Printer by trade then St John officer

Relaxing at home: Richard Ralph reflects on a full and eventful life. Picture by Paul Rickard

Richard Ralph was a full-time St John ambulance officer for 27 years and experienced the highs and lows of tending to people in life-and-death emergencies. His humble background and supportive grandparents stood him in good stead for his calling. John Gillies reports . . .

Richard Ralph didn’t have the best start in life, and he almost had an abrupt end to it, but the bits in between make for good memories.

Richard, 83, reckons he is about 90 percent right after a fall on to concrete at home in March left him with a fractured skull and two brain bleeds.

A large part of his working life was spent attending to people needing urgent medical help, so he appreciates what’s been done for him.

He was a St John Ambulance officer, starting as a volunteer and progressing to full-time paramedic, abseiling from helicopters to reach people in difficult terrain and tending to the injured at accident scenes, in among the countless everyday calls for medical emergencies.

As part of his recovery from his own accident, he walks four kilometres a day and intends to take part in the 5.6km walk in the Gisborne Herald Quarter Marathon on September 17. Just yesterday, he cracked the 5km barrier.

One of the “excellent surgeons” who looked after him said his pre-accident regimen of daily 5km walks and his healthy lifestyle — he doesn’t drink alcohol or smoke — would help him recover from his injuries.

All he remembers of the accident was that he had got out a step-ladder as he prepared to change a security camera battery, then realised he needed a screwdriver.

“I put the stepladder on the driveway and that’s the last I can remember,” Richard said.

He assumes he tripped on the ladder and fell backwards, hitting his head on the concrete driveway.

His wife Lynne found him unconscious, with blood coming out of his ear. Two police cars and two ambulances arrived, and he was taken to Gisborne Hospital, where a trauma team had been called in.

Richard did not require surgery, but he didn’t know where he was for the first few days.

“I had a fractured skull, a subarachnoid haemorrhage (bleeding in the space between the brain and the tissue covering the brain) and a perforated eardrum,” he said. “I was three or four days in intensive care and three and a half weeks in hospital.”

The accident happened on March 25, the day before his 83rd birthday. Richard says that as he was unconscious for his birthday, he can claim to be still 82.

He was born in England in 1940.

“My parents weren’t married, because the war was on,” he said.

“They were together for about 18 months, I was born and for some reason they went their separate ways. My father was left with me, so he put me into a home and I was there for six months. I have no recollection of my mother or father.

“My father’s mother, Emma Ralph, didn’t like how I was being looked after, so she said, ‘We’re going to take our grandson and bring him up here’.

“She was in her 50s and my grandfather, Edward, was 20 years older . . . his first wife had died.

“We lived in a village between the English Channel and London — everyone worked for the Shell oil company — and we were on the ‘main road’ for the German bombers.”

As a small boy, Richard found the night searchlights, the passing parade of bombers and fighter aircraft, and the aerial “dogfights” thrilling fare.

He recalls train travel to London to visit his grandmother’s sister, who drove an ambulance. When the adult Richard became an ambulance officer, his grandmother thought that was a “brilliant” thing to do.

He started school at four and a half because his grandfather worked evening shifts stoking the boilers at Shell, and his grandmother worked in the fields. The first thing he learned at school was how to put on the gas masks — “big rubber things with a pipe and bag . . . terrifying”.

When the war ended, people sang in the streets but Richard felt let down. No more bombers, Spitfires, dogfights . . . “I didn’t realise the danger.”

He was brought up with rationing and queues, and to this day avoids queues.

“My grandfather could plant a pencil and it would grow,” Richard said. “He had an allotment and grew all the vegetables he could. You could have as much fish as you liked, and we had rabbits and chickens.”

In 1950, Richard’s grandparents decided to come to New Zealand for a better life. With them came Richard’s Auntie Claire and Uncle Archie Hollands with their daughter Jean, 12 years older than Richard and like a sister to him. “She’s 94 and living in Tauranga.”

Eight years ago, Richard found out he had two half-brothers and two half-sisters by his mother.

His birth certificate had turned up in his Auntie Claire’s effects and he learned the name of his mother. With the help of Google and some detective work, he found the family, some of whom had already tried to find their lost sibling. Two sisters and one brother came to New Zealand in 2015, and Richard and Lynne went to England to meet all four siblings and their families in 2017.

Richard attended Central School, Gisborne Intermediate and Gisborne High School. He was a paper boy but wanted to contribute more, so resolved to leave school at 15.

A teacher, Roy Williams, who taught Richard maths and trade drawing, told him he was gifted in those subjects but to be an architect he would have to go to university.

“He told me he realised I had to get a job but he said, ‘Promise me you’ll get a trade . . .

you’ll never be out of work’. That was the best advice I ever had.”

Richard got a job with Kandid Kamera Kraft (KKK) and learned photography and darkroom techniques. After nine months a friend who worked at The Gisborne Herald told him the Herald was advertising for an apprentice printer.

“I went to see the Muirs and they signed me up for five years.”

He had continued working for KKK, taking photos at weekends and some of his work went to the Gisborne Photo News. Magazine founder Bob Logan said to him, “You’ve finished your apprenticeship; we’re going to change from black-and-white covers to colour. We’re getting a new press from Sweden. Would you like to work on it?”

Richard said the Logans were the first in New Zealand to use the lithographic process — the process of printing from a flat surface treated so as to repel the ink except where it is required for printing — and he worked for them for about six years.

“The Herald realised it was a thing of the future and asked me to come back as they were buying a litho machine,” Richard said.

“You had to produce your own plates, and you needed a darkroom and cameras. I was told to go ahead with the darkroom side, and I taught an apprentice about the litho process.”

Seeking a change from inside work, he applied for a job in Herald commercial printing sales and for a while was sales manager.

From about 1970 he had been volunteering for the Order of St John, attending sports fixtures — inluding the national league football games of Gisborne City, with whom he became an honorary member — and doing weekend shifts on ambulance work.

In 1976 he was asked if he wanted to become a permanent St John staff member.

“The Herald had been good to me, so I spoke to Geoff Muir. He said ambulance work had been my hobby and passion, and if I could make a living out of my passion I should ‘go to it’, and the door would be open if I wanted to return.”

Richard was working four days on, four off, so the Herald commercial printing manager recruited him to work on his days off.

Outside work, he drew up the plans for a house in Heatherlea Street, had them checked by an architect, and then served as labourer for another ambulance officer who was a builder by trade.

Overtime was a big part of the ambulance work. Acute mentally ill patients had to be driven to Tokanui Psychiatric Hospital when Gisborne had no psychiatric unit, and cancer patients had to be driven to Palmerston North.

He attended courses to become a paramedic, and helicopters began to be used when time and location were critical factors.

He recalled one maritime rescue where swimmer and surf lifesaver Glen Sutton had to swim from the rescue vessel — a fishing boat — to a stricken yacht in “horrendous” seas with a line for it to be towed in.

Richard said he was not a good sailor, and another officer did not like helicopters, so they specialised to avoid too much of what they didn’t like.

Cyclone Bola brought the use of helicopters into sharp focus. A meeting of emergency service representatives worked out a system by which people in remote areas could seek help — many farmers had no communications. They were to put out a big white sheet with a heavy object in the middle of it.

“Wayne Ashworth and I were on a job and suddenly it was pleasant going. Wayne said that was because we were in the eye of the cyclone.

“At one stage we had 17 choppers in Gisborne.”

He made lifelong friends through his ambulance work. Former policeman Nigel Hendrikse is one. Richard was called to the scene and spotted the puncture mark in his neck that caused him such problems.

And he can recall about 10 instances where he was called on to deliver babies when a midwife or doctor was out of reach. It was a part of the job he found especially rewarding.

Richard retired from ambulance work when he was 63 because he didn’t want his advancing years to affect the physical side, where it might cost someone their life.

He worked part-time at Printing House and remained active.

He’s had medical issues since then but, with the support of his family, they have been overcome . . . just as he is sure the latest bump in the road will be.