MR W. S. GOOSMAN, M.P.

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 72, Issue 6238, 5 June 1946, Page 7

MR W. S. GOOSMAN, M.P.

WORKER AND MAN OF ACTION NEPHEW OF FAMOUS STATESMAN The following interesting biography of Mr W. £. Goosman, M.P., who is well known throughout the length and breadth of the Dominion, appeared in last week’s issue of Freedom, the official organ of the National Party. The record of Mr W. S. Goosman, M.P. for Waikato, is that of a worker and a man of action. At 13 years of age, after passing Standard 6, he was working on a dairy farm at 5s a week. At 17 he was catting bush with two others in the high country at the back of Waipirc Bay. At 22 he was sharemilking in the Mangatawhiri Valley, near Auckland, and a year or two later he became the owner of a dairy farm of his own. Dairy-fai ming led to cream carting, and cream carting led to other forms of contracting, and eventually to road construction in a big way. As head of one of the largest businesses of its kind in New Zealand, Mr Goosman became a man of substance, but while the business was being developei he was still milking cows and driving a truck. For 25 years of his life (he •s now 55) his day’s work began in a cowshed. He is a man of tireless energy, with great organising and executive ability, and a gift for going straight to the heart of any practical problem. In politics he is noted for his plain speaking. He talks to New Zealanders in their own language, without frills. He is completely unaffected and unassuming and thousands of people throughout the Waikato, in all walks of life, including many who have worked for him, know him as “Stan.” William Stanley Goosman was born in Grafton Road, Auckland. His mother was the elder sister of the Rt. Hon. W. F. Massey, with whom he spent part of his boyhood after the death of his mother when he was eight years old. His father was farming for some years at Mangere, and it was there that he started work as a farmer’s boy, milking 15 cows by hand, night and morning. When he was 16 he went to the Gisborne district to work as cowboy and “rouseabout” on high-country sheep stations north of Gisborne, first on Pakurai station, and then on Pautae. Communication with the East Coast settlements in those days was either by steamer or by means of Redstone’s coaches, which for part of their route travelled along the beaches. When he was 17, for a weekly wage of £2 10s a week and found, which he regarded as princely (for “money was money in those days”) Goosman joined two other young men in a bushfelling contract 35 miles in from Waipiro Bay. They went in by pack track, fording the Mata River en route, and were in there for two periods of ten months at a time without being out. They lived in rough shacks, did their own cooking, baked their own bread, and received fresh “tucker” by packhorse from the station once a week. Diet was varied occasionally by a roast of wild pork or beef. The bush was mainly taua, and snowbroken in places from the winter falls. It was a hard life, demanding exceptional toughness, but Mr Goosman looks back on it as one of the happiest periods of his life. The slopes they cleared have long been carrying sheep and cattle and contributing to the pastoral production of the East Coast. A strained heart compelled him to give up this strenuous work. At 19 no life insurance company would accept him. To-day, at 55, he is classified as a first-class risk. After working as a labourer on the railways for a while, he went back to dairying as a sharemilker. For a time he leased a farm at Mangere with his brother Arthur, and then went to the Waikato, with which he has ever since been identified. He was at Tamahere for seven years, then sold out and went to No. 1 Road, Waitoa. This was the place where his success story really began, and its immediate origin was in the short-lived depression of 1920-21. “We had to do something about it,” is Mr Goosman’s explanation. What he did was to take on a cream run for the New Zealand Co-operative Dairy Company, taking cream to the Waitoa factory by horse and • dray, while at the same time carrying on his farm. The contract paid, and he bought a motor-truck; then another; and another. So was launched the contracting business of W. S. Goosman and Company. It did not grow like a mushroom overnight, but developed by slow degrees, and it was the product, first and foremost, of the unremitting industry of its owner. From carrying he turned to roading contracts, the first contract handled being a fivemile stretch of a road in Waitomo. This side of his activities expanded rapidly. He undertook contracts in the Poverty Bay area and reconstructed the roads in some of the districts where he had worked as a boy.. He opened a quarry at Motuhcra which proved a valuable source of road metal for these operations. For 53 miles, to-day, the main arterial road through the Waikato, from Taupiri to Otorohanga, is hi some measure a “Goosman road,” for his firm had something to do with the modernisation of every mile of it, doing both the reconstruction and surfacing of some lengths, and the surfacing of others. A stretch of 121 miles on the Tirau side of the Mamaku Hills, between Hamilton and Rotorua, is also a Goosman road. He is proud of the work accomplished in handling these contracts and of the speed and efficiency with which the jobs were put through. He had a fine team of men associated with him, and they earned good money. The work that was done, he considers, is a justification of the tendering system, under which the community had the benefit of competitive tenders and there was no waste or loss of time. Until a few w r eeks prior to the I£3B election Mr Goosman had had no thought of entering politics. The first suggestion that he should do so came from, of all people, his bank manager, who told him practical men were badly needed in Parliament. He dismissed this lightly, but others were thinking on the same lines, and when a deputation asked him to contest the Waikato seat, the boundaries of which had just been re-drawn, he agreed to “give it a go.” He made his first speech in the

campaign at Fencourt. This and the next meeting passed off smoothly, but the third meeting, at Cambridge, was a test of his tenacity. The Hon. Walter Nash had spoken in the same hall the night before, and had had rather a bad time. Labour supporters from far and near decided to take it out on Mr Goosman, who, without the aid of a loudspeaker, and painfully conscious of his inexperience, had to face one of the rowdiest audiences ever known in the Waikato.* In spite of this hostile reception, he had a majority of 112 in Cambridge on polling day, and in 1943 this rose to 500. Hisj opponent in 1938 was Mr J. W. Neate, who obtained a majority in only one out of the 39 polling booths. The National majority was 2928, a remarkable margin to be won by a man contesting his first Parliamentary election. It was the largest non-Lab-our majority, and spoke eloquently for Mr Goosman’s personal popularity, and for the goodwilfcand respect held towards him throughout the Waikato. Even more impressive was his majority of 4615 in 1943. In Parliament his original benchmate was the late Colonel John Allen, who represented the neighbouring electorate of Hauraki. They sat together in the back row. Mr Goosman now is a front-bencher, and sits next to Mr W. A. Bodkin, member for Central Otago. Apart from politics, he is also well-known as a racing owner. He has had a lifelong love of animals, and takes a personal and affectionate interest in the horses which carry his colours. The first of them was Representative, which won the Avondale Guineas, Great Northern Guineas, and was second in the New Zealand Cup. Mr Goosman names his horses himself and chose Representative for its political flavour. Town Survey, which was named when he bought him, put up a New Zealand record by winning the Great Northern Hurdles, Winter Hurdles at Trentham, and Grand National, all in one year. Expanse has won the Great Northern St. Leger and the Auckland Cup. Balgowan, in which racing men are taking a keen interest, has won the Takapuna Cup, and the Herries Memorial at Te Arohai Batal has won the Avondale Guineas. Mr Goosman races for the love of it, and many tributes have been paid to him by sporting writers, as one who is maintaining the best traditions of the turf, while at the same time encouraging the breeding of highclass animals. His colours are yellow, with a red Maltese cross back and front, a red cap. The keenness which has made him one of the leading racing owners is typical of his wholeheartedness in anything he dies. When he took on golf, at the age of 45 (having previously had no time during his busy life to apply himself to sport) he determined to become a good player. He went to a coach, but disagreed with the methods which were prescribed for the comparatively simple problem of hitting a sationary ball with a club, and therefore evolved a style of his own, by which, with two years, he brought his handicap down to ten. On the morning after his hectic meeting at Cambridge, during the 1938 election campaign, he was to play the final "of the Morrinsville Golf Club’s championship. Slightly hoarse, but otherwise as fresh as a button, he turned up on the first tee and won the first four holes of the 36-hole match, after which he was never headed.

In the same way, he had never played snooker before he went to Parliament, but is now the Parliamentary snooker champion. He abhors idleness, and whatever he does, he likes to do well. He is meticulous in meeting the many needs of his constituents, and the only letters with which he does not deal sympathetically are those asking for racing tips. Mr Goosman’s home for the past 11 years has been in Morrinsville. It is typical of him that although now financially independent, he prefers to live in the district where he spent so many busy years. He is still interested in farming, and is breaking in a farm at Tahuna, near Morrinsville, having erected extensive stopbanks to overcome a flood problem which previously reduced the output of the property. Throughout their married life, Mrs Goosman, who was formerly Miss Maigaret Boyd, of Northern has been a staunch ally and partner, and he attributes his success very largely to her help. She takes an interest in politics and is usually in Wellington during the sessions. They have one son, Mr Stanley Keith Goosman, of Papatoetoe, who served in the Middle East during the war, and re-, recenty made the member for Waikato a grandfather.