Gisborne Thistle stalwarts (from left) current patron Paul Rickard, former secretary Ian Gordon, former player-coach Paddy Sweeney and former chairman Eric Toplis share a moment during Thistle's 90th anniversary celebrations in 2014.
OBITUARY
Eric Toplis
A job on the other side of the world seemed just the ticket for Eric Toplis, his wife Chris and children Stephen and Heather.
It was 1971. Three years in the sun of Gisborne, New Zealand – with Toplis working on the local daily newspaper – would be a nice break for them all.
It turned out to be a long stretch.
Eric Gilbert Toplis returned to England only on holidays. He died in New Zealand, in Taupō, on November 22, a week shy of his 84th birthday and 54 years after he first set foot in the sun-drenched subeditors' room of the Gisborne Herald.
He was part of an infusion of gifted English subeditors in the early 1970s. Keith Huyton, Toplis and John Aldworth tightened reporters’ writing, wrote snappy headlines and brightened the “look” of the paper.
Toplis and his family warmed to life Down Under. After spells of relief teaching at Cobham and Elgin schools, Chris settled into a teaching position at St Mary’s primary school, and by the mid-70s Toplis was chief subeditor of the Gisborne Herald.
Longtime Herald police and court reporter Dave Conway recalls Toplis encouraging him in his efforts to make court reports more readable.
Court reporting was fraught with pitfalls for the unwary, so a formulaic report of essential information was favoured.
Conway wanted to cover court more like general news, highlighting the most interesting aspects of a case while including the essential details.
Some thought that approach was risky. Accuracy and fairness were not to be compromised, but Conway reckoned the stories could be brighter without sacrificing those tenets.
“Eric got me aside and said, ‘I know what you’re trying to do ... go for it’,” Conway said.
“He’d met similar resistance when he tried the same thing in Britain.”
Page layout was a Toplis forte.
Among many memorable front pages was the one announcing the resignation of Richard Nixon from the office of President of the United States. Gisborne, the first city to see the sun each day, could also claim to have the newspaper that was first to announce Nixon was quitting.
Toplis resigned from the position of chief subeditor on a point of principle but remained on the staff. His layout skills were called on during the state of emergency caused by the 1985 Ngatapa flood. Floodwaters prevented some staff from getting into the office, so Toplis oversaw the make-up of the front and other major news pages until the subs’ room was restored to its full complement.
When the Herald introduced a sports department, Toplis became the paper’s first sports editor (not counting then-chief reporter Jack Jones’ lengthy stint as Onlooker for the weekly round-up of local sports snippets in the 1960s and 70s).
Away from work, Toplis enjoyed sport – cricket and football in particular – and jogging.
He was a handy medium-pace bowler and an expert organiser for the Gisborne Herald mercantile cricket team. Gisborne Thistle stalwart Paul Rickard saw the potential and recruited him for the football club.
“He used to come down to the Record Reign [Thistle’s unofficial clubhouse] with me on a Friday night,” Rickard said.
“It was there that he met Ian Gordon, who worked across the road at Holts, and Laurie Heavey, who ran the BP depot at the wharf. The three of them wanted a game of football, so we started a Thistle fifth team for them, and other people turned up. Bobby Hoggart was one.
“ET [Toplis] did a great job at Thistle. I got him involved [in the committee] about 1978 and it wasn’t long before he was chairman.
“A group of Thistle die-hards called The Thursday Night Club had raised money and bought a house on the other side of Roebuck Rd for the football club. The sale of that helped build the clubrooms. ET, Laurie Heavey and Ian Gordon did a great job seeing it through.”
Toplis remained Thistle chairman until he left Gisborne in 1986.
He and Chris were bound for Thames. Toplis was hired as editor of a community newspaper group that included the Thames Star, Hauraki Herald and Paeroa Gazette.
In 1998 he took on a new challenge, as editor of the Taupō Times, which was then published three times a week. He retired in 2005.
Chris said her husband loved helping young journalists, and their house in Thames was “always full of young people”.
“They came with their problems and would sit around talking,” she said.
“He was almost a father figure to them.”
Thames joggers also tasted the Toplis hospitality. He had started jogging in Gisborne and continued well into his 60s.
“He did six Rotorua marathons and I don’t know how many half-marathons ... lots,” Chris said.
“On Sunday mornings Eric would go for a run with some of the Thames harriers. I stayed home and cooked breakfast. We had a swimming pool, and they would end up at our place for a swim and a bacon butty.”
Toplis was raised in Derby, the elder child – he had a sister, Ann – of Margaret and Harold Toplis. His mother worked as home help for elderly people, biking from job to job, and his father was a factory worker.
Toplis attended Hereford Cathedral School and at 15 left – with School Certificate in English language, Literature, French, Latin and Religious Knowledge – to become a cadet reporter at the Hereford Times.
Chris met him at a dance when they were both 19.
“He was a sports reporter for the Hereford Times and quite good-looking, and in those days working on the newspaper was really something,” she said. “We were a group of girls at the Hereford Training College for Young Ladies.”
Toplis (well over the six-foot mark) asked Chris (well under) to dance, and remarked that while many couples were cheek to cheek, they were cheek to navel.
His sense of humour and ability to relate to people from all walks of life – from the mayor to the tramp on the street – were among the qualities that appealed to Chris. But back home in Wales, her father had to be convinced.
“He said, ‘You’ve gone and picked an Englishman who doesn’t even play rugby.’ But they became good friends.”
Toplis moved from the Hereford Times to the Nuneaton Evening Tribune, then the smallest daily newspaper in England.
Thinking Chris was about to leave training college and go to South Wales, Toplis joined the South Wales Argus in Newport. But Chris got a job in Hereford, so Toplis returned to the Hereford Times as a subeditor – a new position for him in the editorial process.
They were married when they were 21 and celebrated their 62nd wedding anniversary last year.
Around 1970 the Hereford Times changed hands and Toplis was not happy with the new regime. He applied for two jobs – one in Manchester and the other in Gisborne, New Zealand – and was offered both.
“He persuaded me it could be an adventure for three years and then we would go back to the UK,” Chris said. “We were too broke to go back.”
Much later they did go back, and travelled to many other places ... on holiday.
In London they had met Gisborne Herald managing director Geoff Muir, who travelled to Britain in 1970 as chairman of the New Zealand section of the Commonwealth Press Union, leading a delegation to the quinquennial conference of the union at St Andrews, Scotland.
He was no stranger to London, having worked at The Times in 1937 as the holder of a fellowship under the Empire Press Union training scheme.
He met Eric and Chris Toplis “in some gentleman’s club somewhere”, Chris said.
“He said, ‘You will have a company house equipped down to the last teaspoon,’ and, ‘Don’t bring any winter clothes; we really don’t have a cold winter’.”
Alas, the company house was occupied when they arrived, and a flat was arranged.
On the way to New Zealand, a hijacking scare had resulted in flight delays and a missed connection that left them stranded in Singapore for several days. There they met John Aldworth, also stranded on his way to join the Gisborne Herald subediting staff.
Now 84 and living in Te Aroha, Aldworth recalled the trip and arrival in Auckland, where Toplis was given a bowl of water and a brush to scrub away remaining Herefordshire mud and grass from a pair of cricket boots.
Having had Sunday to rest at their motel in Gisborne, Aldworth and Toplis arrived at the Herald offices at 6.30am on Monday “to subedit the front, foreign then other pages with Percy Muir in the chief sub’s chair”.
With windows facing north across Gladstone Rd, “it rapidly got hot”. Morning tea brought some relief but after being told that was the only tea break, they returned from lunch with thermos flasks full of tea for afternoon sustenance.
“The theory then was that brighter, bolder layout attracted and better held the interest of readers,” Aldworth said in an email message.
“Some truth in it but actually I believe it’s the quality of the content that matters most.
“Each of us ran up against entrenched traditional practice as we sought to bring the paper into the then state of the art.
“On my first morning subbing the front page I incurred the wrath of the admirable Scots lady who was the reader when I stipulated a four-deck single-column headline. ‘You’re only allowed three decks,’ she thundered. That rule didn’t last the day.
“Keith [Huyton] also incurred censure, sparking a testy argument that ended only with the dour Yorkshireman’s final word: ‘Remember Culloden, woman’.”
Stephen Toplis, now based in Wellington as BNZ Markets head of research, said his father was “old-fashioned English”, tied to his job but supportive of his family.
“You got the sense he would defend his staff to the hilt – even if they weren’t his best mates, it was still his role to do that.
“In his younger days he smoked too much and drank too much [coffee and beer], but he managed to put all that behind him as he mellowed,” Stephen said.
“He’d had quite a serious heart issue in his mid-30s. A virus attacked his heart, which weakened it and left him with heart issues as he aged.”
Toplis was scheduled to have a heart valve replacement five years ago but “for a lot of reasons” it didn’t happen.
He was in hospital for the valve replacement when he succumbed to an unrelated medical issue in November.
“Dad struggled with his breathing for his last five years,” Stephen said.
“He also had arthritis in his back, probably due in part to his running and cricket, but his determination was such that he bought a three-wheel electric bike so he could keep exercising. He was a menace because he couldn’t turn his head, and was still riding it relatively recently.”
Stephen said that as well as being determined, his father was gregarious, the type of person who would return from a life-changing overseas holiday and tell you about a taxi driver and what an interesting background he had.
“He was always looking to understand people.”
Eric Toplis is survived by wife Chris, son Stephen, daughter Heather, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
– by John Gillies
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