50,000th Bale For Season

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31042, 23 April 1966, Page 10

50,000th Bale For Season

'THIS week Pyne, Gould, Guinness Ltd.’s Christchurch wool store received its fifty thousandth bale this season. The firm’s Christchurch store has never before handled this number of bales and the occasion was marked by a small ceremony at which Mr D. C. Gould, the director of wool departments of the company (centre) made a presentation to Mr W. S. L. McRae. of Lake Forsyth, Little River (on the right), one of whose three-bale consignment happened to be the fifty thousandth. Mr J. Devine, the Christchurch wool manager for the firm (on left) is looking on, with members of the store staff in the background. After the ceremony Mr Gould recalled that up until the recent merger of Dalgety and Company and the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Agency Company Pyne, Gould, Guinness Ltd. had for many years been regarded as the premier wool brokers in Canterbury from point of view of business handled. The earlier merger of the National Mortgage and Agency and H. Matson and Company had not affected their position. However they could have no real complaint at this situation for the reason that his grandfather, the second Mr George Gould, had initiated the merger of Pyne and .Company, Gould, Beaumont and Company and Guinness and Le Cren around about 40 years before the process of mergers and take-overs had become commonplace.

The firm remained by far the largest independent stock and station agency in New Zealand—that was distinct from co-operatives or organisations with New Zealandwide associations—and it was considered that the very personal nature of their business and their relationships with their clients had been a most important factor in wool growers having entrusted

them with this large volume of wool. This was a feature of their business that they intended to maintain, particularly because the operations of the large New Zealand-wide companies must inevitably be of a more impersonal nature. Mr Gould said that in 1929-30 in less prosperous days for the country the company had handled 18,500 bales of wool in four sales and these averaged £l2 each. That year when the average wage rates of wool store hands were £4 5s a week, 6000 bales had then been reclassed in the store for £BOO in wages. In the 1950-51 boom season the firm’s share of the local clip in Christchurch had been 34,000 bales and in the three sales held that season wool had averaged a tidy £l3l a bale. That season 19,000 bales had been reclassed for £12,000, with the ruling wage rate in the store being £8 a week. In the current season the average return a bale so far was £62, and for 32,000 bales reclassed the cost in wages had been £30,000, with the ruling wage rate now £l5 a week.

Every season brought with it its own problems, said Mr Gould. In the boom 1950-51 season the season had ended with a third of the season’s intake of wool unsold because of the waterfront strike, and when this wool was sold at the conclusion of the strike it returned to its unfortunate owners about £4O a bale whereas six months earlier it would have brought about four times that amount. In that Season one client in the Marlborough district had put a reserve of 180 d per lb on his wool when he had been advised that the valuation for his clip was 168 d. Subsequently he had had the dubious privilege of having this same wool binned by another firm and sold about nine months later for less than 30d per lb.

For the store these difficul

ties had meant that two-thirds of a season’s work had been done in one season and one and a third seasons’ work in the next season.

The recent innovation of .monthly sales was proving very costly, said Mr Gould, and while it might appear to be an orderly system of marketing it was difficult to see any concrete gains being derived from it to counterbalance the extra costs involved. One thing that would almost certainly arise from it was that the system was not really workable with the 18-day prompt date, which had been carried on from the days of the large one, two and threeday sales. One distinct advantage from an auctioneer’s point of view was that the selling of a modern monthly catalogue was a good deal less arduous than that of the mammoth sort of catalogue of 16,527 bales which the firm had offered in the three-day sale in February, 1960 .