1892-1914
Keith Rodney Park was born in Thames, a small town south-east of Auckland, on 15 June 1892. His father, James Livingstone Park, was a Scotsman, born near Aberdeen in July 1857. He was the second son of another James Park and of Mary Elphinstone, a niece of Mountstuart Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay from 1819 to 1827. In 1874, having already travelled down from Aberdeen to study at the Royal School of Mines in London’s South Kensington, James made a far longer journey to Wellington, New Zealand. He spent nearly four years as a sheep farmer before turning to geology and a career that would earn him an international reputation. In May 1880 he married Frances, daughter of a Captain William Rogers, in Wellington. They had seven daughters and three sons, of whom Keith was the ninth child and third son.
By the time of Keith’s birth, James had made a name as a mountaineer and explorer as well as a geologist. Since 1889 he had been Director of the Thames School of Mines and Keith retained several sharp memories of Thames even though he was only six when the family moved to Birkenhead, on Auckland’s North Shore. He remembered his father bringing home an amazingly heavy gold ingot from the Maunahie mine; but the ‘stampers’ or quartz crushers made the nights hideous when the Parks lived down by the mine and Keith was greatly relieved when they moved to the hill above the Maori village at Totara Point. He also remembered being told about famous men who had done poorly at school. This information encouraged him in later years because his own school record was, as he admitted, ‘undistinguished’.
In March 1901, when Keith was eight, James Park was appointed Professor of Mining at Otago University in Dunedin in the South Island. The family therefore moved again, to the other end of New Zealand, but Keith remained in Auckland, as a boarder at King’s College, until 1906. Strangely, for a man destined to earn fame as an airman, Keith loved the sea from his earliest days. He was much too keen on playing about among the ferry boats at Birkenhead to concentrate on school work. As a very small boy he would sail his father’s dinghy in the Waitemata harbour, using a stick and a holland blind for a sail. He would also swim out to ships anchored in the harbour, climb aboard and talk to sailors from many lands. That self-reliance and self-confidence remained with him all his life; so, too, did his love of the sea. His ability to swim was put to excellent use one day to save his sister Lily from drowning in a large pond. No details of this dramatic incident survive and Keith characteristically made light of it, but Lily never did.
The Park children were evidently a boisterous lot and on one occasion they prevailed upon Keith to go up a bank near their home dressed in a white sheet and wander about, moaning and groaning. Screaming with fear, the children called their father, telling him they had seen a ghost. James grabbed a gun and charged up the bank. Keith scuttled for cover when he saw his father coming, knowing him to be an accurate shot, and took some persuading home again. Thus ended ghost games in the Park household. However, on another occasion – when James was away – Keith helped to ‘lay out’ his sister Maud in a winding sheet, ringed by lighted candles and with her face chalked. The children then called their mother, lamenting poor Maud’s untimely demise. Her views on such games are not known. What is known is that she left James some time after his move to Dunedin and went to live in Australia, where she died in March 1916.
Keith, meanwhile, completed his education at Otago Boys’ High School. According to the school’s historian, there was in those years ‘an intense patriotism and enthusiasm for things military’ and Keith enrolled in the cadet force in February 1909, at the age of sixteen. Exactly a year later, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum visited the school and was practically mobbed by excited boys – and their parents. Although Keith enjoyed his first taste of military life, he did not then intend to become a professional soldier. He loved guns and horses now, as well as the sea, but he did not yet know what he wanted to do with his life.
‘I investigated the origins of Dunedin wealth,’ Keith recalled many years later, ‘and quickly learned that few men who work for anybody else accumulate much capital.’ Nevertheless, even the greatest tycoons have usually started out on someone’s payroll and so, on 1 June 1911, a fortnight before his nineteenth birthday, he joined the Union Steam Ship Company in Dunedin as a Cadet Purser. By the following April, he was a Purser (Class IV) earning £6 per month. He was employed on colliers and other coastal vessels until he graduated to the inter-colonial ships, visiting Australia and several Pacific islands. To become a purser aboard a passenger vessel naturally required a talent for discretion and at least the appearance of wide experience. Men occupying such positions were usually over twenty-five, but Park served as purser aboard three passenger vessels in 1914 when he was only twenty-two.
In December 1914 he was granted war leave and although his ambitions were to be transformed during the next four years, Park cannily withheld his resignation from the company until December 1918. Unfortunately, from a biographer’s viewpoint, he kept out of trouble throughout his three and a half years as a purser and consequently little is known about his life at that time. With his experience, he could have become an Assistant Paymaster in the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy when war broke out, but his friends were joining the Army in the ranks and so he did too. This is Park’s own explanation, recorded many years later, but we shall see that within a year of joining up Park had chosen to cut himself off permanently from those friends and transfer to the British Army. He had already served in Dunedin as a Territorial. After the cadets at school, he had enrolled in ‘B’ Battery, New Zealand Field Artillery, in March 1911 and had remained with that battery on a part-time basis until his discharge in November 1913.
As a father of fighting-age sons, James Park had better luck than many in the First World War. All three served and all three survived. The two eldest came home, but James would not meet Keith again until 1923. In 1918 James married again. Keith also married in 1918 and so father and son performed the rare feat of taking wives in the same year – a matter which afforded all concerned wry amusement for the rest of their lives. James and Keith had much in common. James was a handsome, upright man, friendly but firm with colleagues and students. He kept himself physically fit and believed in hard work. He was resilient and abstemious. Ambitious, conscientious, unwilling to countenance foolishness, particular about his rights as well as his duties, he was more widely respected than loved. James was often referred to, by friends and family alike, as ‘Captain’; Keith was known to his family as ‘Skipper’. James retained his vigour into advanced old age, dying in Oamaru on 29 July 1946, aged eighty-nine, at a time when his now-famous son was in New Zealand for the first time in over thirty years, enjoying a triumphant tour of his native land.1