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| ISBN-13: | 9781775580874 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 556 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
His Way
A Biography of Robert Muldon
By Barry Gustafson
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2000 Barry GustafsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-087-4
CHAPTER 1
Family and Childhood
Almost half New Zealand's male population of military age served in the armed forces during the 1914–18 war. Half of those became casualties and one in seven died on the slopes of Gallipoli or the fields of Flanders. Among those who returned to New Zealand many were old before their time, traumatised by the ghastly experiences they had endured. They returned to a country in which war profiteers and speculators had flourished but where returned soldiers had to struggle to find a job or a home and re-establish themselves into civilian life. Many of those who did start a business or break in a farm found their dreams and achievements subsequently smashed by the Great Depression which started in the later years of the 1920s.
Staff Sergeant James Henry (Jim) Muldoon, a clerk at Kempthorne and Prosser Ltd, Auckland, who had been born at West Derby near Liverpool on 21 April 1882, and his younger brother Corporal John Wesley (Wes) Muldoon, a salesman with the NZ Farmers Co-operative in Ashburton, were two such survivors. The sons of James Henry Muldoon (senior) and Jane Ellen Muldoon (née Griffith), they had enjoyed a stable, religious, family-centred upbringing which had ill equipped them for the horrors of trench warfare.
Their father, born in Enniskillen, Ulster, and their mother, born in Dwygy-fyllchi, Wales, were evangelical Methodists. In 1892 James senior decided to leave his job as manager of a grocery shop in West Derby, Lancashire, and emigrate to New Zealand as an unordained missionary of the Methodist Church. The family settled first in Collingwood Street and later in Seymour Street in Auckland where James became an evangelist and social worker in charge of the Helping Hand Mission in Freeman's Bay, for many years one of the poorest working-class areas in New Zealand. A strongly evangelical and fundamentalist lay preacher, opposed (in his grandson's words) to 'Satan, the Pope, and the Demon Rum', James Muldoon during 1893 conducted evangelical meetings in eighteen North Island towns and 'upwards of 350 persons professed conversion during the tour, and about the same number of Christians and backsliders were restored'. James, who later became a land agent and Justice of the Peace, was a prominent member of the Pitt StreetMethodist Church, where he formed and led the Wesleyan Young Men's Institute and coached the Pitt Street Methodist Association Football Club. The church's successful soccer team included not only the two Muldoon boys but also the Gunson brothers, the sons of Auckland's 1915–25 mayor, and the Winstone brothers, one of whom, Frank, captained the team.
Before the war, Jim and Wes Muldoon were healthy, happy, rather 'proper' young men. Jim, although short and stocky, was a fine sportsman who switched from soccer to rugby, playing while working as an accounts clerk in a produce merchants in Oamaru for a team which won the North Otago Rugby Football Union tournament. Later he became an Auckland senior rugby referee, 'who gave his decisions in no uncertain manner. Players both large and small accepted his decisions with respect.' Wes shifted to Wellington to work. Gregarious and popular he became engaged to a Wellington girl. Then came the war. When Wes's fiancée's brother joined him overseas, he found that his future brother-in-law, a teetotaller before the war, was in custody for creating disorder in the YMCA, disobeying an officer and allowing a prisoner to escape. Wes returned from the war a 'larrikin' and an alcoholic and the engagement broke up.
Some indication of what the two brothers and many other young men experienced in the trenches overseas is given in Wes's diary. On the day he landed at Gallipoli, for example, he wrote that 'Old mates of mine from all over NZ have been killed and wounded and it was a pitiful sight to pass the lonely graves on the beach.' Two months later he described how 'On Sunday evening it was murder here. The Turks came in hundreds hurling themselves into our trenches ... It was just a shambles. The place ran with blood ... sick of all this fighting.' In September, weak with dysentery, Wes was evacuated but recovered physically to fight on in France.
His brother Jim, who had earlier spent three years with the North Otago Mounted Rifles, at the age of 33 sailed to Europe with the 4th Battalion of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade and served in Egypt and France for three years and twenty-four days from 1915 to 1918.
Returning to New Zealand in January 1919, Jim Muldoon started his own grain and seed business at Whangarei, where two of his sisters lived and where his mother retired to after her husband's death. Unfortunately, the business, which was inadequately insured, burnt down shortly after Jim had married Amie Rusha Browne at the Kingsland Methodist Church on 29 October 1919. Jim returned to Auckland and got a job as a meter reader at the Auckland Electric Power Board and also did some part-time bookkeeping work. On 25 September 1921, when Jim was 39 and Amie 32, a son, Robert David Muldoon, was born at 'Willesden' hospital in Gillies Avenue, Auckland. He was named Robert after a friend of his parents, Frank Robinson, who had been killed at Passchendaele. Jim Muldoon was described on his son's birth certificate as a 'Government Inspector'. At the time of Rob's birth his parents were living at 8 Bellwood Avenue, Mount Eden. In 1922 the family moved into a house they built with a state loan at 34 (later renumbered 20) Western Springs Road. Amie was to live there until she died in her sleep in October 1968, a few weeks before her eightieth birthday, and her only son Rob lived there apart from his war service until his marriage at the age of 29 in 1951.
Amie had been born at Napier on 29 November 1888 and was the eldest child of Jerusha (also known as Rusha) Browne (née Smith), whose father had owned a brickworks at Badingham in Suffolk, and Walter Clayton Browne, who was the display manager of the Auckland Department store Smith and Caugheys. The couple, who had married in England in 1885 but migrated to New Zealand the following year, had two other children, Walter (Wally) and Florence (Flossie), but Jerusha's 'no-hoper husband' walked out on her and the children about 1905 and reportedly went to Australia. He was never again mentioned in the family and Jerusha developed a strong dislike for male 'rotters'.
None of Jerusha's children went to secondary school, although Wally was top of English at Newton East Primary School. The family, though respectable, was very poor and Jerusha and Amie both worked as seamstresses. Wally from the age of 9 or 10 collected firewood in a trolley and sold it door to door. On leaving school at 14 he was offered a job as office-boy by Frank Winstone, his Sunday School teacher at Pitt Street Methodist, and after subsequently qualifying as an accountant he went on to become managing director of Frank M. Winstone Ltd, the Auckland seed merchants.
One of Jerusha's grandchildren remembered her as 'a hard old bird', who in her sixties and seventies before she went blind walked miles every Wednesday from Western Springs to Mount Albert to visit her son's family. She carried an umbrella which she used as a walking stick, the thump, thump on the path warning of her arrival. The same umbrella was often waved as she made an interjection at the many political meetings she frequented.
'Old Jerusha', as she was called by younger family members, was politically quite radical. She detested the Reform Party, worked for the Liberal Party, supported the 'Red Feds' during the 1913 strike, later became an active member of the Morningside branch of the Labour Party, admired Richard John Seddon and Michael Joseph Savage, about whom she talked constantly and whose photo she had on the wall, and became an ardent radio listener to 'Uncle Scrim' and 'Uncle Tom' and the 'Friendly Road' on 1ZB. Muldoon later claimed that his grandmother's 'hero worship of Seddon' influenced him into regarding 'King Dick' Seddon as 'New Zealand's greatest ever politician', while he was also 'brought up to regard Bill Massey as a devil incarnate.'
In the later years of her life, Jerusha, whom some of her grandchildren also remembered as a dogmatic, critical woman of whom they were somewhat afraid, lived with her younger daughter Flossie Stone at 40 Finch Street, some two hundred yards downhill from Rob's home. Although Rob had little to do with his paternal grandparents, he was closer to his maternal grandmother than any of his cousins, who remembered Rob visiting her almost every day after school. Particularly after she became blind in the early 1930s, she spent a great deal of her time listening to radio and talking with visitors. Rob Muldoon remembered that as a child and young man, 'I admired the old lady tremendously and enjoyed being with her ... I used to go and spend hours with her, arguing politics and current affairs, and in later years hearing of the latest of her friends who had died. She died in 1951, in her ninetieth year.' Discussing his grandparents in later years, he observed that they were 'Irish, English and Welsh' who came to New Zealand 'to get away from a class-conscious society' and like other New Zealanders 'very quickly fashioned for themselves an egalitarian tradition' and 'learned to live with each other and live with our Maori people on a basis of mutual acceptance and understanding. That is why I and many others who were born and bred in this country deeply resent and bitterly oppose those who misguidedly try to foment class hatred or racial antagonism in New Zealand.' Muldoon believed that many of his own political ideas and attitudes came from his grandmother's influence on him in those formative years. Certainly, if a cousin's recollection is correct, Jerusha also imparted to Rob at an early age a great ambition. Sliding down the grassy slopes of Onetangi on nikau palms during a holiday at Waiheke, the 12-year-old Rob told 10-year-old Lawrie, 'One day I'm going to be Prime Minister.' Muldoon was not amused when his cousin replied, 'What's a prime minister?'
The day after the 1935 election the extended Browne family met for their regular monthly Sunday lunch, always a roast cooked on a coal range, at the home of Flossie and her railway worker husband, Will Stone, who later became a storeman at Alfred Bucklands. Jerusha and Flossie were jubilant at Labour's landslide victory and the victory of their 'great Saviour', Michael Joseph Savage. They believed tough times required tough leaders with answers. As far as Jerusha was concerned, the only salvation for New Zealand in the 1930s was the Labour Party and she kept her two oldest grandsons, Rob and Lawrie, 'well-informed from a one-eyed point of view'. Lawrie in retrospect expressed some surprise that Rob, who was 'relatively underprivileged' and 'brought up in an atmosphere of socialism' was not converted by his forceful and intelligent grandmother, who exercised such 'a strong force on Rob's views and personality'. But although not converted to socialism or the Labour Party, Rob from a very young age became a supporter of the welfare state and developed a strong belief that society should not throw the aged, widows, deserted wives, invalids or the unemployed into the gutter.
The 1920s were difficult years with economic slumps in 1921–22 and 1925–26 before in 1929 New Zealand collapsed into the Great Depression of the 1930s. The financial pressures on Rob's parents, however, were not their sole or even their primary cause for concern. Jim's health progressively declined during the decade, until by 1928 he had lost the use of his right arm and left leg, the power of speech, and most of his memory. Amie had the primary task of coping with the tragedy, becoming the family's sole source of income, and explaining the situation to her young son. Rob was told that his father had had a stroke resulting from an old war injury. It was not the truth, though one understands why Amie concealed that from her son. Years later Rob discovered that, like many returned soldiers, his father was suffering the effects of syphilis, which as it advanced caused strokes, fits and partial paralysis which left him forgetful, deluded and anti-social, degenerating from an intelligent man to a pitiful wreck. However, because tertiary syphilis and the onset of mental degeneration usually takes about twenty years, it is unlikely to have appeared as early as the late 1920s. It is possible that Jim Muldoon was initially hospitalised because of a mental breakdown or stroke caused by continual stress resulting from a combination of post-war psychosis and the collapse of his business, although academic studies of venereal disease have found that men from very religious backgrounds are also often much more deeply disturbed psychologically than non-religious men by syphilitic affliction. He may well have simply withdrawn into himself and only later in the hospital exhibited the symptoms of the venereal disease that was eventually to kill him. Certainly there were many other ex-servicemen at Wolfe's Home at the Psychiatric Hospital at Point Chevalier where Jim Muldoon spent almost twenty years until his death in 1946.
After he entered hospital, Jim was rarely spoken of at family gatherings, or at least not when the children were present. Everyone knew where he was, but it was generally regarded as shameful if someone was in an asylum, and Jim was only mentioned briefly when Amie after a visit said she had taken him some apples or baking or that he was better or worse.
It was rare for children or teenagers to visit relatives, even parents, in the asylum and as late as the 1970s it was discouraged by the hospital authorities. Rob's cousin, Lawrence Browne, remembers at about the age of 12, when Rob was about 14, going to visit his Uncle Jim in hospital. At the time Lawrence was attending Gladstone Road School, near the asylum, and the children often used to 'give cheek to the loonies'. His Uncle Jim, however, would come and speak to the children and at that time, about 1935, his condition did not seem too bad. Amie visited her husband regularly until his death, as did her brother Wally and some neighbours, but Rob went less frequently as his father's condition deteriorated over the years, and most if not all the family saw his eventual death as a relief.
A neighbour recalled Rob's mother as 'one of the hardest-working women I ever knew' and one of Rob's cousins described his Aunt Amie as a marvellous person for whom he had 'more admiration ... than any other woman I knew, and not only because she was such a great cook'. She was 'tall (about 5 foot 10), handsome and well turned out'. She always wore big hats and carried an umbrella, and whenever she met Lawrence in Queen Street, or as she often did went to the races at Ellerslie or Alexander Park 'to meet friends and imbibe the atmosphere', she was always so well-dressed and well-groomed that 'no one would have guessed her circumstances.' She was a 'very strong personality, very hospitable, very hardworking.' Amie had many friends and neighbours, whom she entertained at home and who kept an eye on her and her son's welfare. The children were usually kept out of the front room of her cosy little house, which was reserved for special occasions and visitors, but from time to time the children were allowed to sit in the immaculately clean and tidy front room and listen to records of Gracie Fields, Flanagan and Allen, and 'Bye Bye Blackbird' on Amie's large old gramophone while their mothers played cards.
Muldoon was spoilt by his mother, who thought her only son was wonderful. The whole world revolved round her son, and Muldoon and his mother developed a mutually intense and defensive maternal-filial relationship, especially during the many long years her husband was in hospital. Muldoon was not house-trained as a boy because his mother did everything for him. Even after he was married, when his mother came to visit Rob and his wife, Thea, she would take his shoes out of the closet and clean them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from His Way by Barry Gustafson. Copyright © 2000 Barry Gustafson. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title page,Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
1 Family and Childhood,
2 School and Church,
3 War and Work,
4 The Junior Nationals and Marriage,
5 Three Times Lucky: The Mount Albert (1954), Waitemata (1957) and Tamaki (1960) Campaigns,
6 The MP for Tamaki 1960–63,
7 The Under-Secretary 1963–66,
8 Minister of Finance 1967–69,
9 The End of the Holyoake Era 1969–72,
10 In Opposition 1972–75,
11 The 1975 Election,
12 Power, Personality and Political Process,
13 Turbulent Times: SIS, Abortion, the Moyle Affair, and the Governor-General,
14 Foreign Policy and Overseas Trade 1975–78,
15 National Superannuation and 'Restoring New Zealand's Shattered Economy',
16 Economic Restructuring and 'Think Big' after 1978,
17 The Colonels'Coup 1980,
18 The Springbok Tour and the 1981 Election,
19 Third World Debt, the Clyde Dam, the Quigley Affair, and Bob Jones's New Zealand Party,
20 The Freeze: Unions, Consumers and Finance Houses,
21 The 1984 Election,
22 The Post-Election Currency Crisis,
23 The Leadership Transition: Muldoon, McLay, Bolger 1984–86,
24 Court Cases, Radio Pacific and the 1987 Election,
25 The Global Economic Action Institute and the 1990 Election,
26 'Mr Speaker, I Say Goodbye',
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
Copyright,