CHAPTER 2

THE RIDE OF A LIFETIME

Richard loved steam engines for their noise, their smell and the vibration they made.

I’ve always loved trains. When I was boy in the late 1960s, steam trains were still around, but they were on their way out. My father was very eager to get out and record these disappearing trains.

For me, it was a wonderful experience. I was exposed to the very loud ‘chuff, chuff, chuff’ of the engine — it was a visual pleasure, as well as visceral and loud. I really enjoyed the click and clack of the rails, the movement of the carriages, the smell of the steam and coal. And I could feel the heat.

Ingrid, Richard and George.

The train driver was the hero for me. He was in charge, and when I was young all I wanted to be was a train driver. But I was born too late. By the time I was old enough to drive a train they were all controlled by radio telephones. I would have made a terrible job of it.

Dad loved trains, but more from the perspective of a railway archaeologist, a pictorialist. He liked the steam trains in action, but he also wanted to record a snapshot in time when the railway infrastructure was going and a way of life was disappearing. He was specifically interested in the area around Central Otago. He was a railway historian — taking photos of things other people took for granted and might not notice when they are gone.

My mother was a railway widow, sitting in the car doing her knitting while Dad and I were running across the country looking for steam trains. Bill Cowan, who wrote a couple of books on steam trains, told me that my father wasn’t like a lot of other photographers who would park on the road next to the track, get a quick photo and move on. Dad would go further — he would walk to the hard-to-reach places and get the better photographs. We’d sometimes walk and wait three or four hours for a photograph.

My father travelled the country looking for trains, and it was a good experience for me to learn places and geography.

Richard, pictured with his father George, used to record steam trains on a cassette recorder so he could replay the sound later on.

George West Emerson was a driving force in Richard’s life. While he didn’t give his son a love of beer — Richard found that on his own — George did pass on his passion for trains, imbuing Richard with a lifelong love of all things rail, particularly steam trains.

Like any father and son, George and Richard Emerson clashed — both strong-willed, stubborn and determined to do things their own way — and yet they shared many common interests, so much so that Richard came to see his dad as his best mate.

George, however, was not always easy to love. Even those closest to George describe him as a curmudgeon, stern, grumpy, a bully, even Elizabethan in the sense he controlled the finances and made all the family decisions. In an interview late in life, George admitted while not quite ‘the Ayatollah’ he recognised the ‘dictator’ in himself.

Ingrid Emerson says her first encounter with her future husband left her thinking ‘he was the rudest man I’d ever met’.

Helen Emerson, Richard’s younger sister, says her father was frugal, firm, fastidious but always fair. ‘He was no-frills, puritanical, but we had all the essentials and it was a very caring, loving home.’

George drove everything in the family’s life and what George said went. Fiscally conservative, he hated spending money and would never pay for someone to do something he might be able to do himself.

George decided when and where the family would holiday, a schedule usually built around trains. Helen recalls a tedious — for her — Easter Weekend spent in a motel in the unglamorous Southland town of Lumsden; the Emerson family and other train enthusiasts booking out the entire place so George, Richard and others could chase the Kingston Flyer.

The family joke has Richard chasing his first train while sitting on a potty — and even that was at the mercy of George’s control. On one of the many family trips spent indulging George’s obsession for train photography, Richard’s need to relieve himself coincided with George’s need to get in the car and drive to the next train-snapping spot, so off they went in the car with Ingrid balancing Richard on a portable potty. As Richard says with a smile, ‘George was so impatient he wasn’t letting my shit get in the way of photographing a steam train.’

Meanwhile, at home the radio stayed tuned to the station George wanted to listen to and silence reigned when the news came on. The Bakelite radio was so old, however, it had to be turned on well in advance of any news bulletin as it needed time to warm up; but it worked and therefore didn’t need to be replaced or updated.

Equally aged was the family’s worn-out Triumph 2000 car. It so embarrassed Helen when George drove her to school, she demanded that he park on a side road short of the main gate. She didn’t want any of her friends to see the car, but George ignored her embarrassed pleas and drove right to the gate. ‘He knew damn well what he was doing — he was driving all the way to the school gate whether I wanted him to or not!’

George had high expectations of himself and of Richard and Helen. Did he demand more of Richard because of his disability than he would have done with a mythical son who doesn’t exist? Probably not, say family members.

Richard’s disability cut him no favours, but nor did George over-discipline his son. On the contrary, one of Richard’s long-time friends remembers George ‘driving’ Richard to ensure his disability didn’t hold him back, didn’t make him a victim and didn’t give him a handy excuse for not achieving his full potential.

Richard hated the harness he had to wear for his bulky hearing aids — he was embarrassed because it looked like a bra.

As a child, I was afraid of my father. My friends were afraid of him. Often when I got into trouble it took me a long time to work out why he would discipline me. Other times it was more obvious.

One snowy day when I was walking home from school at lunchtime, my friend Rob Smillie said to me, ‘I dare you to throw a snowball at a car.’ So I did. The snowball hit the car, but it turned out the snowball had a stone in it and it chipped the windscreen of the car. Sheeeit! I was off running as fast as I could home.

The man in the car caught up with Rob and demanded to know where I lived. Rob was a bit of a stirrer and he wanted to see what would happen next, so he pointed to our house.

Dad was in bed with the flu, the doorbell rang, my mother answered and there was this man in a long trench coat. He outlined for her what I had done.

The next thing I saw was my father getting out of bed … Faaark, I knew what this meant — I was in for a hiding! I was so terrified that I rushed out the front door and ran down the street. Dad finally grabbed me and dragged me home into the hallway. Then he picked up a piece of wood that was lying around from some renovation work and whacked me. Oh boy, I bawled my eyes out and he made me go back to school red-eyed and sore-arsed.

George Emerson was born in New Brighton, Christchurch, on 6 March 1935. His father, Albert, trained as a schoolteacher and the family moved to Croydon Bush, in rolling farm country northwest of Gore, where Albert ran a one-room school.

The eldest of three children, George had seven years on his brother Les, with another two years back to Alistair. Ingrid describes her in-laws as not being well off.

The defining characters in George Emerson’s life were his father and his paternal grandparents, Albert and Ida.

George and his brothers grew up believing the family legend that their grandmother, Ida, was French. Her maiden name was Gay Tan, which if pronounced with a Gallic twist could sound similar to the famous brand of French cigarettes, Gitanes.

The French connection story hid a far more interesting heritage, which the family tried to keep secret. Richard’s uncle, Alastair, believed the secrecy helped cover up an inter-racial marriage — frowned on by both Chinese and Pakeha communities at the time — and so Albert could prevent his sons from suffering the same racist bullying he’d been subjected to as a boy.

According to Alistair Emerson, his father could have been mistaken for Asian when he was a young man. ‘And it was hinted at by some family members that George, Les and I had done well to “overcome our difficulties”.’

Far from French, Ida took half her DNA from her Chinese father, Louis Gay Tan — a pidgin English adaptation of his given name, Looi Yi Tsaan. Born in Canton, he immigrated to New Zealand in 1867, but unlike many Chinese of that period in Otago, he didn’t work in the goldfields. Instead Louis established himself as a manager of mine-workers, securing and directing labour where it was needed.

If gold-mining had the ability to make or break fortunes, managing workers became the path to security and steady wealth accumulation, and it saw Louis Gay Tan become one of the better-off and more well-known Chinese in Otago. Just three years after arriving, he became the first Chinese person in the province to become a naturalised New Zealander.

Gay Tan’s wealth and position in society allowed him to rise above the typical fate of Chinese gold-miners, many of whom remained poor. He built his own cottage in the mining town of Macraes Flat, about 50 kilometres northwest of Dunedin.

The cottage is still standing and is now listed as a historic place by Heritage New Zealand, which says of it: ‘A house of this size, style and permanence was uncommon among European miners, let alone the Chinese. Gay Tan was a man well outside the Chinese norm in Otago, being both relatively wealthy and having married a European wife.’

That European wife was Emma Finch, an English immigrant. Both she and Louis stepped outside racial boundaries to marry at Naseby in 1873. They moved to Macraes Flat in 1875 and had three children, two of whom survived into adulthood. Their daughter Ida — George’s grandmother — had a good education and found work as a governess in the household of Dunedin grandee, former New Zealand premier and chief justice, Sir Robert Stout.

The Chinese family connection is a very interesting one and certainly sets us apart from other people. It was natural for me to make fun of this, saying my Chinese comes out when I laugh — you have to see this to understand!

Dad was proud of his Chinese background and wanted to find out more, which led him to Dunedin’s authority on Chinese immigrants, James Ng, who assisted him with tracing information.

When George tried to find out about this side of his heritage from his family, he found they wanted nothing to do with their Chinese history, refused to talk about it. Naturally, George was sad about this. Many years ago, it would have been understandable, but in this modern world, multi-racial life is commonplace. The Gay Tan cottage is only 20 minutes away from my Middlemarch home,

I always slow down to view the cottage if I’m on the Macraes Road heading north. Oceania Gold [the local mining company] have made good progress in preserving the cottage. Needless to say, I’m proud that a piece of our early past has been preserved.

Reading the old newspapers revealed that my relatives were hauled in front of court quite a few times for being drunk and disorderly … perhaps it was my Chinese blood that led me to setting up a brewery!

George’s grandfather Albert fought with the Otago Mounted Rifles in the Boer War then stayed in South Africa to join the Transvaal police. Described by George as an ‘explorer’, Ida travelled from New Zealand to Great Britain and then to South Africa — where she met and married Albert and the couple had their two sons, Albert Jnr and Horace.

During the First World War, Albert rejoined his old regiment and, with the rank of regimental sergeant major, was deployed to northern France. Ida, meanwhile, left South Africa for New Zealand.

The handwritten Emerson family tree says Ida, on returning with her two sons to New Zealand while Albert fought in the war, was ‘not accepted by her father-in-law’ because of her Chinese heritage. It gave her son Albert another reason to keep his lineage a secret.

After the war, Albert returned home where he and Ida settled in Canterbury — first in Timaru and then in Christchurch. While Albert’s military background instilled in him a fondness for discipline and duty, it was Ida’s devout Christianity that saw her share these values with an added dose of devotion. Over the years, she ensured that these three Ds were all instilled into her sons and her grandchildren.

As a result, George’s father ran his school with the same military strictness and moral conservatism he learned from his parents. While other pupils could leave it behind at the end of the day, for George there was no escape. He spent morning, noon and night bound to his parents’ regime.

Through his early schooling, he found himself in the unenviable position of being a student in his father’s classes, which meant higher expectations of his behaviour than of the other children’s. He described it once as a ‘not terribly comfortable’ position. His brother Alistair said their father’s discipline was not unjust, but he strapped all his sons on a regular basis at school to ensure no one could accuse him of favouring them.

‘I think those strong feelings of discipline carried on into my life, and I think if you speak to my children they will confirm that I’ve been fairly strong on discipline — perhaps over-strong at times,’ George once said. He noted that his father mellowed later in life — as George himself did — but when Richard and Helen were children, he ruled with an iron fist, or rather with a piece of wood in his hand.

‘It wasn’t brutal,’ Helen recalled, ‘but I do remember wooden spoons getting broken on Richard’s arse. I was scared of Dad. My cousin Catherine, the closest I have to a sister, and I freely admitted to each other we were scared of him. Dad was probably a bit of a bully, but he also had a wicked sense of humour and a fun side to him. For all his gruff exterior, he was incredibly loving and there was no doubt we were in a loving household.’

Even as a practical joker, George preferred scary to funny. A typical example came one evening as the family watched a storm unfold across Dunedin, lightning flashing in the sky and loud bursts of thunder rocking the house.

Amid the thunderclaps, George exited the room. Shortly afterwards, a monstrous figure with a ghoulish paper bag on his head and dark holes cut out for eyes shuffled into the darkened room. George delighted in the resulting screams of fright.

Another favourite game of George’s was Hobgoblins. While out walking in the bush, such as the Pineapple Track up to Flagstaff lookout, George and Richard would race ahead of Ingrid, Helen and any other unwitting family members along for the walk. They would then make use of the track’s numerous hiding spots before jumping out on their unsuspecting victims.

Dad was a practical joker, especially when he was at work. One of his favourite tricks was to take a piece of rubber tubing, tie a knot in one end, then drop in a piece of dry ice before tying another knot at the end. He would then walk up to an unwary student and slip the tube into their lab-coat pocket then watch as the student’s body heat warmed up the dry ice, causing the tube to swell with carbon dioxide.

I enjoyed these kinds of practical jokes and Dad would often help me create them. Once, I wanted to give my friend Paul Trotman a record voucher for his birthday, but not to make the present too easy to figure out. I explained to Dad that I’d like to use a room in the biochemistry department that was kept at minus 40 degrees to freeze my little project.

With a twinkle in his eyes, George said he liked the idea. The record voucher was triple-sealed in plastic, taped to a broom handle and immersed in a bucket of water inside the freezing-cold room. Boy, what a beautiful ‘ice block’ it was, with the voucher clearly visible in the middle. Dad was really amused and the ice block was a hit at my mate’s party — though he did have to wait several hours to get his hands on the voucher!

George felt isolated during his childhood. The family lived in a remote area and George found it hard to make friends — not helped by his father’s schoolteacher role. He also felt different to the sons and daughters of farmers in the area and once described himself as a ‘townie living a country life’.

Eventually, Albert got a job at Wakari School in Dunedin, and George was able to slip out of his father’s shadow at last. That said, he found it hard to adjust to city living. The loner in him found socialising difficult and at Otago Boys’ High School he hated the emphasis put on team sports, particularly rugby. He enjoyed the individualism and solitude of cross-country running, but the school didn’t have a team. He fought for the right to run and got permission to join a harrier club outside of school.

George Emerson always carried a camera — or two.

‘George was non-conformist; he didn’t like sport,’ his brother Alastair said. ‘He wasn’t prepared to go along with an all-boys’ school culture of rugby and cricket. At one stage, I played cricket and he couldn’t understand why I’d want to do that.’

Despite their tough relationship, George and his father bonded over trains and photography. Albert enjoyed photographing ships and locomotives, and at an early age George had a model railway and subscribed to Meccano Magazine. ‘There were model trains all over the floor of the house,’ Alistair said. ‘Trains were always an obsession for Dad and George.’

As a boy, George rode his Raleigh Sports bicycle to spots around Dunedin where he could photograph trains. In his final year of high school, he took a bike trip around Southland looking for small branch lines that were under threat of closure. His interest in railway infrastructure made him unusual among railway enthusiasts. He understood that the railway era would eventually pass, and the disappearance of trains would in turn signal the end of the infrastructure, the tracks and the stations. He preferred to document that; to capture a disappearing slice of railway life. As such, the Otago Central Railway would become his lifelong passion — for its topography, its sense of history and its place in the community.

On leaving school, George’s passion for railway systems spurred him on to apply for a New Zealand Railways scholarship to study engineering. Unsuccessful, he enrolled at Otago University to study chemistry. There he met Ingrid Holst, who also had a railway story running through her DNA — albeit a tragic one.

Her grandfather Olaf Holst came to New Zealand from Denmark after being caught up in a railway accident. In June 1897, Olaf, his parents and three of his six siblings were about to board a train at Gentofte Station, north of Copenhagen, after a family outing. At that moment, an express train missed a stop light and ploughed into the stationary train. In all, 40 people were killed including both of his parents and one of his siblings.

According to Ingrid, Olaf, who was 18 at the time and the eldest child, decided that rather than move in with an aunt and uncle who took custody of the other children, he wanted to ‘go as far away from Denmark as possible’. That turned out to be Dunedin.

Somewhat ironically, Olaf’s son Erik became a railway engineer and with his wife Catherine had three children: Ingrid, Peter and Richard.

Ingrid Holst grew into a feisty young woman who campaigned for chemistry to be taught at Otago Girls’ High School. The school deemed it an unfit subject for young women, but under duress brought in a chemistry teacher for the small group who demanded it. Unfortunately, the school had a teacher but no laboratory, so when Ingrid arrived at Otago University to study chemistry, her knowledge was solely gleaned from books. In modern parlance, she had the software but no proficiency with the hardware.

When Ingrid ended up in a laboratory setting she knew the theory, but the equipment remained foreign to her. Her first task in the lab was an inventory of equipment. ‘I asked the boy next to me to explain what was what and he grumbled, “If you’ve got this far you ought to know that by now.” I thought he was the rudest man I’d ever met.’

One of George Emerson’s most famous photographs is the ‘dollar train’ — one of the top-secret trains that carried the decimal currency supply around the country.

Rude or not, a spark flew in that chemistry lab and the pair became an item. Ingrid eventually switched to the budding field of biochemistry while George stayed on the chemistry track, getting his Master’s degree before switching to biochemistry for his PhD.

Ingrid and George married in 1958 while still at university, and Ingrid later picked up paid work in the biochemistry department. George made a seamless transition from student to lecturer in biochemistry, learning as he went and passing on that knowledge to his students.

Biochemistry delivered an income for George, but his passion — his calling — remained out on the railway lines. In the 1960s he joined the Otago branch of the New Zealand Locomotive and Railway Society (NZLRS), a group set up for railway enthusiasts to get together to exchange stories and photographs.

As part of this group, George gleaned the information required to insert himself into a critical part of New Zealand history. With the country’s switch to decimal currency in 1967, a massive, top-secret operation delivered new money to banks around the country. Trains played a critical role in transporting the new currency — the coins in particular weighed far too much to transport by road.

Armed guards accompanied these trains on their secret journeys. Fugitive Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs was believed (correctly) to be living in Australia, and officials feared that he would come out of hiding to cross the Tasman for a heist.

As a result of the secrecy and the pressure brought to bear on newspaper photographers by police, there was very little documentary evidence of Operation Overland. The New Zealand Railway Observer scored a coup over the daily newspapers by publishing an uncredited photo of the ‘dollar train’ coming into Dunedin.

A half-century later, in 2017, Richard Emerson confirmed the photo had been taken by his father George, who got wind of the train’s arrival and snuck out to Ravensbourne to photograph it. There he was briefly apprehended by a police officer and ordered to remove the film from his camera. According to Richard, George always carried two cameras and if any film came out of a camera it was from the ‘other’ camera!

With George as chairman, the Otago branch of the NZLRS bought an old steam engine and built a small track for it, creating Dunedin’s popular Ocean Beach Railway. That was the first of a number of railway preservation projects, which culminated in the rescue of the famed Taieri Gorge Railway.

As New Zealand Railways scaled back its operation from the 1970s onwards, George led the Otago branch to buy old carriages that had fallen into a derelict state. They planned to restore the smashed windows, rotten woodwork, missing doors and ripped upholstery so they had enough carriages to make a viable train.

As the restoration progressed, the group formed a new incorporated society — the Otago Excursion Train Trust (OETT) — to take over the carriage rebuild programme and run excursions, starting with a jaunt along the increasingly disused Central Otago line from Dunedin to Cromwell in October 1979.

Train projects consumed much of George’s spare time. So much so, his daughter Helen remembers the phone being tied up for hours on end in the evenings as George did his wheeling and dealing for what he thought was ‘a worthwhile community project’.

Railway historian Bill Cowan said George ‘ran a tight ship’ with the OETT. He and fellow committee member Arthur Rockliff were the ‘action men’.

‘Arthur and George had skills that complemented each other so neatly: Arthur was the practical man who spoke and thought NZR lingo and procedure; George had the vision and leadership qualities.’

Over the next few years, the society purchased additional carriages to refurbish and in the summer of 1986–7 around 11,000 passengers were taken to destinations such as Oamaru, Clyde, Kurow, Invercargill and Bluff. On these trips, apart from NZR operating crews, OETT volunteers did everything from handling luggage to cleaning to running the busy buffet car.

The trust recognised the demand for a tourist train from Dunedin through the Taieri Gorge to Middlemarch, and with support from the Dunedin City Council, the first run of the Taieri Gorge Limited chugged off from Dunedin Railway Station on 21 February 1987.

The council later presented George with a framed certificate for his efforts in making the now world-famous train journey a reality — a certificate that later played a role in the creation of one of Emerson’s most-loved beers.