Cath Kelly, who died in Wellington in March 2017, aged 91, was a CAFCA member continuously from 1980 (when we were CAFCINZ) until her death. She invariably included a donation with her annual sub. And, from 1991, she was a founder pledger to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income. She was a pledger right up until, indeed a bit beyond, her death. Because she was a lifelong Wellingtonian, I only ever met her on a handful of occasions, such as when she visited family in Christchurch. The last time I saw her was at the 60th birthday party of her nephew Bill Rosenberg at his Wellington home (and that remains the only time I ever met her daughter, the late Helen Kelly) in 2011, that unforgettable year for us Cantabrians.

A couple of years later I tried to visit her in her retirement home (which had been Athletic Park in my Wellington childhood) but the reason it didn’t happen illustrates the very active nature of her “retirement” – she regretted that she was too busy to see me, because she had to go into town to attend a book launch (the book in question being Mark Derby’s “White Collar Radical”, the biography of veteran Public Service Association national leader, Dan Long. Jeremy Agar reviewed it in Watchdog 141, April 2016, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/41/12.html).

I had dealings with Cath not only in my CAFCA capacity but also as a long-time member of the former Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos Support Network (VICALSN). I thank Cath, on behalf of CAFCA, for her nearly four decades of continuous membership. And I thank her, on my own behalf, for her nearly three decades of continuous financial support of the Organiser Account. Without her and people like her, I could not do this job.

I have known the whanau, one of NZ’s leading progressive families, for nearly half a century. One of Cath’s sisters was Ann Rosenberg (my obituary of her is in Watchdog 116, December 2007, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/16/09.htm). Ann was married to Wolfgang Rosenberg, the first family member that I met (my obituary of Wolf is in Watchdog 114, May 2007, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/14/04.htm).

One of their three children is my good friend and colleague, Bill Rosenberg, a CAFCA founder and Committee member for 40+ years. Bill’s obituary of Helen Kelly, his cousin, Cath’s daughter, and his Council of Trade Unions’ colleague, is in Watchdog 144, May 2017, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/44/11.html. Cath Kelly’s obituary, below, is reproduced, with permission, from the Labour History Project Bulletin, 69, April 2017.

Catherine Vera Kelly

(10 March 1926 - 13 March 2017) Hazel Armstrong and Marie Russell (with thanks to Bill Rosenberg, Max Kelly, Gerald Sutton and Anne Goodman)

“You have to keep going. You don’t win anything without a struggle. And even when you do win it, it tends to disappear unless you keep on putting in the effort”. - Cath Kelly

Cath had three older sisters, Ann, Max and Margaret. Their mother was Vera Chapman and their father Siegfried Eichelbaum. She was raised in Thorndon in a house opposite the site of the current US Embassy in Fitzherbert Terrace. Sir Thomas Eichelbaum, who is a retired Chief Justice of New Zealand, was a cousin of her father’s, who escaped with his family from Europe in 1938. He remembers as a young boy meeting his lively cousins for the first time and especially his mischievous older cousin, Cath. Without the support of Siegfried and his family, Sir Thomas may not have survived.

Communism

Cath went on her OE in her early 20s. As a young Communist in London immediately after World War II, she had a ball. She was a great fan of the singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson and attended several Robeson concerts. On one particular day she followed him to different venues across London, racing from one hall to the next to hear him.

In the former Yugoslavia, following Tito’s split from Stalin in 1948, the call went out from Tito about a project called “Brotherhood and Unity” to build a motorway from Zagreb to Belgrade. Tito called on young people in Yugoslavia and around the world to form international brigades to work on the motorway. Cath joined up from London and spent a month with a brigade.

The daily routine was gymnastics in the morning, working on the road all day, and after work, attending lectures on Marxist-Leninist thought. As they worked, the workers sang: “Pick and spade, pick and spade, we are Tito’s Youth Brigade”. Cath’s commitment to internationalism and working people continued throughout her life. Cath’s son Max, speaking at her funeral, said:

“Cath Kelly has variously been described as formidable, as a fighter, as an activist, as a hero to her beloved Vietnam and by the Truth* newspaper (that now thankfully vanished paragon of critical news) as the Red Siren… a scandalous harlot here to infiltrate New Zealand with her Communist wiles. Mum was all of this… bar being a scandalous harlot; in fact she was many different things, to many different people”. *See Jeremy Agar’s review of “Truth: The Rise And Fall of The People’s Paper”, by Redmer Yska, in Watchdog 126, May 2011, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/26/10.htm. Ed.

Equal Pay Campaign

In 1952 when Cath joined the public service as a typist in the Department of Maori Affairs, she became interested in equal pay. When a committee was set up in 1955 to campaign for equal pay she was already chairing the Women’s Committee of the Public Service Association (PSA) Wellington section and was elected to the campaign committee. As Cath explained to Anne Goodman during an interview:

“Equal pay had been an issue for the PSA all along. Rona Bailey* had been at the forefront of a campaign in the 1940s after the war. In 1955, the Wellington section supported a resolution by Jim Winchester that the Executive launch a major campaign for equal pay. It was the treatment accorded to Jean Parker in 1956 that gave the campaign impetus. She was a most efficient clerk with eight people under her. So when a male cadet was promoted over her, she laid an appeal – and she won it. Then they demoted her”. *David Grant’s obituary of Rona Bailey is in Watchdog 110, December 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/10/09.htm. Ed.

“There was absolute outrage, not only within the PSA but publicly. There was a lot of media coverage and the case was debated in Parliament. Eventually her salary was reinstated but by this time the equal pay campaign had really taken off. Margaret Long was the Convenor of the PSA Women’s Committee, which had two positions on the Executive, and I was Chair of the Wellington Women’s Committee. The campaign was particularly active in Wellington, the Waikato and Palmerston North. Wherever there were activists”.

“We held lunchtime women’s meetings in all the Government departments. We organised two big Town Hall meetings in Wellington, attended by over 1,000 members. I remember running off leaflets on a Gestetner in the dead of night. Buffet teas were a big organising tool. We would invite a speaker and sell tickets. It amused us that here we were, non-respectable women doing such a respectable task as having a buffet tea”.

“One of our tactics was to meet with MPs. Equal pay was in the Labour Party’s manifesto but Walter Nash, the (1957-60) Labour Prime Minister, was very reluctant to support it. The only reason the Equal Pay Act was passed was that Nash was overseas at the time. Jack Turnbull, the PSA General Secretary, got the law drafting office to draft the Bill. It went through Parliament and National voted for it as well. We won this through a mixture of clever tactics and the strong opinions of women both inside and outside the PSA”.

Cath wrote: “One of the features of the whole campaign was that, while women themselves organised and battled for equal pay, it was never just a ‘women’s’ campaign; it was supported by local PSA sections and by the National Executive, men and women, and was won through the strength and unity of the PSA”. Cath married Pat Kelly in 1960. In their son Max Kelly’s words:

“Mum and Dad came from quite different backgrounds: Mum from affluence, Dad from poverty; both came together over a politic that reflected their respective desires to see the betterment of those at the bottom of society’s pecking order… the workers who toiled in factories, on roads; any form of labour where the wages were minimal and conditions tough and often dangerous”.

“Communism initially reflected that ideal, though eventually they were booted from the NZ Communist Party, at a time when it split into Russian and Chinese factions; they going to the Chinese side. The expulsion was for ‘expressing socialist leanings’, or so the family joke used to go”.

Cath and Pat had two children, Max and Helen. They lived in Shannon Street, Mt Victoria, Wellington and kept open house for contacts and strangers passing through and welcomed neighbourhood children. Cath’s nephew Bill Rosenberg recalls the Kelly household: “I remember visits to the family in my teens and later. Discussion of politics was part of the breakfast and dinner conversation and the times in between. This wasn’t a frothy commentary on political personalities and polls – it was active politics and organising: what needed to be done, who you should support and why…. The children took part in pickets and demonstrations”.

CARP

Cath helped to form CARP (Campaign Against Rising Prices) in 1966. CARP opposed increases in prices, e.g. for Watties goods, beer and petrol, and increases for milk from four cents per pint. CARP was also concerned about deceptive packaging. She represented consumers on hearings about price rises and monopoly practices. She persuaded Dan Long and Barry Tucker of the PSA to staff CARP. With her work in CARP, Cath was nominated by the National Party’s Lance Adams-Schneider to a place on the Board of Consumers’ Institute (at that time a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation).

She warmed to Jim Fraser, who represented the Ministry of Health, but did not care for the other Board members representing Big Business, nor for Dick Smithies, the Institute’s Director. She felt she was an isolated voice on the Board, especially as Rogernomics took its toll in the 1980s and 1990s. At Smithies’ farewell, to which she was invited although she’d left the Board, Smithies apparently repented of his earlier views and said to her quietly: “Now we are seeing the dark side of market forces”. Cath roundly riposted: “There is no other side”.

Indochina Solidarity Work

After New Zealand recognised Vietnam in 1975, Cath worked with the Government to establish a more meaningful relationship with Vietnam. She established a group initially called VAIN (Vietnam Action and Information Network). It evolved into VICALSN in 1989 (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos Support Network). The Network began small, self-sustaining aid projects in those countries, working through local organisations, and supported by a subsidy from the New Zealand government’s VASS programme.

With her friends Dave Kent and Bob Kerr, Cath produced a quarterly newsletter to members with information she gleaned from the Internet (she was an early adopter of this technology). In 1991, she was involved in setting up a Government aid programme called ELTO – English Language Training for Officials. The programme continues today, having recently had its 44th intake, and it now encompasses seven South-East Asian countries.

Cath loved the work she and others from New Zealand did with the Vietnamese Women’s Union, with aid projects, skills training and solidarity. In 2003, when Vietnam opened an Embassy in Wellington, Cath arranged accommodation for the first Ambassador and Secretary. In 2005 the President of Vietnam awarded her the Friendship Order “in recognition of her active contribution to the promotion of the relations of friendship and cooperation between the people of Vietnam and New Zealand”. In 2010, the city leaders of Ho Chi Minh City invited her to the 35th anniversary of the reunification of Vietnam. She was a special guest.

Helen Kelly, Cath and Pat’s daughter, absorbed her parents’ values and made her mark as the President of the Council of Trade Unions before her untimely death in 2016. Bill Rosenberg wrote, “Helen was a deep believer in collective action as the response to injustice. She resisted personal awards and accolades”. In 2015, with delight, Helen presented her mother Cath with the CTU’s lifetime achievement award. The sadness of having her daughter die before her was a great blow to Cath, and she died five months after Helen.

For further information see www.payequity.wordpress.com

Brian MacKay

- Murray Horton

Brian Mackay, who died in April 2017 in Christchurch, aged 70, was a critical member of the CAFCA team for several years in the 1990s, when his one-man Addington Print was Watchdog’s printer. This is what I wrote, by way of appreciation, when he finished (“Thanks, Brian”, Watchdog 85, August 1997): “Several years ago, Watchdog faced a rude awakening. No longer was it possible for mates to print it at mates’ rates on other people’s borrowed antedeluvian printing presses. So, we had to find a commercial printer and pay the going rate. To our great good luck, we came across Brian Mackay of Addington Print”.

“He gave us 100% and more in the years he printed Watchdog – he kept his rates dirt cheap, he always provided plenty of extra copies at no extra charge, he sorted out layout corrections and he delivered for free. At great cost to his leisure time, and probably his health, Brian worked around the clock, seven days a week, from his freezing old shed next door to Addington Prison, kept company only by his old black and white TV and several tough stray cats”.

“It was common for him to deliver late on the Saturday night, or even the Sunday morning, before a Sunday mailout. Nothing was too much trouble for him. He took a personal interest in Watchdog’s content, and always commented on interesting stuff that he found in it. Watchdog became his single biggest job, and by 1997, it was too much for a sole printer. He counted himself out of contention, saying that he would take at least a month to do it. That is too long, so by mutual agreement, we went elsewhere. Brian continued to do smaller jobs for us, such as the covers and letterheads. He still slogs his guts out but at least he’s moved from the freezing shed into the shopfront”.

“Not only has Brian printed Watchdog for several years, but two of the books CAFCA has published – Murray Horton’s ‘In Deep Water?’ and ‘Clearcut’ – plus innumerable flyers and leaflets for CAFCA and related groups. In that time, he also became the printer for the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa’s Kapatiran (Solidarity). Both CAFCA, and the broader movement, offer heartfelt thanks for years of a job done extremely well”.

CAFCA Member For Decade

Brian recommended our present printer to us, and we still get Watchdog printed there, 20 years later. But that was far from the end of our dealings with him. Having stopped as our printer, he then did what no other person with whom CAFCA has a commercial relationship has ever done – he became a member. He did so because he said that he supported us and wanted to continue getting our information and material. Brian was a CAFCA paying member for a decade from 1997, until his extreme busyness as a very popular one-man printer left him no time to read Watchdog (or anything else, I imagine. He was always flat out).

Even that didn’t end CAFCA’s relationship with Brian. The printing of Watchdog and its covers went elsewhere (to two different printers, for technical reasons) but he continued to do small printing jobs for both CAFCA and the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) for many years (he gave up printing PSNA’s former Kapatiran newsletter for the same reason he gave up Watchdog). For several years ABC’s Waihopai spy base protests featured the late Bob Leonard* as Uncle Sam. These were the days (i.e. before the Domebusters deflated one of the domes, in 2008) when protesters were officially allowed into the spy base’s outer circle. *My obituary of Bob Leonard is in Watchdog 134, January 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/34/13.html

So, one of ABC’s most popular and media-friendly stunts was to have Uncle Sam inspect our “Undemocratic Republic of UKUSA passports” as we all left New Zealand and entered that top secret foreign country (the 1940s’ UKUSA Agreement is now universally referred to as Five Eyes, and is the intelligence-sharing agreement between the electronic intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ). Brian printed those and he took more than a commercial interest in them – it was his idea to include one of the iconic Mad Magazine’s Spy vs Spy comic strip images on them. Those passports became collectors’ items.

Until very recent years Brian continued to print things for us, such as the letterheads used for the regular CAFCA/ABC Organiser appeals, and the covers for ABC’s Peace Researcher (a time-intensive job involving two colours). He only stopped doing them when he apologetically explained to me that his early 1970s’-vintage platemaker had finally died. That ended Brian’s connection with CAFCA and related groups. But it was far from the last that I saw of him.

I’ve lived in Addington for 35 years. Brian’s Addington Print shop on Lincoln Road was part of the local furniture for nearly all of that time. I go for a daily walk (either solo or with Becky) that took me past it every day. I’d see Brian in passing nearly every day (he was always busy with customers) and every now and again I’d pop in to say hello and have a chat – that became harder in recent years as his hearing became worse (decades ago he’d worked as a printer at the Christchurch Star* when it was a daily afternoon paper. My job in the 1970s and 80s regularly took me into the printeries of both the Star and the Press, so I can personally vouch for the deafening loudness of those workplaces). *I wrote an obituary for the Star in Watchdog 69, April 1992 (“Star Goes Into Black Hole”, https://www.scribd.com/doc/24209912/campaign-Against-Foreign-Control-or-Aotearoa).

Emblematic Of Old Addington

Brian and Addington Print were emblematic of old Addington, the historic working class suburb that has proved so critical to Christchurch’s survival in the years following the quakes catastrophe (some things have changed – the Addington Prison mentioned above is now a high profile, prison-themed, backpackers’ lodge).

He printed Addington Times, the local free community newsletter (they kindly supplied the accompanying photo). His unprepossessing old building was essentially unscathed by the many thousands of quakes during the 2010/11 seismic reign of terror – while plenty of neighbouring buildings either fell down or had to be demolished (to be replaced by the gleaming edifices of new Addington).

Brian just carried on as before. Even his favourite stray cat, Tipene (the fattest fluffy cat I’ve ever seen, due to an extremely laissez faire feeding regime) became one of old Addington’s leading characters, sleeping all day inside the big front window, blindly and deafly oblivious to the adoration of passing pedestrians, and surrounded by photos of him and messages about him stuck up on the window.

It was a shock when Addington Print abruptly closed in 2016 and was listed for sale (all his customers were transferred to another nearby printing business). Becky and I feared the worst and so it proved – what was thought to be simple earache turned out to be terminal cancer. Brian was told that he only had months to live. I only saw him once after he got that diagnosis.

He was in the shop - although it had been sold by that stage – and, typically, his reason for being there was because he was worried that one of the stray cats wasn’t getting fed (he had taken Tipene to his home but the change of scene proved too much for the old deaf and blind cat, and he pre-deceased Brian). When I asked Brian how he was he gave me a rather harrowing account of the effects of cancer treatment but he didn’t complain about any of it. And his only remaining life goal was typically modest – he wanted to live the few months necessary to make it to 70 (he did).

Brian was an incredibly unassuming, mild and self-effacing man. Look at the accompanying photo – Addington Times told me they couldn’t get him to look directly at the camera. He was also incredibly obliging to me personally, to CAFCA and to all his huge number of customers. His Press death notice described him as “printer extraordinaire” and said “Brian’s gentle, caring and loving nature will be missed by all”.

He was both a gentleman and a gentle man. I extend my deepest sympathies to his wife Toko, whom Becky and I have known for as long as we knew Brian. And, as for his former Lincoln Road building, which is no longer Addington Print – the new owners spent many months in 2017 doing a beautiful renovation job on it and have recently opened it as a fully vegan café. New Addington; life goes on.