Take with a grain of salt all that talk from Hughie Hughes about taking it easy and living like a 90-year-old.
As reported by the Gisborne Herald this week, Hughes last week passed on the Ruatōria business that began as Hughie Hughes Electrical and became much more, as other stores closed and Hughes took on the services they provided.
Now the store is known as Nati Trading Super Hub and is owned by Josie Wilkie Reedy and her husband Eruera Reedy.
Asked what plans he had for retirement, Hughes (91 on May 9) said Hato Hone St John – formerly the Order of St John – would figure prominently.
He was a pioneer of the organisation on the East Coast, training St John cadets, fundraising for ambulances and buildings, and recruiting and training volunteers to respond to emergencies.
“After all that, I took on the idea of starting a health shuttle service to get people to clinics,” Hughes said.
“I’ve been fundraising and operating that for the past 25 to 30 years. We run it at Te Araroa and Tikitiki. I’ll raise money for that and represent St John on the Coast. I’ve run an op-shop in my store and had a lady who volunteered to help and raised quite a bit of money for the health shuttles.
“I plant native trees for sale and make stools from pallets ... anything that makes a buck.”
The Hughes family made their name in the Gisborne-East Coast community through decades of service in their trades, and comparable periods in voluntary roles.
Hughie Hughes was active in St John Ambulance services and volunteer firefighting. He was coroner for the northern East Coast for 33 years, and a Justice of the Peace for 30 years.
Elder brothers Dave and Bob Hughes have a public profile that owes as much, if not more, to their voluntary work as their workaday jobs.
They were raised in a different era, as children in a large working-class family.
“My father, Stanley Hughes, went to sea at the age of 14 and was in the Merchant Navy in World War I,” Hughie Hughes said.
“He and my mother, Emily, were Welsh but living in Liverpool. In 1929 my father signed off his ship in Sydney and came to New Zealand. He started off working for the Post Office in Taihape and asked his girlfriend (Emily) to join him.
“When she got there she found he had saved £10 in all the time he had been in New Zealand. He was a gambler.
“He joined the railways and was a signals operator. Over five or six years he worked at Paekākāriki, Woodville and Palmerston North.
“I was born in Whanganui, the third child of seven.
“In 1942 we came to Gisborne. Dad was a signals maintainer. His first job was to build the telephone system for the line from Te Karaka to Moutohora. As kids we would live with him up at Moutohora for a couple of weeks at a time, in a little railway cottage half the size of a caravan. When the main line came he did the signals right down to Opoutama.
“We lived at 31 Awapuni Rd, where the Captain Cook Motor Lodge is now. I went to Awapuni School, then Central School. Six boys and a girl ... we were a bit rough around the edges. We hopped on bikes, went tramping, canoeing, caving – everything that anyone did around Gisborne in those days. When he was older, Dave was on the national cave rescue team.”
Dave was also captain of Gisborne Harrier Club and active in the Canoe and Tramping Club. He has been a keen planter of trees in Waikereru bird, plant and animal haven, and was awarded the Queen’s Service Medal for contributions to Search and Rescue, and scouting.
“We all left school at 15,” Hughie said. “That was my father’s wish. In those days you did what your dad told you to do.
“He wanted us all to be tradesmen. I was told to be an electrician so took an apprenticeship with Ellis and Bull and helped wire the places at Waerenga-o-Kuri, Tahora, Tiniroto, Pehiri.
“At 16, I’d be sitting in front of a fire drinking whisky with the farmer at the end of the day, while my brother Bob, who’d had to join the power board, was down in the shearers’ quarters drinking Gold Top beer.
“After he qualified as a lineman, Bob became an arborist. He could climb just about any tree, and he’s become a champion of the environment.
“Dave had to be a carpenter and he worked all his life with Bob Taylor, and Story and Lomas.”
The fourth brother, Owen, worked for Dennis (Rocky) Hall’s father as a painter. But, living so close to the railway station, he developed a love of engines. As soon as he finished his apprenticeship, he left the trade to become an engine driver.
The fifth brother, Jeffery, travelled the world and became a follower of the Baha’i faith.
The sixth brother, Philip, broke the mould and went to university, obtained a PhD and worked for the University of Canberra. He lives in New South Wales.
Their sister Sally, 15 years younger than Hughie, died in 1984 when the 1936 Chevrolet she and her husband were in went off the road in Lewis Pass. Sally was thrown out of the car and hit her head on a rock.
Hughie joined the Order of St John on May 8, 1945 – almost 80 years ago. In the 2021 Minister of Health Volunteer Awards, he was named Health Volunteer of the Year and joint winner of the Outstanding Achievement Award for Long Service. In 1985 he had received a Queen’s Service Medal for community service.
During his electrical apprenticeship, he was given a flying scholarship, which he used to learn to fly a Tiger Moth. He did his compulsory military training and came out of his apprenticeship in 1954.
After briefly working at Te Karaka on Mick and Barbara Fisher’s house – Barbara was a great friend at St John functions over the following decades – Hughie Hughes headed north in 1955 to get some of the work that came with the spread of power supply up the East Coast.
He went into partnership with Jim Rule and, for the next 29 years, Rule worked out of Tolaga Bay and Hughes was based in Ruatōria.
The 1980s were not good for the Coast or for Hughes personally.
“Muldoon sent the country broke, we had arsons in and around Ruatōria, Rogernomics pulled the plug on farming, forestry came in and had so much money they were buying good farms, Cyclone Bola hit, my sister Sally died, my marriage (to Janet, they had four children) collapsed, and the Coast population dropped dramatically.”
Restructuring of the economy also took away people employed in government and local authority roles.
Hughie Hughes weathered all that, and now he says he just wants to be an old man at home with Pat, his partner of 35 years. Few would begrudge him that, but bet on him slowing down, not stopping any time soon.
Rain started falling at the top of the country before dawn.