Farmer, Engineer, And Jet-boat Pioneer

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32252, 21 March 1970, Page 4

Farmer, Engineer, And Jet-boat Pioneer

Wild Irishman. By Peggy Hamilton. A. H. and A. W. Reed. 208 pp. Index. It is not uncommon these days for the wives of notables to write about them. Peggy Hamilton however has two attributes not always found in such biographers: she has a talent for simple intensely-readable prose and she has had an unusual and adventurous life which makes an effective counterpoint to the story of her husband, C. W. F. Hamilton, well known in New Zealand and beyond as an engineer, inventor, high-country fanner and jet-boat pioneer. The first two chapters, on her husband's origins and boyhood, are humdrum and slow-moving, but this is presumably because Mrs Hamilton is writing at second-hand, and her accounts of personal experiences have far greater animation.

Before Mr Hamilton brought her as a bride to his newly-acquired sheepstation at Irishman Creek in the Mackenzie Basin, in 1923, Peggy Hamilton had had a sheltered, conventional English upbringing. Toughening-up began with the 1914-18 War—“cruel wasteful years” she calls them, when as a skilled munitions-worker in Woolwich. Birmingham, Southampton and London, she earned £3 for a sixty-three hour week, enduring not only appalling working and living conditions but also the unco-operative jealousy of some of her male companions, who resented women doing skilled work they had worked so many years to achieve. They were grim years but they were also a

thorough preparation for the very different challenges she was to meet in

the rugged life at Irishman Creek In her preface, Mrs Hamilton says that she has written fully of her wartime experience, “because of its bearing on Bill's work and engineering development, and as an account of industrial conditions of 50 years ago.” After the war Peggy visited New Zealand with a family party, and later back in England, at the country house of friends, was introduced to “a slight, quiet, shy young man in tennis flannels”—C. W, F. Hamilton. The Hamilton’s station is named after the Wild Irishman or Matagouri, that übiquitous prickly bush that grows so abundantly in the area. The book’s title therefore does not refer to Mr Hamilton, whose forbears came from Scotland. A grandfather was Hereditary Keeper of Falkland, the hunting

palace of the Stuart kings, and his father William Feilden Hamilton was sent to Australia as a cadet on a sheep-station at seventeen. Subsequently “W.F.” came to New Zealand and took up a run near Fairlie called Ashwick. Here Charles William Feilden Hamilton was born in the snowy winter of 1899. A farming childhood encourages initiative, and from his earliest years C. W. F. Hamilton showed great resourcefulness. He completed his education at Christ’s College and in 1921 bought the 23,500 acre Irishman Creek run. It is bare tussock country and lies between Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukaki at 2300 feet.

For several years between 1925-29, before settling down to family responsibilities, Hamilton, with some equallykeen friends, competed in major North Island car races, driving a special racing Sunbeam and a 4.5 litre Bentley, breaking records and winning trophies at speeds up to and over 100 m.p.h. After the birth of their son and daughter, Mr Hamilton turned again to his twin loves of farming and engineering. Soon he had designed and built an earth-moving scoop, pulled by horse or tractor, and was doing contract work on airfields. His first job was the Hermitage aerodrome, Mt Cook. Bulldozers and more earth-moving machines followed, all being manufactured at Irishman Creek in a workshop sixteen by twenty-four feet. “As he had no finance to start with, the buying of any new tools or machines was made with very careful consideration and whatever he found too costly to buy, he improvised.” During the Second World War, the incredible C. W. F. Hamilton personally trained a group of unskilled men and women, to do high-precision work on munitions, working round the clock in shifts in the now-famous Irishman Creek workshop. Up to 17 muni-tions-workers lived and worked on the station. The firm of C: W. F. Hamilton and Company Ltd began after the war with the purchase of a ten-acre site at Middleton, Christchurch, and the chief engineer and technical director today is C. W. F’s son, Jon Hamilton.

The jet-boat, the engineering achievement for which Mr Hamilton is most famous, began as a dream above the Waiiaki River, at a camp-site by Black’ Rock. Looking down at the wide expanse of water and rocks, he said to his wife, “If we had a boat that could make it upstream against the river we could explore all those streams and islands.” That was the beginning, and today the boats he invented are serving a multitude of purposes all over the w'orld. His first boat was a flimsy 12-foot plywood jet used for family trips, his next a 14-footer was called Whio 1, after the blue mountain duck, a bird of the high-country streams, and this is the name he has kept for all of his successive boats. C. W. F. Hamilton’s story is an inspiring one. Several printer’s errors detract from the general high standard of the book.

Charles Dickens began his professional life by working for a firm of attorneys in Grays Inn called Ellis and Blackmore; in Southwark today the curate of St George the Martyr, better known as “Little Dorrit’s Church,” ig the Rev Ellis Blackmore.