Stranger in a Strange Land
‘New Zealand is a good country enough to work in, but I cannot imagine living here after my working days are over . . . I don’t believe I’m any more of a colonist than you were.’—Guy Russell writes to his father Ham in September 1897.
After five years in the British Army Guy Russell was a regular soldier no more, but the prospect of life as a sheep farmer in Hawke’s Bay did not excite him. In the early months, he crossed the Tasman to Victoria and South Australia to assess the prospects of farming there, taking particular interest in the mallee country in northern Victoria, and the potential for investment in Queensland cattle stations. He found nothing to justify a shift of countries, and the Australians he had dealings with were uncouth. ‘A miserable lot after Army men,’ he wrote to his family. ‘The clean shirt business I don’t care one straw about, but I do like mixing with gentlemen as I understand the word.’
Guy now considered returning to England to qualify as a lawyer. He also investigated, unsuccessfully, the prospects of his being admitted to the bar in New Zealand—using his Sandhurst examination results as a foundation. In the end, family interests in New Zealand, combined with a lack of capital, won out. With the agreement of his uncles William and Herbert, Guy would work for two years as a farm cadet on the Russell brothers’ properties at Tunanui and Flaxmere, with a view to eventually managing his father’s investment in the two runs.
The New Zealand to which Guy Russell had returned after 13 years abroad, however, was not the one he had left. The country was in the grip of a ‘long depression’ that would run from 1879 to 1896, and the political landscape had entirely changed. A new Liberal Party had swept into power in 1890 with a radical legislative programme that would establish New Zealand for a time as the social laboratory of the world, and would lay the foundations of the modern welfare state.
Unstable political coalitions dominated by big runholders like the Russells had given way to a party of small business, small-farming and working men. As historian Keith Sinclair put it: ‘With their defeat in the 1890 election . . . the rule of the early colonial gentry, with their public school or university background, their Latin tags and cultivated English speech, their sheep-runs and their clubs, was done.’12
In 1882, the first shipment of frozen meat had been shipped to Britain, opening up an export trade in meat, butter and cheese, all of which could be produced efficiently on relatively small holdings. Living in poverty in the towns, unemployed men, many of them new immigrants, were desperate to exploit the opportunities that were now opening up. The new Liberal Government—first under John Ballance and then under ‘King Dick’ Seddon—was determined to give them the chance.
In 1892, and in the following years, the Liberals introduced a number of measures designed to encourage or compel big runholders like the Russells to sell undeveloped land to the Crown for subdivision. Among the measures were absentee and graduated land taxes—the first a penalty on absentee owners of property in New Zealand; the second a progressive tax on the unimproved value of land. Between 1892 and 1912, the Government bought over 200 estates totalling 520,000 hectares, on which it settled some 7000 farmers and their families.13
Meanwhile, Guy was being initiated by his Uncle Herbert, the manager of Tunanui, into the practicalities of back-country farming—mustering sheep and cattle, dagging, dipping, dosing and weaning. His reactions to this new life appear largely negative, driven no doubt by loneliness and the hard physical life he was now compelled to live. ‘I grow country-like, rustic, day by day,’ he wrote to his sister in March 1893, ‘shaving at rare intervals and not wearing a tie for whole days at a time.’
He judged New Zealand as a good country to work in, but a poor country to live and play in. His work as a farmer he rated as ‘intellectually inferior to that of a subaltern in a line regiment’. Society in Hawke’s Bay—‘a bore almost anywhere’—was intolerable. In short, Russell was feeling his isolation from the social and cultural life of Europe, his brother army officers, and even from a comparatively rough-edged colonial society: ‘I no longer look down on the colonial born and bred,’ he wrote, ‘as I used to be half inclined to do once.’
But there were compensations. Guy spent his weekends setting up a local polo club to meet his need for company and the physical excitement of a sport he had played so vigorously in India. He tried to keep up his reading of serious books, despite the days of hard physical work. On the shelf, and obviously read, was John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. In spite of his isolation and criticisms of colonial life, however, Guy claimed to have no regrets over his decision to leave the British Army to go farming in New Zealand.
A diversion of sorts came in March 1893 with a visit to Flaxmere by the Governor-General, Lord Glasgow—probably at the invitation of Guy’s uncle, William Russell, who had already served in the Atkinson administrations as Colonial Secretary, Minister of Defence and Minister of Justice. Glasgow, a 60-year-old former naval officer, was proving unsuccessful in the post, clashing frequently with his ministers over a range of issues, including defence. In 1874, he had been cleared by a court of inquiry after his ship was wrecked off Miquelon in the North Atlantic. Never overawed by people of high position, Guy saw him simply as ‘an old gentleman of courteous manner, sound ideas and weak arguments’.
His Aunt Harriet (wife of William) was not so courteous towards Guy at a dinner in honour of the governor-general and his wife. When the younger Russell, eager for good conversation, attempted to join a discussion on the rights and wrongs of the women’s suffrage movement, he was curtly dismissed by Harriet as being too young to know what he was talking about—a very public humiliation and one much resented. ‘Harriet has been trying of late,’ Guy recorded with commendable restraint. ‘A cross-grained nature and one of little pleasure to her surroundings.’
Guy was not invited to the governor-general’s garden party that followed, but his letter to sister Milly revealed a cynical appreciation of the aspirations of certain sections of colonial society. ‘A garden party to which the common herd was invited en masse gave, I am told, heart-burnings to seekers after social recognition on account of non-introductions to people in high places, and consequent lost opportunities of making a meal off boot-licking.’
By this time, however, Guy was beginning to worry about the future after his cadetship on the two stations was over. In September 1893, he asked his father to declare his intentions: if the runs were sold, he would probably ‘clear off’ to a newer country; if not, was it worth his while to ‘hang on for the management, which I presume you will give me. My meaning is, in plain English, what am I steering for?’ A year later, nothing seemed to have changed. In a letter to his grandfather in August 1894, Guy expressed himself anxious to make an arrangement with his father that would put him on a more or less independent footing. ‘I hate this sort of hanging on to other people’s coat-tails.’
The early 1890s appear to have been particularly hard years for Guy—unenthusiastic about farm life, lonely, and largely in the dark about his father’s plans for the two Hawke’s Bay properties. There was also a nagging sense of potential unfulfilled. ‘At 26,’ he wrote to his sisters, ‘one has pretty well found out that one is not more or less . . . than the average man. I often feel that I am not flying my kite high enough. But since I have left the service, I have hardly seen how to fly it.’
By 1894, he was unhappy enough to want to return to England and risk his father’s displeasure. He appears to have been persuaded out of it by his Uncle Arthur, then farming a large tract of bush country at Ohingaiti on the other side of the Kaweka Range. Behind his decision to stay was also a sense of obligation to financially support his family of two sisters in England and his father in Switzerland. He would carry on with his cadetship, and seek solace in his books and playing polo when he could.
In 1895, two events gave Guy’s life in New Zealand new focus and stability. By mutual agreement between Ham and William that year, the Russell brothers’ partnership was amicably dissolved, each receiving about 4000 hectares of the original Tunanui and Flaxmere blocks under the terms of settlement. After assisting his father through the division process, Guy took over from Uncle Herbert as manager of Tunanui and the new Twyford station, which were Ham’s share of the now subdivided Russell properties.
In this year also, Guy’s lonely bachelor life came to an end. His liaison with Lili de Saugy had terminated in 1893 when Lili herself called off their engagement. This might have hurt his pride, but caused no permanent emotional damage. ‘Am very glad,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘which shows how much protestations of eternal affection are worth in my case.’ Over the next two years, he courted Gertrude Mary Beetham Williams, of Frimley, Hastings, the daughter of one of Hawke’s Bay’s most prominent landowning families and a young woman likely to contribute considerable assets to a marriage.
Gertrude, however, was in no hurry to succumb, and refused him more than once. At one point in the courtship Guy turned up at the Williams homestead and asked the maid if ‘Miss Gertrude’ was in residence and able to see him. Back came her reply: ‘Tell Guy Russell he’s a fool and is to go away!’ On another occasion, Gertrude and Guy were to attend a local ball together. He asked that she wear a white rose if she accepted his offer of engagement and a red one if she did not. She wore a red one.
Persistence, and the services of Gertrude’s sister ‘Miss Elsie’ as a go-between, finally brought success, and in January 1896 Guy wrote to his grandfather seeking his blessing for the union. The campaign for Gertrude’s hand, he admitted, had been a long, hard one: ‘I must plead guilty of having been on the warpath for some time, but could not succeed sooner in forcing the enemy to capitulate.’
In August 1896, Guy and Gertrude were married at St Matthew’s in Hastings. The first of their five children, Katherine, was born the following year, and for the Russells it was a memorable beginning. Returning Gertrude to Twyford from confinement in Hastings involved a rough journey by horse-drawn wagon. The notorious 1897 flood had washed away the bridge at Fernhill, and mother and new baby were ferried across the Ngaruroro River by an old Maori in a canoe while Guy searched the river for a safe ford for the wagon. Soon after, he retired the ‘sulky’—a one-person, two-wheeled, horse-drawn cart—as unsuitable for mother and baby, and bought a more roomy ‘buggy and pair’.
Overall, the marriage appears to have been a happy one, but it was no meeting of minds. Guy was well read and widely travelled, and could speak several languages fluently. His wife had been educated in Hawke’s Bay, had never been out of New Zealand, and her interests and experiences were limited.
What the Russells did share was a strong religious faith and commitment to family, and in the eyes of at least one of their five children, complementary strengths: ‘My mother was an excellent partner for him, with her never-failing common sense, fairness and kindness, and was able to restrain him from possibly too quick judgments and decisions, whereas he gave her strength, courage, and devotion.’ As later events would show, Gertrude Russell was also a shrewd investor and businesswoman.
Gertrude, however, was unable to break her new husband’s addiction to polo. He was now playing regularly for the polo club he had founded, and with his usual aggressive and risk-taking style. In 1896—the year he was married—he smashed his jaw in two places in a horrific accident on the field. His head was bound up and he had to be fed through a tube until an operation could be done to remedy the damage. Five years later, another accident on the polo field would immobilise him for several weeks with a broken leg and dislocated ankle.
Accidents apart, Guy was now firmly settled on his future and could focus on increasing the productive capacity of his new domain. Fences were put in, trees planted and huge areas of land turned into pasture. Between 1896 and 1910, nearly two-thirds of the 9350-acre (3783-hectare) Tunanui block was cleared of scrub, ploughed and sown, most of it financed by bank overdrafts and loans. He was confident by now that he could generate an annual income for his father of 4000 pounds a year. If this could not be done, he wrote to his ageing parent, ‘you must just get rid of me’.
From the start, however, there were tensions between owner-father and manager-son. On the one hand were Ham’s expectations of a good income from his properties; on the other were the realities of frontier farming—low wool and fat-lamb prices, floods, droughts, caterpillar and grass-grub infestations, and the need for constant improvements. Guy wanted to invest more of his slim profits in the farms themselves and increase his overdraft with the banks. With large borrowings already on both properties, Ham was unwilling to increase his debt and was constantly urging restraint. Guy confessed at one point that reading his father’s letters at the end of a hard day’s work gave him ‘the blues’.
While urging economy, Ham was also quite willing to charge some of his expenses to the station, including the debts of his free-spending younger son, Claude, who was now at Oxford studying law. Guy, much displeased, took a firm line with his father: ‘I am sorry Claude’s debts are so much, but you must not, as in the case of your original debt to Richardson of 2000 pounds odd, debit it to the station. It is not fair.’ Necessity forced him to be exceptionally frugal at this time. His grandson, John Russell, the current owner of Tunanui, recalled that he kept incoming bills in two piles—those that offered a discount and those that did not. To those suppliers who complained about late payment, he would reply, presumably in writing: ‘Well, which pile would you like to be in?’
Money worries apart, droughts and the flooding of the Tutaekuri and Ngaruroro rivers were to be recurring problems for the new manager, as they had been for his father and his Uncle William. During one bad drought Guy was forced to sell stock at rock-bottom prices rather than see the animals die from lack of feed. In April 1897, a severe storm dumped 20 inches of rain on Hawke’s Bay in 20 hours, washing out roads and bridges, and drowning 120 of his hoggets. The storm also destroyed much new fencing, 50 hectares (123 acres) of new grass, nearly 20 hectares (49 acres) of barley, and deposited a heavy load of river silt on the flats at Twyford. On Tunanui, one dam burst and another silted up, temporarily wiping out the run’s water supply.
Guy and his shepherds toiled for hours in driving rain to rescue flocks of sheep trapped in riverside paddocks as the waters of the Ngaruroro rapidly rose. One flock, driven by wind and rain onto the river bank, could not be coaxed to drier ground and had to be left to drown; and Guy himself had to swim his horse back to where a few minutes before there had been dry land. Overall, it could have been worse—several lives were lost in the flooding and one farmer in the district lost over 10,000 sheep.
The following year brought further trials at Tunanui. In April, the expected profit on the barley crop was wiped out when the biggest stack of the harvest was set on fire, possibly by a careless swagger. In August, ‘a regular blizzard’ carried off 40 or 50 of the breeding ewes Russell had bought just as lambing had begun. It then rained continuously for the following 10 days: ‘Work at a standstill. Four teams and six scrubcutters all twiddling their thumbs and eating their heads off,’ Guy wrote to his father. The ploughing contractors had given up the job, so he was doing the work himself, entailing a heavy outlay in horses and implements. In October, powerful westerly gales ruined most of the newly sown grass on the run and blew him off his horse at a high point on Tunanui known as The Flag.
Setbacks like these, three years of low wool prices, and lack of development capital fed Guy’s nostalgia for the England of his youth and the army life that was now six years behind him. ‘The war in South Africa seems a serious affair,’ he wrote to his father in 1899. ‘I see my old battalion is at the front and often wish I was with it.’ He still looked on England as home, vowing that ‘if ever some good fairy left me a fortune, I should pack up and say goodbye to this country. However, Gerty and I jog on very comfortably and happily, and if only things will pay well out here, shall feel that I haven’t exiled myself in vain.’
Guy recognised early on that the ‘virgin fertility’ of Tunanui soils was steadily being exhausted by current farming methods and could no longer sustain the large-framed shorthorn cattle and Lincoln sheep with which he had stocked the run. The result was a switch to Hereford cattle and Romney sheep—smaller, lighter-boned animals that were capable of thriving on poorer pasture. Foreseeing also the role that Southdown sheep would play in the development of the fat-lamb industry, Guy established a stud of the breed.
He was also trying new methods and crops. In the pre-war years he experimented with turnips, kale and lucerne for stock feed, and grew large quantities of oats, wheat, barley and grass seed as cash crops. He introduced rotational grazing, a farming practice designed to ‘rest’ pasture from stock, which was then in its infancy in New Zealand. In 1902, he began a series of topdressing experiments for the Agricultural Department that steadily increased the carrying capacity of Tunanui pasture. He also began applying lime to his paddocks—one of the first farmers in Hawke’s Bay to do so.
By early 1898 Guy could report to his father that he was now running 21,000 sheep on the two properties. The overdraft had increased by 3000 pounds, but a new sheep station (Twyford) was up and running, and they had survived two years of low prices and a disastrous flood. He regretted that his father had not received a better return on his money so far, but felt confident of the future.
The shortage of development capital, however, continued to rankle. In 1900, he wrote to his father in exasperation: ‘Owing to a constant and natural desire on your part not to increase the debt beyond its present limits, I am constantly trying to save money against my better judgement. Too often at Tunanui, ploughing, or rather working, is curtailed because of expense . . . It would have taken, say, 30 pounds to make the road properly down to the station, instead of which I spend 5 pounds annually in patching. A grain store would represent a large outlay in one year but would pay for itself in three or four . . . To be undercapitalised is ruinous—nothing more so, unless it be an extravagant manager.’
Guy complained regularly of not being given a free hand to manage Ham’s investments in New Zealand as he saw fit. There were unsubtle hints that the old man should now accept a guaranteed income from his properties, ‘take a well-earned rest’ and no longer interfere: ‘It seems to me that either you have confidence in me, or not. If you have, there can be no advantage in tying my hands.’
Staffing problems on the two runs were ongoing. At the end of 1902, Guy reported that his manager, Alick Shaw, and the couple employed as cooks on the station were not getting on, and that the latter were leaving, much to his regret. ‘I find their successors extravagant,’ he wrote to his father. ‘I shall put in a contract-man cook. Not a comfortable arrangement: meaning as it does an exclusive [diet of] meat, bread and potatoes.’
The results of Guy’s steady efforts to develop the Russell properties, however, were now beginning to show. In the 1904/1905 year, the two stations made a combined profit of 5670 pounds. Guy reported that Tunanui itself was ‘paying well; is in first-rate order, stock, fences and land; and has, I believe, the reputation of being as well managed a hill farm as there is about’.
Now that the financial situation had improved, Guy wanted to increase his investment in the development of the run. He wrote to his no doubt reluctant father: ‘I fear this will perhaps frighten you but the fact is that to do this land justice one must work, and to work one must pay, but I can guarantee proportionately higher returns . . . I consider Tunanui now in very fair paying order, but think a great deal more might be made of this place. That is why I am still hankering for ever more money.’
Early versions of the motorcar had the potential to save busy farmers time and physical effort. In April 1903, Guy asked his father in England what he had done about buying one, and if it was to be oil or steam-powered. ‘I see that steam are regaining favour. They are great inventions. I wish I had one.’ In 1904, Guy indulged his wish and bought a six-and-a-half horsepower two-seater Wolseley, saving him the daily 60-kilometre round trip from Tywford to Tunanui on horseback. ‘It [the car] will add years to my life,’ he noted, ‘and hours to my day.’
In September 1905, Guy made his father an offer. He would lease the two Hawke’s Bay properties from him, including livestock and plant, for an annual rental of 4000 pounds, rising to 5000 pounds per annum for the next three years. ‘I am now 37,’ he wrote, ‘and should, I confess, like an opportunity to do something for my children. As it is, I live with one eye on the overdraft and the other on the undrained swamp and the sheep I lose, drowned in the drains. I am at my prime and must either go on, or go back. At any rate, I am prepared to take all risks.’ A year later, Ham Russell went further. To reduce the absentee and graduated land taxes he was compelled to pay, he transferred the whole of Tunanui by deed to his son, keeping the much smaller Twyford run for himself.
But political winds were blowing, and by now the Russells were feeling the effects of government moves to encourage big runholders to sell land for resettlement. A Lands for Settlement Act had first been passed in 1892, giving the Government the power to acquire private land for this purpose. Subsequent amendments increased that power by allowing the compulsory purchase of land where the owner refused to sell or exchange.
‘The Govt are going in largely for buying out people,’ Guy wrote to his father in mid-1901. ‘No doubt small settlement, if successful, is a good thing. The compulsory clause is a bad thing, however, and unnecessary. Many of the landowners here are trying to get up an agitation.’
In 1905, the Liberal Government toughened its land-purchasing policy with an amended Land for Settlement Bill. As introduced into Parliament, the Bill prevented anyone from owning land to the value of more than 50,000 pounds. It also prohibited sales of land to any purchaser who owned (including the land purchased) more than 640 acres (259 hectares) of first-class land, 2000 acres (809 hectares) of second-class land, or 3000 acres (1214 hectares) of third-class land.
Although the Russells had not yet been targeted, the owners of the nearby stations had been given formal notice of the Government’s intention to take all or part of their runs by compulsory purchase. The proposed limitation on the value of land in private ownership raised Guy’s hackles. He wrote to his father: ‘So you would, if their proposals are carried, not have been able to transfer by gift or purchase, or will, Tunanui to myself. Hadn’t we better get out of this country?’
By early 1906, Guy was in a more accepting frame of mind, and obviously prepared to sell if compelled to do so. Noting that Seddon would shortly be speaking in Hastings and would ‘no doubt promise more land for the landless’, he wrote: ‘I think 2000 acres of Tunanui is all I shall have to worry over in a few years. I daresay it is all for the good of the country.’
In 1907, Guy sold off 3650 acres (1477 hectares) of Tunanui in two lots, reducing his holdings to around 5700 acres (2306 hectares) in total. The possibility that the bulk of the run might be taken by compulsory purchase appears to have been behind the sales. In Guy’s mind it would have made sense to sell land while market prices were firm, rather than take the lower prices he might be offered by government purchasing agents. These early sales would also have given him a benchmark price with which to negotiate should the Government require more of the Russell lands.
However, Guy had long been keen to divest the Russells of the flood-prone Twyford run, and now hoped that the Government would buy it. ‘Twyford is one of the worst investments I know,’ he told his father. ‘It pays, in my hands, little interest; does not appreciate in value anything like sound arable land or pasture lands; is located with a big risk in the shape of the river floods. There are many better investments to be had.’
In the end, the shadow passed. Guy kept the remainder of Tunanui, and Twyford was eventually sold. His approach to the taking of land for resettlement, however, would not have been typical of the big landowners of the time. While he was politically opposed to Seddon and the Liberals, and to compulsory purchase, he supported the principle of closer settlement and would lobby actively for it for the rest of his long life.
In 1909, Guy took over Ham’s remaining land assets, stock and plant by taking his inheritance early and buying out his brother and sisters’ shares by way of mortgages over the Hawke’s Bay properties. He now had a good equity in the two runs and was at last his own master, freed from the need to produce a guaranteed income for his father in Switzerland and free at last to plough back his profits into developing the land.