Time to take things a little easier

AT HOME AMONG THE BLOOMS: Nigel and Sandra Mead have plenty to do in retirement, but find time to relax in peaceful surroundings. Picture by Paul Rickard

Nigel Mead left England — home of football — at the age of 12, never having played the game at an organised level.

He arrived in New Zealand — hotbed of rugby passion — took one look at the size of the boys playing the game, and decided he'd try football.

A serious injury to his right leg in his early 20s put paid to any aspirations he had as a player in serious competition, and a bad injury to his left leg four years later ruled out social kick-abouts, too.

But by then he had already committed himself to his accidental sports vocation — refereeing.

Now 74 and retired from paid employment, he can look back on 50 years of football refereeing and at least a thousand games where he has been either referee or an assistant (the modern term for linesman).

He says he has retired from refereeing, but won't rule out “wandering around” a social game in desperate need of an official.

He would still like to coach referees and do assessments – he's a qualified referee assessor – and be involved in the game.

“It's been a part of my life for a long time.”

Nigel was born in Redhill, near the Surrey Hills, south of London, in June 1946.

He attended Windsor Grammar School “down the road from the castle”, and played hockey and rugby, the latter at halfback. He had an uncle who was a football fan, though, and when he visited him in Leicester they'd watch Leicester City at the old Filbert Street ground. It was there he saw the great Stoke, Blackpool and England outside right Stanley Matthews play.

But change was in the wind.

“Dad couldn't settle to anything after the war,” Nigel said. “He'd been looking after the morgue on battleships. They were desperate times, and he took a while to adjust to everyday work again.”

Ernie (Joe) Mead was a refrigeration engineer and tried to emigrate to Canada and Australia, but single men were preferred. Ernie was called Joe because as a 15-year-old apprentice he had to stand on a shoebox to work, and it put workmates in mind of a silent-movie character called Little Joe. He paid £900 for him, his wife Freda and their son Nigel to come to New Zealand in 1958.

Gisborne was their destination, Wises ice-cream factory the employer (after two years, the company repaid the fare that Joe Mead had forked out).

“Dad had trained at a company called Hall's Refrigeration in London,” Nigel said.

“All the compressors at Wise's were made by Hall's. The compressors were notoriously unreliable, and it was hard to find someone who knew a bit about them. The equipment wasn't new or state of the art.

“They had three sets of compressors to compress the ammonia gas used in refrigeration. Two would be running and one would be out of service being maintained.

“Soon after we arrived in Gisborne, Dad came home and said to Mum, ‘You'll never guess, Freda,' and she said, ‘No, I'll never guess'.”

Joe Mead had taken the head off a compressor to do routine maintenance and there, punched into the metal, was his name. It meant he had worked on the creation of the compressor when he was an apprentice at Hall's. He took it as a sign that he was where he was meant to be.

Twelve-year-old Nigel, meanwhile, having decided to play football instead of rugby, fell in with a group of like-minded youngsters and made his way through the ranks of schoolboy representative and Gisborne Boys' High School football teams.

The names of some of his teammates will be familiar to football's old-timers: Stephen Wright, Peter and John Beuth, Paul Rose, Vern Owen, Jim McMillan, Derek Barber, Roger Polhill, Ross McNamara, Ron Mulrooney.

“Even though I'd played rugby, I'd always been able to kick well, and that helped,” Nigel said.

His coaches included some of the best in New Zealand. The schoolboy reps were treated to practice sessions with former Chelsea captain and England international Ken Armstrong — “Everything was with the ball at your feet” — and Nigel recalls a Boys' High session at which former Scottish professional Bert Ormond gave them tips about how to combat the Thistle team he was coaching at the time.

His coaches at Boys' High were Dave Metzger and John McFarlane.

“Dave was quite an innovative coach,” Nigel said.

“He had a throw-in move he called Rhubarb — he was a big fan of The Goon Show — and it worked every time. He and Bert Ormond later coached Blockhouse Bay together.

“John wasn't as technical a coach as Dave but he got us fit . . . running in the soft sand at the beach.”

Nigel wanted to be an architect, so at the beginning of 1964 he went to Auckland. To make ends meet, he got a job with architects Hole and Annabell while he pursued full-time study at the University of Auckland. His first job related to Dilworth School — big clients of the firm.

After two years at university, he switched courses.

“I couldn't do the physics,” he said.

“I ended up doing a New Zealand Certificate of Draughting, Architectural Division. It was a five-year course but I got some cross-credits and was able to do it with two more years of study.”

On the paid-work front, at Hole and Annabell he did a lot of work on school halls and auditoriums, so he did a night class in acoustics, which became even more useful further down the line.

He left Hole and Annabell after seven years to work for a property developer, “which in the 1970s was not a sensible thing to do, although it was good experience . . . building shopping centres”.

Nigel worked as lead designer: “I did the work and someone else signed it off.”

By now his main connection with football was as a referee.

He had joined Grey Lynn, who played in the Northern League second division. Former Eastern Union and Gisborne Thistle goalkeeper Ronnie Leakey coached them for a season, having already coached Mt Albert.

Coming through the grades, Nigel had played in every position except right wing. He was left-footed. The quality that endeared him to coaches was his ability to cross the heavy leather lace-up balls then in use. By the time he got to Auckland, he was usually playing in a defensive role.

In 1971, playing for Grey Lynn against University at the Auckland Domain, Nigel ventured out of position and found himself on the right wing. The opposing centre-half came across and took him out with a studs-first tackle that split Nigel's shinpad asunder and opened his right shin to the bone.

He was taken to nearby Auckland Hospital, where the wound was stitched and Nigel was told he would have to stay off the leg for six weeks, otherwise he would need skin grafts.

“I was a bit lost for a couple of seasons after that,” Nigel said.

“I couldn't play anything other than a bit of open-grade over-35 stuff.

“I coached the Grey Lynn under-18 side for a season. We won our league, too, in spite of the fact we were unfashionable. As a coach, half the time you would referee those games, and I decided I would go full-time refereeing.”

He had already taken steps to equip himself for the role. As a first-team player, he would arrive early to watch the reserve team. If no referee turned up, he would step in.

“I thought I'd better learn more about the laws of the game, so in 1969 I did my first course,” Nigel said.

“I refereed junior football. I usually did a secondary school game in the morning and played in the afternoon.”

Then came the gashed right shin, the foray into coaching and the decision to concentrate on refereeing. A non-footballing injury put the seal on his future in the game.

Building a house in Greenhithe to his own design in 1975, he fell off a saw-horse and ripped open his left leg. That closed the door on any return to playing football, and he decided he could make a difference — and still enjoy himself — by being a referee.

He found that Auckland referees had a lot of opportunities to gain experience.

“You moved your way up the grades until you were doing Northern League. You got the opportunity to run a line in the National League. You'd do the odd National League game and they'd decide whether you were any good.”

From about 1978 to 1983, he refereed a lot of Northern League football — in Auckland and places like Whangarei, Counties, Hamilton, Rotorua and Taupo.

Life outside football moved apace. Nigel and Sandra (of Auckland) had married in 1968 and had two children, Logan and Claire.

The knowledge about acoustics that Nigel had gained while at Hole and Annabell came in handy after his spell designing shopping centres, when he worked in the acoustics field for an AHI company called New Zealand Fibreglass.

He was sent on a course to Toledo, Ohio, in February 1977, in the middle of winter.

Nigel said he realised then that “New Zealanders learn a lot of stuff in different silos, whereas Americans learn all of one silo and nothing about the others alongside it”.

Nigel worked for AHI from 1976 to 1983. He was away from home three weeks out of four, worked 60 to 70 hours a week, helping places like canneries, freezing works and timber mills with their acoustic problems. His own hearing suffered.

“It's probably why I was a referee,” he said. “I couldn't hear the snide comments. I'm deaf, but not blind.”

The catalyst to the family's move to Gisborne in 1983 was a lucky escape on the Auckland motorway. Nigel walked away from an accident that badly damaged his car, his only injury a cut on his nose. Nigel and Sandra decided it was time to leave “the rat race”.

Nigel had maintained links with Gisborne — playing football for the North Shore Cosmopolitan Club against their Gisborne hosts, for instance – and he heard that a bookshop in the Ballance Street Village was for sale.

“We had always wanted to get into something like that,” Nigel said.

In early 1988, a customer came into the shop “a little upset”. She was with what was then called the Crippled Children Society and the man appointed to take over as Gisborne manager had opted for another job only a few weeks before the annual accounts had to be presented to the annual general meeting.

Nigel knew something of the society's work. When he was a university student in Auckland, his landlady's son got tuberculosis and was taken to the Wilson Home – a former family home and coastal gardens in Takapuna, given over for the benefit of disabled children.

“We used to go and take turns reading to him,” Nigel said.

And in the early 1970s, a Grey Lynn teammate was run over by a drunk driver one Christmas Eve. Nigel was working close to the society's main office in Mount Street, and at lunchtimes he and other teammates would take turns swimming with their injured friend in the hydrotherapy pool in the basement of the office building.

Nigel offered to help the Gisborne society get its 1988 accounts out.

“I'd been in business for five years by then,” he said. “I could read balance sheets and make them balance.”

With the accounts out of the way, Gisborne (and national) board member Richard Crawshaw asked Nigel if he wanted a part-time job. The bookshop's Post Office Bank agency had closed, affecting turnover, so the offer came at the right time. Nigel had not been in the position long when the job of manager was advertised. He applied and was appointed.

Meanwhile, Sandra had undertaken extramural study in early childhood education and was active in the establishment of community preschool centres in areas of need. For 19 years, Sandra oversaw the teaching of early childhood educators at Tairawhiti Polytechnic and EIT.

With their interests outside the bookshop taking up more of their time, Nigel and Sandra sold the business in 1989. It remains part of the Ballance Street Village streetscape today.

Nigel's position with the society from 1988 evolved into that of a full-time manager.

“I had only four ‘full-time equivalents' as staff — two were field workers who went around helping people with children who were disabled,” Nigel said.

“Then the Government changed the way they did things. Instead of subsidising the cost of field workers, they made us contract to do the work. I was quite good at writing contract proposals. We managed to get quite a few government contracts for various bits of support for people with disabilities.”

Fields covered included employment, education, and daily living support.

“We also got a contract for supporting elderly people in the community with home help and personal care,” Nigel said.

In 1989, the name New Zealand Crippled Children Society was changed to New Zealand CCS. The work was not confined to children. Rather, the aim was to help people of all ages with disabilities, and to help people remain independent.

Then about 1999 Nigel was asked to help the Hawke's Bay branch of CCS.

“They had very few services and lots of clients,” he said.

“We combined the branches as Tairawhiti-Hawke's Bay.”

Two years later he was asked to manage the Waiararapa branch and then, in 2003, the Manawatu branch . . . the latter was cash-rich but needed help managing services.

Nationally, CCS changed its organisational structure. Instead of having 17 branch managers, it had four regional managers, and Nigel was one of them.

For 18 months, he was responsible for fundraising for the national office, and he tried to set up a professionally run fundraising department.

“It's all gone now . . . it's all changed.”

However, he continued managing the Tairawhiti-Hawke's Bay, Wairarapa and Manawatu operations until he retired in 2013.

By then, CCS had been called CCS Disability Action for six years.

The staff under Nigel's management had increased from four full-time equivalents in Gisborne in 1988 to 102 full-time equivalents from Gisborne to Manawatu, serving over a thousand clients.

Now both Nigel and Sandra have all the time they need for their retirement passion of motorhome travel. True to form, Nigel had an organisational role in the New Zealand Motor Caravan Association's 2019 national rally in Gisborne, as the association's national rally secretary.

And while he can look forward to more leisurely Saturday afternoons in winter, he can look back on a few highlights over the past half-century of refereeing – running a line for All Whites games in Gisborne, against Fiji in 1985 and Dynamo Minsk in 1987, being fourth official for the first leg of the 1987 Chatham Cup final between Gisborne City and Christchurch United, and being involved in the National League “when Gisborne City were up there with the best of them”.

“Every second week there'd be a cracking good game of football and I'd be on the sideline almost every time,” he said.

Yet he maintains that every game is as important as the next, and the last.

“You try to be as even-handed as you possibly can be . . . free of preconceived notions about any player.”

The camaraderie, keeping in touch with the game, moving with it and being part of football — these are the things he has liked about being a referee.

“If I had a choice of occupation, I'd be a professional somewhere in the football world.”

He's seen plenty of changes in the game.

“Some of the things players got away with in the 1970s and '80s, they wouldn't get away with today. A lot of it comes down to ‘mouth' . . . boilermakers' language. By and large, I find players these days are much more respectful of the referee.”

He refereed the occasional National League game when outside referees couldn't get to Gisborne, and many Central League games.

“I was a journeyman, not a flash referee . . . just a bloke who kept on going.”