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Issue Number 24, August 2004
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Kapatiran Issue
No. 24, August 2004
OBITUARY
YANN FLEMING
- Murray Horton
Yann Fleming was a PSNA
member but it was only several months after the event,
courtesy of a third party, that we discovered that he had
died. As is the case with too many of our members, we
knew nothing about him. I am indebted to his daughter,
Monique, for filling us in on her father's life. She sent
us the programme for his August 2003 funeral, which
included a biographical article on him that was published
in Rangiora's Northern Outlook newspaper, early
in 2002.
Yann was born in Paris, on Christmas Day 1920, to a
French mother and an English father (his daughter thinks
that Yann is the French version of Ian). He spent his
formative years in France and then the family moved back
to England (he was bilingual and the French connection
was strengthened by his son marrying a Frenchwoman). His
father was a Major-General in the British Army, so the
family moved a lot. He had a privileged childhood and a
"public" (i.e. private) school education. His
secondary schooling was at an institution run by
Benedictine monks.
Like the vast majority of men of his generation, his life
was brutally interrupted by World War 2. In 1940 he
joined the infantry in the British Army, being posted
first to North Africa and then Sicily and Italy, where he
spent four years doing clerical work. "Like many
others I was bomb happy or suffered anxiety neuroses, to
be more precise". The British Army was then even
more class-ridden than it is now, so Yann was offered a
commission as an officer, because of his father's rank
and his own private school education. He rejected the
commission, preferring to remain a private. This so
disappointed his father that they became alienated and
went their separate ways.
After the war, Yann worked on a dairy farm. In 1952 he
joined the great Pommy assisted migration to New Zealand,
having been promised a job on a Taranaki dairy farm by
the Government. However, as soon as his ship arrived in
Wellington, he was sent in the opposite direction, to
Oamaru, and ended up working on a sheep farm in the
Waitaki Valley. After four years there, he moved down the
valley to Hakataramea. In 1962, he married Clare
Pavletich, at Station Peak, near Kurow. They had three
children - Paul, Monique and Ann-Marie.
In 1970 the family moved to North Canterbury, buying a
pig farm at Sefton. Only a few years later Clare died of
cancer and Yann had to singlehandedly bring up his three
kids. The farm struggled financially and he had to find
other work, spending four years at North Canterbury
Transport, debarking logs. He paid a price for that job,
believing that the constant dust affected his health.
Chest pains led to a diagnosis of lung cancer, followed
by surgery. In the late 1980s, he retired to Rangiora,
where he lived until his death, aged 82.
It was during his retirement, after a life of decades of
hard labour on farms in both Britain and New Zealand that
he was able to fully develop his interest in, and support
for, a number of progressive organisations (including
PSNA, Corso and the Campaign Against Foreign Control of
Aotearoa). His two great passions were dogs and reading.
The former were an integral part of his family (having
their own designated areas in the living room) and he was
extremely generous in his financial support for training
guide dogs for the blind. So generous in fact that he was
accorded the privilege of having a guide dog named after
him.
PSNA extends our condolences to his family.
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