already had the idea that we should move to this country as I thought that there would be better

opportunities here for our children. It was a long time to be away in another country and I

decided that it would be a good idea to bring our car with us. At that time I was the only person

in our yard that owned a car, mine was a 1939 Morris 8. Because we would be travelling round a

lot, I built a roof rack and a carry compartment in the back. It looked very smart by the time we

left.

Whilst we were staying in Auckland I went to visit a friend of mine, Evi Arbuthnot, who was

working for a local firm, Shipbuilders Ltd. He suggested that I come and work for them whilst I

was in New Zealand. I explained that I was there on holiday and already had a job back in Fiji,

but he tried to convince me that it would be a good idea as I could earn some extra money. He

got me to talk to the foreman, John Ledger, who was a fine person. It turned out that he was a

qualified shipwright who had originally come from Tonga, meeting and talking to him helped

convince me to go and work for them. Because I was really supposed to be on holiday, they said

that I would be allowed time off to do the other things I wanted whilst I was working for them.

This was just after the end of the war and there were a lot of shipyards owned by private

companies here. Many of them were sited down on the waterfront and at the time there was a

shortage of qualified boat builders in Auckland, many of the men who had been working in the

business at the beginning of the war had grown old and retired. One of the main types of work

that this firm was doing when I first went to work for them was reinstating ships and boats.

During the course of the war many ships and boats had been requisitioned from private

individuals to use by the Government. Our job was to return them to their original condition so

that they could be returned to their rightful owners.

This firm were keen to have me because I was a qualified boat builder and it was a requirement

of law that every shipbuilding yard should have a qualified boat builder on site. When I spoke to

the foreman I told him that I could build a boat from the keel right up to the truck, which is the


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piece that sits just at the top of the mast. On the day I started work John took me over to where a

chap called Bill MacKinty was working on a ferry belonging to Sir Ernest Davis who owned the

Devonport Ferry Company. He was building a staircase with fancy railings to go between the

two decks and John wanted to know if I could build a staircase like that. I told him that I could

do this type of carpentry and he set me to work building an identical staircase on the other side of

the boat.

As I was working on the staircase I couldn’t help noticing the other workers who kept coming

over to watch me as I was working. Most of them were not qualified tradesmen; they were used

to help out with the work but couldn’t set out a boat or anything like that. They were watching

me to try and learn from the way that I was doing things. Sir Ernest Davis, who owned the ship,

also used to come along to check on its progress and he also praised the work that I was doing.

It wasn’t long after I had finished working on this first ship that I was told to go and see the

manager, Mr Hokey Williams. He told me that their foreman Dick was due for retirement and

they were looking for someone to replace him. Hokey asked me if I would like to stay in New

Zealand and work for them as foreman, taking over from this chap Dick. At first I wasn’t too

keen on the idea as I already had a great job in Fiji, but Hokey Williams told me that he could

organise all my immigration papers for me and help me apply for residency so I told him that I

would think it over.

Once I got home from work I sat down and talked things over with Hilda. I told her that the job

looked good and that there would be about 100 men working under me in the place where I

would be foreman. As we talked about it we realised that New Zealand could give better

opportunities for our children in the way of education and better job opportunities. Still it was a

hard choice, Fiji is a beautiful place and I loved living there but I decided that there was not

enough work in the end. I had just been lucky that I had found a place to work that I could fit

into and build up into a really good job for myself. I still believe that the reason that I did so

well in that job was because I was obedient and willing to do all the things that I was asked to.

In the time that I worked in Fiji I never refused to do anything, it had been a wonderful job but

after sincere thought we decided to make the move to New Zealand.

I went hunting for a place for us to live in Auckland but it was very difficult, at the time there

was a very strong colour bar in New Zealand. Every morning I used to wake up at 2.00 am, go


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and buy the newspaper and then look through the advertisements for places to rent. I travelled

all over to look for a place for us. I went out to Titirangi in the west, down south and up north but

still I couldn’t find anywhere. Finally I decided to go and get a caravan and put it in Panmure

where some lovely friends of Hilda’s sister Ruby owned a place. The chap who owned the place

was a Tahitian named Joe, he had married Harry Backhouse-Smith’s sister, and they were really

a wonderful couple.

Still, my time working in Fiji was not quite over. I had to go back to Fiji in order to resign from

my job and once I got there I found that the Government was waiting for me to do a job there.

The job was for the New Zealand Air force and I felt that I really had to stay to do the job as they

were depending on me. I went off to inspect the job, which involved raising a barge that had

sunk out by Suva Point. This was a large concrete barge that had been built as a hotel/motel

where the seaplanes used to land and discharge their passengers so that they didn’t have to go

ashore.

The barge had sunk because somebody had left the forward hatch open one night when there was

a storm blowing, the barge had filled up with water and sunk completely in the end. The New

Zealand Air force wanted me to raise the barge although I told them that it looked like an

impossible job because it was made of concrete. I was very familiar with this particular barge

because I had been one of the people who had worked on it when it was originally built. We had

built a six-inch thick concrete partition and all the inside rooms so I knew just how heavy it was.

The New Zealand Air Force people told me that I had to stay and make an attempt at getting it

back afloat as their Prime Minister Fraser had ordered that a salvage attempt be made.

I had been hoping to finish the job within four weeks but it was an impossible job and as we kept

on trying to raise the barge the time stretched out to nine weeks. All the time I knew that there

was no hope on earth of raising this barge. The barge was about 60ft long and 60ft wide and had

been built so that the planes were able to go right inside and unload their passengers. The planes

that they used were called Sunderland flying boats that used to fly out from Mechanics Bay in

Auckland. The flights would take them eight hours to get to Suva and then another eight hours

to get back.

To try to raise the barge we ran inch and a half thick chains under the barge. By using these

chains the New Zealand Air force Commander hoped to gradually drag the barge back towards


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shore using the rise and fall of the tide to slowly lift it up. In my knowledge of floating things I

felt that there was no hope and that the strain of the tide would break the chains. We carried on

for nine weeks until finally the Commander decided to call it a day.

All the time that I had been working away in Fiji, my wife Hilda had been living in that caravan

in New Zealand with our three young children. I was worried about them but I realised that I

would be in trouble if I tried to leave. I had to stay there and do this impossible job. The Air

Force people I was working for had promised me that they would reward me if I stayed and I had

no doubt that I had to stay as I wanted to become a new Zealand citizen and didn’t want any

trouble, I wanted to be very careful. In the end the Government was happy that an effort had

been made.

Finally I was able to leave Fiji and return to Hilda and the children, I had hated the thought of

them being stuck in a caravan all that time even though I knew that Hilda was very active and

able to look after them all. The New Zealand Government were going to fly me back to New

Zealand but they thought that I should also take a holiday. They offered to take me to New

Caledonia, Singapore and Norfolk Island to stay for as long as I wanted on our way back. I told

them that I would like to do this but that I was thinking only of my wife at that time.

Still the New Zealand Air force people tried to get me to take a bit of a holiday as we were flying

back. First they took me to New Caledonia, they asked me how long I wanted to stay and I said

that just one day would do. Then they took me to Norfolk Island and the same thing happened, I

said that it would be fine if they just stopped there for one day. After leaving Norfolk Island they

finally brought me to Auckland where I could be reunited with Hilda and the children. That was

the end of my time in Fiji.

I finally returned to New Zealand and started my new job. Shipbuilders Ltd was owned by Eric

Winstone, the oldest son of George Winstone of the Winstone family. He was the one who

helped me fill out my immigration papers and apply for residency, which went through with no

problem at all. His firm made all types of boats, they were wooden hulled and some of them

were very big. Some of these turned out to be really beautiful boats.


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Once we were settled back in Auckland I started looking for a place to live again. I came across

a woman called Mrs Fances who was advertising a boarding house that she wanted to rent out.

Well she turned out to be the biggest crook, a liar and one of the nastiest women on this earth. I

think that all she was interested in was the money but I said that I would pay the bond that she

wanted. Still, she told me that she had changed her mind about the boarding house but that she

had a house at 43 Church St, Devonport that she would rent to us. She told me how beautiful the

house was and told me that she needed ninety pounds in bond. The rent that she was asking was

2 pounds a week and yet she wanted that much in bond. I hadn’t seen the house but I told her

that I would take it anyway.

When I went to see the house I found that it was a real pigsty, the weeds were so high that you

could hardly see the road. That house stands next door to the one I live in today. I realised that

if I wanted to live in it I would have to clean the whole place up. I was exhausted from looking

for somewhere to live, everywhere that I went there would be a sign up saying the place was for

rent but when I went in and asked they would say sorry, the place is gone. I knew that this was

because of my colour and I felt that this house in Devonport was my only alternative so I took it

anyway.

When I took Hilda and the children to see the place she just sat down and cried at the sight of it,

she looked at me and said ‘How can you put me and my children in this house?’

I made Hilda a promise then and there, I told her: ‘Hilda, I promise you that I will fix this house

and before long you will be proud to own it’.

When I started cleaning the house and section up the council told me that the place had never

been cleaned or attempted to be cleaned since the beginning of the war. I could believe it, the

grass in front of that place must have been six feet high. Well I got stuck into it every day, I

cleaned on Saturdays and Sundays, and I cleaned it in the nighttime. People soon began to

notice that I was cleaning the place up and generally doing some good, one of the people who

noticed was the chap who lived next door, Angus McDonald, who was a member of the council.

He told the council that I was cleaning up all the mess and one of the clerks from the council

came round to see me. Good people ran the council here, the clerk told me to pile all the rubbish

I got from the section out onto the road and that they would send a truck to take it all away.

They were very kind to me and they were also happy to see that someone was finally cleaning

the house up.


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Besides cleaning up the outside of the house, I also did a lot of work on the inside as well. The

whole house had to be scrubbed and then we hung wallpaper and painted it all. I was much

younger then and I had Hilda working alongside me, we did the work together and before long

the house was beautifully done and we were able to move in with the children.

Unfortunately once the place was looking good that old lady, Mrs Fances decided that she could

now get more money for it. She used to come round when I wasn’t there and annoy Hilda by

telling her that she wanted her to leave so she could charge more rent. She never came round

when I was there; she just used to harass Hilda. I went and saw a lawyer about the situation and

he wrote Mrs Fances a letter telling her that if she continued harassing Hilda she would be

prosecuted. Not only did he do that, he also informed her that she had to reduce the rent to one

pound ten shillings a week because she had been overcharging us. He said that she also had to

give us twelve hours notice before she came onto the property otherwise I didn’t have to let her

in.

When Mrs Fances got the letter from the lawyer she came round crying and apologising for

having cheated us. She was upset because the lawyer had told her that she had to repay all the

money she had cheated us out of. I felt sorry for her but I told her to do as the lawyer had said

and to leave us in peace. After that things went along smoothly and when I asked her if I could

build a shed on the property she agreed. From then on I used to build boats there at night so that

I could make up enough money for us to be able to build our own house.

Once we had enough money we bought a section in Browns Bay and we were planning on

building a house there, but one day when I was out this way I happened to notice that this house

at 41 Church St, Devonport was up for sale. The chap who was living here had a sign out front

so I had a look around and found that the house was very dilapidated. It was up for sale for 850

pounds, the price was low because the house was falling to pieces. But in 1946 we bought the

house despite the condition it was in. I did a lot of work on this house to improve it and I

extended it back from the kitchen as well as doing many repairs.

Soon after we came to live in New Zealand, Hilda had a miscarriage and had to spend some time

in hospital. I was unable to work because of this, I had to stay home and look after our children


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who were very young. Every day I would have to go off to the hospital to visit Hilda and when I

did this I would have to leave the children at home by themselves. I was not happy about leaving

Walnetta, Oscar and Matson at home but I had to do this. There was a terrible polio epidemic in

New Zealand at the time and one of my fears was that if they played with other children they

might catch polio. But I had to go and see Hilda in hospital also and would have to leave them

for a period of time each day.

There was a woman living next door to us who had children of her own and Walnetta used to go

over and play with her two children, a boy and a girl. Although this woman was friendly to

Walnetta she would hardly speak to me and never seemed to warm to me, I could not understand

why until later. Nevertheless when she realised what was happening with us, she offered to look

after my children each day whilst I was visiting Hilda.

Because this family had helped me with the children I decided that I should do something for

them. The husband was a keen fisherman and loved to go off fishing in the harbour but he could

not afford his own boat, as he did not earn much from his job as a labourer. I had a friend who

worked in a timber yard who could get cheap timber for me and he suggested that I should build

this man a dinghy to go fishing in. Because I was still working part-time and caring for the

children I had time on my hands and decided that I would build him a dinghy in my shed. The

husband couldn’t believe it when I gave him the boat, he asked me how much I wanted for it but

I told him that it was a gift.

I became friendlier with this family and when I did the reason they had been so cool towards me

finally came out. My daughter Walnetta was a very talkative child and when she first started

going over to their house she had talked to the wife about our family and our life in Fiji. The

wife had asked her why we had decided to come to live in New Zealand and Walnetta had

launched into a long story. She had told the wife that we had come to New Zealand because I

had killed a woman in Fiji. She said that after I had killed this woman I had chopped her up into

little pieces with an axe and then burnt her bit by bit. After killing the woman I had supposedly

built a launch and escaped from Fiji with my family by sailing all the way here.

It was no wonder that this family didn’t want to talk to me for a long time. I think that Walnetta

must have picked up the idea of the story from hearing us talk about an identical story in the

newspaper. At the time there had been a case reported in Mt Roskill that involved a similarly


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gruesome story of a woman being murdered and chopped up with an axe and it must have stuck

in Walnetta’s mind.

After all this had been sorted out we got along happily in this neighbourhood, the community

finally accepted us and we made many friends. The children went off to kindergarten and began

mixing with the children around here; they were beginning to enjoy themselves here too. We

had a beautiful big garden with a good vegetable patch and a lovely lawn. Our neighbour Mr

McDonald (who had helped us when we first came here) had a big garden and he was always

giving us kumaras and potatoes. It was a happy time.

Hilda’s sister Ruby had moved to New Zealand many years before we immigrated here. She and

her husband, Arthur Backhouse-Smith had a farm up in Broadwood, in the Hokianga. Their

farm was about 800 acres but it was very hilly which made it quite hard to farm. We would

drive up to visit them in my Morris sedan, which was a long and dusty drive because the roads

were all unsealed. Sometimes we would all go up on holiday, or I would leave Hilda and the

children there whilst I returned to Auckland to work.

We had brought our car over with us from Fiji when we moved here, which was a good idea, as

it allowed us to get around. But petrol was still rationed after the war and we were only allowed

4 gallons of petrol per month. This meant that if we wanted to make a long trip, we would have

to save up petrol until we had enough for the journey.

When we were making our way on these long trips we would often see other people broken

down on the side of the road. There were not so many cars around then, especially on those dusty

country roads. I would always stop and ask them if I could help in any way and most of the time

they were very grateful. One time though I was nearly put off stopping to help people, there was

a man broken down at the side of the road and when I pulled over and asked him if he needed

any help he turned on me and abused me until I gave up and drove off. After that I was really

upset and for a while I became nervous about stopping to offer people help.

But there had been many people who had been grateful for our help and one evening as we were

driving back from the Hokianga we came across a man, his wife and children whose car had

broken down. I decided to stop to ask if we could help and he sadly told me that his car’s engine

was broken beyond repair. They lived out Dargaville way, which was about three hours drive


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out of our way. I spoke to him for a while but being unable to help with the engine, we drove

off.

As we were driving away I talked to Hilda about this family’s situation and after a while I said

‘this is not right’ and we decided that we should take these people home. So we turned around

and went back, the man was reluctant to have us drive so far out of our way but I knew that it

was the right thing to do. They all piled into the car and we took them to their home. We arrived

home many hours later than we had planned.

After a few years I decided to sell the Morris sedan that we had brought over with us from Fiji.

When I sold it I bought an old Morris Cowley 1924 van. It was a beautiful vehicle but the body

wasn’t quite right for us so I converted it into a station wagon. We used to drive this car up

North and although it was slow it was certainly sure. The station wagon had magneto seals (this

is a source of supplying electricity to the engine) and a few times when we went up there I would

take the seals of the engine and put them into the oven. Once I had done that I would leave them

baking in the oven for a while then take them out and put them back onto the engine. After that

the car would always take off like a sewing machine.

I built many boats in my time, most of them of course were built for the shipbuilding firm that I

worked for. But in my spare time, I also built boats for my family. The first boat that I built for

my family was a 24-foot launch that I built whilst we were in Fiji, this boat I built when my little

daughter Walnetta was very young and I named it after her. I remember once when we were out

on the boat I was carrying a big bunch of keys that were used for the shop that I worked in.

Walnetta was playing with the keys near the water and before I knew it, she had accidentally

dropped the keys overboard. ‘Don’t worry Daddy’ she said, ‘I will buy you another one’. She

didn’t realise that losing a set of keys was a little more complicated than that. She was only

about two years old at the time.

Whilst I was working at the boat-building yard I used to also build eight and twelve foot dinghies

at home in my spare time. The eight foot ones were very popular because a lot of people owned

big launches and they used the eight foot ones with these. I used to advertise a dinghy and often

when I sold it there would be many people interested so I would take orders and build more

dinghies for them. It would take me about two weeks to build a dinghy in my spare time; I

would work on them early in the morning and in the evenings after work. Shipbuilders Ltd was


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the name of the boat-building firm that I worked for; I stayed working with them for 9 years. I

then joined the Auckland Harbour Board and worked for them until I retired when I was sixty.

When Oscar and Matson grew up, they decided that they wanted to go into their own business so

I went in with them financially.

The business that we started was a trenching business, after a while we became very busy and

had to travel around the country as far as Wellington sometimes. As the company grew, we

hired a large number of employees who worked for us trenching and laying cables,

Night school

I went to night school at Takapuna Grammar for about two years. I did this to get a Certificate in

Planning to help with my boatbuilding work. There are times where, in court cases, the courts

need to have the testimony of an expert witness. This was an aspect of my work that I was quite

interested in, so I went and got some extra qualifications to help me.

Operations

I have had a few operations in my time. The most serious operations that I have had were here in

New Zealand. This was a few years ago now but I still carry the scars to remind me of them.

You can see that there is a dent in my skull, which is where they drilled a hole in my skull to

relieve the pressure there. I think that it must have been because I was born with too many

brains and they had to take some out!

But what happened was that I had a terrible headache that went on for days and days. The pain

from this continuous headache was so bad that I felt as though I was going to die. I went to the

doctors but they couldn’t find anything wrong with me. That was fine except this terrible


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headache wouldn’t go away and I knew that something was wrong. In the end, the doctors

admitted me to hospital and they drilled a hole in my brain to relieve the pressure in my head.

I was actually quite lucky, in the Ward that I was in there were several people who had been

admitted with similar problems. They had all had similar operations to me but none of them

made a full recovery, they were left with impairments to their speech or movement that stayed

with them for the rest of their lives. I, on the other hand, was fortunate enough to make a full

recovery.

But that wasn’t the end of the story because after a while the headaches started up again and I

had to go back into hospital. It seemed that the old problem had come back and once again, the

surgeons drilled a hole in my skull. It was not a pleasant thing to have happen to you but I was

just so relieved to have the headache go away that I was at the point where I didn’t care what

they did. Once again, this operation was a success and I was again fortunate to make a full

recovery. It seems that this problem that I had was a hereditary one; it was a type of blood clot

that formed in my brain and caused the headache. In fact, my brother, Arthur died from the same

thing. He also suffered from the same headache and blood clot but he was not diagnosed in time

and he died.

One time when we were travelling we went to New York, which seemed quite an interesting

place. We went there because the Mormon Church was starting off a new branch there and we

went there to help with that. New York was so big that we got a little bit lost there one day and

had to phone up to find how to get home. It turned out we were only about a block away from

the place we were staying in.

Those big places are a bit too fast for me. I remember that once we went out to dinner with a

couple of friends on a Saturday night. We went to a popular restaurant and after we had been

sitting there for a while I noticed that the people who worked in the restaurant kept on looking at

us all the time. I grew suspicious and in the end I went up to them and asked them why they kept

on staring at us. They said that it was very unusual to have people sitting quietly eating on a

Saturday night. They thought we were strange because we weren’t being rowdy at all. It’s

funny that we stood out because we were behaving as people should in a restaurant. It really

made me wonder about the city we were staying in. The next day when I got up there was

rubbish all over the street, the place was a real mess. It was all a bit strange.


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Not all of America is big and fast like New York. I remember that we went to a place in

America where you could fish for these big tasty fish. I forget the name of these fish; they are

just like flounder in shape but very big. In that part of America you couldn’t just go straight out

in the ocean to fish, there was a special place to go to where you could fish from. So myself and

this other chap decided that we would do a spot of fishing and we went to this place, they had

this little compound that had a restaurant and motels within it. We stayed at this motel and then

the people who ran the motel took us out fishing in there boat the next day. They had everything

that you could imagine down there to do with fishing. We caught some of these big fish and they

were delicious.

But the interesting thing was that when I went down to the beach at this fishing place there I saw

that the beach was covered with mussels and nobody was collecting them. So me and this chap

collected all these mussels and filled up a pot with them and then we ate them all up. I had never

seen a place with so many mussels; we must have eaten three or four pots of them between us.

Whilst we were in America, I made a point of visiting many of the historical church sites in New

York State. America is the country where the Mormon Church originated; it was founded there

by the Prophet Joseph Smith. The Mormon Church was established in the township of Fayette in

New York State 1830. I have visited that site and many others in my travels. There is one

temple in New Zealand, at Temple View in Hamilton and I lived there with Hilda for twelve

months whilst I did service as a Temple Missionary.

My faith

My father was baptised into the Mormon Church in 1898. At that time, there were very few

members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints living in Samoa.

When I was twelve years old, I was baptised as a member of the Mormon Church. Although my

father had been a member of the Mormon Church all his life my mother had originally been a

member of the London Missionary Society Church. There hadn’t even been a Mormon Church

in or near Iva at that time. Dad had come to Iva as part of a team of people to build a London

Missionary Society Church and that was when he had first met my mother Valasi.


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Once the Church in Iva had been built the rest of the gang returned to Fiji, but my father

remained behind because he had fallen in love with my mother. My mother was the daughter of

a Matai (chief) and I suppose that he also thought that he would be marrying well if he wed her.

Anyway, he stayed in Samoa with my mother and that became his home forever after that. My

mother Valasi remained with the London Missionary Society Church for some time but she was

baptised into our church whilst I was still young.

Of course, when my father first arrived in Iva there were very few members of the Mormon faith

living there. I found this very scary when I was younger. But that situation has all changed now,

when you go to Samoa every village has a meetinghouse and the number of congregations is

growing very fast there.

There were not many other Mormon families around where we lived when I was growing up; I

think that it was about 50 miles between the churches. But for us there was a church right near

us, that was because our family was pretty much the first Mormon family in the area. When we

moved over to where the whaling station was there were no churches nearby and we would just

have to worship at home.

The Mormon Church itself has done a great deal to help people in the Islands. They always help

when the islands have been damaged by cyclones and such like. Our church gives large

donations to people in situations like this; it also helps people in its own community and around

the neighbourhood. The church will not let people go down the drain without trying to help

them.

The Mormon religion has been very good for me and it has taught me a lot about helping other

people and being a good member of the community. One of the most important parts of being a

Mormon is that if your neighbour is in need you should help him in any way you can. If a family

next door has no food then we will give food to them. I feel that we are more concerned about

the welfare of other people than some, although I do not want to say anything against other

religions. Our aim is to help the world and to have peace.

I believe that the church is a wonderful thing, I don’t know about anyone else but the benefit for

me has been wonderful. Our duty is to love our neighbours as ourselves, so if I have food and


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they have none I share it with them. That is one of the main teachings of the church and I feel

that it is quite important.

I was the first Mormon to live in Devonport; in fact I was the only one because my wife was

Catholic at that time. So when I wanted to attend Church I had to travel over to the city. But as

time went on others joined our faith. With the increase in numbers it became obvious that we

needed to find a place for us to worship on the Shore. Eventually the Church Elders asked me if

I could look around and find a place where we could meet. My wife found a suitable venue

when she arranged to hire the Labour Party hall in Fleet Street, Devonport and we soon began to

gather there. Shortly after my wife Hilda, Walnetta and Oscar Jnr were baptised into the church

in the city, in the nearly completed Scotia Road chapel.

A few years later the Elders of the Church decided that it was time to build another church on the

North Shore and they asked me to look for a suitable site in Takapuna. We built a chapel in

Takapuna in the mid 50s; this is the chapel in Taharoto Rd that is still used today. The Church

has really grown since then and there are now over a thousand members over here.

I was invited to become a member of the Elders Quorum by the Elders of our Church. This

Quorum was responsible for organising community work all over Auckland. It doesn’t exist

anymore in the form it was when I was President. Now they have Quorums for each of the

different Wards in Auckland. There were a lot of great men then; most (maybe half) of them

have died now. I was one of the oldest members of the Quorum and I think that I am the oldest

still alive. It was a great time to be a member of the Quorum and sometimes we would organise

dances and social events.

I was the President of the Elders Quorum for about eight years and I feel that I was part of a

great organization. The Church initially organised the group and chose me as the President.

From there I then chose my councillors and the things that we should do. Because we had too

many groups we set up another Presidency and they reported to us. This work kept me very busy

on Sundays. I used to visit the Elders from all the different Wards and that would take a long

time. I would leave the house at seven in the morning and I wouldn’t get home till 7pm at night.

The Elders Quorum used to meet in the Chapel at the top of Queen St in central Auckland. This

Chapel stands right up at the top of Queen St in Scotia Place near Karangahape Rd and is still


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standing today. There were 139 members in the quorum at the time I was President. Every

member was an Elder and we used to meet one Sunday a month to discuss quorum matters and

allocate work assignments. Because I had so many duties as the President, I had two councillors

and a secretary to assist me and I used to meet with them every Monday. At these meetings we

used to plan out the work we would undertake, sometimes it would be helping people clear their

gardens or paint their houses, occasionally we even built a whole house. The members of our

Quorum used to be kept very busy. We all felt good about the work we did because it helped to

keep everybody together as a community.

There were three different Wards in Auckland at that time and we used to direct them to do

different things. With a large group of people to help, it doesn’t take very long to do these kinds

of things. Once we built a house in one day, we decided that we would build this house and

spent a long time organising all the materials that we would need. On the day we had marked

out for building the house everything that we needed was there and we had so many people to

help that the construction went along very quickly and we were pretty much finished at the end

of the day.

Whilst I was a member of the Elders Quorum, I had the chance to create opportunities and help

people in a way that was really of great benefit to them. That way of working together was also

of benefit to us as members of the Quorum because it gave us a chance to work together as a

team and to gain strength from that. The principles of the Church are very specific; the work that

is done benefits all of the people involved and helps to build a stronger community.

My last calling has been as a Patriarch which means members of the Church come to me to get a

Patriarchal blessing. I am called a Patriarch Emeritus now as two years ago I was relieved from

active duties due to my age. I gave 408 blessings in my time and my daughter, Walnetta used to

type them all. One copy would go to the Church and the other to the person given the blessing.

I am not quite sure how to express this but the church believes in God, it believes in the

resurrection. We believe that we are rewarded by God for the good work that we do. We

believe in keeping the commandments.

You know that as a worldwide organization the Church gives aid in a lot of countries. It is one

of the principles of the Church but it is not only confined to the Church as an organization. As


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an individual member of the Church I try to live by the same principles. If I have neighbours

who are in need then I should feed them and help them out. That is the way that it works. You

become so used to the principles, it becomes like a big family. If something happens to the

people who live next door to me then I should invite them into my own home. It is said that you

should love thy neighbour as thyself. That is the principle of the Church. You don’t want to eat

whilst the people next door have nothing.

Nowadays there are many more people in the Mormon Church and different areas in Auckland

take care of their own matters. However, back then it was a much smaller community and we

would work in the whole Auckland region.

The Church has been very good for me and I believe that part of the reason that I have lived such

a long and healthy life has been because of the Church. The Church taught me sound principles

when I was very young. I have never drunk alcohol, tea, Coke, coffee or smoked cigarettes and I

believe that has contributed to my good health. I would probably not be here today if I had not

been a member of the Mormon Church.

Hilda was originally a member of the Catholic Church, but after we had been married for a

while, she took up our faith and became a member of the Mormon Church as well.

I always remember that there was a man some years ago who made me think about my faith. I

met him one day at the local shops. Hilda and I had opened a little shop down there. Hilda sold

flowers, fruit and vegetables from the shop. It was mainly Hilda who ran it and I would also go

in there every day. It was Hilda’s idea because she had seen the empty shop and liked the idea of

having something to do which took her out of the house during the day. She would take the

children down there with her; the shop was closer to the school than our house was so she would

get them to come there after school was finished. She would also cook our evening meal down

there and I would meet her there when I had finished work.

On this particular day, it was after school and our children were in the shop. There was another

child there, I can’t remember if it was a friend of theirs or not. It was getting on towards six

o’clock and we were going to be closing the shop soon. The child’s father came in and he must

have been in the pub all afternoon because he was as drunk as anything. When he arrived, the

child asked him if he could have an ice cream. The man got really angry with the child and


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yelled: ‘What do you think I am? Do you think that I am made of money?’ The child did not get

the ice cream of course. I thought to myself that I would never forget hearing him saying that. It

must have cost him at least twenty dollars to get that drunk and there he was getting angry when

his child asked him for a ten-cent ice cream. I thought that it was a terrible thing and it made me

understand again why the Church tells us not to drink alcohol.

During my time in the Church I have been called to be a Stake Missionary. This means that I go

and meet people and tell them about the Church. It is a responsibility that was given to me by

the Church. Generally I would go and talk to new members of the Church or to people who were

interested in joining the Church and wanted to find out more about it. I would do this work

around Auckland and during this time I went to many different places. I would go into hospitals

to visit people and take the teachings of the Church to them; I would also go into jails and see the

people who were incarcerated there.

Hilda and I were also Temple Missionaries; we served a mission in the Temple for twelve

months. This meant that we went down to Temple View in Hamilton, which is where our

Temple is in New Zealand. Whilst we were there we worked inside the Temple.

Accommodation was provided for us in the Temple Motels, which is situated on the Temple

grounds.

We were always quite busy in the year that we worked as Temple Missionaries. There were

always people to be taken through to different areas of the Temple. The things that we do in

there are not so much of a secret, but they are sacred. This means that we do not really discuss

things that go on inside the temple itself when we are outside of the temple. However, I can say

that it is your worthiness that counts inside of the temple. To be worthy to work inside the

temple you are judged on the way you have lived your life up to that point. If you have not lived

your life in a good way, for example if you have been the type of person who leaves your wife at

home and spends your time going off with other women then you are not worthy enough to work

in the Temple.

Another way of explaining worthiness is this example. If I was walking down the street and

somebody in front of me dropped five dollars. Now I am the only person who saw that person

drop that money so there is nobody to catch me if I keep it for myself. Nevertheless, what a

worthy person should do is this, they should go over and pick up that money and give it back to


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the person who dropped it. It is not a hard thing to do, but many people do not do these small

things that are the right thing to do.

When I was younger I was also the President of the Sunday school. This meant that I looked

after the running of our Sunday school. There were many different classes within the Sunday

school as we ran it for Primary School age, Secondary School age and adults. There would be

teachers for each of these different levels and I would have to make sure that the teachers ran the

classes in the proper way.

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