JOSEPH WARD WAS so young when he resolved to stand for the newly formed Campbelltown Borough Council early in 1878 that some thought he was not yet of legal age. There were to be stories throughout his life that he had not been entitled either to stand or to vote.1 In fact Ward was twenty-one when the electors of Bluff seated him on the council in February 1878, with his former employer, George Nichol, as mayor. Fire destroyed the council’s records in 1914 and details of those early days are hard to come by. Accounts vary as to when Ward became mayor. Although the mayoral chain says that he took office in 1882, he was actually elected in November 1881.2 He was only twenty-five when he became first citizen of Bluff, a position he held until November 1886. However, while consequence might come from the council, the commercially astute Wards knew that real power in Bluff lay with the Bluff Harbour Board. The import tonnage passing through the port ranked it fifth in New Zealand,3 while its exports placed it fourth, ahead of Dunedin. Ward was convinced that an ambitiously expansionist policy was needed to reduce any likelihood of farmers choosing to rail goods to Port Chalmers, or using Riverton in preference to Bluff. He became a passionate advocate of reduced rail freight charges to Bluff.4 In 1881 he won election to the Board from the ward of Bluff by one vote. He later changed his ward to the Lakes District to the north, and remained on the Board until 1917. From February 1883 till February 1888 Ward was chairman of the Board.
It was Ward’s position on the Harbour Board that first gave him regional prominence. During his election campaign he promised a full investigation into the sacking of the harbour pilot, James Smith, whom the harbourmaster, Captain Thomson, seems to have blamed for a number of accidents to ships when passing through the narrow harbour entrance. Thomson had the backing of the Invercargill Chamber of Commerce; Smith was Bluff’s protégé.5 By careful questioning of the principals and judicious lobbying of fellow councillors at the inquiry early in 1882, Ward secured the resignation of the harbourmaster, and Pilot Smith was appointed in his place. It was a coup by Bluff that brought a stinging rebuke to Ward from Invercargill’s commercially oriented morning paper, the Southland Times. ‘The unworthy and dangerous fling in which this youth [Ward] indulged at the veteran sailor and scientist [Thomson] was simply contemptible.’6 Ward gave as good as he got. In a long, wordy protest about the editor’s reference to ‘this youth’, he went on to label the editor of the Times ‘a septuagenarian’ whose eyesight was failing.7 This spat promptly endeared Ward to the Times’s evening rival, the Southland Daily News, which became Ward’s patron for life. On 1 February a letter appeared in the News praising the ‘youthful Ward—with his ability to detect injustice and wrongdoing’.8 References continued to be made about the Thomson/Smith affair for many years. Ward had managed to get himself known to the people of Southland, and there is no doubt that his colleagues on the Board realised their colleague was no fool. The rather brash, personal note to Ward’s comments mellowed over time as he adopted a more genial, less sarcastic tone to his public comments.
J. G. Ward about 1879.
Ward’s principal predicament concerned the financial position of the Board. It was heavily indebted when he took over. Yet he was determined to expand the Board’s wharf, dredge the harbour and purchase a new tug even when the deepening depression was straining finances. The more protests from the Invercargill Chamber of Commerce and the Times, the more determined became the chairman and a majority of the Board.9 Ward was an optimist whose first political thinking had taken place during the expansionist days of Julius Vogel. It is interesting to note that in his first year as mayor, Ward presented an illuminated address to Vogel praising his policies.10 While Invercargill was contracting, Bluff seemed to be riding the depression successfully. Moreover, with the first-ever shipment of frozen meat leaving the port on 26 May 1883 and the newly formed Southland Frozen Meat Company in the process of establishing a refrigeration plant on Bluff’s waterfront, the outlook for exports looked promising. Risks were worth taking.11 And they paid off. The Board was soon in a position also to provide a regular passenger and mail service to the people of Stewart Island.
Others, however, remained more cautious. The Southland Frozen Meat Company (SFM) had difficulty convincing the New Zealand Shipping Company that Bluff Harbour was safe for large refrigerated vessels. Exports of meat through the port increased only slowly. Ward joined the board of SFM in 1887 in the hope of convincing them to invite other lines into the port. When his efforts failed to move the company he personally chartered a very large steamer, the S.S. Triumph, which came and went with full cargoes, proving fears about the port imaginary. Eventually Ward persuaded the Tyser Line to call regularly. Ward was thriving on his image of being the most daring man in town.12
Bluff waterfront, 1870s.
Ward’s wedding party menu, Bluff, 1883.
In his dual capacities as mayor of Bluff and chairman of the Harbour Board Ward saw himself boosting the whole region when he promoted Bluff in particular. He was indefatigible. When the Governor, Sir William Jervois, came to town in 1883 Ward presented him with an address extolling the virtues of Bluff as a port, and suggested to him that the colony might see it as a suitable spot for a naval coaling station.13 Ward’s assiduous promotion seemed to pay dividends for Bluff. It was to be the only part of Southland untouched by depression. As late as 1888 when things were at their gloomiest elsewhere, business through the port remained fairly steady, with only a slight downturn mid year. The growing oyster trade softened any impact on the population of the port, now standing at 510. A guide book published that year noted that while Bluff’s inhabitants were not making Fortunes, nor were they giving employment to the official assignee. It added that Bluff was becoming ‘a favourite resort of the Invercargill magnates as a watering place’.14
Meantime, Joseph Ward’s personal life had taken a decisive turn. By the end of 1883 he was well into his twenty-eighth year. He was handsome, businesslike and undoubtedly Bluff’s most eligible male. And he had fallen in love with a seventeen-year-old local beauty, Theresa Dorothea de Smidt. She was the second of three very attractive daughters, occasionally referred to as the ‘Three Graces’, of a European couple who had settled in the town a little before the Wards’ arrival. Her father, Henri de Smidt, had been born in Belgium and was a man of forty-two when he married Louisa Gohl from Stuttgart in 1863. He then bought the Golden Age Hotel, which by the eighties was the Club’s main rival in Bluff. De Smidt died in 1872 leaving his wife, who was partly disabled due to a riding accident, to bring up the girls. For a time she left the Golden Age in the hands of a manager and took her daughters to Invercargill for their education. But they returned to live in Foyle Street, close to the Wards.15 Contemporaries described Theresa as ‘slight’, ‘graceful’ and ‘tall’. Her complexion was ‘bright and clear’, her ‘fair hair … turned back from a smooth, open brow’. Her eyes were ‘clear, soft grey’, and her smile was ‘exceedingly winning’. She was ‘passionately fond of music’, and supported votes for women.16
Theresa, however, was a Protestant of Lutheran stock. This necessitated two wedding ceremonies, the first a Catholic service at Mina’s home since there was no Catholic church in Bluff until 1893. On 4 December 1883 Father William Burke from Invercargill officiated at the simple ceremony. The following day a Presbyterian service was held at Louisa de Smidt’s home,17 followed by an elaborate wedding breakfast. Most of the town’s population gathered in one of Ward’s waterfront storage sheds to toast the mayor and his bride. During the day the ships in port displayed bunting, as did the shops and business places in town. There was a band at the feast and the dancing continued till daybreak. A ship in port fired rockets during the evening and the mayor and mayoress left to go north on the last train.18 The Wards were now the next best thing to royalty in Bluff and retained that status for many years to come.
It was to be a most successful marriage, lasting until Theresa’s premature death in 1927. Over the years she grew more beautiful, even stately. She dressed elegantly and was always up with the fashion. Huge, extravagantly adorned hats became Theresa’s trade mark just as Ward’s expensive suits and expansive moustache became his. Theresa was always Ward’s favourite ornament and, after Hannah’s death, his chief admirer. She also possessed an independent business intelligence, learned no doubt from her days at the Golden Age. She had been left some land in Dunedin by her father, and she bought and sold real estate often with little more than a cursory check with her husband. Like all who married into the Catholic faith at that time she gave an assurance that all her children would be raised as Catholics. None of them knew until her death that she was not ‘of the faith’. The family followed a routine of church on Sundays and fish on Fridays. Ward doted on her and made gifts of real estate to her ‘in consideration of my natural love and affection’. She in turn was very supportive of him during his financial difficulties, and once the children had reached a degree of independence was constantly at his side.
The first of five children to survive, Cyril Rupert Joseph, was born on 22 September 1884, nine months after the wedding. Eileen Josephine, their only daughter, was born on 12 October 1886, followed by Vincent Aubrey on 4 January 1888. Twins (Alfred and Dorothea) were born prematurely on 12 January 1890 but died immediately. On 14 May 1891 Gladstone William was added to the family, and there was then a long gap until the arrival of Awarua Patrick Joseph George Ward on 14 January 1901. All except the youngest, known as Pat, were born and received their primary education in Bluff. They enjoyed the close company of their two grandmothers. Hannah was fairly short, and became dumpy in older age. She was known always as ‘Big Grandma’, while the rather more fragile Mrs de Smidt was ‘Little Grandma’. Other members of the family contributed to their wide social circle in Bluff. Mina lived there with her family for many years before going to Invercargill. Willie stayed with the Post Office, living with Hannah until his marriage in 1887. He was later posted to Dunedin. One of Theresa’s sisters, Louisa, married Ward’s close friend, business partner and lifelong supporter, Walter Henderson. Her other sister, Christina, spent much time in Bluff, although her marriage in 1896 to Theodore Boys, later Sir Theodore, who was Director of Meat Supplies in Great Britain during the First World War, caused her to move north to Christchurch.
Joseph and Theresa first settled into a house at the southern end of Gore Street. In time they built a large modern villa in Bann Street. It had a sweeping verandah and was just a few doors along from Ward’s school friend, George Roxby Waddel. In keeping with Ward’s passion for gadgets, the new house contained the first ‘hush flush’ toilet in Bluff.19 Mina lived less than a hundred yards away, and Hannah, who continued to live in the Club Hotel until her last days, was only a brief walk for the children. Baptisms, bereavements, weddings, political meetings and private functions were neighbourhood business in Bluff. Hannah heard the local news over the counter at the Club, while each day Ward brought the regional picture home from Invercargill.
Marriage made little change to Ward’s lifestyle. He was already showing signs of becoming a workaholic. A visit to the Council offices first thing in the morning, a quick eye over the waterfront and his stores, and then he was on to the train to Invercargill. There his export business was expanding. Besides buying grain, wool and skins he acquired the Invercargill agency for Standard Fire and Marine Insurance of New Zealand.20 Occasionally Ward chartered ships for transporting loads of timber to Port Pirie in South Australia. He was in a sufficiently big way by 1886 to build his own headquarters on the corner of The Crescent and Liddell Street, just across the road from the railway station. He acquired the prime piece of real estate in January 1885 and next year borrowed enough money to erect a three-storey building that still stands today. In 1887 he leased part of the building to the Union Steam Ship Company, and in later years the New Zealand Shipping Company also had its Invercargill office there. Ward then acquired by lease from the Invercargill Town Council one acre of land behind his headquarters. He constructed a vast storage shed on it. Eventually the shed covered three quarters of an acre.21 Newspaper advertisements soon told of Ward’s wool sales, of his policy of making ‘liberal cash advances’ to farmers for their produce, and of providing them with storage ‘at lowest current rates’. Besides Standard Fire and Marine he was agent for the Livestock Insurance Company, the CML Assurance Office, the New Zealand Trust and Loan Company, the Patent Triangular Grooved Steel Fencing Wire Company and Coopers Celebrated Sheep Dip! He was even into real estate: ‘I have several farms for sale or lease …’ ran his regular advertisement. In 1887 J. G. Ward and Company opened a branch at Gore. Heywood’s Guide speaks of a large warehouse in that town next to the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Agency. Ward’s carried ‘full supplies of farmers’ requirements’.22
By the time Ward was in his early thirties he had become a substantial wheeler-dealer in Invercargill. That ‘thriving little Scotch town’, as Trollope had called it, was different from Bluff. Indeed, the more conservative businessmen, especially those in the Chamber of Commerce, were inclined to see Ward as an outside adventurer who made his money not through the accepted companies but in competition with them. Invercargill saw Ward as a youthful, slightly brazen (even if he was polite about it), Bluff, Catholic speculator, one who was more inclined to cock a snoot at the Invercargill establishment than to kowtow to it. Holcroft comments tardy: ‘The elders of Invercargill valued stability and the ancient virtues, and distrusted brilliance. Their strength of character was found most often in large simplicities, whereas Joseph Ward was complex and may sometimes have appeared to be a man without a core, ruled by expediency rather than by principle, and unashamedly ambitious.’23 In fact it was Ward’s style rather than anything else that was forming his reputation in Invercargill, a town of nearly 9000 people in the late 1880s. His dress, his religion, his risk-taking, his lavish advertising and his fast manner of speech that people attributed to the Blarney Stone, set him apart. He was not doing anything wrong; he simply marched to a different beat. In Invercargill he was an Irishman among Scotsmen.
Not all Scotsmen were sceptical. Some warmed to Ward’s flair. At a testimonial dinner for Ward who had become Prime Minister again in 1928, David McDougall, then United MP for Mataura, recalled the approving comments of a neighbour. Imitating a Scots accent, he quoted the neighbour as having said of Ward many years before, that he was ‘a man they canna keep oot’, adding ‘that’s another Willie Gladstone’.24
However, Ward knew he was an outsider in Invercargill. His heart and home remained in Bluff. There he built up his holding of prime waterfront real estate, eventually acquiring the whole block bordered by Gore, Boyne, Liffey and Barrow Streets. Substantial sheds capable of storing 20,000 sacks of grain were in place there by 1887, and seven years later he could store 100,000 sacks at the site. He and his wife now owned twenty-five of the sixty-six sections of prime commercial land on the Bluff waterfront. He was buying most of the land out of net profits. Ward was proving to himself, and to any others that were watching, that money could be made despite the depression, if people were prepared to take risks.
In April 1887 Ward turned thirty-one. He was a family man, a prominent local body politician and a businessman who exuded confidence while many around him were pessimistic about the economic future of the new country. The Press of Christchurch referred to him at that time as ‘elegant and supple of figure, genial and placid in manner, spic and span in his attire’. He was the sort of person who ‘attracted general attention’.25 At a time when men of lesser ambition were only beginning to think of public office, Ward was running out of rungs on the ladder. Given the prevailing pessimism, and his own personal experiences in combating it, the next and most obvious step was to stand for Parliament. J. P. Joyce, the sitting member for the seat of Awarua, let it be known that he was considering retirement, and Ward was soon planning. Parliament was not a foreign world to him. Through his business contacts he knew the previous Invercargill parliamentarians personally and had been up to Wellington to lobby ministers on Harbour Board business.26
By 1887 the long depression was approaching its nadir. The economic miracle promised three years before by Sir Julius Vogel had not materialised and the old financial wizard was beginning a policy of retrenchment more reminiscent of his critics.27 With export receipts declining, imports were cut back, and property and customs taxes raised. The production of wool, meat and grain fell. Immigration died away as many immigrants went back to Melbourne. The pace of land settlement, so vital to a merchant like Ward, slowed. Small subsistence farmlets increased in number as settlers ceased taking risks and hunkered down until the storm passed.28 For the previous fifteen years the population had expanded. Transport and communications networks tied a series of semi-autonomous, precarious settlements into a fragile nation. But morale was now at a low ebb. Unemployment and a shortage of development capital was hindering production. The coming election seemed to be turning around national issues more than any of its predecessors. Several new faces appeared on the political scene, men who, if not born in New Zealand, had spent most of their lives there. James Allen, W. P. Reeves, Thomas Mackenzie, James Carroll, James Mills and Joseph Ward—each was distinct but all shared a New Zealand perspective on local problems. For a time they used the title ‘Young New Zealanders’, a description Ward was most happy to adopt.
The election of 1887 obliged people to take sides on national issues. Retrenchment was in the air. The government of Sir Robert Stout was now cutting back on subsidies, threatening even the mail delivery to Stewart Island. Some Southland conservatives sounded thoroughly sinister to a man of Ward’s temperament. G. F. Richardson, MHR for Mataura, told a meeting in July: ‘If… I had control of affairs for six months in my own hands you would see change. Wouldn’t I send the drones to the right-about and clean out the Augean stable of officialdom. There’s Defence, Wind and Weather Departments, Public Works and Land Offices, Education and a heap of other things that could either be swept away or reduced …,’29 While the editor of the News dismissed Richardson, saying that he was like hundreds and thousands of other colonists ‘who, over a glass of toddy, see their way quite clearly to radical reforms’, the Member spoke for many. On 1 July 1887 a Reform Association was formed in Invercargill at a meeting of thirty local businessmen. They wanted reductions to Members’ salaries, fewer public servants, and an end to all borrowing and railway construction. They hoped this would then enable taxation to be reduced.
Stout was no great spendthrift, but he had grave doubts about the wisdom of cutting expense on education. Those who advocated such a policy wished ‘to keep the poor always as hewers of wood and drawers of water’, he told an election meeting in Dunedin. Nor did he favour ceasing railway construction. Arresting construction before lines were completed would mean that money already spent would never pay its dividend.30 These were Ward’s sentiments as well; he would ‘unhesitatingly’ vote for Stout if the alternative was one of Stout’s more conservative critics.31
Ward moved cautiously at first. On 9 July 1887 a special advertisement appeared in the News. It read simply: ‘To the electors of Awarua: Gentlemen—In response to a numerously signed Requisition, and at the solicitation of Friends from all parts of the District, I have definitely decided to be a candidate for the representation of Awarua in Parliament, and will, in due course, notify dates and places of meetings. In the meantime I respectfully ask Electors to remain unpledged. I am, yours faithfully, J. G. Ward.’ Further notices appeared over the next few weeks and a campaign committee was established at the South Invercargill home of James Kelly, who lived within the Awarua electorate.32 Awarua encircled Invercargill. It contained the working-class streets on the south side of the town with a concentration of Catholics, as well as several scattered settlements on the north side. Ward’s contacts with the farmers around Makarewa, Waikiwi and Otatara, many of them his clients, gave him a head start with his campaign. Bluff and Stewart Island in the south of the electorate were his fortresses. Two older identities, J. W. Bain and G. Froggatt, also emerged as candidates, but both were hostile to the Stout-Vogel Government. Froggatt, an Invercargill butcher and former mayor, was a member of the Reform Association; Bain wanted ruthless pruning of the civil service. They were representative of the forces in Invercargill who were most dubious about Ward. Between them they managed to split the conservative vote.33
A careful analysis of Ward’s campaign addresses reveals him to be a relative sophisticate. He was aware of the complexities produced by the depression, and was conscious of the need to lighten its impact on the poorer segments of the community. He was willing to use new management techniques to reform some of the agencies of state. He would have been at home in the developing Progressive movement in the American midwestern states. He believed in the new technologies. He was against property taxation which tended to deter investors, and in favour of a progressive system of land and income taxation. Rather than adding to the level of unemployment by redundancies in the civil service he preferred reducing all salaries, with the biggest sacrifices being made by those on the highest incomes. On education he sounded like Stout, vigorously opposing any cost-cutting. Borrowing should cease, except for the completion of railways already under construction.34
Today’s observers are likely to see in Ward’s first campaign speeches the mind of a mildly progressive liberal with a technocratic bent. While some of those who later came to be his colleagues were developing a concept of the state as a help-mate, a notion that Ward himself accepted to an extent in commercial matters, Ward seemed to be saying in 1887 that government had a role in people’s lives only if it could deliver more cheaply and efficiently than private enterprise. While he clearly favoured the state’s taking the risks involved in borrowing and building the country’s railway infrastructure, a few months later he added that he would be happy to sell the railroads if he could get £20 million for them. Ward knew the value of services, but he kept a close eye on the price as well.35
Many years later a young admirer of Ward’s, John Fisher, who came to be his business manager, recalled the campaign of 1887:
I acted as [Ward’s] secretary, and was present at his first political address in a little meeting house at Greenhills, since demolished. No political career could have started under more humble conditions, the building was lighted with a few tallow candles stuck in the necks of bottles and the light was just sufficient to show up the darkness. For weeks [Ward] had devoted time and energy in the preparation of his address, making himself thoroughly conversant with the political position of the day. From Hansard and the press he collected a mass of matter to equip himself for the campaign and saturated himself with the knowledge acquired, at the same time reducing all the salient features to writing. Commencing his address fortified with pages of closely written foolscap and tabulated statistical returns, within five minutes of starting he threw the whole roll of paper aside …,36
Ward’s campaign style was always pleasant. He spoke rapidly, was quick to produce statistics and occasionally displayed a sense of humour. On his favourite subject of railway tariffs he noted that it cost a man nine pence to travel five miles if he was alive, but twenty shillings to carry his corpse the same distance—a ‘rather stiff rate’, he punned to one audience’s delight. He also revealed a good conceit of himself. He was proud of his business successes and lost few opportunities to tell his audiences about them. He told the Sloane Theatre meeting of nearly 500 people on 12 September that the goods he had exported had brought more than half a million pounds of foreign money into Invercargill for the betterment of the community. By his endeavours he had personally ensured that rail freight that would otherwise have gone out of the region through Port Chalmers had passed instead through Bluff. Above all he claimed that he was the one who had introduced the system of cash advances to farmers for their crops, noting that one of the other big farming companies was supporting one of his opponents.37 His campaign was angled at the small, struggling farmers and workers, whose champion he offered to be. At no time in his long political career was Joseph Ward troubled by undue modesty. His meeting chairmen were encouraged to introduce the speaker with elaborate praise which the young political celebrity would then embroider.
Ward was much the best organised of the Awarua candidates. He alone had a campaign committee of volunteers. In Bluff his local strength saw him obtain a unanimous vote of confidence from the floor. As he progressed around the electorate he always ensured that he got a bigger audience than either of his opponents. Even before polling day newspapers in other parts were predicting that he would win. His victory on election day, 26 September, surprised with its size. While his opponents split the conservative vote, Ward still won slightly more than 50 per cent of the poll. The final vote was Ward 660; Froggatt 401; Bain 237. Ward won more than half the booths, securing his best majorities in South Invercargill and Bluff. In his home town he won 110 votes, his opponents getting only eight votes apiece.38
The Stout-Vogel Ministry, however, went down to defeat. The Prime Minister lost his seat. Ward expressed sorrow at this, and declared he would act as an independent. He had hopes for the ‘Young New Zealand Party’. His sour old opponent, J. W. Bain, predicted that without Stout Ward would be like Japhet in search of a father.39
No sooner had the celebrations died away than Ward was off to Wellington on what became a lifetime of tripping to and from the capital city. First to Invercargill by train, where the locals farewelled him in style, then to Dunedin and on to Christchurch. Timetables seldom clicked with the ferries from Lyttelton to Wellington, and Ward came to expect a journey of 48–55 hours, a time that had been reduced only a little by the turn of the century. Once in Wellington it was not possible to return home at whim. Politicians were virtual prisoners until the end of the session, living in a variety of rooming houses around the suburb of Thorndon. Child-rearing and family matters were left entirely to wives. Theresa by this time had two children and was pregnant with Vincent. She was to be a political ‘widow’ in Bluff until she decided to shift the family to Wellington in 1900.
