Clive (or Cliff) Mundy was a founder member of CAFCINZ. One of our very first campaigns was against the proposed export, to Japan, of the West Coast’s Mt Davy coal. This was an obsession of Clive’s. He was instrumental in getting CAFCINZ to organise a picket of the then Trades Hall with the aim "to gently nudge Trades Council off the fence and take a stand on the Mt Davy issue" (CAFCINZ [ChCh] Newsletter, August 1975 – this was the forerunner of Watchdog). Gently nudging was definitely not Clive’s style. I worked with him, and Paul Corliss, in the Railways, although never in the same job. Later in the 1970s Clive and I were involved in calling a stopwork of the Canterbury branch of the then National Union of Railwaymen to try and stop the export, by rail to Lyttelton, of Buller coal to Japan. It was a very short meeting and we got rolled. I learnt a valuable lesson in realpolitik that day, which is that the issue of jobs has to be addressed if you want to win over trade unions and workers. Eventually CAFCINZ (which became CAFCA) moved on from the issue of West Coast coal exports – which continue unabated to this day – and Clive never missed an opportunity to berate me, at work or in the street as a "traitor and sellout". Oh dear, that was Clive and I never took it personally. He ceased to be a member in the 1980s.

Railwaymen were a special breed and track work was, and is, hard and dangerous (I briefly worked as a British Rail surfie, or navvy as the Poms call them, when in London on my Big OE, in the 70s. I suggest you see "The Navigators", the excellent current UK film by Ken Loach, about the fatal and unforgiving nature of railway track maintenance work). Clive fitted right into that world, one that has now gone, when NZ Railways employed over 20,000 workers and was a mini-State in its own right. He was a racist old bastard too, which always made for a lively time in such a multiracial workplace. But, forgive the cliché, he had a heart of gold (although I definitely wouldn’t have wanted the shirt off his back if he’d offered it. I endorse Paul’s observations about his personal hygiene). I lost track of him after he retired and only found out that he’d died, earlier in 2002, months after the event. He was one of the characters that make the memories of my 14 years as a railway worker so vivid. Murray Horton.

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In the time I knew Clive, he was a Christchurch based railway surfaceman (surfie) from the mid 1970s to the late 1980s. Surfacemen generally, then and now, had probably the most physically demanding role in maintaining railway tracks and the infrastructure. They were also, then and now, at the lower end of the wages’ pecking order. Clive was regarded as a ‘toiler’ even by surfie standards. A tall rawboned bachelor bloke of the old school, who not only got his hands dirty but seemed to keep them that way 24 hours a day. Always one to find a quicker way of doing anything, it was not unusual to spot Clive’s brushed cotton pyjama legs protruding from the bottom of his overalls as he shovelled ballast on the job.

He was equally renowned for his thriftiness, he had very early memories of the Depression and had long made a commitment not to be caught out financially. Stories abounded of Clive propping himself up against a roadside window at home with the paper spread, reading it by the free light provided from the street lamp directly in front of his house. He could make a shoulder of lamb last for a week and would always be pleased to scrape the last of any worksite hangi into a bag for dinner (and breakfast). If he wasn’t working on the track on the weekends, it was a common sight around Waltham to see Clive and his old 28 inch wheeled bike, balancing enormous loads of timber, galvanised iron and any potentially handy piece of scrap he could salvage from demolition sites, not unusually before the site had even been made available. His lawn at home reflected his acquisitive habits and he picked up the nickname Steptoe (from the 1960s British TV series "Steptoe And Son", about a father and son firm of rag and bone merchants. Ed.).

Clive also played a leading role in the nationwide campaign to seek permanency for what were then known as "winter employees" or TEPs (Temporary Employment Project workers). Railways used to honour their social obligation and provide employment (ostensibly temporary in nature) for unemployed. Most of these were used on track maintenance work and as the months went by were often used in place of hiring full time workers and could literally be temporary for several years. The campaign was generally successful but I remember one incident that occurred not long after the treacherous "Save Rail" campaign of Richard Prebble* in the early 1980s. A group of track workers had heard that Prebble was due to launch new shunting engines manufactured at Addington Workshops** and we decided that it was very appropriate to picket and protest. The entire show was recorded by TV and newspapers and Clive led the trackworkers with placards to occupy the entire front row of the invited guests’ seating. When Prebble, clearly furious at the hijacking of his well-planned public relations exercise, attacked Clive for not being grateful for the security of employment he was introducing (railworker numbers would shortly plummet from 23,000 to 6,000) Clive produced for the cameras a fellow trackworker who had been denied permanency because he was a Pacific Islander who couldn’t pass an English exam - he had been a ‘temporary worker’ for 14 years! Prebble’s sails collapsed spectacularly. * Prebble was Minister of Railways in the 1984-90 Labour government. Following his actions, there has never been any need for that portfolio to exist anymore. He is now ACT Leader. ** As a direct result of the policies of Prebble and co, the Addington Workshops no longer exist. Ed.

CAFCA expresses our condolences to Betty Baird and her daughters, Sharleen, Lynn, Sandy and Julie, for the death of her husband, and their father, Ken Baird. Ken died of cancer, aged 72, in September 2002, in Auckland. His cancer was painful and he died much quicker than had been predicted. Over the years, various members of the Baird family, including Ken and Betty, have been members of CAFCA and they were both very pleased to be present at our 25^th anniversary celebration, in 2000.

Ken was a fair dinkum Kiwi bloke, who worked for years in the brewery at Otahuhu and, it has to be said, had a fondness for the end product. In short he enjoyed life, he enjoyed his family, and he made the most of his retirement, travelling overseas, touring New Zealand in their campervan, or going fishing from their second home on Waiheke Island. During the three decades I’ve known the family, I ran into Ken and Betty all over the place – in Christchurch, at their Papatoetoe and Waiheke homes, and in Sydney (three of their four daughters have lived there for long periods; one still does). I have vivid memories of one particular Sydney occasion in the 1980s, when their family got together with that of my then partner (the Bairds and the Birds). They got on like a house on fire. Both were matriarchies and the men were forced to trudge around, bringing up the rear, while the women emptied the Cronulla shops. Ken and I ended up squatting in shop doorways, sitting on a chilly bin of beer that we lugged everywhere with us and steadily consuming its contents (nobody batted an eyelid, this was Australia). We all had a great day, with a boat trip across to the beautiful beach at Bundeena and more than 20 of us had an uproarious night out in one of the monstrous clubs of the Ocker suburbs, where Warren Mitchell did his Alf Garnett act and brought the Aussies to their feet every time he told New Zealand jokes (the bastard – they were funny though). They were game for anything – we all spent one boisterous New Year’s Eve at a Darlinghurst gay bar in central Sydney.