Family Life on the Midland Railway Line 1904 – 1906
James Henry McKeich (Jim) found work on the Midland Railway Line in 1904. He had just finished working on the Caversham Tunnel in Dunedin. He took his family to live in the small settlements that sprang up as the line advanced towards Otira on the eastern side of the Southern Alps. In 1910 he was employed as a Tunnel Foreman for the firm of McLean Brothers who had been contracted to build the railway tunnel from Otira through the Southern Alps to the West Coast. Before the end of the job the Public Works Department took over the contract and completed the tunnel. Jim was proud of the work he and his men were engaged in and often spoke of the success of the scheme when he was on duty at the time of the completion of the tunnel. He would remind everyone that even in those early days and with no sophisticated technological equipment. the two ends of the tunnel were only five eighths of an inch off centre.
The story of Jim’s brush with death during a tunnel collapse has been well documented in the Christchurch Star newspaper of 2nd and 3rd May 1910. Also Eugene Grayland recorded the episode in his book “More New Zealand Disasters”.
Two of Jim’s children, Ernest b 1898, d 1978 and May b 1900, d 2001 had very clear memories of the harsh living conditions encountered during the family’s two years at Terry’s Flat. After the two years their mother, Fanny, could put up with it no longer and took the children off to Christchurch leaving Jim to carry on with his work. Four years later in 1910 Jim was appointed to the position of Tunnel Foreman.
The following is an edited version of May’s recollections.
“……………my father arrived to take us to live in Broken River. The railway line was built through very rugged country; high above the Staircase Gully. The Waimakariri River ran clear and blue, 200 to 300 feet below us. We passed over a short bridge that spanned the Cascade Waterfall, through a short cutting, around a slight bend, across a long bridge and pulled up at Broken River Station. That was as far as the railway line went. Passengers were met there by Cobb and Co Coaches, usually six horses to each coach and taken to the West Coast via Cass and The Bealy on the Canterbury side of the Otira Tunnel.
The only road in Broken River was the Coach Road that was just above the settlement where we lived. A narrow track led from the station past several houses, Kelly’s Flat, all built of corrugated iron on wooden frames. The Shaws lived in the first one, then the Keys, George Birss, Charley Birss, and then a family of Irish immigrants named Cosgrove. Paddy lived in three tents end on end. The middle one was used as a kitchen come living room with a tin chimney. The fireplace was 2 cross bars resting on 2 bricks. All cooking was done there as well as water heating in kerosene tins cut sideways. Preparing the meals was done outside on a rough bench built into a clay bank. There were no toilet facilities and people had to do with a tin bowl to wash in and whatever cover nature provided.
Our house was further along the track perched almost on the brink of a precipice, high above the river. A length of wire netting was all that stopped us children from falling to a certain death. It was a comfortable enough house, corrugated iron of course, but it was lined with tongue and groove timber, had three bedrooms, a living room with a large table and forms to sit on at meal-time. On either side of the fireplace were my mother and father’s rocking chairs. We children sat on the “Rat Rug” in front of the fire. There was a lean-to built along the length of the house with a “Dover” stove at one end. There my mother spent most of her time preparing our meals, sewing and washing our clothes. At bath time it was a real chore because all water had to be carried from a butt which is a large barrel or Hogshead. There was a continuous flow of clear, fresh water that just overflowed onto the ground and ran down to the river. One barrel to three houses was the only water supply. In the winter it used to freeze solid so all the water had to be carried to the house before three o’clock in the afternoon. It was a hard life for the women in those days. We bathed in a large oval zinc tub with handles at each end. The water was heated in kerosene tins on the Dover stove and over the open fire in the living room. Our closet (toilet) was a talking point among the other children with whom we played and had to be shown to any new arrivals.
From our one and only door of the house, we came out onto a veranda, turned right around the end of the house, past the tin chimney of the Dover stove, up a narrow track alongside the wire netting fence, up hill into a clump of Black Birch trees and there it was. It was much wider than an ordinary dunny because it had two toilets, one for the grown ups and one, on a lower level, for the children. Both had wooden lift up lids. That toilet was scrubbed every day with Jeyes Fluid in the water.
Above where we lived was a small plateau where single men lived. Some were in tents but most were in tin huts. One elderly man kept a few hens and one of these, a Rhode Island Red, used to lay an egg every day. Guess where- between the two toilet seats.
Going to the toilet before bedtime was an ordeal for me. I was only five years old and frightened of the dark. My brothers took turns at waiting for me at the corner of the house with a lantern. One night my second brother, Ernest, put the light out and when I came down the track he jumped out at me. I never got over that fright plus many others, which were unbelievable adventures over eighty years ago.
My first brush with death occurred before I started school in Broken River. We were forbidden to go near the railway bridge. One day my brothers and I and the Birss, Kelly and Shaw boys were going across the bridge to gather mushrooms. The other boys had all been there before and knew the ropes. A narrow plank between the rails was all there was to cross on foot. The boys were all at the far end of the bridge and I was in the middle when I heard the train whistle as it came out of the cutting. All I remember was doubling up and just waiting. Fortunately some men were painting the side girders when one of them looked back and saw that I was not with the other children. He ran in front of the train that had just started to cross the bridge, grabbed me by the clothes and held me back against the side. I did not know until years later that my poor mother had witnessed all this but was helpless to do anything. My father was on shift in the tunnel at the time. He was furious with the boys for not taking more care of me but it was my own fault. After that adventure I stayed closer to home. My best friend was Rene Shaw and we had a special spot where we used to play at being ladies. We each had a certain rock that we called our house and would take turns at inviting each other to afternoon tea using small rocks for cups and plates of cakes etc. It was a level area with a deep blue stream running through. The banks were lined with blue and white violets that filled the clear air with their scent.
To get to the school at Broken River we had to walk about a mile up the Coach Road to the township on the flat. There was a Store/Post Office, a Butcher’s shop and the school. The school was one room with a potbelly stove for heating and one teacher who taught all twenty of us from five-year-olds to about standard four. We all had the same lessons. I was the youngest and would not have survived if my father had not taught me the rudiments of learning at home. It was pretty rugged. Mr Thompson, the teacher, was a hard taskmaster and used the strap with rigour. One day I was later than my brothers in getting to school. They were scared of being late and had run off ahead of me. I would not answer his questions as to why I was late so he grabbed me like a madman and shouted, “Answer me! Answer me!” My answer was a hard kick on his leg which was, unfortunately for me, a wooden one, so, not only did I hurt my foot but my pride was shattered especially as I had sworn at him. “You old bugger,” I said. Guess I must have heard the boys use that expression at some time. My father’s anger over the incident was not so much that the teacher had thrashed me but that I had sworn at him and must apologise. I never did. Mother would not hear of that so the incident was forgotten, but not by me.
During 1906 we went to Christchurch for the Christchurch Exhibition at Hagley Park. It was like a fairyland with lights, music and side shows. We stayed at Holmes’ Hotel, a private hotel on Manchester Street. It was very crowded. All the children slept in a large room like a dormitory. Mother was not very happy about that so another bed was put up for her. I don’t think she slept much that night. My parents returned to Christchurch for the closing of the Exhibition leaving my brothers at home while I stayed up in the township with Mr and Mrs Ern Smith who were very nice good living people. Mr Smith worked in the tunnel but lived in the township. I used to walk down the road to meet him until one day on the way home he was asked into one of the single men’s huts to have a drink. I waited for him sitting on a bundle of barrel staves. Concrete for the tunnel arrived in barrels and the workmen took it in turns to take the staves home for firewood. As I waited I began to feel afraid as darkness was falling when Mr Smith came out of the hut. He was staggering and fell against the chimney. I took to my heels and ran down to home. Wally and Ern were there and got a light each. The light was a vinegar bottle with the bottom cut out and a candle inside. The neck of the bottle was used as a handle. We went up the Coach Road and found Mr Smith lying on the side. He had been very sick and was ashamed when the boys explained to his wife. On another occasion the carpenter on the job who lived over the Broken River bridge near Cascade Creek did not turn up for work for one and a half days. A search party was sent out to look for him. He was not found nor any trace of him until one day Wally and Ern and one of the Kelly boys went looking and found him. At least they found his body. He would never have been found had the sun not been shining on his hammer, which he had tucked into the bowyang on his dungarees. His body was taken to the Blacksmith’s Shop. The windows of the shop were covered with sacks and I remember going with some other children to try and have a peep. The boys were hailed as heroes. My first year of school ended at Broken River and in 1906 we went to Musselborough School in Dunedin”.
The following is an edited version of Ernest’s recollections of the time when he lived in the shanty town on the Midland Line.
“………………..Well, Dad, he finished this Caversham Tunnel job and he was working on a drainage scheme in Dunedin. I just vaguely remember that. Then he got a job on the newly started Midland Railway up the island. It was a railway to connect Christchurch with Greymouth on the other side of the Southern Alps. He got this job up there and we were on the move again from Dunedin. I remember the shift. There were some people next door named Cherry. He was an engine driver. You know an engine driver was always looked up to as being somebody out of the ordinary. We lived in a very poor house, very poorly off. Life was pretty tough and we didn’t have much fun at all. Anyhow, I remember the Cherry’s gave us shelter the night before we took off for Christchurch on the train. I had a raging toothache all that night in Cherry’s place and then on the train up to Christchurch. I was howling and making a great fuss. Dad took me along to a dentist and he yanked this tooth out for a shilling, no anaesthetic, just yanked it out and I was free of this pain. Life became quite adventurous from there on.
We moved up from Christchurch to this place called Broken River on the Midland Railway. The train went as far as a place called Springfield and from there you got on a Public Works ballast train and it went to a place called Atarama. We got off this ballast train and there was the Staircase Gully Bridge. It was a steel viaduct across the Staircase River, a branch of the Waimakariri, a raging torrent down below. They had cut out a ledge in the solid rock on either side and went straight into a tunnel. The bridge/viaduct wasn’t completed. They had a gantry going across for the construction and carting of materials for the tunnel. We were put on this square box affair. Mum and us kids. Let’s see, there was three of us I think, my elder brother Walter, myself and May. That’s right there were three of us then with our pitiful belongings in this square box affair. We were taken across in this gantry over this Staircase Gully and landed on this rock ledge. We were put on this flat decked trolley and pushed through this tunnel and eventually finished up in a shanty.
Now this shanty and thereby hangs a story. The workmen, single chaps, were provided with a tent with a board floor and boarded up round the sides about two foot six. The married men could buy timber, 3 x 2s, and corrugated iron off the Public Works. They had to build their own places. Dad had bought this shack and it consisted of a corrugated iron shanty, lined with sacks cut opened and pasted over with papers mostly illustrations from the Weekly Press. There was an open fireplace with a corrugated iron chimney and a row of hooks over a camp oven. That was the cooking facilities that Mum had to put up with. It was a bleak, dreadful place this Terry’s Flat. There were quite a lot of things happened here. But while I am on this shanty I remember coming home from school and Mum had the rolling pin and she was rolling some dough out to make scones.
She was sniffling and tears were coming down her face. There was this dirty old man sitting in an armchair affair that dad had made out of a cement barrel. He’d cut this thing down and he’d made this armchair. In those days there was no cement made in New Zealand. It was all imported in these barrels. This old bloke, dirty old man, was sitting there reading the newspaper. Mum told me to go out and play. Dad was on day shift. They used to work three shifts and he knocked off at four o’clock in the afternoon. He came home and there was a parley then and I remember this old joker saying, “Oh well, that’s that,” and he put on his semi-bowler hat thing that they used to wear in those days and stuck his paper in his pocket and away he went. Well, he was a bailiff and dad had bought this shack off Bob Semple.
You might remember Bob Semple. He later became Minister of Works in the labour Government. Well, dad had bought this shanty off Bob Semple for twelve quid and this bailiff was sent up from Heath and Co., the drapers in Christchurch, to take this shanty to do something with it to get back the thirty quid that Bob Semple owed them. This Bob Semple was quite a character. He was supposed to be working as a trucker in one of the tunnels but he seemed to strut around Terry’s Flat all dressed up, always sporting a bow tie, blue with white spots. He had a black ebony cane with a silver knob on it and amongst all this squalor of Terry’s Flat Bob Semple used to strut around in this rigout. Now, he sported this bow tie right up to his death. He was a Member of Parliament and as Minister of Works he always wore the same gear. Well that was one incident.
There was a bloke named Jimmy Rice. He had one arm. He had a little shed and a store to cater for the tunnelers. He sold things like tobacco and pipes and working boots, hob nailed boots, all that sort of gear. Well, Jimmy Rice’s store caught fire. We use to get water from the water race, clean water it was too. Jimmy, he had two kerosene tins on a pole across a yoke affair across his shoulders. Poor old Jimmy had been down getting some water and his place caught fire and was burned down. He couldn’t do anything about it. He had to stand there and watch it burn. We used to have to pass Jimmy’s place on our way to school and I went fossicking around in the ruins. I got some half-burned pipes and some half-burned tobacco. The tobacco used to be in plugs in those days in a wooden box. Us kids had a cache down in a bit of a gully nearby and we dumped this half burned tobacco and pipes in our cache for our usual gathering on a Saturday morning and get into mischief and on our way to school.
Well now, this school might be of interest to your students. You mentioned to me in one of your cassettes that they would be interested in the conditions of schooling in those days seventy odd years ago. Well, this was a corrugated iron shed; you couldn’t call it anything else, unlined and there was about thirty pupils ranging from infants up to the sixth standard. It was controlled by a chap name of Thompson and old Thompson had a green swallow tailed coat. He lived in a little bit of a hut, one with one of those pot-bellied stoves in it. He tried to teach us each school day. It was a shame that they sent an old bloke like that to this dreadful place. The climate and conditions were just ghastly and very primitive. I remember crying one morning, it was bitterly cold and icy outside. A big roaring fire going there just warmed his coat tails and that’s all and we were sitting in this ice chamber trying to learn something. Old Thompson set us a task and he was sitting at his desk. I thought he was praying. He had his hands clasped together in the attitude of prayer and all his knuckles, his joints had these frost cuts in them just as though he had cut them with a knife. There was watery blood pouring out of these frost cuts. Poor Thompson, I thought he was praying. Anyhow, I remember I cried a bit. Poor old Thompson, he died in a train going from Christchurch to Dunedin a few years later. That was the Broken River School. In the winter we used tie sugar bags around our boots and clamber over the frozen solid masses of tussock up onto the coach road.
The Cassidy’s Coaches used to come over from Otira. They were just a replica of those wild west coaches, just exactly the same shape with five horses and this driver perched up there. They used to drive them over the ice-covered roads with chains on the wheels. They came slithering down the hills with sparks flying and the horses with their feet splayed out just like ice skating around corners. The horses were marvellous.
By that time the train had reached Broken River Station and that was the railhead. A big store was there and us kids used to get bunches of these mountain daisies, mountain lilies and sell them to the tourists who came. The mountain daisies had quite a reputation. They were very rare and you might spend a whole day gathering them and only get three or four. We would bundle them together and sell them to these tourists for sixpence a bunch.
We had another adventure. We had two about that time. There was this Broken River Bridge. We were going mushrooming one Sunday morning. To get where the mushrooms were we had to go along the railway and there was a short bridge called Waterfall Bridge. There was a waterfall down the side of the hill and it formed a sort of a hollow in the side of the hill and they had pt this short bridge across. We got there and somebody spotted a parcel of meat in a newspaper parcel, just down to the side of this steep cliff and then a clodhopper and then a body further down. So we forgot all about the mushrooms and rushed back to Broken River and gave the alarm. They took what you call a jigger out. It was a thing they had on the railway. They pulled this lever backwards and forwards to make it go. I can remember his name, Jordan.
He’d been boozed and set off along the railway line and instead of getting across the bridge he went down the side and killed himself. Oh, there was another incident there too. This was prior to the Jordan incident. There was a big fellow at school. He was older than me and looked like a full-grown man. I was only a little chap. I’d be about six or seven years of age then I suppose. After school one day he enticed me down to where he was living with his father which was through that tunnel I mentioned, Staircase Gully Bridge. This father and this boy, they lived in this tent.
He was called a surfaceman and he had been left behind to patrol the newly laid track. If there were any loose sleepers and anything like that he would tuck shingle underneath and consolidate it. This old chap was quite a boozer and he had a five-gallon keg of beer in the tent and the boy, he was like his father, he used to drink this brew. He gave me a pint pannikin of this beer. In those days, Bob, beer was really powerful stuff. So I drank this beer. Didn’t like it very much, and he sent me off home across this Staircase Gully bridge.
There was only a narrow plank along the centre of it about nine inches wide. I crept across this bridge on my hands and knees clutching the sides of this plank and got into this tunnel. I wandered backwards and forwards until somebody came along and took me by the hand and led me through the tunnel. I got home somehow and I went to bed. Mum was clucking round. Oh, I was very sick. It’s a wonder she didn’t smell the beer. That was my first experience of drinking intoxicating liquor and it might have been the death of me.
I’ve been racking my brains to try and recollect what I’d been learning all this time and I can’t recollect anything I learned but I must have learned something. We used to have slates and a slate pencil and we’d write our work down on these slates. When the work was set all you’d hear was the scratching on these slates. When the work was finished you’d spit on the slate and you’d erase the work with a bit of a rag or a sponge towel on a bit of string on the corner of your slate. Very unhygienic and the slates would be ready for another bit of work. Hence you get the saying “you had a clean slate”, a fresh start.”
The account of the purchase of the shanty that the family lived in had its repercussions well into the 1940s. My father, Colin McKeich, who was engaged in overseeing all electrical installations in and around Wellington during World War 2 often wondered how his Uncle Jim seemed to have unlimited access to Bob Semple’s office. As Ernest described, Bob Semple was by now the Minister of Works for the Government. It seems that the sale of the shanty by Bob Semple to Jim McKeich for twelve pounds helped get Bob Semple out of debt. Jim obviously used this favour as a method to access Bob Semple’s office.
Notes supplied by Bill McKeich
Great nephew of Jim McKeich
Paraparaumu
Email yanakie@xtra.co.nz
