Transport In Hawke’s Bay

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31542, 2 December 1967, Page 4

Transport In Hawke’s Bay

Coache* North: The Story of the Hawke'* Bay Motor Company. By Len Anderson. A. H. and A W. Reed. Illustration* and' map, index. 124 pp.

This is the story of an era that is gone and is rapidly being forgotten, of adventures and misadventures with coaches and horses on the notorious so-called roads out of Napier to Taupo, Wairoa and Gisborne, inland Patea and other place* in an, isolated hinterland. They wqre bridgeless and little more than narrow, dusty (or muddy) tracks hs they flirted with perilous drops or wound their weary way up and down steep and tortuous places. It is also the chequered story of the Hawke's Bay Motor Company which was formed with such a brave flourish in 1903 that it included the word "motor” in its title years before motor vehicles were a practical means of transport on service routes. It is fortunate for th* en-

thustastic founder-investors that they could not see into the future; for if they had been able to do so it Is highly probable there would have been' no company. If ever a company had its ups and downs, this one did. In tracing Its history to its present firm footing, Mr Anderson spares it not at all. It faced financial disaster many times and for a number of year* was in the hands of a receiver. Irate shareholders shed general managers and changed policies, but always it seemed there was another corner and, coming round it, another shattering frustration. Especially was this so after primitive motor fleets were coming on to the roads and no-one knew much about their administration. Milestones that loomed like tombstones in and on the company’s road included overhead costs that ate away profits, the First World War, the unregulated cut-throat competition from owner-drivers, the depression? of the ’thirties, the

appalling earthquake of 1931 (in which the company’s staff and vehicles provided a notable community mercy service), the Second World War, competition from the railways. In spite of discouragements, the company earned an affectionate image for itself in Hawke’s Bay, and Mr Anderson has recorded instances of the trustful esteem in which the public held it He ha* stories of the coach driver* and their successors, the bus drivers, and of adventures both hair-raising and comic. At one time the company owned 600 horses and much property here and there along the routes for staging stops on journeys that took day, and now take hours.

The company spread its wings along city, suburban and country roads and often had them clipped. Taradale and Hastings have long relied on its services, and even today, when the Railway Road Service has taken over the coastal route, the company still joins Napier and Hastings via inland road*.