MR W. FLOWER 94 YEARS OLD

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27374, 12 June 1954, Page 6

MR W. FLOWER 94 YEARS OLD

Long Service On Railways

INTERESTS AFTER 33 YEARS’ RETIREMENT

Mr Walter Flower, of 1 Norwood street,' Beckenham, is 94 today. A railwayman throughout his working life in New Zealand, he is probably the oldest surviving member of the department. His middle-aged interviewer had not been born long when Mr Flower retired. In a retired life almost equalling his working life, Mr Flower still enjoys all his life-long pleasures. “There is seldom an* important cricket match that I miss,” he said yesterday. “I read ‘The Press’ from cover to cover—but I leave the leading articles till the evening.” Mr Flower seldom uses spectacles. He eats well, he is solidly built, and he has never had a day of illness.

“Do you smoke?” Mr Flower was asked. “Smoke,” exclaimed his family. “He does little else.” Mr Flower is not perturbed by recent reports about the ill-effects of smoking. He said he had never smoked a cigarette completely, but his pipe has always been stoked with plug tobacco for about 70 years. He enjoys a glass of beer. •Born in Lincolnshire—“the greatest agricultural, district of England”—Mr Flower worked on farms from the age of 12, and had recently been married when he c£me to New Zealand at the age of 21 years. He recalls that the sailing ship Taranaki, under Captain Herd, took 77 days for the passage to Lyttelton, leaving Plymouth on August 4, 1881. Mr Flower looked round Christchurch for jobs and then decided on the railway, his father having been an engine-driver. He started as an assistant shunter on a “Dido” engine weighing six tons, compared with the 90 tons of modern locomotives. Its load limit was six trucks. Rising quickly to shunter-in-charge, Mr Flower was transferred to Westport in 1900, when the Christchurch railway yard staff numbered 10, including drivers, guards, shunters, and porters. He remembers all their names. He was yard foreman at Westport when he returned to Christchurch as senior foreman in 1907, a position he held until his retirement in 1921.

Mr Flower vividly recalls the busy season from February to May when grain and wool came in from the country. In his earliest days In Christchurch he remembers up to 13 sailing ships in Lyttelton at once to take grain. Once when the Railways Department had not enough tarpaulins, a rake of 60 waggons of grain was run into the Lyttelton" tunnel overnight for shelter from “a howling southerly storm.” Enormous expansion had occurred in the railways, Mr Flower said, but he remembered the completion of the present Christchurch station about 1885. He recalled, too, that the introduction of the Westinghouse brake about 1904 entailed a considerable increase in staff for coupling. Mr Flower first became a subscriber to “The Press” ip 1884, when, he said, it had only two leaves. Today he enjoys reading “sports, racing, and other accidents.”

Mrs Flower died eight years ago, but on his birthday today Mr Flower will have greetings from a large family—his two daughters (Mrs R. McDonagh. of Westport, and Mrs W. Mann, of Beckenham), 10 grandchildren, and 16 great-grandchildren.