Part of walking forward, for me, has turned out to be looking back.
That is not what I expected. I thought the new me got made out of what comes next. It turns out a fair bit of him is getting made out of what came before.
It has been sitting at the table with my mother, Karen. It has been long talks with my brother. Going through the old papers with the two of them.
And I am finding out how much it means to me.
This one is my great grandfather.
Joe Timms is the first name on the honours board at my rugby club in Picton. Above every Huntley. Above my uncles. Above the lot.
I have been telling bits of his story for years and I never had the start of it.
Turns out Karen has had it the whole time. Not the book. The transcripts. The actual typed pages of him talking, in 1970, answering the questions.
And what he says about how his whole life began is one sentence long.
A SMALL FACT
In 1970 a man sat down with my great grandfather and a tape recorder and asked him how he came to be at Whekenui.
Joe was an old man by then, over eighty.
He answered it in one sentence, and then he went straight back to talking about boats.
I want to say that part properly before I say anything else, because it is the truth of how this family works. Karen did the research. She did it for the reunion, years ago, and she went and found it and wrote it down and she has carried the rest of it in her head ever since with no filing system at all. Her brother, my uncle Bosun, stood up in front of a judge in Blenheim in 2012 and said a lot of it out loud under oath, and it has sat in a government transcript ever since where anybody could have gone and read it. But it came from her first.
So this is Joe, from the start, and where he talks, they are his own words off the page.
The minister
There is a page in Karen's papers headed GIL PERANO & JOSEPH TIMMS. Taped 1970.
Gil Perano is asking the questions. Joe is over eighty. And about six lines in, Gil says this.
Gil: Do you remember old Sedgewick the Anglican Minister.
Joe: He was the one who brought me over here, to Charlie Godfrey to be company for him.
I read that and I had to put it down and go outside.
Because I have spent months telling people my great grandfather was an orphan, like that is the headline. And it is true. He was born in Nelson in 1889, his mother was a Timms, his father was a Godfrey of Blenheim who would not put his name on him, and in those days that meant a boy went on a cart. They sent him to the orphanage in Nelson.
I am not going to make a sad song out of that, because he never did.
An Anglican minister came and got him. And the reason he came and got him was not charity, and it was not to put him to work.
There was a man on his own at the mouth of Tory Channel, and they sent a little boy to be company for him.
That is the whole arrangement. That is the actual reason my great grandfather ended up where he ended up. Somebody needed company, and they thought of him.
Charlie Godfrey
The man was Charlie Godfrey, and he kept the leading lights at Whekenui, right at the entrance to the channel, where the tide runs through like a river and the rocks have never moved for anybody.
Joe went to him at about five.
And here is the next bit of that 1970 page.
Gil: He was blind, wasn't he.
Joe: Stoneblind yes.
Stoneblind.
Now sit in that for a second, the way I had to. A blind man. In charge of the light. At the mouth of the channel. Every scow and every ferry coming through there in the dark lining itself up on lead lights that the man responsible for them had never seen.
And the way he did it was a kid.
How the light got lit
This is the best thing in the whole of Karen's papers and I am going to give it to you exactly as it is printed, because I could not improve it and I would not want to.
Gil: The story I got was that you used to go over to the Beacons which were all lit with kerosine and you used to go up the stairs.
Joe: He used to.
Gil: You used to first to get on the other side of the light, and then old man Godfrey would come up and he would light it and then you would say, Peak on your side dada, and then he would trim that with his thumb and he'd turn around the other way, you would say peak on my side dada.
Joe: Yes that's the way we used to work it.
Read it again and watch what is actually happening.
A blind man is up a set of stairs in the dark with a flame in his hands and his thumb on the wick. He cannot see it. So a small boy stands on the other side of the glass and tells him where the peak is.
The old man does the hands. The boy does the eyes.
Gil says it out loud on the next line and it is the best sentence anybody has ever written about my family.
Gil: So that's how you trimmed the lights, old man Godfrey doing it with your eyesight, good grief you would have only been a boy.
Old man Godfrey doing it with your eyesight.
And Joe does not make a thing of it. He never once makes a thing of it. He just says yes, that's the way we used to work it, and Gil has to move him on.
But look at the word the boy is using.
A SMALL FACT
Twice on that page, a boy out of an orphanage calls the blind man he was sent to keep company.
Dada.
What kind of house it was
I want to be clear that this was not an arrangement. It was a house.
Joe: Yes, well at the house, his mother was there then, she was alive then too, I was only about six years old when she died. Him and I carried on for awhile, 12 months or more and he married and George Kenny took over Okukari.
Three of them. An old woman, her blind son, and a small boy. She died when Joe was about six and the two of them carried on for another year or so, and then Charlie got married.
And in his own book, years later, writing about the Godfreys, Joe puts it in four words.
"They became my family."
That is all he says. He does not tell you what it was like before, or what it cost, or how long it took him to believe it.
And then, buried further down, without making anything of it at all:
"I named one of the Godfreys as my next of kin when I joined the army."
Think about a young fella standing at a table with an army form in front of him and a box on it that says next of kin.
He is not making do. He is telling the army who his people are.
The oars
Then the light and the oars.
"As time went on his sight began to deteriorate so I had the job of rowing his dinghy to help him out."
That is it. One sentence, in his book, no fuss.
And that is the first time in his life anybody puts a pair of oars in his hands. He is a kid, in a dinghy, taking a blind man where he needs to go.
He does not really put them down again for seventy years.
Thirty kilometres for a dance
Before we go any further I want you to know what these young fellas were like, because it was not grim and I am sick of it being told like it was.
"We thought nothing of rowing to Picton, about 30 Kms, for a football match or a dance, and then rowing home again."
Thirty kilometres.
Then the dance.
Then thirty kilometres home in the dark.
We thought nothing of it.
There are cousins of mine who would still do that, and about four who would need a lie down first.
Fifteen
Gil: Well what age were you when you went into the boats.
Joe: I would have been 15 years old, just left school.
Fifteen does not sound like much if you have never had to count them.
It sounds like a school year. It sounds like a number you forget walking from one room to the next.
But if it is you, standing up in an open boat in Cook Strait in July with grown men either side of you and your voice not finished changing, then fifteen is a whole life.
Fifteen winters.
Fifteen and already the steadiest hand on that light.
Fifteen and out on the water with a rope in his fists.
And here is the boat.
Joe: Second season I was in there we never saw a whale, that was in the "Swiftsure", old man Jackson's boat, my first boat.
Sixty years on he still calls it his first boat.
Te Awaiti, by a man who stood in it
Now, this is the part I did not know we had, and it is the reason I am writing any of this down.
Karen's papers do not just have Joe on Campbell Island. They have Joe on Te Awaiti, describing it from memory, as a boy who was standing right there.
Joe: I can remember Te Awaiti when there were six whares up the beach towards Jim Norton's house, all built of Raupo, and Toitoi roofs. The Love's used to come down to Te Awaiti and bring their schooners, they had one schooner called the "Charlotte", and they used to pull them up on the beach. All the families would come to Te Awaiti and live in these Raupo house's for the winter.
Six whare of raupo with toitoi on the roof, and the whole coast coming in for the winter.
Joe: I can remember going up that walkway to Norton's house, there was nothing else but whale bones for a fence, right from the beach, and there was a big Raupo covered boat shed.
A fence made of whalebone.
And this, which stopped me cold.
Joe: About halfway up the bench there used to be a whalebone about so high, stuck in the ground there, it was old Paddy Norton's grave (This is Patrick Norton the first, he married Tangitu).
The note in the brackets is the person who typed the tape up, not Joe.
Patrick Norton the first is Kura's great grandfather. He is where our side of that family starts in this country.
So my great grandfather, as a boy, could walk up a beach at Te Awaiti and point at a whalebone stuck in the ground and tell you whose grave it was. Years before he ever met Kura.
He also says the palisades were still there.
Joe: There must have been a maori fortification there as there are still the stumps of the palasades, stumps of trees about 18 inches in diameter and I think if you dug there today you would still find them, just above highwater.
Eighteen inch posts, still in the sand, just above high water. He said that in 1970. They will still be there.
Excuse me, you're just on the wrong track
And then, in the middle of all of it, this happens, and it is my favourite thing he does.
Gil is telling him a story about old man Jackson being a very big man who used to leave the steer oar and run along the gunnel of the boat, eighteen stone of him, when they harpooned a whale.
And Joe stops him.
Joe: Excuse me you're just on the wrong track, Jim Norton was the man that had the steer oar, old man, Jim Jackson was the one that fastened the whale.
Over eighty years old. Being interviewed. Being flattered, really. And he stops the man mid story to put two dead men back in the right seats of a boat.
That is the thing this family does. It is all through those papers, over a hundred years, different people, different documents. Somebody gets to the edge of what they can actually prove and they stop.
They kept it straight when nobody was watching and nobody could check them.
That is the inheritance. The names are the rest of it.
The one he watched from the hill
He was a nipper on the hill for this one and he never forgot it.
Old Jim Norton got swept overboard, the rope running through his legs and out of the chocks. And his boy went in after him.
Joe: Harry Norton he was climbing down the rope while the other boys were pulling in, saying, Dads overboard. He just grabbed an oar and made one jump and he was out with his old man. He shoved a paddle under the old mans arms to hold him up, his old man said, never mind me son, go back look after yourself, he says I'm alright Dad, and brought him back to the boat.
Never mind me son.
I'm alright Dad.
There is a Harry Norton who went to France with Joe and did not come home. I do not know if that is the same Harry Norton, and I am not going to say it is until somebody can show me.
The bottom of the world
In 1912, at twenty three, he went to Campbell Island with the Nortons.
Seven hundred kilometres south of New Zealand, he says. There is nothing under it but ice.
They went for the whalebone and they stayed for the sheep and the seals, and they lived in five huts with a cookhouse, and I want to tell you about the huts because it tells you everything about who these men were.
There was room for four in each. Weatherboard, lined with newspapers and magazines, a window in one end and a corrugated iron fireplace in the other.
One hut was called Look and Laugh. One was called the Dew Drop Inn.
Joe: It was called that because the first crew to sleep it once had unusual hair styles. One of the gang had got to work with the hair clippers.
They had a tame king penguin. One of the Nortons was called Shot. The open whaleboat down there was called the Brothers.
Their entire medical kit was this.
Joe: We had nothing. All we had was a bottle of whisky locked away in the drawer, that was all we had.
Dentistry was this.
Joe: There was a dentist in Dunedin, gave Dick Norton a pair of forceps. Just sit down, open your mouth and grab it, pull it out.
And the pay was this.
Joe: We weren't paid anything at all, we just used to get our share, that's all, no wages or anything. There were 12 of them, they were getting a one-twelfth share each.
And then, straight after:
Joe: Well we reckon we did all right.
Twelve men, no wages, a twelfth each, at the bottom of the world. We did all right.
The rope
When the whales got scarce they went after seal, and they had a licence for it, and the rookeries were at the bottom of cliffs.
One of them needed seventy fathoms of rope to get down.
That is four hundred and twenty feet.
Next time you are in town, find a building about twenty storeys high, stand at the bottom of it and look up, and tell me that is not a fucking mad way to go to work. And then remember they came back up it with wet sealskins on their backs.
The first season they took two thousand four hundred skins.
Joe writes the number down and does not say another word about it.
Hang on Joe
He nearly drowned down there three times.
Joe: Manny yelled out "hang on Joe". I could feel the kelp coming up through my legs and I grabbed it and hung on. There's no beach there, just deep water off the rocks.
And this is what he remembers about it.
Joe: It was quite funny to see me away down in the water, my white bald head, had just had a shave the day before.
Man goes into the Southern Ocean, hangs off the kelp, gets pulled out.
Funniest part of it, apparently, was his haircut.
Jack Norton and the two sticks
One thing happened down there that nobody explains and Joe does not try to.
They had not seen a whale for a month.
Joe: He came bursting into the hut and grabbed two burning sticks out of the fire. He went outside chanting in Maori. He knew a fair bit of Maori. He went down to where the boat was pulled up on the beach and kept waving the sticks chanting all the time. He walked down inside the boat from one end to the other and threw the sticks into the sea.
That is Jack Norton. The man who led the gang down there.
Joe tells it flat, the way he tells everything. He does not say whether it worked and he does not say whether he believed in it.
He just tells you it happened, and that the old fella knew a fair bit of Maori.
The Awaiti Boys
In April 1916 they came home on a ship called the Rachel Cohen, and they walked into a war.
They enlisted together. They called themselves the Awaiti Boys, and they went in the 23rd Reinforcements, and they took a battle cry with them, and it was not a soldier's one.
It was On She Follows. The whalers' cry. The shout out of the boat when the whale runs and you go with it.
They carried that to France.
Joe: In 1917 I travelled with the four Norton brothers from Campbell Island, which is about 700 Kms South of New Zealand, to France, to fight in the war. I am almost certain that nobody travelled further than we did.
That is the only boast in the whole of his book, and he takes it straight off you with the next sentence, which is I suppose I should start at the beginning.
Mack McKay
At Codford camp on Salisbury Plain he wrote this, and it is the warmest thing he ever put down.
Joe: There were two types of men at Codford. Those who were getting ready to go to France, and those who were getting ready to go back to France.
And in the middle of that:
Joe: My best mate at Codford was the fellow in the next bed to me. We all knew him as Mack McKay although I suppose he had another name. He was a Scotsman who came from the Isle of Tiree, which is the most Westerly of the islands in the Inner Hebrides. He had a great sense of humour and we really enjoyed each other's company.
Two island boys in a hut full of strangers on the wrong side of the world, telling each other about their bays. Mack told him about Tiree. Joe told him about Arapawa Island and Campbell Island.
And then Mack invited him home, and they went. Days of changing trains up through Britain to Oban on the west coast of Scotland, and a ferry out to a small island in the Hebrides, because his mate wanted to show him where he was from.
A boy out of the Nelson orphanage, standing on a Scottish island, because somebody wanted him to see home.
Joe: The McKay family were sheep farmers and their house was very basic, you could say primitive, but they made up for it by the friendly way they treated me, and the wonderful farm meals they provided.
Of course. That is exactly the kind of house he would have been at home in.
Joe: They showed me how they plucked wool off the sheep ready for spinning and I showed them how we shear sheep in New Zealand.
A Tory Channel whaler on a Hebridean farm, swapping wool.
Joe: Tiree was flat without any trees or anything that could be called bush. The island is only about 12 miles long and 3 or 4 miles wide, with beautiful sandy beaches and tremendous rolling waves coming in from the Atlantic. It was sunny but the wind was always blowing. I would think in winter it would equal some of the gales we had on Campbell Island.
He got all the way to the Hebrides and measured the wind against Campbell Island.
Mary
And then there is this, and I did not know it was in there until Karen told me it was.
Joe: Mack had a very pretty sister, (Mary), who showed me all round the old ruins and ancient churches, and made sure I had a good time when we went to the dance on Saturday night.
He was twenty eight or twenty nine. It was 1918. He had been at the bottom of the world and then in the mud, and a girl on a Scottish island took him round the old churches and made sure he had a good time at the dance.
And then this is the last line he writes about the whole trip.
Joe: I really enjoyed my stay on Tiree and have often wondered what happened to Mary.
A SMALL FACT
He never found out.
Karen says that when he was about eighty he asked one of his daughters if she could try and find her.
He was still wondering sixty years later.
Harry
Joe: After I had been in the camp a couple of months I got the sad news that Harry Norton had been killed in action in France. Started out so bravely, and had been through so much.
Harry Norton. One of the four brothers he went with. One of the men he had lived alongside in a hut at the bottom of the world.
And a bit later Joe is writing about going
"back in the trenches with my three remaining mates."
Four went with him.
Three.
Lucky
Shrapnel got him on the 8th of August 1917. Nine months in the New Zealand hospital at Walton-on-Thames. By the end of it he was well enough to be helping out on the wards, and this is what he wrote about that.
Joe: I soon realized how lucky I was when I saw the horrible wounds that some of the men had. At least I had two arms and two legs and would be able to work.
Lucky.
A man in a hospital bed counting himself lucky, and measuring it in how much work he had left in him.
And then the one that got me.
Joe: The hardest thing to come to terms with was the fact that I was out of the war and my mates were still fighting in the trenches. Even now I don't much like going to Anzac.
Even now. He said that as an old man, fifty odd years later, into a tape recorder.
Not the horror of it. The guilt of being taken out of it.
If you have ever wondered where the men in our family get that thing where they will not stand still and be thanked, it is in that sentence.
Home April 1919.
South Bay
He went back to whaling, and this is the part I had wrong.
I used to tell it like he washed up in Kaikoura and met a girl on a beach.
He did not. He went to work.
Jimmy Johnston took over the South Bay Whaling Station at Kaikoura in 1917 in partnership with Jackson, Reardon, Nicholls and Roberts, and here is the list of the men who ran that station over the winter, printed in a Kaikoura history that is sitting in Karen's papers.
Mick Starkey, Tom Reardon, Phil Jacobs, Joe Timms, Cecil Pacey and Harry Norton.
Look at that list.
A Starkey. A Reardon. A Norton. A Pacey. And Joe.
Kura's father's people. Her mother's first family. Her mother's own maiden name, Norton. And Cecil Pacey, whose daughter Joe and Kura would one day raise.
All on one payroll, in one bay.
He did not stumble into that family. He worked alongside them for years.
And in Karen's papers there is a photograph of South Bay with the crayfish holding pots out on the beach, and the woman standing at the right of it is named in the caption. Kate Reardon.
Kate Reardon is Kura's mother.
Her name was Kura Florence May Starkey. She is my great grandmother. Karen gave me her maiden name herself.
They married in 1925.
And here is how Joe tells you about the biggest thing that ever happened to him.
Joe: I went to South Bay in Kaikoura and continued whaling, shearing and fishing, and married my wife Kura, and settled down to raise a family. But that is another story.
In the same breath as the shearing. And then he changes the subject.
The house
Kura already had two children when he met her. Zena and Harry. They were Starkeys.
He took the pair of them on and raised them as his own.
Fourteen children came out of that house, and my mother can still name them in order, which she will do, at speed, if you give her half a chance.
Harry in 1925, and yes, that is the same year Joe and Kura married. He is Kura's, not Joe's. I am leaving that sitting exactly where it is, because that is what the record says and I am not tidying up my great grandmother to make a neater sentence.
And there is a Harvey further down, born 1929, and he is Joe's own. Harry and Harvey are two different men. Karen had to say that to me twice. My Grandma Doreen, the eldest of Joe's own, in 1926. Gerald in 1927. Harvey in 1929. Pat in 1932. Jinny in 1933. Ivy Maria in 1935, who everybody called Iggy her whole life. Garry in 1936. Rhona in 1938. June in 1939. Nita, the baby, in 1940.
Then in September 1943, Kura's sister Martha died and left nine children, and the whanau did what this coast has always done. They shared them out. It is written down in the Pacey family's own book.
"After Martha died in September 1943, the family split up. Mona was married and took Bob and Jim. Elsie took Kay and Helen went to live with Aunty Kura and Uncle Joe. Bill and Rewi stayed with their father. Ernie was in army..."
Nine kids, parcelled out around the family in one go, in the middle of a war.
Joe and Kura took Helen.
She went through her whole life a Timms and she is on my club's wall now with the rest of them.
Fifteen, counting Helen.
And then a grown man asked him for his name
Years later Harry was a grown man. Old enough to know exactly what Joe had done for him and exactly what Joe had never once been obliged to do.
And the only way he could find to say it was to go to my great grandad and ask him, straight out, if he could have the name.
Joe said yes.
A SMALL FACT
A minister once took a small boy out of an orphanage and gave him to a blind man to be company for him.
And the boy grew up and spent fifty years handing that back out.
Zena. Harry. Helen.
They came and found him
He did not write the book.
I need to say that, because I have said the opposite in the past and I was wrong.
A man called Ian Kerr wrote the history of Campbell Island and had it published in 1976. Done. Finished. The island's story, between covers.
And then, shortly after it came out, a ranger called Norman Judd, who had been down there on the Lands and Survey expedition of 1975 and 1976, told him something.
"…one of the Te Awaiti whalers who had worked at Campbell Island more than 60 years earlier was still living at Picton. This is Joe Timms."
A man had just written the whole history of that island, and then found out one of the men who lived it was sitting in a house up the road.
So they went and found him.
"Taking advantage of Joe Timms' excellent memory, Norman and Ian collaborated to produce a tape recording of Joe's reminiscences."
They put a microphone in front of an old man and he remembered the lot. And then they printed a title page.
MARLBOROUGH WHALERS at CAMPBELL ISLAND 1909 to 1916 A narrative, Based on the Recollections of J. TIMMS
His name sitting on its own in the middle of the page.
I do not think he would have made anything of that either.
And there is a book about New Zealand's whaling stations that calls him the last man in New Zealand to go whaling in a row boat.
That same page says he came from Austria, which is rubbish, he was born in Nelson. So even the printed ones get it wrong. But the row boat line is right, and it is the one that matters.
Joe Timms
Born the twenty first of June, 1889, in Nelson. Died in 1978, eighty nine years old. Buried in Picton Cemetery beside Kura.
He never retired properly. At seventy two he reckoned he was too young for it and took a job at the Picton Freezing Works.
First name on the honours board at my rugby club. Above every Huntley. Above my uncles. Above all of it. A hundred and forty years and he is still at the top of it.
He is the orphan the sea kept trying to drown and never once managed it.
I came off a ferry a few years ago with nothing myself. No money, no teeth, nothing to my name. I thought a man with nothing is nothing.
And the first name on my club's wall is a boy who was sent up a set of stairs in the dark to be a blind man's eyes.
Karen says he was a humble man. She says when you read him you can tell he was happy and that he felt like he was part of a family, and she is right, and she would know.
He never once uses the word himself. His words are lucky, and enjoyed, and glad, and they turn up all the way through.
Old man Godfrey did it with his eyesight.
He did the rest of it with his hands.
Yes. That's the way we used to work it.
Timms.
In loving memory of my Grandma.
Doreen Langtry Huntley, the eldest of Joe's own.
She died on the twenty fifth of August, and that is tomorrow.
Everything in this came down through her. To my mother. And then to us.
For my grandmother, for my mother, and for my family.
May we always remember where we came from.
Tēpane
Steven Philips
Where this comes from. Everything Joe says here is quoted, not paraphrased. The Whekenui material, Charlie Godfrey, the lights, Te Awaiti, Paddy Norton's grave and the boats are from a transcript in my mother's papers headed "GIL PERANO & JOSEPH TIMMS, taped 1970", pages 168 to 170. Campbell Island, the army, Mack McKay and Tiree are from "Marlborough Whalers at Campbell Island 1909 to 1916, a narrative based on the recollections of J. Timms, edited by I.S. Kerr and N. Judd", published by the Department of Lands and Survey and made from a tape recording of him, and from the raw question and answer transcript of that tape, also in Karen's papers. The South Bay station crew list is from a Kaikoura whaling history in the same papers. The Pacey passage is quoted from the Pacey family's own book. The names and years of the children are my mother's, and so is most of the rest of this. My uncle Bosun Huntley gave a lot of it under oath at a hearing in Blenheim on the fourth of October 2012, and the words "the last of the oarsmen" are his.
On the spelling of Harry. My mother says it H A R R I. I have gone with the ordinary Harry for now, because that is how the family says it out loud, and if she wants it the other way it gets changed.
Three things I will not tidy up quietly. One family book gives Joe's birth year as 1891 where the birth register says 1889, and I have gone with 1889. Another says Joe and Kura raised twelve children where my mother counts fourteen, and fifteen with Helen, and I have gone with my mother. And on the lights, the typed page reads "Peal on your side dada" the first time and "peak on my side dada" the second. I have put peak both times, because that is the top of a wick, but the page says what it says.
If anybody knows anything about the Godfreys at Whekenui, or Charlie Godfrey and that light, or has a photograph of the "Swiftsure" or the "Brothers", I would like to hear from you.
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