Quitting the Welfare State: And-Friday the 13Th.

Part I

Chapter 1

New Zealand—During and Following the Great Depression

Friday the 13th, January 1928: that was the day my mother pushed me out and into this crazy world. I had no option, apparently arriving in time for supper, so I suppose she gave me my first feed. The superstitious say that Friday the 13th is very unlucky. Not for me, but maybe for the rest of the world.

I was born in Palmerston North, a small rural town of maybe 10.000, in New Zealand, which probably had a population of around 1 million at that time. Like almost all New Zealand families, we were middle class, soon struggling to survive the Great Depression of the 1930s. Also like most Kiwis, we were descendants of immigrant pioneers. My great-great-grandfather was one of the first white men to arrive in Wellington in 1839. He worked as a bush clearer, sawmill operator, cultivation/animal farmer, and engineer, as did his sons, grandsons, and all the way down the line through my generation. We Sinclairs spent all our time opening up farmlands, running mills, and building roads and bridges, as well as raising our families. My great-grandfather was an engineer with the Pohangina County Council, in addition to being a farmer. Upon his retirement in 1902, my grandfather took over from him.

Grandfather finally quit the Pohangina Valley, moving to Palmerston North to enter into partnership with his brother to operate the first general store chain in the region. His youngest son and only daughter were able to complete their educations in law and music, while his eldest son, my father, was obliged to work with his father as a storekeeper. He soon fell out with that idea, as well as with his father, because my mother became pregnant out of wedlock (with my brother), which in those days was a greater sin and cause for shame than committing murder. My grandparents were strict, dour Methodists, and my mother was a Catholic, which only added to the shame. My parents were shortly married, but only in the sinners’ sanctuary of the church; the priest would not permit them to grace the church altar.

My brother was born several months after the marriage ceremony. I arrived sixteen months after my brother, so we were always very close. So began the early years of our family life. After falling out with his father, my father managed to obtain employment with the local town council, and I believe he began to enjoy the bottle a little. Within two years of my birth, the Great Depression had gripped the world, and things became increasingly difficult for my family.

Disaster struck in 1931, when I was three. My father had acquired a female whippet, Betty by name, and I remember playing with this miserable hound in our back garden. Horse racing and dog racing were the main pastimes of the male population of New Zealand in those days, along with off—and on-course betting. My father must have had great faith and expectations in the poor animal, with the result that he was soon up to his neck in debt with the local bookies. The pressure was too much from those guys, whom he was obliged to satisfy by relieving the town council of some funds—I believe the sum was around £200.00, quite a lot of money in those days. Of course, this brought more shame on the family, which was then well known throughout the town, particularly with my grandfather just nominated a justice of the peace. My uncle, being well connected in the legal world, made quick arrangements for the trial to be held in Wellington, well away from the local press and gossipers. I believe the trial lasted a few minutes, with the sentence coming down at two years’ hard labour, as that was probably the only punishment known in those days. My father was whisked out of the courthouse, not even allowed to bid my mother goodbye. He disappeared to an unknown confinement, never to be seen again by any members of the family for the next two years.

What a dilemma for my mother, left with two little boys to raise, no breadwinner, and a pile of shame to endure. The temporary solution quickly evolved. My brother was passed over to my paternal grandparents, I was settled in with my maternal grandparents, and my mother left town to live with friends at some distant location. At the time, my brother and I did not know the real reason for our relocation, but we would learn the truth sometime later. We never knew what happened to Betty either, but I often wondered about it.

My brother had the luck of the draw. Dad’s sister, Aunt Lorna, a lovely young lady, was still single and living with her parents, and she became a second mother to my brother. He also started school, which was just around the corner from their home. My maternal grandparents were a lovely couple, and they also had a young single daughter. Unfortunately, she had a mental sickness that periodically sent her into wild epileptic fits which would become very violent, and which my grandparents could not control. These fits scared the daylights out of me. At age three, I was too young for school, and I had nobody to play with, because the other kids were school age. My grandfather was running his cabinetmaking business, and my grandmother often out playing bridge. As a result, I was left alone with a loony who spent most of the day playing the same three tunes on an old clanking piano.

My grandparents went to the theatre at times, and they would put me to bed and leave my crazy aunt to look after me. This took its toll on me as a young child, both on my mind and my body. I soon began to wet the bed, which was looked upon not as a sickness, but just a very naughty thing to do. The treatment was scalding, not medical help, and this sickness continued for some time. Twelve months after I had been stuck with my grandparents, my grandfather suddenly went down with double pneumonia. He died within a few days. For the next twelve months, I lived in constant fear. Consequently, I went into myself, obviously developing a method for survival and self-protection. I became far more naughty, even rebellious, and I began to be destructive around the home, which only made the situation worse. That was the most horrible year of my life, and I still hold memories if it.

Finally, after two very long years, my mother appeared to tell me that she was going to take me to meet my father, who had returned home from working upcountry because of the Great Depression. I remember meeting him very well. Mother took me to a street corner some distance from where I was staying, and she left me with him. Dad and I just stood there looking at each other, neither of us saying a word. Eventually some simple words passed between us, and then he turned, walked across the street, and entered a pub on the opposite corner. I guess he hadn’t had a beer for over two years. We settled back as a family in a rented house in Palmerston North.

Somehow, my father was soon able to obtain employment as an assistant to the engineer of the Pohangina County Council mainly in charge of maintenance of the roads. Probably there was a connection, as both my grandfather and great-grandfather had acted as county engineers of Pohangina—some of the bridges constructed during their tenures are still standing to this day. In any case, this employment was a blessing to my father, as he was away from the town of his crime.

Dad was back in the region of his birth and growing-up years, where he had lived up until his teens, and he just loved the place. He spent the weekdays working on the roads, travelling home for the weekend in an old Gray motor car; this vehicle which was a cross between a Model T and a Model A Ford. Many years later I was to locate that antique car in perfect condition; it had passed to the son of the man my father had sold it to.

As the school starting age had been put back to six years because of the Depression, I used to travel with Dad, spending most of that year with him. I loved sleeping alongside of him and my fox terrier, in the small cottage Dad had been allotted, all three of us snuggled on the floor in front of a blazing fire during the cold nights.

Dad became very friendly with all of the farmers of the region, and I used to spend some of the days on those farms, collecting walnuts and blackberries. I also liked to join the farmers when they milked the cows or fed the pigs. It was a year of therapy for both Dad and me, bringing us closer together. However, the traumas of the previous two years still remained deep inside me, and I suspect the same was true for my father.

At last, I started school, two years behind my brother. We attended the local convent school. The nuns were very strict, but the teaching was very good; of course we had a lot of religion rammed into our heads. Two years into this period, New Zealand was hit by a massive outbreak of infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis), which forced the government to close all primary schools. During the next six months, teaching was continued throughout the whole country by radio, and every student was obliged to listen in to the appropriate lessons, writing them down and completing the tests. At the end of each week, all students were obliged to complete their assigned tasks and tests, and then forward them by post-free mail to their respective schools for correction. This was an incredible operation which demonstrated the high importance the NZ government placed on education, even at that time.

New Zealand was still suffering the effects of the Great Depression, with unemployment at record highs and considerable frugal living conditions endured by all. Almost every household had a home garden for growing vegetables and fruit for the family’s needs. We joined a neighbourhood communal potato-growing scheme for planting a fairly large crop on an area of free land available close by. Evolving out of the Depression meant that NZ went totally socialistic, and in the mid-1903s, the country elected its first labour government. Our family life continued against the backdrop of national and world events, as is the case for all families everywhere.

The year World War II broke out, 1939, I graduated to high school, following my brother into the Marist Brothers entity, which had only just become established in what was now the city of Palmerston North. This school had much stricter discipline and even more ramrod religion, but it was very strong on athletics and had excellent teaching.

Disaster struck again during my second year; I was twelve. It was a very cold, rainy, winter’s day, and we were all playing in the house rugby competition. I remember very little about it, as I passed out halfway through the game. I vaguely remember regaining partial consciousness at home when the family doctor was called in, but then I went out like a light for the next few days. I was moved into hospital, diagnosed firstly with acute nephritis, which later progressed to Bright’s disease, an acute failure of the kidneys. (I would later learn that this was the disease that killed Isambard Kingdom Brunel at age fifty-three; he was one of Great Britain’s most famous early civil engineers.) Our family physician, Dr Durward, was one of those wonderful general medical practitioners no longer encountered these days. They said he could cure coughs, colds, sore holes, and pimples on the dickey—or any other sickness for that matter. The hospital doctors said that I was on the way out, and a priest was brought in to administer the so-called extreme unction. Durward was not interested in that, and he went to work forcing liquid into my body, and then applying intense heat on my back by way of arc lamps, all in the endeavour to suck the liquid out and get the kidneys working again.

It worked: four days later I regained consciousness but had gone blind. He kept this process going for several days and nights, and I gradually regained my sight. I soon came back to life. Four weeks later, I was out of the hospital, though a little weak.

Throughout my life, I would learn that Friday the 13th was my lucky day.

A couple of years later, just after going to bed one night, I heard my mother and father arguing. I crept out of my brother’s and my bedroom to listen at the kitchen door. My mother was berating my father for not taking any interest in our schooling, and, particularly, for not accompanying us to the Saturday rugby games.

You know damn well why I don’t go, my father told my mother. It’s because I have been to jail, and I do not want to mix with people!

I crept back to bed to tell my brother what I had overheard, and we both felt a little shaken.

A short time after this, we both had to produce our birth certificates to the school, and it was then I noticed that my brother had been conceived out of wedlock. We both resolved to say nothing to either of our parents, and we kept our knowledge about these facts to ourselves, never disclosing what we knew to them until we were well into our middle lives.

Back to my life in the 1930s. All-boys schools went out of fashion years ago. The question has to be asked about my years in that school: what about paedophilia? That question only raises another question: what did anyone know about that in the 1930s,and even later? The answer is, nothing—nor would they have wanted to know the truth even if they had suspected anything amiss, nor would they have faced it.

Looking back, I have had to ask myself, Did it occur at my school? It is a bit of a question mark, but here is all I can truly state about my four years at that religious high school. There was a young, vigorous, likeable school chaplain who was very popular with all of us, participating in many activities in the college. However, one of his particularly strong themes was the creation of the church altar-boy group, consisting of twenty-four acolytes: four for each weekday mass, and twelve for each alternate Sunday. To be selected as one of those twenty-four was looked upon as kudos by the boy and the family.

Apart from the kudos, the only recompense was to participate in the altar boys’ picnic, held once every year on Saint James’s Day. It consisted of piling the twenty-four young guys into a hired bus, together with the chaplain, and heading off to Foxton Beach for a day’s picnic. When the bus stopped at the top of the beach entrance, the door was opened, and we all had to spill out to run a mile or two down the beach and into the sand dunes. Once there, all twenty-four had to strip off totally naked, as did the chaplain, and then the frolics began. Chasing one another around, grabbing each other, and so on—including everyone grappling with the naked priest!

This performance continued throughout the day, interspersed with swimming in the surf and eating lunch. We would leave for home after a wonderful day. I detested this day, feeling ashamed, as I believe most of the other boys did. However, we all had to go through with it, and then cover up with stories when we got home. We just could not relate to our parents what the picnic consisted of, nor would they have believed us had we told them the truth. Long afterwards, I wondered just what that priest guy had been up to. We all knew he had his favourite, who would go to his presbytery room after school for a cigarette. Anyway, back to the original question about paedophilia, if there was anything to it at my school, that’s the closest I ever got to it.

My brother and I both finished high school. He became indentured to a land surveyor, which guaranteed a successful profession for him. While primary and high school were free in NZ, it stopped there. It was pay all the way through university, which my parents could not afford. I was happy to leave school and do nothing except play rugby. My mother hounded me into getting a job, and I somehow was accepted as a cadet into the New Zealand Forest Service—that was in 1946.

After one year at Palmerston North, I was sent to the Forest Training Centre in Rotorua, where I joined a class of some twenty-five aspirants training to eventually become forest rangers. The top four of this class were given government grants to attend the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, in order to obtain degrees in forestry, as NZ did not have a forestry faculty in any of their universities in those days. I came in around the last four, and when the rest of us were informed that we would be sent out to the forests for further training and probably forgotten, I quit.

So began my quest to find myself; the truth was, I had no idea what I wanted to do or be. That deep-seated trauma still persisted, unbeknown to me.

Chapter 2

Becoming an Engineer

I travelled up to Auckland, not knowing what to do with myself. I recalled the philosophy of a well-known soothsayer—Out of the gloom a voice said unto me: ‘Smile and be happy; things could be worse.’ So I smiled and was happy, and, behold—things did get worse! However, I landed on the doorstep of my father’s brother, Len, who by then, had risen to senior magistrate of the city, following a brilliant career in law. I received a bit of a lecture about my ancestors all having been working civil engineers, but he was kind and sent me over to his and my father’s cousin, Herb Russell, who was then heading up one of NZ’s leading public business relations companies. Herb had just landed a contract with the British Petroleum Company, which was in the throes of setting up operations in NZ.

The next week, I found myself having an interview with the local BP engineer, Andrew Mustafa Ward (his father was Scottish, and his mother was Turkish). His office, located in the Auckland Harbour Board’s building, was so small that he had to climb over his own desk. He asked if I was any good at math and drafting, and I convinced him that I was the guy he was looking for. It just so happened to be Friday the 13th (February 1948)!

The following Monday, we both moved into a slightly larger office. I installed a drawing board and became an engineering cadet. I learnt a lot that first year, working on the construction site of the BP installations and producing drawings I never thought I would be able to create. Soon I started night classes at the Seddon Memorial Technical College, and then I enrolled in the correspondence course of the Institution of Civil Engineers, London, becoming a student member. I had been conned into an engineering career, and I’d hardly even known it.

Andrew Ward must have seen something in me that I still did not recognize, as he convinced BP to transfer me to their head office engineering department in Wellington, where I arrived on my twenty-first birthday in 1949. (Again, Friday the 13th!) This was an incredible incentive, and I was able to enrol for evening classes at Victoria University for the engineering preliminary course. I loved living, working, and studying in Wellington, but another big factor that was to influence my life soon occurred: joining the Maranui Surf and Life-Saving Club.

Maranui, founded in 1911 for the purpose of saving swimmers on the beach of Lyall Bay, was then probably the leading life-saving club in NZ. I was a reasonably good swimmer, and, after qualifying, I soon rose through to the ranks of the top teams, competing in regional and national championships. However, there was a much stronger aspect of the club that played a dominant role in the lives of youths and young men at that time. It was a combination of comradeship, discipline, competiveness, community spirit, and behaviour. I kept progressing, from gear steward, to committee member, to assistant secretary, to secretary, to deputy club captain, and, finally, to club captain during 1953-54. The monthly committee meetings were conducted along the lines of board meetings of corporations. In other words, those committee meetings were equivalent to what is taught today in an MBA programme, and that gave me a very solid business background which stood me well throughout my future business operations around the world.

Back to my actual career life. I enjoyed working at the BP engineering office, travelling to their many sites under construction throughout the country and gaining considerable experience. By the end of 1952, I had completed the engineering preliminary course at Victoria and had passed Section A of the ICE London examinations in civil engineering. Then came the possibility of a change which stopped me in my stride: the chief engineer of BP, Vernon Hicks, called me to his office to indicate that he was considering sending me to the then-largest petroleum operation in the world for further training, BP’s Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan, Persia, now known as Iran. Vernon was a wonderful man to whom I was indentured, as he was my engineering mentor. I walked out of his office, not knowing what to think. I trusted and admired Vernon, and I had read a lot about BP’s operation in Abadan, but I had also heard that the country was being run by a madman called Mossadeq.

A couple of days later, I returned to Vernon’s office to advise him that I felt a little uncertain about the offer, and perhaps I was not sufficiently up to it. Two weeks later, he called me in again; this time he told me he was sending me to Suva, Fiji, to supervise the new installations to be constructed there. Two offers and two big opportunities in two weeks knocked the wind out of me. I considered this offer for a few days, during which time I kept thinking of myself wandering around Fiji in white shorts and shirt, my head under a pith helmet. I would probably end up a gin soak! However, I knew that if I turned the second offer down there was only one thing to do: quit BP. I thanked Vernon profusely, pointing out that I was only halfway through my engineering studies and that breaking them at that point would make it almost impossible to pick them up again. I told him that I had decided I wanted to finish my degree and chartered engineering exams with the ICE, and that I had decided to enrol at the engineering faculty of Canterbury University in Christchurch for this purpose. He was very understanding, and I believe he thought greatly about my decision. Later on he confirmed that he would continue to act as my mentor.

I calculated that my savings might just last long enough to get me through the next two years. I enjoyed Canterbury, even though it was hard work, and I was able to return each summer to Wellington to enjoy my surf life-saving sport. Two years later, in 1954, I graduated from Canterbury and also completed Section B of the ICE exams to become a graduate of that entity. By 1955, I reckoned that I probably had sufficient experience under my belt to apply for the professional interview of the ICE. For this final examination, the requirements were at least one year of design experience, one year of construction experience, and one year in