King’s Birthday Honours 2024: Stamps, taps, dead cats and the NZ way of life - Steve Braunias

Jenny Banfield celebrating her 90th birthday this month: "Are you coming down for dinner? Just let me know.”

Much of the King’s Birthday Honours List is a cast of nobodies, and I duly chose to interview three such honoured people who no one has ever heard of outside their narrow sphere of influence. This is the thing about the annual list: everyone on it has achieved high excellence but for the most part it recognises the unrecognised, names the nameless. It’s a beautiful national custom. Really what it honours is the approved and official version of the New Zealand way of life as lived by people simply going about their business, and so it was that I called a plumber in Dunedin.

Brian George Foley, 86, has been made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to plumbing.

There is possibly a saying in Dunedin that goes: if you’ve seen one Foley, you’ve seen them all. “We all look like the same person,” Brian said, of himself, his son Craig who now heads Foleys Plumbing, and Craig’s son Nathan, who now also works for the family firm. Four generations of five Foley men, all plumbers, all with the same face: Brian’s father Alfred, who established the trade in 1934, had a twin brother, Bill, also a plumber.

I said, “The lookalike gene runs strong in the Foley bloodline.”

“Very much so,” Brian said. And then he added, “My mother’s brother was a plumber too.”

He said his father asked him to take over the business just after he had served his apprenticeship. “We only had one man working for us back then. Alan. Alan Briggs.” I was to hear more of Alan later. Brian continued, “So I said to Dad, ‘If Alan will stay working with us, yes, I’ll take it on.’

“So I said to Alan, ‘Would you stay if I was running the business?’

“And he said, ‘Certainly. I’ve got nowhere else to go.’

“So he and I ran the business and then we took on apprentices and just built it up from there.”

Foleys Plumbing now employs 260 people and has branches throughout New Zealand.

I asked, “Is there a sense of pride to fix what is broken?”

“Look, I tell you what, there really is,” Brian said. “When you do the plumbing on a new bathroom, or a new kitchen, it’s quite a thrill. Yeah. You know, when you finish, stand back and look at it.” He left a silence over the phone. It was as though he were standing back and looking at a new bathroom. And then he said: “Plumbing was really my life.”

We cross live to a Foleys van in bustling Twizel.

I asked, “Does a plumber ever really retire?”

“Well, you’ve got me there,” he said. “I was at Wānaka on Christmas Day with my wife and my ex-wife, and the phone went and this fella says, ‘Can you come around? The sewage is running up inside the shower.’

“Both my wives said, ‘Oh no you don’t. It’s Christmas Day. You tell him no.’

“But I said, ‘Oh, no. I can’t say no.’ I had the gear and the know-how.”

I said, “It sounds like a hell of a mess.”

“Oh it was awful,” said Brian. “It was shocking. Coming up through the shower. The drain was blocked outside, and when you flush the toilet, the sewage would come back up the pipe and into the shower up through the grate on the floor because it was the lowest point. It wasn’t very nice. He was very grateful. I think he gave me a bottle of wine.”

This act of service alone made Brian deserving of the Order of the Merit but I was dying for him to finish the story so I could ask, “You were having Christmas with your current wife and your ex-wife?”

“She’s my children’s mother, so it’s worth getting on. And her husband died, and she and my wife get on very well.”

The conversation returned to Alan Briggs, who Brian said had taught him the most about plumbing. “But he was a different character to what I was,” he said. “He didn’t know how to mix with ladies. He was very sort of shyish around women. He lived at home with his mother. His brother got married, and his mother told him it was his job to look after her. And she lived ‘til 100.”

“Good grief,” I said.

“Yeah. So Alan never got married, but he used to come in and have lunch with my mum and dad every day.”

“Was he happy?”

“He never complained,” said Brian. “He liked his job and he liked the company of my mum and dad.”

“What was his mum like?”

“Well, she was a nice lady. But dominating. Yeah.”

Brian said his wife was thrilled about his Order of Merit, and so was his son, Craig. Alan Briggs died about 15 years ago. I asked Brian what he thought Alan would have made of the honour.

“I remember when I sat my plumbing exams, and I got second highest in New Zealand. Alan said, ‘That’s very good.’ That was his highest praise,” Brian said. “He never got excited.”

The lonely ballad of Alan Briggs (“I’ve got nowhere else to go”) was another version of the New Zealand way of life.

The main topic of my conversation with Dianne Patricia John, 75, of Picton, made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to ornithology, was the New Zealand way of death. We talked a lot about establishing pest zones for native birds, which is to say we talked a lot about trapping and killing predators – rats, possums, stoats, weasels, cats.

I said, “It’s easy to feel no empathy whatsoever for a rat or a stoat.”

She said, “I don’t know. Some of them are actually quite nice. And I never thought that I’d be able to go out there and kill creatures like that because I hate the idea of it. And I don’t like killing every time I do it. But I know it’s for the birds. I say to myself, ‘It’s for the birds! It’s for the birds!’ And if I wasn’t doing it, the birds would be getting eaten.”

I asked, “How many predators do you think you’ve killed?”

“Quite a few,” she said.

“What happens to the body?”

She said, “Well, around here the keas have a feast. And out in the bush they’re eaten by feral cats and pigs. So nature disposes of them. Very quickly as well.”

I asked, “Have you ever killed a feral cat?”

“Yeah,” she said. “In a trap. I didn’t do it. The trap did it. It was a kitten and it was so emaciated. That was why it went in the trap, because it was so hungry and it was a beautiful-looking animal. It would have made a lovely cat.”

“Oh dear,” I said.

“Yeah. It was really sad. It was horrible. But,” she said, “we need to get rid of the feral cats. They are nasty and there are millions of them out there across the country. Most of them have gone feral because they’ve been dumped. And the ones that are strong enough to survive go on and breed out in the wild, and their offspring seem to survive very well for some reason. But the life they have is miserable. Utterly miserable.”

Picton ornithologist Dianne John, on a mission.

I asked, “What did you mean earlier when you said some of the other pests ‘are actually quite nice’?”

“Well,” she said, “stoats are a gorgeous animal. Really, really pretty. But they are a killing machine.”

“Is the rat attractive?”

“Some of the ship rats are lovely. I trapped one recently and I looked at it, I thought, ‘Oh, you were gorgeous.’ Its colour was this lovely pale white underneath, and this lovely tan brown colour on the top. It was just beautiful. All shiny,” said Dianne of the rat caught and killed stone dead in a trap, “and smooth.”

The three good keen Kiwis who I spoke had a combined age of 251, the majority stake going to Jeanette (Jenny) Mary Banfield, 90, of Raumati, made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to philately.

The oldest, and the liveliest; she was a chatty, merry soul, also very straightforward. Her opening remark when I congratulated her on her King’s Honour: “I think it’s a shame in some ways that the award’s been given just for philately. Because I ran the gymnasium club for kids for about six years, and I ran the book fair, you know, the Lions one, for about five years. So I’ve done all sorts of other things beside philately. But oh well. It’s very nice.”

Jenny was speaking from her home in the Coastal Villas retirement village. Her husband Norman, a retired accountant, had answered the phone. His opening remark: “Hello? Hello? Can you please speak up?”

I asked her how they met, and she told a love story with filled rolls in it. Jenny was born in Yorkshire. She came to New Zealand when she was 19 and entered nursing. “Two of the doctors that I’d been working with wanted me to marry their son. I didn’t quite agree with that. So I went back to Britain just for six months and I went out to dinner with a friend and his fiancee. But he didn’t tell me he was bringing someone with him. Well, I got a big filled roll, cut it in half, put it on the table, and this person came in, promptly sat down and ate my supper. And he’s paid for it ever since.

“When he proposed to me, I said, ‘Yes, I’ll marry you, but I’m going back to New Zealand.’

“Because I could not live anywhere else. I just love it here. I remember I came into Wellington on the boat and then I went up to Taranaki and I saw Mount Egmont.

“I just couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘That’s it. I’m stuck.’”

I asked, “Would you call yourself a proud Kiwi now?”

She called out, “Norman!”

And then, “Norman?”

And then she asked, “Sorry. What did you say just then?”

“Are you a proud Kiwi?”

“Oh yes. We both are. He loves it as much as I do now.”

We talked about stamps. Norman had collected stamps from the age of 10, but she only got into philately at 65. “He does it the normal way,” she said.

I asked, “What way is that?”

“Well, you collect stamps from one country, and it’s more technical. He can tell you who drew the stamp, who printed it, what paper they used, the perforations, and things like that. But I wanted to exhibit my stamps so that anybody walking in off the street could stand in front of it, understand it, and enjoy it.

“What set me going was I did a little exhibit on medicine, and put it into a show in Christchurch. There were a couple of quite funny stamps. I was wandering around the hall and I heard somebody laughing. Being nosey, I went to see what it was, and it was a man standing in front of my exhibit.

“And I said, ‘Are you enjoying that?’

“He said, ‘Come and have a look at this.’

“And he took me to my exhibit, and said, ‘I only came in here to get out of the rain, but I’m going home to get my wife to come and have a look at this.’

“And that’s how I got started.”

I said, “You’re an entertainer.”

She shouted, “Norman!”

He called out, “Yes?”

She said, “There’s someone been knocking at the door.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’d best see who it is.”

Jenny said to me, “What was it you were saying?”

“You’re an entertainer.”

“Well,” she said, “I can’t help being like I am. It’s a bit late to change at 90, isn’t it?”

We talked a bit more about stamps, about her travels to the Middle East, and their cat Oscar, and then I asked, “What are you making for dinner tonight?”

“Roast chicken, roast veggies, and baked apple,” she said. “Are you coming down for it? Just let me know.”

That would have been nice. I love the New Zealand way of roast dinners - a meal served on the tables of the nation this long weekend, families sitting down with the gravy jug and the carving knife, the hot bird stuffed and steaming, Kiwis tucking in and going about their business with good humour, with considerable appetites, with high standards of excellence.