A good keen pension plan

Alcohol could make Barry Crump violent. Photo / BOP

Barry Crump, bushman and yarnspinner, fibber and philanderer, died of a heart attack in Tauranga Hospital on July 3, 1996.

"He abused himself horribly, so there was no big surprise," says his son Martin. "He chain-smoked all his life, he was 61, he drank a lot, played up, took all sorts of substances. He was a bit naughty."

While Crump's passing may have been foreseen, the gathering outside the hospital and the legal wrangling to come was not. Crump was a notorious womaniser, having taken five wives and fathered many children. Often his chief contribution to child-rearing was insemination.

No one was quite sure how many children the author of A Good Keen Man sired – especially when the man himself never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn. His fifth wife Maggie says: "He used to love telling people it was nine. It was never nine. The actual number is five." Martin says his father "embellished his own philandering," and, including his own son whom he says Crump adopted, says the official count is six.

So, on the night that Crump died at Tauranga Hospital, many of the Crump clan became aware of each others' existence for the very first time.

Maggie recalls her first meeting with Martin. "I liked him immediately," says the softly-spoken Maggie of their meeting.

"He reminds me of his dad in lots of ways, not his personality, but his stature and mannerisms." Martin's deep and Crumpish voice has served him well in a career in late-night talkback broadcasting, first at NewstalkZB and now RadioLive.

This amicable first meeting turned sour when the will was read. Martin recalls the short document as: "I leave everything to my fifth wife, Maggie. I want no squabbling over my possessions." Despite these instructions, on December 7 of that year Martin decided to squabble and filed proceedings under the Family Protection Act to contest the will.

Martin says he was acting on behalf of Crump's children, who had seen little of their father while he was alive and now felt cut out of his death. Maggie says she earned the right to the modest estate – comprising of publication rights, some personal effects, and a utility shed converted to a home on the hills above Tauranga – after putting up with a man who, at times, could be like a monster.

"Martin wasn't there to pick up the pieces in the morning when he'd been drinking Black Label whiskey all day, and nursing him, and putting up with the abuse and the shouting and screaming when the alcohol demons were there."

Martin was under no illusions that this would be a pretty fight. "The public, by my recollection, were thinking that the vultures were circling, pecking at the carcass," he says.