Auckland's harbour bridge turns 50 on Saturday. This week, the Herald looks at how it has changed the city.
Today, Mathew Dearnaley goes back to the beginning.
Sir John Allum, "father" of the harbour bridge, was a wily politician accustomed to getting his own way on behalf of his city.
"It has been a difficult task," he told the Herald in October, 1954, after winning a battle with the Government to seal a contract for construction of
the original four-lane bridge.
"It needed a tremendous lot of patience, and I am not a patient man."
The former London messenger boy, who gave 51 years of civic service to Auckland after emigrating in 1909 aged 20 with his wife Annie and first of five babies, acknowledged that some critics called him dictatorial.
One minister railed against the bridge authority, which Sir John chaired for 20 years, for its "impetuous method of going about getting a bridge".
Another MP let slip that the Mayor was known in parliamentary corridors as "His Imperial Highness."
His obituary in the Herald in 1972 described him as "a brisk little dynamo of a man' .
"I was just obstinate," Sir John said in reply to critics, in what his family say would have been a clipped British accent but for a slight Kiwi inflection.
"The merit of the scheme was sufficient to ensure it would be done."
Sir John, who was knighted in 1950 nine years into a then-unprecedented 12 years as Auckland mayor, said he left England after seeing scant opportunity in a land where "you had to know somebody" to get ahead.
Before being elected a city councillor in 1920, he took night classes to become an electrical engineer.
That helped him into his own business, from which he went to posts including leader of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce, the Employers' Federation, and Auckland's drainage and transport boards.
His grandson David Hutcheson remembers him as "one of the most service-oriented people I could imagine."
