Peace Researcher 34 – July 2007
Stan Hemsley, who died in
Campaigned For A
Nuclear Free, Bases Free NZ
He was an ABC member from 1991 until his
membership lapsed when he had to go into care (he developed dementia) in the
early years of this century. The protests at the Waihopai spybase have now been
running since 1988 – in the first decade of that campaign, Stan took part in
four Waihopai protests, the last one when he was pushing 80. Nor did he make
any concessions to his age – he drove or got driven up like the rest of us and
camped out in tents, or cars, on the banks of the
Before he got involved with ABC (and
simultaneous with it), Stan was a veteran campaigner for a nuclear-free
He Fought Foreign
Takeover & Privatisation
Stan was a man of many hats. As well as being a
tireless worker for a nuclear free, bases free NZ, he was also a campaigner for
a New Zealand free from the domination by transnational corporations. To that
end he was a very active member of the Campaign Against Foreign Control of
Aotearoa (CAFCA) from 1990 until he went into care early this century. He could
be counted on to turn up and help whatever the occasion, whenever something
needed doing – he was a regular at all CAFCA activities from public meetings to
our Annual General Meeting to any march or picket. In the 1990s CAFCA was
instrumental in coordinating the Campaign For People’s Sovereignty, a coalition
fighting privatisation and foreign control at the grassroots, local body level.
CPS campaigned for several years to try and keep Southpower, Christchurch’s
former power company, in public and local body ownership. We were up against
the high tide of the 1990-99 National government’s mania for flogging off power
companies, which culminated in Max Bradford’s laughable “reforms” (we’re still
living with the consequences of them). Southpower was duly flogged off to
Canadian transnational TransAlta (it won the 1999 Roger Award for the Worst
Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and quit the NZ
retail electricity sector, leaving an even bigger mess. The main power company
now supplying Christchurch is State-owned but local government no longer has
any role in retail electricity supply). Pickets at Southpower and the City
Council were a common occurrence, as was our attendance at Southpower’s annual
meeting. Stan was always to the fore and he contributed his beautifully painted
banners, such as one reading “Keep Power Public”. There was a wonderful
consistency to Stan’s banners – I have photos that he gave me of several of
them, spanning the 80s and 90s. There’s him and me holding a “Freedom From
Smelter” one at Otago Harbour, in 1981; him holding a “Freedom From Muldoonism”
one in Cathedral Square (presumably during the 1975-84 period of Piggy’s rule)
and one of him at Lyttelton holding a “Freedom From N. War” banner.
During the 90s, CAFCA was also instrumental in
setting up the Society for Publicly Owned Telecommunications (SPOT) which
focused on Telecom. Stan was a regular at the pickets and activities outside
Telecom’s Christchurch building and he was particularly good at collecting
signatures for the SPOT petition calling for Telecom to be renationalised. There
were other battles, such as that protesting Westpac’s takeover of the former
TrustBank and the City Council contracting out Christchurch’s rubbish
collection service to Onyx, a French transnational. Throughout this whole
period there was the relentless march of corporatisation, privatisation and
putting things on a “business footing” throughout the local government sector.
Stan was in the thick of those battles as they affected his lifelong home,
Lyttelton and the former Banks Peninsula District Council (since absorbed into
the Christchurch City Council). I know that, if he’d been a younger man and had
all his faculties, Stan would have loved to have been involved with CAFCA’s
successful 2006 campaign (via the Keep Our Port Public coalition) to stop the City
Council flogging off the Lyttelton Port Company to Hutchison Port Holdings of
Hong Kong. He would have relished that victory, after setbacks in so many other
similar battles.
As it is, he did more than his share for
Lyttelton. Fellow Lytteltonian Tom Hay, who had been a close friend and
colleague of Stan’s since they first met in 1943, said in his eulogy: “…he was
solely responsible for ensuring that the present Lyttelton Library has a secure
home in the not so-old Lyttelton Post Office. He trekked many miles around
Lyttelton to get the requisite number of signatories to achieve this”. He also
played a big practical role at Lyttelton’s Museum.
Throughout the 90s Stan was a generous and
regular donor to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account which provides my income. I
well remember his last donation – he was over 80 and forbidden to drive on
medical grounds (he’d had a series of mini-strokes which played no small part
in his subsequent memory loss and eventual institutionalisation). So he caught
the bus from Lyttelton and walked a long way to our place in order to give me
the money, in cash. When he set out to do something, he was bloody determined
to see it done. And Stan was an internationalist as well. He was a member of
the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa for nearly as long as his
membership of ABC and CAFCA, and always attended any public meetings or
activities that PSNA held in Christchurch.
Legendary Grassroots
Environmentalist
Long before I first met Stan I’d heard of him
as a legendary grassroots environmental campaigner. For decades he was a
stalwart of the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society (his family asked for
those attending his funeral to donate to it). He was active from the birth of
the modern environmental movement in this country, from the mighty Save
Manapouri Campaign in the early 1970s. Stan travelled as far north as Auckland
helping to gather some of the more than 260,000 signatures for that petition
(to save Fiordland’s Lake Manapouri being ruined by a dam to generate electricity
for the exclusive use of Comalco’s Bluff aluminium smelter. The campaign was
successful and the Manapouri power station was built underground. The Bluff
smelter is still there, the biggest power consumer in the country, using 16% of
NZ’s electricity 24/7).
He was particularly famous for his signature
gathering skills for the Maruia Declaration (nearly 350,000 signatures when
presented in 1977, the largest petition up until that time and still one of the
biggest) to stop the logging of native beech forests on the West Coast. He was
actively involved with the former Native Forests Action Council and Friends of
the Earth and spent much time campaigning on the West Coast (never a welcoming
part of the country for “greenies”).
Speakers at his funeral paid tribute to the time and effort that he put
into native tree replanting schemes, both in Canterbury and on the other side
of the Alps. To quote Tom Hay’s eulogy again: “In our wider issues he played a
sterling part in our several native forest preservation struggles. These
included campaigns to save Waipoua and Warawara kauri forests, Manapouri, the
Heaphy Track and in opposing the (former) Forest Service’s Beech Scheme as well
as podocarp logging, especially in South Westland”.
Stan was an immensely practical man, with a
love of the bush and tramping (he walked the Milford Track in his 60s), and was
perfectly happy to make a constructive contribution to the reforesting of
Aotearoa, not just campaign in the cities about it. He was such a staunch
environmentalist that he forbade the use of any native timber in his coffin and
asked his two sons to make him a plain pine one (which they did, although they
didn’t obey the old seadog’s wish to put in a couple of portholes “so that I
can keep an eye out”).
CAFCINZ (as we then were) was born out of a
cross-pollination of environmental and economic concerns. Our founding action
was the 1975 South Island Resistance Ride, which included both Lake Manapouri
and West Coast beech forests among the places we visited in our fortnight long
trip around the island in two buses. I first met Stan on one of the later
campaigns which was a fusion of environment and economics, namely the Save
Aramoana Campaign (we did too, it was brilliantly successful, no transnational
aluminium smelter was ever built on that beautiful spit at the entrance to
Otago Harbour). In 1981 a group of us (including Rod Donald) travelled to
Dunedin and Otago Harbour for a weekend of activities as part of that campaign.
I have abiding memories of the fact that it started to snow as we waited to be
welcomed onto the Otakou Marae (where the non-stop supply of kai was very
welcome) and of travelling some of the way, very uncomfortably, in the back of
Stan’s little old van, while he regaled us with colourful stories from his
working life on land and sea.
Betrayed By Labour
Unlike a lot of environmental and peace
activists, Stan had a solid background in class politics, and it was lifelong –
he even died on May Day. Unlike a lot of those who do have that background, his
came from authentic working class experience and grinding poverty, not out of
books. Stan was an instinctive man of the Left – “I’m a socialist at heart. I
believe all land should be under State control and we pay $25 per year for a
piece of dirt” (Press, ibid.) - but only as Left as the Labour Party. For
decades he was a loyal and very active grassroots activist for Labour in
Lyttelton and Christchurch. For this, he courted flak from his fellow activists
who did not (and do not) share his rosy view of Labour. His view was that to
get anything done you needed to get a party into government and that Labour was
the only party which would represent the working class. His loyalty, and that
of tens of thousands like him throughout the country, was bitterly “rewarded”
by the unforgivable Rogernomics betrayal of the 1984-90 Labour government, a
legacy which has only been stopped in some of its most extreme manifestations
by the present Labour government and certainly not rolled back. All that the
Clark/Cullen government has renounced is that Rogernomics turned out to be very
bad electorally for Labour, not Rogernomics itself. Throughout that turbulent
period (whose effects are still very much with us) Stan had no hesitation in
letting the Party leadership know of his views of their actions, including at
the highest level. Trevor, his eldest son, told his funeral that Stan once quit
writing to the Government in disgust and after some time a letter arrived from
the Prime Minister, David Lange, asking after him and saying that he hadn’t
heard from Stan for a while.
Two things finished Labour as far as Stan was
concerned – Rogernomics was one and the other was that same 1984-90 Government
signing up with Australia to the Anzac Frigates deal, a deal which he
campaigned very hard against, both inside and outside the party. He saw this as
a major step backwards from Labour’s brave move in making NZ nuclear free, as
was Lange’s gifting the Waihopai spybase for the benefit of the US war machine.
Although he became bitterly disillusioned with Labour, he simply let his
membership lapse and did not join the exodus that followed Jim Anderton to,
firstly, New Labour and then the Alliance. And, despite his decades of
environmental activism, he remained a green but never became a Green. He didn’t
join another party after Labour – once bitten, twice shy, perhaps. I don’t know
whether he continued to vote Labour, swapped allegiance or gave up the ghost.
No Labour Ministers, MPs or local leadership figures were to be seen at his
funeral, which tells it all, doesn’t it.
Racism
But there was one contemporary issue on which
Stan was completely out of step with his colleagues in the progressive
movement, and he was extremely vocal about it, in private and public, at every
opportunity. He always prefaced his diatribe by saying: ”I’m not a racist,
Murray but…” and he’d be away about “the Maoris”. Sorry, Stan, but you were a
racist, and that’s the blunt truth of the matter. It wasn’t just “Maori
radicals” but Maori capitalists as well that he was disgruntled about. Like a
lot of other South Island whites he wasn’t happy about the 1980s and 90s’ Ngai
Tahu settlement process, saying things like “that Stephen O’Regan (he would
never call him Tipene, let alone Sir Tipene) is no more a Maori than I am”,
etc, etc. Nor did he confine himself to simply moaning about it, he got
involved in the whole “pakeha backlash”, anti-Treaty of Waitangi movement that
was particularly strong in Christchurch in the late 90s. To quote that 1997
Press profile: ”Last month he attended a meeting which protested about the
Treaty of Waitangi and the way Maoris were ‘getting their way’” (10/2/97;
“Tireless voice in name of protest”, David Gee). I (and others present) was frankly
astonished to hear at his funeral how he had become good friends with Chatham
Islands Maori during his more than 70 trips there as a young seaman, so much so
that he was proud to say that he was regarded by the locals as an honorary
rangatira. Obviously something had happened in the intervening years to
drastically change his attitude towards Maori. Mind you, it wasn’t only about
Maori that Stan expressed politically incorrect opinions but also about the
death penalty (he was in favour of it) and of the need for prisoners to be put
to work.
Actually I think that his Maori bashing was a
generational thing. Stan was born the same year as my Dear Old Dad and, despite
backing opposing political parties for most of their respective lives, they
would have been in total agreement about Maori had they ever met in their old
age (in the case of my late father, he explicitly expressed the view that “we”
[pakeha] had won the “Maori Wars”, so this country was “ours” by right of
conquest, and those bloody Maoris better not forget it. But my old man, being a
recluse, never attended a public meeting or got involved in a campaign in his
life. He was happy to moan about it in the privacy of his own home, justifying
himself to me, and my Asian wife, by saying: “Everybody’s a racist”). I
certainly don’t condone or excuse Stan’s vocal racism, but it needs to be seen
in the totality of his life as a highly valued and very active member of many
progressive organisations. Fortunately, it was not what defined him, it was
just one side of his personality that was out of step with the rest, and with
his colleagues in the movement. It reminds me of the eulogies for Owen Wilkes
at his 2005 Hamilton funeral which talked about how Owen had vocally railed
against “political correctness” in his last years. When I last saw Owen, three
years before his suicide, he gave me an earful about “the Maoris” (Tainui, in
his case). There must be something about
older, I’d better watch myself (if I start
railing about “Asians” there will definitely be domestic strife).
From Extreme Poverty
To A Life At Sea
Stanley Horace Hemsley was born in Lyttelton in
1918, the ninth of ten children (he was born just days after the end of WW1 and
his middle name was in honour of an uncle killed in that war. By a coincidence
my father’s middle name was of identical origin. Obviously 1918 was a bumper
year for war victim uncles after whom to name baby boys born that year). Stan’s
father was a London orphan who was put on a sailing ship in his youth and
jumped ship in Timaru, walked to Christchurch and ended up marrying Stan’s
half-French mother. Hemsley senior worked on the Lyttelton wharves when he
could get work. The family was very poor and Stan was more often barefoot than not.
“We were very poor but we had plenty of love. It was the same for many
families. I found out about poverty early. Once I was walking through a puddle
near the police station with a school mate when he said I would get my
underpants wet. I asked what they were, and he pulled his trousers down and the
inside of his trousers had a shiny material. My mother made our trousers
without a fly, but just a dicky hole. I went home and told mother about the
underpants. I can still see her bursting out crying. We were too poor for
luxuries like that. They were terrible days” (Press, ibid.). I must say that
many’s the time I heard Stan tell of that “dicky hole”.
Stan left school at 14 and couldn’t find work,
so he went to work on fishing boats for no pay (he got paid in fish, which he
gave to his hungry family in the depths of the 1930s’ Depression). He was still
barefoot but the crew found him some sea boots. He worked for no pay for two
years and then started getting a pittance. At 18 he went to sea on the ship which
serviced the Chatham Islands from Lyttelton, eventually making more than 70
trips there, bringing home food (such as pigs) for his family and neighbours.
“I bought mother a washing machine, and the neighbours used to come in to see,
as there were few around in those days” (Press, ibid.). He spent WW2 in the merchant navy, marrying
Lilian Lloyd in 1944 and coming ashore six months before the war’s end. I never
knew Stan as a young man, or even a middle aged one (he was a very vigorous 60
something when we first met) so it was fascinating, at his funeral, to see a
whole series of photos of him as a strapping young fishermen and seaman. He was
to tell me that he was to later pay the price, in the form of skin cancer, for
all those years at sea wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, with no thought of
a hat. And the sea was no place for a sook, it’s a rough, tough environment (I
know, having both witnessed Lyttelton seamen dish it out to our opponents and
having been on the receiving end of the same rough justice due to a
“misunderstanding” during our “student/worker alliance” at the start of my
career as a political activist, in 1969). Stan could look after himself. On
that 1981 Save Aramoana Campaign trip to Dunedin, where we first met, he
horrified my then partner by regaling his passengers with a sea story about he
had ended one youthful fight by biting his opponent’s ear and hanging on like a
pig dog until the other bloke gave in (if Stan did that these days he’d have to
be muzzled and fenced in).
Once ashore he had a whole range of jobs –
boilermaker, stevedore, watersider, and a welder at
He was a most unusual member of the working
class of his generation, he neither smoked nor drank and was the only old
seaman I’ve known not to be tattooed. He was a greenie decades before that came
to be considered as anything other than crackpot. He never owned a car or bike
throughout his working life, walking everywhere. He didn’t learn to drive or
buy a vehicle (his van) until he had retired, and Stan and his van then became
a fixture at activities and protests all around the South Island. He made up
for lost time by packing in some driving adventures, once putting his van into
a West Coast ditch on a native forest trip.
When retired, he devoted the last 20+ years of his life to fulltime
activism.
Stan was a very regular writer of very good,
succinct letters to newspapers, on a whole range of issues. He didn’t confine
himself to editors: he also wrote to politicians, Prince Charles and the Queen.
He had very strong opinions – that 1997 Press profile quotes him as calling
politicians “a shower of bastards…a pack of drongos… rogues and liars… (who)
piss all over us because no-one cares”.
They Broke The Mould
With Stan
I never knew Stan personally, and never went to
his Lyttelton home (although he came to mine plenty of times, for meetings). He
kept his family life separate from his activist one, so much so that his eldest
son, Trevor, commented in his eulogy on the large number of people present not
known to the family. I never set eyes on any of his four kids or numerous
grandkids until his funeral and the only time I’d previously met his wife was
when she accompanied Stan when he called in to an early 90s’ picket outside the
City Council building. He explained that it was her birthday and that he was
taking her out. Trevor was quoted in the Press obituary (12/5/07) “Battler for
peace and environment”, Mike Crean): “His whole life centred around family. He
was deeply involved with family. He spent a lot of time with us kids, building
kites and flying them, fishing, building yachts. He spent a lot of time helping
other people. He was very generous”.
Stan was one of life’s great characters, warts
and all, a person in which the good vastly outranked the bad. He was an
indispensable part of many, many progressive movements (including ABC and
CAFCA) for decades. It’s a cliché but they broke the mould when they made Stan.
He will be sorely missed by all of us.
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