Leonardus "Lex" Lexmond reflects on over 70 years in New Zealand. He and other Dutch immigrants sought a fresh start in the South Pacific after the hardships of World War II and its aftermath. Photo / John Gillies
Leonardus “Lex” Lexmond sits at his dining-room table, looking fitter than anyone has a right to look at 91 years of age.
His craggy features light up when he talks about his grandchildren. Right now, the subject is New Zealand women’s sevens representative Kelsey Teneti, daughter of Lexmond’s daughter Louise Teneti and her husband Kelvin Teneti.
It could just as easily be New Zealand judo Olympian Sydnee Andrews, daughter of Michelle Lexmond and Darren Andrews. But this time it’s Kelsey Teneti.
“She phoned me before the jersey presentation for the Hong Kong Sevens,” Lexmond says.
“I was in bed – I go to bed early – and she talked me through how I could follow the ceremony on my phone ... the speeches, the jerseys being presented.”
He looks forward to following her progress in World Series sevens tournaments in Valladolid, Spain and Bordeaux, France over the next month or so.
This is a retirement he could barely have dreamt of as he grew up in the Netherlands during World War II. It is tinged with sadness, as his wife of 67 years, Marilyn Lexmond, died in February after living with cancer for her last few years.
He admits to feeling “a bit lonesome” over the past couple of months, but his spirits were lifted by a trip with son Greg Lexmond to a bumper sports weekend in Auckland – watching football (the All Whites), league (the Warriors) and rugby (the Blues).
He goes to the “pub” – The Tav or the Cosmopolitan Club – twice a week to socialise.
“When I was young, I talked to old people ... they had been there, seen a lot. Now I spend time with young people.”
He is an advocate of working as long as you can. He was still working at 78, but only as required in his scaled-down concreting business. He led a three-strong crew, the others being (the late) Patrick Simmonds, a month older than Lexmond, and Mal Welsh, four or five years younger. They all retired at the same time.
“I’d be down working on concrete and couldn’t get up unless I had something to hold on to, or the ‘boys’ lifted me up. These days, I do a lot of gardening.”
Lexmond was part of the Dutch migration to New Zealand in the 1950s. He arrived in 1955.
Lexmond was born in Zoetermeer, the Netherlands, on April 21, 1935, the middle son of three in a family of six children to Jacobus and Gerada Lexmond. When Lex was a toddler, they moved to Haarlem, 20km west of Amsterdam. His father had a small transport business, but times were tough during and after the war.
“I started work when I was 14. On my birthday, my father came with me to make sure I said goodbye to my teacher. I was expected to contribute.
“My father found me a job as a chef in a shop cafe but I didn’t last long there. Then I went to work in a shipyard as an apprentice carpenter. I didn’t find that job myself; you had to know somebody.
“I was three years there then went outside, building houses. I had to go to night school from Monday to Thursday, and we worked five-and-a-half days a week. I finished my apprenticeship at 20.
“The war took a lot out of Holland and then we had wars in the Dutch East Indies, with fighting in places like Indonesia and New Guinea.
“Two years of military service was compulsory, but I didn’t want to go. I asked for dispensation. They said if I could get away in three months, I would be free, but if I ever went back to Holland and was still eligible to go into the army, they would take me.”
Emigration was the answer.
New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa were all competing for migrants, and Lexmond chose New Zealand, specifically a job as a carpenter in Dunedin.
Lexmond could not speak English when he emigrated. He got by with “sign language” but sometimes it wasn’t enough.
He flatted with two other men in Dunedin and recalls being sent to the shop to buy bacon and eggs. Distracted while he waited to be served, he forgot the words he needed. Undeterred, he grunted like a pig and clucked like a hen, and left the shop with bacon and eggs.
But flatting, drinking, smoking and money that “wasn’t great” convinced him he needed a change.
He got a construction job on the Roxburgh hydroelectric dam project in Central Otago and when that finished after nine months, he returned to Dunedin and found work where he could, until he saw a newspaper advert for builders at the Mataura freezing works in Southland.
He stayed there for “two or three years”, broken only by a three-month spell helping to build a cement factory at Cape Foulwind, near Westport. But on the West Coast, he spent too much time in the pub and couldn’t hold on to his money.
“My girlfriend in Mataura had given me the bum’s rush, so I returned and persuaded her to take me back. Her name was Marilyn Webb. We were married for 67 years, so I probably did the right thing.”
They were married in 1958.
They had got to know each other because Lexmond’s mail from the Netherlands was hand-delivered to him at his hostel by his wife, who was a “postie”.
When children came, Marilyn and Lex Lexmond shifted the family to Otematata in North Otago, because workers on the Benmore Dam project had the use of houses provided by the Ministry of Works.
After about five years, Lexmond was a leading hand.
“They wanted foreman carpenters for a hydro project at Tūrangi, near Lake Taupō. They accepted me as a foreman on a temporary basis but for it to become permanent, I had to be naturalised. When I did that, I became a permanent staff member.”
In 1973, Lexmond’s parents had responded to a travel promotion, Here We Come, and stayed in New Zealand for three months, based with the family in Tūrangi.
About 1976, Lexmond got a job as a supervisor on the Lake Manapōuri project. He was climbing the ladder.
But after two years, he fell out with his superior when he was reprimanded for taking his children to a rugby game at Mossburn, 60km to the east, when staff were working seven days a week to meet deadlines.
That’s when he came to Gisborne, as a bridge supervisor for the Ministry of Works, an organisation Lexmond rates as the best he ever served.
In 1978, on 20 years with the Ministry of Works, he was given an extra four weeks’ holiday, which he added to his annual entitlement of two weeks and returned to the Netherlands for the first time in 23 years.
Working on state highway contracts and maintenance anywhere from Ōpōtiki to Wairoa, Lexmond stayed with the Ministry of Works until 1980, when he went into partnership with Dave Crosby to build a bridge, the Hikuwai No 1, on State Highway 35.
“It got washed away in Cyclone Gabrielle.”
After a year, Crosby and Lexmond went their own ways. Lexmond carried on bridge-building “all over the place”.
“In those days we had the Waiapu, Waikohu and Cook county councils, as well as the Gisborne City Council. They all had their own engineers and their own identity.
“I was up the Coast with two or three guys for a year fixing bridges and culverts for Waiapu County Council. We weren’t getting rich but we made good money. You couldn’t rip them off because you’d never get another job.”
In Gisborne, Lexmond and his crew laid cobblestones in and around the central business district, did block and brick work, built fences – general construction, most of which used concrete.
“We didn’t lay the millennium pavers in town, but for a long time we replaced those that were damaged.
“Sometimes I had five or six workers, sometimes one or two. My three sons worked for me, even Greg, before he did his 36 years with the police.”
Lex and Marilyn Lexmond reared six children – sisters Jan-Marie, Michelle and Louise, and brothers Rene, Greg and Jason.
Hockey, rugby and football were their standout sporting interests and grandchildren have shone in rugby, sevens, football, waka ama, hockey and judo.
Lexmond himself enjoyed football but didn’t play the organised sort until he was 24. It was tennis balls in the street before that.
“I played on the right wing and was fast, but not much of a footballer.
“I played for Otematata, who had a lot of good players who were working there for the big money. We played against Duncan McVey, who played for Northern in Dunedin and also for New Zealand before he came to Gisborne as a GP.”
In Gisborne, Lexmond played for Thistle alongside the likes of Adam Hair, Ronnie Lightfoot, Bobby Hoggart and Eric Toplis, in masters tournaments overseas with Andrew Elms and Jack de Bruyn, and Cosmopolitan Club tournaments with Neil Farndale, Martin Ryan and manager Dave MacFarlane.
“I was 48 when I stopped playing. I took up golf instead,” he says.
“But I followed rugby when my boys were playing ... I would be the first one on the bus.”