Construction giants golden anniversary

Press, 5 July 1983, Page 31

Construction giants golden anniversary

Downer aricT Company, New Zealand’s largest civil engineering contractor, celebrates its 50th anniversary today. It was on July 5, 1933, that Mr Arnold Downer registered the company which today bears his name on sites in the tropical jungles of Papua-New Guinea and Fiji, as well as all over New Zealand.

Downer is a giant business by New Zealand standards. Turnover in the year to March 31, 1983, was $146 million — up 66 per cent over the previous year — and work in hand on January 1 totalled $124 million. Yet it has grown without suffering the worst disadvantages of size. Part of the Cable Price Downer group, it functions with the tight-knit, cooperative drive absolutely basic to success in the construction game. A tremendous degree of company loyalty exists, demonstrated by family associations extending over generations and the large numbers of long-servicing staff members in the most nomadic of industries.

The phenomenon that is Downer is unique in the construction industry in New Zealand.

Shortly before retiring last year, the managing director, Mr Doug Williamson, wrote that Downer’s reputation in New Zealand construction was second to none.

“In the process Downer has created a reputation for performance. We have assembled the construction equipment, the experienced, personnel and, above all, the professional skill to fulfil contract obligations on time and to demanding standards,” Mr Williamson said.

The company is widely known and respected for its capacity to handle multimillion dollar undertakings

. . - and its flexibility allows it to handle with equal efficiency smaller projects such as the building of a warehouse, a culvert or a carpark.” No idle boasting that. Roxburgh dam to Whakatane liquor store, Terrace tunnel to Cobb River access roads, the New Plymouth power station chimney to concrete aprons at Auckland international airport, all had the familiar Downer signboard at the site entrance.

Not surprisingly for a company with some of New Zealand’s biggest and- most difficult tunnels in its past, the roots of Downer and Company lie below the earth under Wellington’s Mt Victoria. Mr Arnold Downer left the Public Works Department in 1930 to be an engineer-manager for Wellington constructor, Hansford Mills, then building the Mt Victoria tunnel between the city and the fast-expanding eastern suburbs. Hansford and Mills ran into financial problems during the construction of the tunnel but Mr Downer’s reputation as a tunneller and construction engineer was such that he was asked by the liquidator to stay and finish it.

By 1932, the core that would become Downer and Company had set hard. There was Leighton Nanson, Mr Downer’s assistant on the Mt Victoria and earlier tunnels, and Mr George McLean, a Wellington builder, and his three sons, Arch, Callum and Fraser.

With the tunnel finished, they all headed to a gold mining venture at Ruatapu, on the West Coast of the South Island a few kilometres south of Hokitika. It was not a success; and neither was a wharf the

syndicate built at Okarito in South Westland — the first two ships to call bumped bottom on the bar, and that was that for the port.

In 1933, Mr Downer was tendering for the construction of a tunnel on the Dunedin City Council’s Waipori power project and decided to formalise the syndicate’s legal status. Nearly a year later, the tender of "twenty nine thousand, three hundred and twenty eight pounds, sixteen shillings and sixpence, payable in New Zealand currency at Dunedin” was accepted. Downer and Company was on its way. The Waipori job was a difficult one that gave the infant firm a baptism by broken rock and rushing water — but it was finished with a modest profit.

In late 1936 came the contract for cutting nearly 15km of access road into the Tasman Mountains, inland from Takaka, for the isolated Cobb River power project. Downer bought its first bulldozer, a Caterpillar DB, much lighter and less powerful than its descendant today.

Other Cobb contracts followed: three bridges, powerhouse foundations and superstructure, and penstock tunnels.

Downer was already a force in the New Zealand construction business when the World War II broke out.

The tunnelling, roading and powerhouse experience was augmented with its first taste of airport construction and opencast coal mine overburden stripping — activities important in future development. In the early 19505, New Zealand’s economy escaped wartime restrictions and began building for its future and Downer and Company had big tasks to face. It formed a joint venture,

beginning a 12-year relationship, with the giant United States contractor, Morrison Knudsen, to build the Bkm-long Rimutaka rail tunnel. Downer and M.K. worked together on extensions to the original Waitaki River dam, the Meremere power station, the Aviemore diversion tunnel, the Manapouri access tunnel, a wharf in New Plymouth and construction of the No. 2 paper machine at Kawerau.

The American company, with its vast size and experience, brought construction techniques and management, estimating and administrative skills its much smaller partner, devoured, adopted and adapted for its own purposes. Joint ventures are still important in the development of Downer’s skills and resources, both within New Zealand and, more recently, overseas.

Then came 1954, with a government invitation for Downer and Company to take over management of the troubled Roxburgh hydro contract from the overseas contractors Cubitts, of England, and Conrad Zschokke, of Switzerland.

It was only a few weeks over two years after Downer’s arrival when the the first Roxburgh power crackled into the national grid — a mighty achievement that earned Downer and Company the full 300,006-pound, early-comple-tion bonus.

The same year, Downer and Company merged with William Cable Holdings, of which Mr Arnold Downer was already a director, to form the central axis of what is today one of New Zealand’s most powerful industrial combines. Mr Downer retired as managing director in 1962,

although he stayed with the Cable Price Downer board until 1969.

Downer diversified from its mainstream civil engineering activity for the first time, into industrial and commercial building, in the early 19605. It established building divisions in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin, and separate divisions to cover civil engineering, earthmoving and quarrying activities.

The structure suited the rapid growth in building work in the 1960 s but, by 1971, regional management was needed to handle the business.

New challenges were met in the 19705; first the pressures of the construction boom of 1973-75, then declining opportunities within New Zealand, as the economy and growth wound down later in the decade.

Downer’s approach is always to go where the work is and, if necessary, acquire the skills needed; and by the late 1970 s the work was definitely not in New Zealand.

It began to seriously contemplate overseas opportunities and won its first contract, a joint venture with Fletcher Construction, to rebuild Palau Airport in the Caroline Islands, in 1979.

By 1982, the overseas workload had grown sufficiently to justify establishment of an international division.

Early in 1983, Downer extended its building interests with a division to compete in the design and build market.

This afternoon, the Downer staff in New Zealand finishes work early to celebrate the company’s first 50 years in construction — they have earned the break.