‘Mother put on her best clothes’: The 1938 Esk Valley survival story a 96-year-old didn’t expect to repeat

Patricia Morton was 11 when landslides buried her family’s home in Eskdale.

Now she’s 96, and one of the last surviving victims of the 1938 Esk Valley flood who was old enough at the time to remember the impact.

Local historians believe the extent of the flooding in Eskdale, and the damage, silt and debris left behind, has been eclipsed by the carnage wrought by Cyclone Gabrielle, but it was a significant and traumatic event.

Morton remembers taking it in stride as a young person at the time - perhaps not as seriously as she should have taken the situation, she now thinks.

“The river, it teemed and teemed. My father had built a swing bridge across the river which was high above the water and we noticed that it had collapsed,” Morton said.

“We were cut off and it kept raining so my mother put on her best clothes because she thought - because she had a nasty feeling.”

They had an aunt and uncle staying with them as they watched the river continue to rise to roughly “25 feet” above normal near their isolated property surrounded by waterways at the very end of Ellis Wallace Rd.

“The river, my uncle used to call it ‘the creek’ and he didn’t think it was much of a creek,” Morton said.

The entire family were inside the house when a huge crash was heard as a slip crashed down over the hill behind the house and covered half of it.

“When the crash happened, we came out, all of us, except my dad. He was in the lounge stoking a fire and he came crawling out through the passage.”

Her family stayed in a wool shed with no door in a paddock above the house for three days according to a memoir from Morton’s mother, Maud Bourke, eating food that the adults were able to salvage from their partially wrecked storeroom and sleeping under fleece wool.

A second landslide came down not long after the food was retrieved, burying the rest of the house in a pile of gravel and soil.

She said her father travelled by foot for several miles, crossing the still-flooded waterway to get a neighbour who had horses to help evacuate his family.

“The neighbour brought the horses and I think I was on a horse because I cut my foot in the wool shed and we finally got to Napier that way,” Morton said.

She said they were in Napier with family for a couple of weeks before her father decided to return to pick up the pieces and rebuild.

“We had quite a good vegetable garden, it was quite a big one, and after everything was over and everything settled my dad found a lone carrot,” she said.

“We had a couple of relief workers and it must have taken six months [to rebuild].”

Patricia Morton talks about the 1938 Esk Valley flood from her home in Greenmeadows, Napier. Photo / Warren Buckland

She hadn’t lived in Esk Valley for a while, but she often visited and went to the place where her home was rebuilt, up until recently before Cyclone Gabrielle.

The end of Ellis Wallace Rd where she used to live is now inaccessible by normal means after flooding took out a bridge and ford for crossing halfway along it.

She said she felt for the people affected by the flooding after Cyclone Gabrielle and those who had lost their houses.

“Even though it has been a long time since [1938], it is still nature. You can’t stop these things from happening, can you?”

THE MAN IN THE ICONIC 1938 PHOTOGRAPH

Arthur Veale helped coordinate a team of men for clean up of the Esk Valley and its railways while living at a railway station with his family after their home was destroyed in the 1938 flooding.

Gordon Veale recognised his grandfather in a historical photograph from Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust, published in Hawke’s Bay Today last Saturday.

He knows his grandfather’s story well, partially thanks to record keeping of the family’s history undertaken by his father, Arthur’s son Leslie Arthur Veale, who also lived through the flood.

“He [Arthur] had itchy feet and he moved a hell of a lot around,” Gordon said.

The man seated on top of the buried house is Gordon Veale's grandfather Arthur Veale. Arthur lived in Esk Valley in 1938 when flooding destroyed his home and helped clean up. Photo / Hawke's Bay Museums Trust

“Most of the jobs he took were in the bush, selling trees and working in numerous sawmills in the central North Island.”

Leslie wrote that Arthur and his family moved to Eskdale in mid-1937.

“Everything was going along nicely when disaster struck in the Esk Valley. It was Easter 1938 and a week of torrential rain caused the normally placid Esk River to flood, engulfing the entire valley in water and silt,” Leslie wrote.

Gordon Veale has a record of his family's history left behind by his father, Les Veale, who also remembered the 1938 Esk Valley floods. Photo / Paul Taylor

“When the flood subsided, 10 feet of silt had been deposited across the valley floor and very few houses in the valley escaped. Only the roof of our house was showing above the silt.”

The family in the house at the time were all rescued from their roof by rowing boat, but they lost most of their possessions, including family heirlooms.

Leslie was in hospital in Hastings at the time of the floods after an accident working for a farmer in Poukawa.

“It was not until June [about one or two months after the flood] that I could get out to see them.”

He found his family living rough, relying on handouts in a railway station while Arthur had about 20 men working under him to dig out the railway under the silt.

Not long after that, Arthur and his family moved again, out of the Esk Valley and to Ormondville in 1939.