KEY POINTS:
To the outsider in the early years of last century, the postmaster probably had a cushy job. When the telephone was barely heard of and letters and telegrams were the way to keep in touch, he was a pillar of the community in a job for life.
What
could be easier than being paid to be the middleman in a business monopoly delivering glad tidings?
But the men doing the job would see it differently.They knew the messages weren't always about mundane family news and happy greetings.
Certainly not during the Great War, and certainly not down Takaka way.
Ninety years ago next month, the postmaster in Golden Bay was directed to deliver one of the awful telegram messages that reached post offices throughout the country between 1914 and 1918, terse notes telling parents their boy had been killed in action.
Around Takaka the population was thin, so the job was hardly routine. But the postmaster did his duty in early October 1917, breaking the heart of Mary Ann Newlove with a telegram telling her of the death of her 40-year-old son Charlie (Leonard Charles) on the Western Front.
Mary Ann was surely devastated. Her family was everything to her; she was one of 13 children and, after marrying when she was 22, she raised eight sons while husband Leonard broke in 30.3ha to create a productive mixed farm near Takaka.
By the time war broke out, the Newloves had retired to a cottage closer to town, leaving the farm in the capable hands of some of their boys.
It would not be a long and happy retirement for the pioneering couple. Leonard was 67 when he died in 1915, and his wife - with four sons overseas with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force - would, like all war mums, soon live in dread of the postmaster's knock.
When it came and the initial shock had passed she may have looked back fondly at the life of her first-born, for Charlie was quite a character.
Marrying young and settling down was the path most men took back then, but Charlie was a free spirit, often disappearing for days, or even weeks, at a time. It was too much to expect him to be tied down to marriage, although he got close once, leaving a young woman at the altar.
His habit of wandering at will apparently took him to Auckland in the early months of the war, and he wore the insignia of the third battalion of the Auckland Regiment when he fell in the Battle of Broodseinde at Passchendaele, Belgium, on October 4, 1917.
It's hard to be precise about the days that followed that first telegram delivery to Mary Ann Newlove. But it was probably less than two weeks later that the nightmare returned to the Takaka postmaster and a family that had already suffered enough.
Another young man killed in action. Another telegram to deliver. Another Newlove boy the victim.
When the postmaster delivered the news about 27-year-old Edwin (Ted) Newlove, fifth of the eight sons and killed on the front line at Passchendaele on October 12, it must have been unbearable for his grieving mother. But she barely had time to absorb the shock before the military disaster in the mud of the Western Front brought a third telegram to the Newlove door.
Leslie Malcolm Newlove, 22 and married in October 1916, probably just a few weeks before leaving New Zealand, was the youngest in the family and died in the same battle as Ted.
Both were privates in the second battalion of the Canterbury Regiment.
There is no record these days of the postmaster, but he was obviously no cold fish who separated his emotions from his job. He just couldn't do it. He couldn't deliver the telegram that would heap impossible grief on top of impossible grief. He assigned the task to a colleague.
The odds of losing three sons within eight days might seem incalculable, but they were not. They were merely tragic. If you were a New Zealander serving at Passchendaele in October 1917, there was a good chance of collecting a bullet in the chest when you followed orders and went over the top.
The three Newlove boys and brother George - who survived the front line and returned home with an English bride - did their duty; they did what they were told, with pride, for their country and Empire. Their mother, who died in 1932, must have wished for less heroic sons.
The names of Charlie, Ted and Leslie Newlove are engraved on the Memorial to the Missing at Tyne Cot Cemetery, Zonnebeke, in Belgium with those of 1176 countrymen who died at Passchendaele and whose bodies were never recovered. The cemetery contains 11,956 graves, 8366 of them unnamed.
Next month, at the 90th commemoration of the Battle of Passchendaele, New Zealand will join other countries in honouring the fallen in the three-month campaign known as 3rd Ypres.
In a few hours on one day in that campaign, October 12, 1917, nearly 1000 New Zealand soldiers were mortally wounded or died in the mud, trenches, shell-holes and barbed wire of Passchendaele. It is our highest death toll in war or peace, yet the day passes each year with barely a head bowed.
If you're ever down Takaka way, call into the local Anglican church. There you'll find a plaque mounted on a piece of Takaka marble and provided by the Government at the end of the war, recording Leslie Newlove's service to King and Country.
The metal tributes for Charlie and Ted are held by the family.
Around the country there will be scores of similar plaques. Clear off the dust on October 12, and remember the ultimate sacrifice made by the Newloves and hundreds of other New Zealanders who fought and died at Passchendaele.
