Farm To Factory: 25 Years After

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30453, 29 May 1964, Page 1

Farm To Factory: 25 Years After

The choice of a former high country rabbiter to make an official presentation to the founder of C. W. F. Hamilton and Company, Ltd., at the firm’s 25th anniversary celebrations tonight is symbolic of the firm’s origins.

When Mr Bill Geeves was a young man he was a Mackenzie Country rabbiter, and he was the first man to be employed at Mr Hamilton’s property at Irishman Creek in 1939 when the sheepfarmer took a bold step into the engineering business. Irishman Creek’s very remoteness, in the wastes of the Mackenzie Country, made it a bold step. Mr Hamilton was the son of a Mackenzie Country runholder, and took over the 24,000 acre Irishman Creek station at the age of 21. Wanting to excavate a few acres of tussock for a dam, and faced with the prospect of doing it with a horsedrawn scoop, the young farmer designed and built a rotary earth scoop which became the basis of a considerable contracting business. Mr Hamilton, who had already designed and built his own waterwheel to run a lathe and an electricity generator, then built a workshop at Irishman Creek to manufacture earth-moving equipment, designing and making much of the machinery himself. So far from any good-sized town, he was forced to rely on local labour—rabbiters,

shepherds, station hands and cowboys. Many of them became skilled engineers, and Mr Geeves. the rabbiter, now holds an important position in the firm. During the war the sheepfarm factory was reorganised to produce munitions.

and after the war the demand for earth-moving equipment grew so fast that the business shifted to the township of Fairlie, then, in 1942 to Christchurch and two years later to the present 21-acre site at Middleton, where the staff of 350 is now housed in a factory spreading over an area of 150,000 square feet. An incorrigible inventor. Mr Hamilton is now famous

for his development of jet propulsion units for jet boats. Experimenting with bits and pieces to produce working machinery for his own factory led to the commercial production of many successful lines. Today C. W. F. Hamilton and Company’s factory has the largest welding capacity in New Zealand and produces such equipment as loaders, bulldozers, cranes, hydraulic machines, jet systems, heavy fabricated steel and Industrial heating gear. The firm pioneered the design and manufacture of hydraulic equipment in New Zealand, and is a specialist in steel fabrication for bridges and hydro-electric dams.

The 25th anniversary will be celebrated this evening with a ball at the Hei Hei Country Club, when Mr Geeves will present Mr Hamilton with an oil painting of Shotover river, Central Otago, looking towards Mount Larkin. The presentation will be made on behalf of the staff.