Sir John Gorst

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 9, 4 June 1945, Page 19

Sir John Gorst

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One day in the year 1906, two old men, one a distinguished looking, bearded Englishman, and the other a tattooed Maori, greeted each other warmly on the deck of a liner which had just drawn up at an Auckland wharf. The Englishman, Sir John Gorst, had just arrived to represent the British Government at the International Exhibition in Christchurch. He had had a distinguished parliamentary career, having at one time been a member of what was known as the fourth party —a group of young conservatives consisting of himself, Sir Henry Wolff, Arthur Balfour (a future Prime Minister), and Lord Randolph Churchill (a future Chancellor of the Exchequer and the father of Winston Churchill). The fourth party grew out of the Bradlaugh incident—that bewildering wrangle over the conduct of Charles Bradlaugh, radical and atheist—who declined taking the oath of allegiance when elected to Parliament. The fourth party worked on two principles—each member was allowed complete freedom of action, but whenever one of them was attacked the others were expected to defend him. “ Upon these conditions,” writes Winston Churchill in his life of his father, “ was created a parliamentary group which proved, in proportion to its numbers, the most formidable and effective force for the purposes of opposition in the history of the House of Commons.” The group broke up when Lord Salisbury’s Government came into power in 1885, and two of its members were

appointed to high office—Gorst becoming Solicitor-General. Soon after Sir George Grey arrived in September, 1861, to become Governor of New Zealand for a second term, a wellknown Maori chief, Wiremu Tamihana, complained about the liquor that was being smuggled into Waikato. Advantage was taken of this complaint to send a Magistrate into the district with orders to learn all he could of the state of affairs—especially of the growth of the King movement—and to keep the Government informed. Gorst, who had but newly arrived in the colony, was chosen for the mission. The Maoris, however, suspicious of his intentions from the first, refused to recognize him. He was subjected to a mild form of boycott, which, fortunately for him, was not applied to the supplying of food. To employ such an expedient was beneath the Maoris’ conception of political, or for that matter, actual warfare. They were as yet merely suspicious, but when, towards the end of 1862, Gorst was sent to found a school at Te Awamutu, their suspicion changed to alarm. Actually the intention of the Governor was to educate and anglicize a number of young Maoris who might afterwards be expected to renounce allegiance to the Waikato king and remain faithful to the British Government in whatever circumstances may arise. There was already a mission school at Te Awamutu which was now taken over, enlarged, and improved. Its pupils, con-

sisting chiefly of young children, were sent away, and it was announced that in future only big boys would be accepted. “ Formerly,” complained the Maoris, when we wished our young men to go to the mission schools we were told that their lips and tongues had grown too stiff to learn English, and little children only were accepted ; now the lips and tongues of the young men have suddenly become flexible, and they are invited to go to school at Te Awamutu where they will be turned by the Government into policemen.” Many of the chiefs forbade their young men to attend the school, but civilization had certain advantages to offer that were hard to resist. The young men who did attend were taught various trades such as those of carpenter, blacksmith, shoemaker, and tailor. The wares they turned out were in great demand among a primitive people with no other means of obtaining them. Even those two staunch upholders of Maori nationalism, Rewi Maniapoto and Wiremu Tamihana, paid a visit to the school. So great were its attendant advantages that the school might have been allowed to exist unmolested had not the Government persisted in pursuing its propagandist policy still further. All this time Sir George Grey was constructing strategic roads to open out the Waikato. “ I shall not fight against your king with a sword,” he had told the Maoris, “ but I shall dig around him with spades until he falls of his own accord.” It was rumoured that he intended to send a steamer to patrol the Waikato River. The Maoris understood very well that the roads and the steamer were spades with which he was digging around their king, but the chiefs restrained their young men from violence until Grey began to employ yet another implement for the upheaval of their regime. For some time the Natives of Waikato had been printing and distributing a small news sheet, known as the Hokioi, in support of the principles of the King movement. The printing-press had been sent to them as a present by the Emperor of Austria. Hokioi was the name of a fabulous bird, never seen by mortal eyes and known only by its scream which was

supposed to be an omen of war and pestilence. Patara Te Tuhi, the same who came to greet Sir John Gorst at Auckland more than forty years later, was its editor. To combat its influence Grey sanctioned the founding of a rival newspaper ; a printing-press was ordered from Sydney and set up at Te Awamutu. The Government paper was christened Te Pihoihoi Mokemoke, or “ The Sparrow that sitteth alone upon the house-top,” and John Gorst became its editor. The first number of the Pihoihoi came out on February 2, 1863, and its leading article was headed “ The Evil of the King Movement.” Satirical in tone, the article began with a quotation from Jeremiah : “ To the Kings of Judah, sitting upon the throne of David, thus saith the Lord. Execute ye judgment and righteousness, and deliver the spoiled out of the hands of the oppresser ; and do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place.” The article then went on to draw a highly unfavourable comparison between the administrative methods of the Maori king and those laid down in Holy Writ for the guidance of the kings of Judah. It touched a sore point, for the Maori knew that their king was a mere symbol. They complained bitterly that the Pihoihoi “ was written in bad mocking style,” and asked angrily why such a thing was allowed to function in their midst. As one with small claim to knowledge of the Maori race, I suggest with diffidence that it was the use of satire, a thing to which they were unaccustomed, and the ironical tone of the article, which so exacerbated the Maoris’ feelings. Satire is a highly civilized weapon, and they may well have regarded it in the same way as we in our state of enlightenment view the introduction of poison gas into the highly civilized process of modern warfare. The Pihoihoi was circulated widely throughout the Waikato, where it raised a storm of indignation. Rewi Maniapoto sent a message to the Runanga, or Maori council, at Ngaruawahia, asking for guidance as to how he should act, and answer came in the form of a song. Rewi took the song as an incitement to violence. On March 24 he sent a

party to Te Awamutu, who broke into the printing-office and carried off the press with the whole issue (the fifth) of the Pihoihoi, which was in process of being printed. In spite of vigorous resistance by the staff of the newspaper, no one was injured. Von Dadelszen, the printer, had taken off his collar and tie while at work and had left his gold tie-pin sticking in one of the cases of type. The case was taken away, but the pin was found later on, carefully stuck into the wall. When all opposition had been overcome and the press had been removed, the raiding party, before going away, sent one of their number into the house to ask, in all civility, if he might borrow a pot and kettle in which to cook their food. The raiders, indeed, had carried out their act of violence in a most exemplary manner, and no effective reply was forthcoming when a member of the House of Representatives pointed out that if some one had started a violently anti-Catholic paper in the Town of Tralee he might well have met with a worse mishap than befell the staff of the Pihoihoi. Gorst was absent when these events took place, and did not arrive on the scene till everything was over. The experience was not altogether a new one for him. Long ago, when a boy at Preston Grammar School, a paper called The Scholar, of which he was editor, had

been suppressed by the school authorities, curiously enough upon the pretext that it contained obnoxious articles written in a mocking spirit. Though most of the articles in question had been written by his father he did not feel justified in excusing himself on that account. “ Nobody,” he complained many years later, ‘‘has ever employed me to edit a paper since these two failures.” The question of whether he was to remain longer at Te Awamutu was left entirely to his discretion by the Native Minister. Though warned by many Maoris, both friendly and hostile, that he had better consult both his own personal safety and that of his wife and child, who were with him, by leaving the district at once, Gorst remained, hoping that a reaction of Maori opinion, arising either out of disapproval or fear at Rewi’s drastic measures, would take place in favour of the Government. Life had become more difficult than ever. According to Maori custom, he was now looked upon as technically dead. He was addressed as ‘‘You food of Waikato,” and when he travelled on the river by canoe, men standing on the banks called out to the boatman inquiring about the welfare of the corpse he had with him. At the end of three weeks Gorst, who had already sent away his family, realized that he was only risking his own life by staying on. The influence of the firebrand, Rewi Maniapoto, was growing steadily. The young hotheads would soon be out of control. At a meeting of the chiefs Gorst was told that the sacking of his printing-press was the work of all Waikato or, in other words, that the influence of the war party had become supreme. Seeing he could accomplish nothing more, he packed up and went on April 18. It was none too soon. Little more than three weeks later the incident took place which brought on the Waikato war, when an officer and eight other ranks were ambushed and killed at Tataraimaka. Shortly afterwards Gorst returned to England to begin, or rather to con tinue, his distinguished career. Fortythree years passed by before he saw Te Awamutu again.