Most of the photos on this page come from Dorothy . ~ Ian
Cliff’s father was a working man and proud of it — modest, stubborn, hardworking, domestic, admirable.
Dorothy’s Dad shared many of the same qualities but he was different … patrician.
Hugh was the youngest of the surviving McCarroll brothers — Artie had died aged 25 — but he was sixty when I was born and I remember him as grandfatherly, self-confident, and as often as not with an amused half-smile.
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Some of the differences between the Baughs and McCarrolls were pretty fundamental. Jack and Annie had a quarter acre section, for example, whereas Hugh and Vi had — I don’t know — a thousand acre farm.
.We lived next door to Nana and Grandpa McCarroll until I was seven, and in this little kid’s memory their land seems to extend from the road as far as the eye can see. Dogs, horses, sheep, cattle. Between the house and the road there’s a tennis court, a marble bird bath and a sundial. On the roadside the butcher’s shop and a petrol pump.
Looking west from the house you can see, down on the flat, the railway line and station, the local store and a few railway houses. To the east, across the home paddock, are the shearing shed and sheepyards, and further away the slaughterhouse — down by the creek, where the eels gather. Behind the house are Grandpa’s workshop and garage, and through the gate the dogs tied up at their kennels, waiting the chance to earn their keep and please their boss.
As I recall all this the smells flood back in. Livestock and horses and pasture. Saw dust and machine oil in the workshop. Greasy fleece and sheep shit in the shearing shed. The fatty smell of fresh meat, sausages and bacon in the shop, and petrol from the bowser. Dust from the gravel road.
The photo below shows a verandah on the side of the house, weathered and unpainted. It looks across to the red lead painted shearing shed. This is the back entry, the one everyone uses. A path runs along to the right to Grandpa’s workshop and the dog kennels.
Inside the house is Nana’s domain. You enter the kitchen through the door to Nana’s left. The pantry/store room door is next along. Beyond that is the washhouse. It strikes me now how small kitchens used to be, and how much work was done in them. I remember painted bins under the bench for flour and sugar, and the wood-fired stove. And a tin with crackers — cabin bread or cream crackers — that we eat with butter and Marmite, and hot sugared tea for Grandpa.
Beyond the kitchen you enter the body of the house, with Grandpa’s office and its strange Masonic regalia on the left and alongside that the bedroom we sleep in. I can’t remember the rest of the layout very well, but there’s a big dining table, a piano we learn to play Chopsticks on, a glass case full of polished, aromatic Kauri gum, hazelnuts, brazils and walnuts in a bowl with a crocodile nutcracker, a billiard table, and a sun room with windows looking down to the flats and the railway line. Grandpa tells us to keep an eye out for steam from the train whistle as it comes round the bend — and to note how much longer it takes for the sound to arrive. A nice demonstration of the speed of light versus sound.
Dorothy wrote a vivid description of her childhood home, complete with pets, friends, hens and bugs. Today it’s all gone — the house, the dog kennels, the shearing shed, the sheep dip, the shop.
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Nana and Grandpa had a bach at Pahi. It was magic — close to the Village Green, with nothing but a sand and shell roadway between us and the water. The bach was very basic — largely unlined, so you could see the inside of weatherboards, and with hardboard on just one side of the interior partitions. Very handy as every noggin was a shelf. We stayed there for the holidays, often with my cousin Brian. I was impressed by Brian’s athleticism as we kids played on the Green beneath the massive Moreton Bay Fig, and equally impressed by our grandparents’ nighttime snores.
Grandpa had a clinker dinghy and a little plywood cabin cruiser called the Oranga, which I thought the height of sophistication.
He loved fishing. He had jars of foul smelling bait made from liver soaked in kerosene. The snapper seemed to like it, and the kero toughened up the liver so it stayed on the hook.
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Grandpa was the first of many to tell me I was a poor fisherman, and not likely to catch anything if I continued reading while jiggling my hand line.
I can’t remember Nana going out with us, but maybe it was her magazines I was reading.
We kids only went out when the weather was settled, and I remember watching from the bach as Grandpa, in the clinker dinghy, hammered his way back up harbour into an angry chop, with half a gale blowing and the little Seagull complaining over the wind.
I don’t know what Cliff called his father-in-law face to face, but when relating stories about him he was often “Hughie”. I have no idea how widespread that was, and I’ll stick with Hugh.
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Cliff’s mother-in-law, born Anna Elizabeth Violet, was universally known as Vi, or — given all the cousins — Auntie Vi. She’d been born in the Bay of Plenty but grew up in Auckland.
Hugh and Vi married in 1910 and their oldest, Don, was born a year or so later. Having been living in Auckland they’d spent three years in Woodhill before moving in 1927 to Taipuha and life in “a square, ugly, bare box sitting in the middle of an empty paddock”. A hundred well-wishers and friends attended their farewell social. The local paper said it would be Woodhill’s and the tennis club’s loss, and Hugh said they were only leaving because of circumstances beyond his control. According to Dorothy he’d been running a Jersey stud, but trouble with the manager of the Taipuha farm forced him to take that over.
So many gaps. I don’t know how Vi met her Kauri Bushman, or how they fell in love. Maybe the boys met first. There’s this photo of Hugh with two of Vi’s younger brothers, William and Marshall, who both died at Passchendaele. That photo reminds me how little I really know about Hugh. Think of those men, those brothers, the Lamonts and the McCarrolls, and what they did. They were confident, competent, committed, and they worked their arses off. And when you’ve thought about that, wonder about their wives.
In the photo Hugh’s the one in the middle. Is he wearing jodhpurs? Is that his horse saddled up on the left? What was life like in that little cabin? Tell me about that desolate-looking landscape. Where was it? And exactly when? Who took the photo?
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More gaps. As I write I have no idea how, or whether, the McCarroll land was divvied up among the six sons, or even whether Hugh’s land was part of the original block. By the time Dorothy’s kids arrived on the scene they’d knocked the place into shape, and we got to appreciate the fruits of their labour.
Hugh in turn divided his property between his children. How that happened between the boys I don’t know, as Ian moved away in 1935, but Dorothy’s share was 50 acres, plus the butchery business and slaughter house. I suspect she thought that was unfair.
Ian’s dismissal of Cliff as a postman out of his depth was also rather unfair, and maybe a joke. Dad had spent a few rugged years on farms as a kid and he was a good horseman. He demolished the old Pahi Post Office and built their first house using the bits. Later he built a new butchery on their 50 acres. I spent a few rapt hours watching the goings on as he and another sharpened their flashing knives against their steels, broke down the beasts, skinned the sheep, took the hair off the pigs, made sausages, and wrapped up parcels in waxed and brown paper with string.
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I imagine you reading over my shoulder and asking, but what about the women? Good question. Women, by and large, kept the home, cooked, gardened and brought up the family. Men were the providers, and so had far more options, if no less responsibility.
It’s a blessing that women have far more freedom now than in the past, and as a beneficiary of that I’ll be the last to complain. Nevertheless traditional nuclear families — like the Lamonts, McCarrolls, Baughs and Cornesses — were the building blocks of our society. Allowing for more variety in the arrangements they still are. And I don’t know of any successful relationships, then or now, in which the couples weren’t true partnerships of some kind or other. None of them perfect, all of them different.
What is undeniable, however, is that men would find it next to impossible to play the silent partner that their wives often do, or did. More often than not, Vi was Mrs H.S. McCarroll. While Cliff couldn’t abide being called Dorothy McCarroll’s husband.
As I’ve already said somewhere, I’d rather know what my grandparents think of us than stand in judgement of them. In that spirit, my mother loved and admired my grandparents and thought they’d blessed her with a magical childhood. And they were very good to us kids.
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Farming was the second, or maybe the third, of Hugh’s careers. The first, as a Kauri Bushman, was certainly over by 1914 and the Great War. He wrote about life in the bush in a series of vivid radio talks, which I’ve transcribed here. All I really knew about that as a kid was the cabinet of polished kauri gum.
He was also a Captain in the Home Guard. Whether or not there was any intention that he serve overseas, he was disqualified by the fact that he was blind in one eye. Cliff reckoned Hugh only discovered that this wasn’t normal when one day he asked another boy which eye he saw with.
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I remember beef cattle on Hugh’s farm, and there would have been milking cows and chooks too, but primarily he farmed Southdown sheep. And he was famous for it.
The Southdown is raised primarily for its meat, although its wool (which should be “of fine texture, great density and sufficient staple, covering the whole body”) is important too. Southdown rams are also prized as “terminal sires” over ewes of other breeds.
Hugh was primarily a breeder, and an inveterate competitor and judge at the country shows, which were far more frequent then than now. Search Papers Past and the results are peppered with his name for winning rams, ewes, fat lambs and more. Surprisingly I could find no photographs, so I’m stuck with Dorothy’s proud photocopies.
Hugh would have been struck by changes to the breed since the 1950s:
“From being a small, low-set, blocky, heavy shouldered animal with a short neck in the 1950’s – the Modern Southdown has grown to be a much larger sheep that is longer, leaner, more upstanding, yet retaining a good loin and hindquarter. Stud sires in the 50’s would weigh around 80-85kgs. Today they weigh 120-170kgs. Length has also increased and today a Southdown can measure a meter along the back.”
His son Ian went on to farm Southdown too, and became president of the Southdown Sheep Society in 1979.
