SIXTY YEARS AFTER.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 163, 12 July 1928, Page 18

SIXTY YEARS AFTER.

TWO SURVIVORS

OF A DESPERATE FIGHT.

HOW THE IRISH HELD TURUTURUMOKAI. (By J.C.) This (lay exactly sixty years ago was fought the little battle of TuruturuMokai redoubt, a Constabulary post near the town of Hawera. The valour of the defence put up by the small band of colonial soldiers, and the proportion of casualties to the force engaged made it the most gallant and the most desperate fight in the whole of the Hauhau wars. Twenty-two men held the small earthwork against a war-party, sixty or seventy strong, dispatched against the pakehas' outpost by the great fighting Chief Titokowaru. That is, there were twenty-two white defenders when the combat began; by the time it was over, when tardy relief came from the Armed Constabulary headquarters redoubt at Waihi, there were only six men able to pull a trigger. Ten were killed -.r mortally wounded, and six others were wounded. Another notable thing about the defence was that three-fourths o c the garrison were Irishmen. TLev s-tuck to their posts and fought their savage foes •rith the splendid courage and resolution that have ever been displayed by Irish soldiers in a tight corner. It was not « mere dash with the bayonet, when the Jxcitenient of the charge carries the soldier through. It was a long-drawn battle in the gloom of early morning, in a crumbling, inadequate entrenchment. British discipline put stiffening into the defence, for four of the A.C.'s were veterans of the 57th Regiment, and there was a gallant 65th man. Three of those Irish "Diehards" were killed; well they upheld the fighting tradition A their grand regiment. The 57th man who survived is living to-day; he and a fine old County Cork man are the two who remain to tell of the detence of Turuturu-Mokai.

I have heard the story of that bitter winter morning fight from three of the lefenders and also from a Maori warrior who was there, the late Te Kahupukoro, the head chief of the NgatiRuanui tribe. The more I heard of it— one occasion was on the spot with a survivor of the affair—the more my admiration grew for the pluck and the steady resolution of the tiny garrison, against whqjn the picked Hauhau fighters of Taranaki had been launched from the bush stronghold at Te Ngutu-o.te-manu. The Redoubt of 1868. Turuturu-mokai (a grim name; it means "stakes on which smoke-dried human heads are displayed") is a massive old pa on a green hill slope above the Tawhiti Stream, a short distance from Hawera town. Near the ancient earthworks and a little higher up the gentle slope is the scene of the fight of July 12, i ISOB. It is a public scenic reserve now, under the care of the Hawera Borough Council. A road cuts through one corner of the old earthwork—its southeast Hanking bastion. With the usual lack of consideration for national monuments, the redoubt was razed by the pakeha cow-farmer many a year ago. The outlines of the greater part of the work can be traced in the turf, and it would not be very difficult to rebuild the place on the olden plan. The redoubt was about twenty yards square, with two rounded flanding bastions. The late Coslett Johnston, a good old Irish farmer, who lived for many years at Keteonetea, in sight of the redoubt, was one of the two men on sentry duty early on the morning of the attack. He told me how he and Garrett Lacy, an ex-57th man, gave the alarm and ran the gauntlet of the Hauhau storming party. It was just before the first glimmering of dawn, the favourite Maori time for a surprise attack. Johnston and another young military settler nained Milmoe, were the only two armed with long Enfield rifles and bayonets; the rest of the garrison, Armed Constabulary men, had Terry carbines. Johnston said it was probably the glint of the two fixed bayonets as much as anything else that kept the Maoris from rushing the place. Up From the Fern. Garrett Lacy saw a movement in the fern as he paced "on sentry-go outside the redoubt. He challenged, "Halt! Who goes there?" The next moment there was a thundering volley from the Maoris and a host of bushmen leaped from the fern where they had been creeping up on the redoubt, and the fight was on. It went on till after sunrise. The attackers first killed a canteen-keeper, who lived in his whare outside the redoubt. * Fought in Their Shirts. They killed Captain Ross, the commander of the post, as he fought gallantly, clad only in his shirt —like most of his men—to hold the gateway. A Maori charged right in over the narrow plank over the trench and tomahawked a man as he was in the act of firing over the low traverse or parapet that defended the entrance. They fired into the redoubt from the higher ground, and the only places that could be held after the first attack were the flanking bastions. While some Hauhaus kept up their heavy fire, others got into a ditch and chopped away at the parapet with their tomahawks. One after another the defenders were shot down. Brothers From Skibbereen. In the north-west flanking angle there were young • John G. Beamish, from Skibbereen, County Cork. He and his brother, Alexander, who was also one of the garrison, and who was mortally wounded, had only joined the force about three months. He told me that most of the fighting was at very close quarters; only two or three yards separated him and his comrades from some of the yelling and shooting warriors in the trench. Alexander Beamish fell wounded to death. John was wounded about the same time. A large calibre bullet struck him in the left shoulder, and passed out at his back. It was a tremendous shock, nevertheless voung Beamish—though unable to continue firing—passed cartridges to his comrade, Michael Gill (ex-57th Regiment), who kept steadily firing away, in the cool steady way of the well-trained regular soldier. Beamish levelled his unloaded carbine as well as he cou'd with his right hand whenever he saw a black head bob up above the parapit. There were six fellows who manned that angle of the redoubt when the fight began. When it ended Gill was the only unwounded man; three were dead. Tuffin'a Five Wounds. Another defender, George Tuffin, whom I met at Wanganui two or three years

before his death, took off his hat when I spoke of Turuturu-Mokai, and showed

me a miniature trench in the top of his head. "That's what one Hauhau bullet did," he said. He received five wouncs altogether. Tuffin, an A.C. man, was- armed with carbine and revolver. He first emptied his revolver into the Maoris in the trench, immediately he got out of his blankets that freezing winter morning—"we were all in our shirts," he said, "just as we jumped out." Then he fired one shot out of his carbine over' the parapet and- was reloading when a bullet ploughed a furrow right across the top of his head. As he lay on the ground, he received four more wounds—one in the left aim, one through the back near the spine, one in the right hip, and another in the right ankle. But he was a "tough 'iin" (the old soldier's favourite pun, and surely he was entitled to it!). He lived to hold a job for many years under the Wanganui Borough Council. The Offerings to the War-God. There were some savage touches in that wintry dawn battle. When at last Von Tempsky and his men came up at the double from Waihi, they found that the hearts of Captain Ross and Lennon, the canteen-keeper had been cut out by the tomahawk men. There iB a veteran of Von Tempsky's force living at the Lower Hutt, Wellington, who tells me that his party found a human heart just outside the parapet. The other heart, the Maoris told me, was taken to the forest fort as a sacred offering from the battlefield. The Last of Them. The two survivors of the fight—John Beamish and Michael Gill—fully deserve some special recognition of their valour that morning of sixty years ago. But probably the difficulty was to select oue man who was more deserving thau another out of the defenders. Milmoe, Poslett, Johnston, Beamish, O'Brien, Connors (or O'Connor) were all worthy of the New Zealand Cross had a decoration been awarded. Michael Gill, now about ninety years old, is an inmate of the Old Men's Home at Parke Island, Napier. He is one of the last two survivors of the 57th Regiment veterans in New Zealand. John Beamish is a well-known settler of Patea, where he has lived ever since the war. t There were three men, military settlers, who bolted from Turuturumokai when the fight began and ran to Waihi. (They were not Irishmen.) One of them met a curious fate at Tauranga long after the war. On his section he found an unexploded British shell, a rel-c of the Gate Pa battle in 1864. He was trying to get the powder out of it when it exploded and blew his head to pieces. There is a surviving officer of the A.C.'s who is associated with the story of Turuturu-mokai. This is that gallart officer of the old Forest Rangers, ard afterwards for many years of the Armed Constabulary, Colonel J. M. Roberts, N.Z.C., of Rotorua. Colonel Roberts— then captain—was placed in command of the all-but-ruined redoubt, with fifty men, soon after the fight. He repaired it and put in into a proper state of de- , fence. But it was abandoned for good and all a little while later, when the Government forces were ordered to i evacuate nearly the whole of the West • Coast before the triumphant advance of ■ Titokowaru and his Hauhaus.

Turuturu-mokai has been called t!-e "Rorke's Drift" of the New Zealand wars. The circumstances were dissimilar, though both were desperate affairs. At Rorke's Drift in 1879 the gallant British defenders lost fifteen killed and twelve wounded out of eighty-two combatants. One Taranaki garrison lost far more heavily in proportion. But the RorkeV Drift men inflicted very much greater losses on the Zulus than those that the Hauhaus suffered.