The gunpoint hero

Clarence Edward Schwartfeger didn’t hesitate when he was told someone had broken into the small Pirongia grocer’s shop where he was as assistant on October 6, 1948.
Glass had been heard breaking about 8.15pm and another employee told Schwartfeger, who grabbed his shotgun and headed for the store.
He found two desperate men looking for food. He turned on the lights and confronted the two men.
For the next 40 minutes he held his nerve, keeping them at gunpoint until police arrived from Te Awamutu, 12km away while the assistant guarded the door.
It was a good thing he did. One was James Daniel Pease - often called an incorrigible rogue - who had broken out of prison only a week before and was the subject of a huge manhunt.
Pease was no stranger to being on the run. He spent his life escaping.
In fact, the reason he was in Auckland prison was for escaping.
Pease, originally from England, was a ship’s steward in his lawful moments but was better known as a burglar and car converter.
Which is how he escaped. Along with Peter Seaton Young, he nicked a prison truck from the gaol quarry (the keys were in the ignition) and drove it off, right past armed guards.
It was found they had already broken into a shed and taken clothing although at trial they both said it was a spur of the moment decision.
At one point they managed to drive through a police cordon in another stolen car and the police spent a great deal of time looking in the wrong places.
After being caught they appeared in court manacled together and with their shoes taken off them (presumably to make it harder to run) and both got a year's hard labour.
Ironically the sentence Pease was serving at the time was for escaping prison.
When he appeared in court he told the judge he was suffering from mental depression.
Shortly after he began his sentence - in the prison he had previously escaped from - he was sent to an Auckland mental hospital - from which he promptly escaped again by simply walking away.
Six days later he was recaptured - in Wellington and ended up in Porirua Mental Hospital. And there the records drop off. Most likely he changed his name when he was released.
Schwartfeger had been born to Franz Gottlieb Schwartfeger and Agnes Martha Schwartfager (nee Burnett) in 1905. He died after an accident between his car and a five tonne truck loaded with metal on May 3 1957, at age 51.
He was buried with his wife Kathleen Alice in Alexandra Cemetery, Pirongia, Waikato.