Dorothy Lancaster and daughter Tracey with Tracey's grandchildren – Dorothy's great-grandchildren – Marino, 4, and Maia, 1. The photo was taken in 2018.
Football fans watching from the white-spattered wooden seats of the Childers Road Reserve grandstand are guardians of tradition.
They sit in seats warmed over generations by supporters whose devotion to their teams added passion, colour and humour to the excitement on the pitch.
Dorothy Irene Lancaster was an avid supporter of Gisborne City from the 1970s, and her “watch” included the all-too-brief 2000s revival led by businessman Kevin Whitley and glory-days coach Kevin Fallon.
She died peacefully in Hastings, surrounded by family, early this year after a sudden illness, at the age of 83.
Her death was another sign of the thinning ranks of 1970s and ‘80s football fans who called Gisborne home but whose accents often proclaimed “made in the UK”.
Dorothy’s life was an example of how to make the most of the hand you’re dealt.
She ran a home at 13, was a milk sampler visiting farms in two of England’s most picturesque areas, came to New Zealand alone at 23, had a short and unhappy marriage that yielded the love of her life – daughter Tracey – and worked in a dizzying array of jobs as a single mother in a world made for couples.
Dorothy’s companion in the grandstand over many years – another Dorothy (McCullough) from the UK – died in May 2017, a few weeks short of her 76th birthday.
They met at a Gisborne City game in Manurewa in 1980.
“She was standing on her own, and I could tell she was a Gisborne supporter,” Dorothy Lancaster recalled shortly after her friend’s death.
“I invited her to join us and said, ‘I’m Dorothy’. She said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, I’m Dorothy’.
“From then on, she and I sat together in the grandstand at Childers Road Reserve and abused the referees and yelled at all the players.”
Dorothy Lancaster left the district for a time but when she returned, the pair resumed their spectating partnership.
Both served behind the scenes, too. Dorothy Lancaster was the club’s secretary and first female committee member; Dorothy McCullough ran the clubrooms bar, organised housie evenings and served on the committee.
Dorothy Lancaster compiled a neatly typed account of her life in the stated hope it would be an incentive to solo parents with ambition and a love of life.
Born in the village of Haltwhistle in the north of England on January 2, 1941, Dorothy Irene Bell (her maiden name) had a “wonderful childhood” with loving parents and a sister nine and a half years older.
Dorothy shouldered adult responsibilities early. At 13 she was cooking, shopping for groceries, keeping the house clean, and doing washing with a copper, poss tub and mangle, while still going to school.
Two years later the family moved to Newcastle and Dorothy got a new school, where she learned shorthand, typing, bookkeeping and economics, although she really wanted to be a vet.
Passing seven out of nine GCE (General Certificate of Education) subjects, she decided to go into laboratory work.
Her first “real job” was in a milk laboratory. Then, in 1959, she joined the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food as a milk sampler tester in Carlisle. It meant getting up at any hour after 3am, visiting dairy farms before the milk truck arrived and returning to the main laboratory where the samples were tested to ensure those farms could be given Tubercular Tested Licences.
“I travelled all round the Lake District, Cumbria, West Cumberland, experiencing some of the most stunning scenery and being paid for it,” she wrote.
Next she transferred to North Yorkshire, where she worked in the Yorkshire Dales visiting places such as Wensleydale, Swaledale and Buttertubs. During her two years in North Yorkshire she met the man who was to become her husband.
When they fell out, Dorothy recalled she had heard that New Zealand was looking for herd testers. She found an application form in The Field and on May 29, 1964, she boarded the Southern Cross at Southampton bound for Wellington.
Dorothy and the other newly recruited herd testers – five females and five males – were based in Palmerston North.
They started work for milking anywhere from 2.30pm to 5.30pm, stayed the night on the farm, got up with the birds, carried 75lbs of milk in each hand the length of the milking shed, took a sample and labelled it, then went for the next cow. They measured the butter fat content with a hand-cranked centrifuge.
Dorothy’s territory covered “everything on the left-hand side of the road from Mount Bruce to Carterton”.
She spent her first Christmas in New Zealand with friends who ran a coffee bar in Masterton, and mentioned she would like to work with animals more closely than with cows being milked or calves having their ears tattooed.
Her friends told her of a vet’s assistant vacancy coming up at the Waipukurau Veterinary Hospital, with accommodation provided. She got the job and, after seven months herd testing, was off to Waipukurau.
She loved the animals, watching the operations and doing the office work, but was upset at animals being euthanised.
Next she did the season at Wattie’s as assistant bacteriologist, then joined Wattie’s’ opposition, Unilever, as secretary to the company chemist. Among her duties was the salmonella testing of meat products.
After Dorothy had enjoyed a weekend in Coroglen and Whitianga, her boss called her into his office and told her that her father had died that morning. Her father and mother had decided to come to New Zealand to live, and were to have arrived in 12 weeks.
Dorothy’s mother came by air instead of by sea, and in the meantime – after training in Motueka – Dorothy had begun work as lab technician in the new Walls Ice Cream factory in Papatoetoe. Dorothy and her mother moved into accommodation that came with the job, and then her old boyfriend phoned to say he was coming over from Australia.
Marriage, pregnancy, and daughter Tracey came next but soon it became apparent the marriage was doomed. Dorothy’s mother had given them the deposit for a house, then moved to New Plymouth.
After two and a half years of marriage, Dorothy filed for a separation, picked up her baby, cat and mother, and moved to Gisborne.
They booked into a cabin at the Waikanae Beach Motor Camp and Dorothy got a job at Columbine on the “four to 10 shift” pressing stockings.
They moved several times and eventually were given a state house in Munro St.
Deciding she needed to spend more time with Tracey, Dorothy took a position at Cook Hospital watching electrocardiograph monitors in intensive care during the night shift. She stayed for three months but could not handle people dying.
Short-term jobs dealing with complaints at Columbine and working as secretary to the manager of Beazley Homes on the Roebuck Rd-Gladstone Rd corner followed, then Dorothy worked part-time with the boys at the IHC hostel, putting them in the bath, giving them tea then putting them to bed.
Dorothy was allocated a new state house in Lyell Rd. At this time her sister, brother-in-law and their two sons arrived from England and lived with them.
Dorothy decided to give her sister and her family space, so advertised in national newspapers for a live-in housekeeping job.
She found two, one after the other, in the Waikato. She and Tracey stayed there until it was time to return to Gisborne for Tracey to start school, at Waikirikiri.
Dorothy got a 9am-to-3pm job delivering meat for a butcher and weekend work at a dairy.
When Tracey was 6, Dorothy took her to Hastings for a weekend and called into Unilever to catch up with friends. The technical director asked her to manage a new motel for a syndicate in which he was a member. It was a live-in position and was close to Te Mata School for Tracey.
After two years in the motel job and having had her request for a pay rise turned down, Dorothy resigned.
Now with nowhere to live and no job, she found a house to rent and did casual field work.
She contacted a Miss Turner Williams, who found cook-housekeeping positions, usually for couples. While Dorothy was there, Miss Turner Williams took a call from Lady Judith Ormond, wife of Sir John Ormond, chairman of the New Zealand Meat Producers Board. They wanted a cook-housekeeper as they had three sons being married during the year.
Dorothy and Tracey moved to Wallingford Station and were given use of the nursery wing, which had its own bathroom and a small kitchen. They spent two idyllic years there. Tracey had a Timor Pony, courtesy of Lady Ormond, and Dorothy, having joined Yoga Teachers of New Zealand, gave free yoga lessons once a week for neighbouring farmers and friends of Lady Ormond.
During her second year at Wallingford, Dorothy received a letter from her best friend in England asking her to go over for a holiday.
She had only enough for return fares to Australia for her and Tracey, so she arranged for an advert to be put in one of the Sydney papers. After a spell as live-in manager of a youth hostel in Sydney, Dorothy found work on a sheep station called Hunthawong, out towards Broken Hill. Her duties included making breakfast (some combination of chops, steak, eggs and lots of toast), lunch (cold meat and salads) and dinner (usually a roast). She baked bread and made butter and ice cream.
After 10 weeks on the station, Dorothy and Tracey headed to Britain. They visited Tracey’s grandparents and learned that Tracey’s father was overseas for another year. He asked if they could stay in Britain until he returned. It was 1977.
Back in her hometown Haltwhistle and surrounds, Dorothy worked as a hotel cleaner, a nightclub bar worker and a private secretary to an import/export manager.
Dorothy and Tracey had a flat in Fourstones, near Haltwhistle, and stayed there until Tracey’s father got back from overseas.
They travelled to Yorkshire to meet him. Dorothy felt he hadn’t changed so returned to Fourstones and successfully applied for a cook/housekeeping role in a castle at the Aigas Field Centre near the village of Beauly in the Scottish Highlands.
One of Dorothy’s tasks was the production of 2500 assorted pies for the expected paying guests staying in chalets and the castle.
When she and Tracey headed back to New Zealand they had been away for two and a half years. Tracey was enrolled at Ilminster Intermediate and a week after getting back to Gisborne Dorothy picked up the paper and found a job. She became restaurant manager at Woolworths, where she stayed for two years.
During this time she did two Waikato University block courses for supervisors, and became secretary and committee member for Gisborne City AFC.
After sharing rental accommodation, Dorothy was allocated a state house, where she and Tracey lived for six years.
In 1982 Dorothy opened a health food restaurant at Spanasium (in the building that used to be Wise’s Ice Cream factory in Palmerston Road) but it was “10 years too early” and she had to give it up.
Over the next few years, Dorothy worked at Gear Meat making pies, at the police canteen bar, with the Budget Advisory Service, at the Trade Aid shop, and as a chef at the Royal, DB Gisborne and Sandown Park Motor hotels.
Between cheffing jobs, she was employed for brief spells at Awapuni School and then Makaraka School doing art work.
During her time at the Sandown, she saw an advertisement for a live-in matron at Woodford House boarding school in Havelock North.
A staircase at Woodford reminded Dorothy of a recurring, unsettling dream she’d been having, so she ended the interview.
Before leaving Havelock North, she bought a newspaper and found the job she wanted – catering supervisor at Iona College. She got the job, which came with accommodation on the school property. She left Tracey, now 18, in their home in Gisborne with a flatmate.
As catering supervisor, Dorothy planned the menu and ordered everything to feed 250 people three times a day, plus morning and afternoon teas. She also cooked on the chef’s days off. She’d work two weeks straight, then have four days off, when she’d return to Gisborne.
While Dorothy was at Iona, she did some of the catering for a karate tournament at the Hawke’s Bay Highland Games and was introduced to Charlie Walford, former president of the Notorious Mongrel Mob. He ran courses for street kids, work that fascinated Dorothy.
Walford offered her a position tutoring at-risk students in life skills and cooking. She accepted. For 14 months she worked with Walford and his wife Tammy, and at weekends cheffed at the Havelock North Club.
Charlie Walford suggested Dorothy start her own cooking, catering, waiting and wine-waiting course for at-risk people.
Dorothy gained approval from the authorities and obtained daytime use of a Havelock North restaurant for her course.
She started a wine-waiting, cooking and catering course with a “great tutor”, Jan Napier. When Jan left, Dorothy shifted the course to the Hastings Club and recruited daughter Tracey to tutor in the waiting and wine-waiting disciplines.
There, the typed account of Dorothy’s life ends. An accompanying handwritten list of job dates puts Dorothy’s course for at-risk people in the late 1980s. She was not yet 50.
The jobs list starts in 1955 with ironing and babysitting, and ends in 2010. She would have been 69, and was still putting in a shift. I counted 60 jobs, most of them requiring skill but not offering great material reward.
Daughter Tracey Strother updated the story: “Mum lived in Gisborne up till three years ago, when she moved to be closer to us. She worked with kids at BLENNZ (Blind and Low Vision Education Network NZ) in Gisborne, making textile books for sight-impaired children.
“Mum also worked for Access, helping people in their homes.
“She did reading at Elgin and Te Wharau schools, which was all volunteering. She was part of the Granny reading programme at Waipukurau Primary School up till the Christmas holidays of 2023. Mum always helped others in the community, too.
“She was living in her tiny home on our front lawn in Waipukurau till she passed away two days after her 83rd birthday.”
Tracey is now learning support co-ordinator at Waipawa School in Hawke’s Bay.
Dorothy Lancaster is survived by her daughter Tracey, grandsons Kody and Konrad, and great-grandchildren Marino and Maia.
Blue was the colour for these Gisborne City fans
Dorothy Lancaster is representative of generations of spectators at Childers Road Reserve, some of whom are still with us. They include Eastern Union old-timers Ron Johnstone, Dave Elliott (and son Bob), Dick Cook, Bert Trueman, Cliff Whitley (and all the Whitleys) and Bill Mulrooney (and all the Mulrooneys), trilby-and-greatcoat senior statesmen Tom Hill, Jim Dunsmore, Bill Bryant and Jesse Cook, sharp-tongued sideline wag Maurie Charles, and old faithfuls Peter and Eileen Grealish, Terry McCavana, Tommy Walker, Geoff Campbell, Brian Pugh, Chris Fenn, Terry Martin, Rod Husband, Charlie and Sue Jones, Ken and Drew Wood, Arthur and Margaret Shelton, John and Ann Kibble, Terry and Pauline Wood, Denis Smith, Bill Roberts, Geoff Logan, Ron Higham, Tom and Anne Johnston, Mick and Joan Orford, Frank and Mary Spencer, Bob and Norah Niemiec, Betty Braybrook (and all the Braybrooks), Arthur and Daphne Bacon, Fred Lugtig, Theo Broeke, Hans van der Kuijl, Bill and Sadie Wilkie, Trevor Rice, Bruce Sinclair (and all the Sinclairs), John Dwight (and all the Dwights), Wilson Pears, Ross McNamara, brothers John and Sandy Stirton, Brian Amor, Martin and Colleen Ryan, Dave and Audrey Comber, and Northern Irish Kiwis the Kennedy, Hill and Hooks families. Apologies to those inadvertently left out.