It’s time we acknowledge the help of a particular person when we are writing some of our stories.
Between us, Fran and I have a large collection of books related to New Zealand history - in fact the stranger the book the better.
But few have been as helpful as books written by Eugene Grayland.
If we are short of inspiration, the books written by him never fail to give us an idea.
Eugene Charles Grayland was born in 1916 to Charles and Anne Grayland.
He began writing at primary school and just never stopped. He partly grew up in Hawke’s Bay.
His career was in journalism and he worked for so many newspapers, magazines and journals in various capacities that it would take up most of this post to write them all down.
But along with that, he wrote books. He started his own private printing company Colenso Press and began putting out his own books.
They are not in print now but they do tell compelling stories. New Zealand Disasters, More New Zealand Disasters, Tarawera, Famous New Zealanders, More Famous New Zealanders and New Zealand Sensations are just a few. Many were published along with his wife Valerie who wrote detective novels under the name V Merle Grayland.
But what makes Eugene’s work so special is the detail of his stories. Not just the extraordinary tales he tells, but how much fact is in them.
Some are relatively small disasters by today’s scale but he never fails to use a name if he has it, telling the stories from the human point of view.
And it’s because of this he is still having an impact.
Deb read about the Eskdale floods from 1938 in one of Eugene’s books. In the story was a little line about a man trapped in a house after a slip rammed into it, causing a beam to pin him to his bed.
There wasn't anything about his name or what happened to him, so we went looking. Sure enough - in one newspaper article of the time was William Lee’s name and the fact he was a retired soldier.
That led to a series of events that are ongoing to this day. We found Mr Lee’s grave and it turned out he had no headstone, which led to his family being found and a headstone made for him.
We were honoured to be part of that. But from that came the realisation that there were other veterans who did not have headstones and the nationwide search was on.
Since then more have been properly honoured and had their graves marked.
Eugene himself died in 1976 and is buried in Waikumete Cemetery. The little plaque that marks his place doesn’t reflect the impact his work continues to have.​

The liner Mamari was getting a cleaning. The huge ship had arrived from Australia to load wool before going to London.
But before that she was due to have her hull cleaned and painted and was brought into the Calliope Dock at Devonport in Auckland.
The dock was 33m wide and 170m long, and could take good sized ships. Ships sailed in, the big doors were closed and the seawater drained out.
On November 27, 1906, William Henry Smith was scrubbing (by hand) the hull of the Mamari.
Below him, the water was being pumped out and was down to only a couple of metres.
At the bottom of the dock were chocks made of timber on which the Mamari would rest.
She was just about ready to settle into these. All along the ship, workers were getting stuck in, about 50 men in all, some working from boat decks at water level.
On her deck was Captain Moffatt watching.
The sudden loud noise startled them all. And the water began to rise furiously.
Smith found himself caught in the midst of a whirlpool with huge logs in it. One caught him in the right leg, smashing it and he sank.
All along the ship, men were being swept into the dangerous water, filled with logs and far too close to the huge ship. Some were being pummeled up against the sides.
From around the dock other men came running, reaching out to pull men out of the water.
Some of the chocks that the Mamari was supposed to settle into had shifted, causing the ship to lurch forward and churn up the water.
Smith was rescued - dragged from the now foamy water with a broken leg but as he was he was hit in the head by another piece of timber.
He managed to drag himself out of the water onto dry land.
Orders were quickly given to refill the dock to allow the listing ship to float.
And a roll call of the men began.
Thirty men had been badly injured, two could not be found even when divers went into the unsettled water to look for them.
The ferry steamer Osprey was requisitioned as a hospital ship and medical staff came to help.
The Mamari was put out to sea and anchored in the harbour to allow the dock to be searched.
It took hours to then drain the water again and find the missing men.
An inquiry said the Mamari was too big for the dock and the Auckland harbour board was criticised.
Three men had died, William Craig May, Rupert Clark and John (sometimes James) Mayall.
May and Mayall are buried at Waikumete Cemetery. Clark is buried at O’Neill’s Point Cemetery.​

There is an old saying that court trials are as much theatre as justice and it’s certainly true in the case of Thomas Hall, where crowds lined up for seats and tickets had to be sold to see his trial.
Thomas Hall was born in Hull, Yorkshire, England, but, like with much of his life, there are few records that give us precise facts. His father Thomas Williamson Hall and wife Sarah Young came to Timaru in New Zealand about 1865 and Thomas was about 16 or 17.
He worked on a sheep station, managing it for his uncle John Hall who would later be premier of New Zealand.
Thomas didn’t like it however, his family was well enough off and he did not like the harshness of sheep country life. He reinvented himself as a businessman but was, in fact, a conman.
He was described as good looking, talked well and was always ready for any amusing enterprise.
Thomas became a partner in a land agents and lending money business and began courting Kate Emily Espie. He married her on May 26, 1885.
She was the stepdaughter of the rich Captain Henry Cain.
Thomas drew up Kate’s will within a month of marrying her. And a month later he took out two life insurance policies, one was for £3,000 payable on her death; the other, for the same amount, was payable if she died in seven years.
Henry died a year later and Thomas had appeared a dutiful son-in-law to him. Cain had frequently mentioned that the whisky Thomas gave him was the reason he was sick.
After Henry’s death Thomas took on a live-in companion for Kate, Margaret Houston.
Kate gave birth to their son Nigel and fell ill, and it worried the family doctor Patrick McIntrye who could not work out what was wrong.
Thomas was just as caring with Kate as he had been with Henry, preparing food and tea for her. When a visiting friend accidentally drunk some tea meant for Kate, she fell ill herself, And the rumours began.
It was then Dr McIntyre suspected antimony poisoning, and once a sample of Kate’s stomach contents were analysed, his suspicions were confirmed.
Both Thomas and Margaret were arrested on a charge of attempted murder. But not without some drama. Thomas was caught with the poison in his pocket. He tried to throw it into the fire but was wrestled to the ground by police.
His business also went bankrupt and was discovered the bank accounts were badly overdrawn and he was also charged with fraud. He had been shuffling money around to make it appear he was more successful. But he badly needed money - and the insurance policy was attractive.
The crowds at the depositions hearing in Timaru were huge. The evidence was overwhelming against Thomas, but Margaret’s was circumstantial.
At trial she was acquitted while Thomas was found guilty (in just eight minutes) and sentenced to life imprisonment.
But by then there was concern over Henry’s death and the body was exhumed to find unmistakable signs of poisoning. Thomas was charged with that too and found guilty but it was overturned on appeal.
Hall served his term and was released from Mount Eden prison in 1907.
A relative gave him an annuity to get out of New Zealand and stay away. He was believed to have gone to Australia and lived there under an assumed name.
The day and place of his death are unknown as Thomas Hall but he is believed to have been using the name Peter Newstead and died in the seaside town of Yeppoon.​

During war time extraordinary measures are sometimes taken that were supposed to be for the public safety.
Things like censorship of mail and prosecuting people for making seditious statements all led to a type of hysteria about doing the wrong thing and that it would harm New Zealand’s war efforts.
In part, it was also to control a public reaction to conscription which was not popular.
It led to an odd law, called the anti-shouting law.
Those conscripted soldiers had a discipline problem. Quite a number did not want to be there and drinking became an issue.
And it was made worse by people who wanted to buy them a drink because they were serving their country. Which led to no shouting drinks or the anti shouting law.
The War Regulations were enacted in 1914 allowing the government to make other laws as emergency regulations to keep law and order. The Anti-Shouting law was part of it.
The temperance movement had been in New Zealand since the 1870s with clubs springing up around the country. Most of them did not last long.
When Wellington lawyer Richard Clement Kirk founded one in Petone in 1905 it was expected to go the way of all the rest. And it did within a couple of years.
Pundits quipped that the men that founded temperance leagues were the sort that would not shout a round anyway.
The law came into effect in 1916 and publicans had to enforce it much to the despair of their patrons. People could not even hand over the money to someone rather than pay themselves.
Their customers quickly dropped away - pub owners said their trade dropped by a third in days.
And the quickest way to get around it was to buy alcohol and drink at home, meaning people were still getting drunk, just somewhere different.
Then the persecutions began. Plainclothes constables were sent into pubs to check the law was being followed.
There were loud protests, most notably from the trade unions and the Licensed Victuallers’ Association.
Over time the enthusiasm from police to keep going faded. There were, after all, so many more important things to do.
Officially the law was repealed in 1920 - it had lasted only four years.
But while it had not served its purpose - the lawmakers tried a new measure modeled after an Australian law - of 6pm closing.
The six o clock swill that saw huge numbers of rounds bought just before the deadline and men stumbled home wildly drunk continued until 1965.
And Richard Clement Kirk who tried and failed to keep a temperance league going in Petone, had been born in Mongonui in 1861, went on to be mayor of Petone for a couple of terms. He died in 1927 and is buried in the old Taita Cemetery.
Photo by John Arano.​

In the space of a few weeks, one Kiwi soldier won three medals for bravery.
Reginald Stanley Judson was a boilermaker in Auckland in 1914 when war broke out and he went to enlist and was overseas in 1916, going to Egypt.
Judson was born in Wharehine, Northland, New Zealand to Edgar and Emma on September 29, 1881 and trained as a mechanical engineer and worked as a boiler maker.
He married Ethel May Grice at Mareretu, Northland in 1905 and they had four children.
Judson served with the New Zealand Rifle Brigade and the Auckland Infantry Regiment in France but was wounded severely early on and was evacuated to England to recover. He did not return to the front until May 1918.
Now a sergeant, in July he led an attack on the enemy positions at Hébuterne, a village in north France during which he rescued six men. For that he was given the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
On August 16 he led a bayonet charge against a machine gun post earning the military medal. Only 10 days later he went on a series of raids on German trenches, at one oint he climbed a parapet and ordered an enemy machine gun crew of about 12 to surrender. When they fired on him he threw in a hand grenade, killed two and captured the machine gun.
He was awarded the Victoria Cross. The citation said his prompt and gallant action not only saved many lives but also enabled the advance to continue unopposed.
Judson had won all three medals within 33 days.
He was the victim of a gas attack a month or so later and was sent to recover. He then went to officer training.
He returned to New Zealand in 1919 and was discharged before enlisting in the New Zealand Staff Corps serving in Auckland and New Plymouth.
After a divorce from Ethel he married Kate Marion Lewis and had a daughter.
He suffered from ill health due to wounds suffered during the war - he had shrapnel lodged in his chest and abdomen - and retired from the army - going on to work at Mount Albert Grammar and tried his hand at local politics, serving on the Auckland City Council as a Citizens’ and Ratepayers’ Association councillor.
He re-enlisted at the outbreak of World War Two by falsifying his date of birth and served at home.
At the end of the war he moved to Mangonui in Northland to farm - working also as a justice of the peace and a coroner, retiring in the 1950s to Kohimarama in Auckland.
He died on August 26, 1972 and was buried at Waikumete cemetery.​

When Joel Polack moved to the Bay of Island he built a magnificent home at the northern end of the beach at Kororāreka (Russell), calling his estate Parramatta. Very shortly after he built New Zealand’s first brewery.
The legend goes that the first beer brewed here was by Captain James Cook made from rimu and mānuka leaves on Resolution Island and apparently was horrible.
But Polack opened the first commercial brewery in 1835. He also put up businesses and was hugely successful.
However there is no record of what that beer was like.
Joel Samuel Polack was born on March 28, 1807, to Solomon and Sarah Polack in London. Originally from what was then Holland, they have moved to Ireland then to England.
Joel worked in the War Office before beginning to travel, going to South Africa and Mauritius, America and Australia before coming to New Zealand in 1831.
Originally he lived in Hokianga and explored much of the area and began talking to local Māori about growing and harvesting crops to sell.
He moved to the Bay of Plenty in 1832 and bought land and set up businesses including his brewery.
Polack became the first man to take part in a duel in New Zealand when in 1837 he and his bitter rival, innkeeper Ben Turner had a gun battle on Kororareka Beach which ended with Turner being wounded.
Then in 1842 they had another duel in which Polack was shot in the elbow and Turner received a bullet wound to the cheek. Polack himself admitted to having a bad temper.
Polack was an advocate of an organised system of colonisation and warned that anything else would see Māori society ruined.
He was well respected by Māori who called him Porake (Polack) or Waewaeroa (Long-legs).
On a return trip to England, he sold some of his own land at auction - the first time land was sold in quarter acre lots - and wrote two books about his time in pre-colonial New Zealand.
HIs businesses faltered during the first conflict between the British and Māori and his house was destroyed, losing all his personal writings, sketches and collection of rare paintings and books.
He moved to Auckland, restarted his businesses and went into shipping, trading with America. He continued to buy land and became vice consul for the United States.
In 1950 he went to North America - going into house building.
It was there that he married Mary Hart.
Polack died in San Francisco on 17 April 1882, and is buried in Cypress Lawn cemetery, Colma, having been moved there in 1946 from Laurel Hill cemetery.
He was considered one of New Zealand’s first Jewish settlers.​

One of the first international volunteers to be killed in the Spanish Civil War was a Kiwi.
Griffith Campbell MacLaurin started his life as a scholar and ended it as a soldier.
Born to Kenneth Campbell MacLaurin and Gwladys Rogers Jones in October 1909 in Auckland, his family was scholarly. An uncle was a professor of mathematics at Victoria University and another was an analytical chemist.
Griff was educated at Hamilton High School and Auckland Grammar, a top history student, skilled debater and a crack marksman with the grammar school’s officer cadets.
He gained an MA and was admitted to study for an honours degree in mathematics but began to struggle with his social life.
It was a trip to Germany in 1933 that changed his life. He was horrified at what he saw under the new Nazi regime and it turned his conservative political opinion to the left.
But he also discovered alcohol and what would then be considered subversive literature and barely scraped through his studies.
He managed to get fired from his first teaching job so opened a bookshop which became a success with left wing sympathisers.
He became a communist and when the general secretary of the British Communist Party told him they were getting up a small group of volunteers to head to Spain, Griff agreed.
The Spanish Civil War between the democratically elected government and nationalist rebels became a battle between competing ideas with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supporting the rebels.
The Soviet Union - and communists world wide - supported the government. Which was how Griff ended up being involved. He had also been trained as a cadet to use a light machine gun which was useful.
He and others like him were attached to a French unit of the International column.
On November 8, 1936, he marched into Madrid with the other soldiers and volunteers from all over Europe.
Two days later he was fighting, helping to defend a city.
He and another Kiwi volunteer Steve Yates were killed on November 1, 1936, while manning their machine gun to cover a retreating unit in the Casa del Campo. Madrid was to hold out until early 1939. Four more New Zealanders would die in the war in Spain, the forerunners of the thousands killed fighting fascism in the Second World War.
As Griff was not considered a member of any New Zealand armed force he is not memorialised for his military action however he is on the online cenotaph record.
Sadly, there are no known records for where he was buried and his grave site is unknown. It was an unfortunate truth that some who fell in battle were buried where they fell and the whereabouts was lost or later moved and no records made.​

Poor Henry McKegney did not have much in life and he died a cold lonely death.
Henry was a swagman. He wandered, primarily in the Hawke’s Bay, Manawatu and Wairarapa area taking any job he could do on any station.
Swagging wasn’t easy. You had to be prepared to sleep rough, to be turned away nastily and if something in the area was ever stolen, you were the first to be looked at by police.
Still, it was a semi-honourable profession, with many men doing what they could to find work.
The trick was always to be humble and nice, and hopefully someone might give you some bread, or tobacco or let you bed down in the barn for the night.
Henry had been born in 1864 to Henry snr and wife Mary. But he knew tragedy early on. His father was killed while felling a tree in 1885 leaving four sons and then a daughter who was born after he died.
Mary died in 1909 and Henry jnr went on to marry Edith Jones in 1919 in Foxton.
It doesn’t look like they had a happy marriage, within a few years Henry was wandering taking jobs on stations around the bottom of the North Island.
Henry got himself into trouble now and then but managed to find his way in life in a solitary fashion.
They did manage to have a couple of children.
By 1933 Edith was petitioning the courts for Henry failing to pay maintenance. And the court ordered that he pay however whether anyone was able to collect is unknown.
Then in July 1936 Henry was found dead.
John Morrison the station manager at Tuatane in Herbertville was out riding the back of the cattle run when he thought the cows were acting funny.
He headed over to a patch of reeds and found Henry lying dead. His swag was by his side and his hat had fallen off.
There was nothing to show how he died and there were no signs of violence.
Henry had been at Bert White’s station in Porangahau a few days earlier. He had stayed the Friday night but there was no work for him and so on the Saturday he was given a bit of food and he headed off.
He was found about five miles from White’s station.
He was 72 and carrying a very heavy swag of about 60lb.
At the inquest he was found to have a little money and papers showing that he had been working at various places around the Wairarapa region.
A doctor said Henry had been under his care for a couple of years and had a severe form of heart disease and that it was likely what killed him.
Henry was buried in a lonely grave at the Mangatera Cemetery in Dannevirke.​

​All of us have seen one, there are examples of the great New Zealand bungalow in every town.
Two or sometimes three bedrooms, a front porch and often a bay window. Usually made with a weatherboard style finish.
It is considered the most prevalent housing design in the country and many of them have survived, often with modifications like the porch being enclosed for more room.
The reason we have so many of them is due to Samuel Hurst Seager.
Samuel was born on June 26, 1855, in London to Jane Wild and Samuel Hurst Seager snr, coming to New Zealand in 1870. They settled in Christchurch where his uncle Edward William Seager was the superintendent at Sunnyside Asylum.
HIs father started a building contractor firm and after his death Samuel continued it.
In 1877 he built the first permanent Canterbury College buildings to the design by B W Mountfort’s who he then worked for as an architectural draughtsman. He studied at Canterbury College.
He went back to London to study further and on his return to Christchurch won a design competition for the Queen Anne-styled Christchurch municipal buildings.
In December 1887 he married Hester Connon and he settled into a job as a lecturer.
In 1899, he designed and built a home for his brother in law in Cashmere. It introduced the design of a bungalow. In part it combined an English arts and craft movement with the idea of the California bungalow.
It was an unique residential development of timber cottages in a garden setting.
In partnership with Cecil Wood from 1906 until about 1912, the workers' dwelling they designed were built as part of the 1906 Heretaunga settlement in Petone, while their model worker's dwelling was exhibited at the 1906–7 New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch.
Seager also campaigned for better standards in World War One memorials organising designs and became the official architect for battlefield memorials and he designed the ones at Longueval and Le Quesnoy in France, Messines in Belgium and Chunuk Bair in Gallipoli.
He also became internationally acclaimed for lighting in art galleries as well as advocating for the preservation of historic buildings.
He moved to Wellington in 1929 then to Sydney where he died on October 5, 1933..
There are memorials to him in every city in New Zealand, where a bungalow still sits.
Picture from the Godber Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library.

We all like a good beer, especially on a hot summer's day. But have you ever heard the story about how beer - or rather too much of it - led to a New Zealand Prime Minister?
The election of 1893 was hotly contested and in particular in the Waimata electorate, where Richard Monk won.
But there were swiftly allegations of bribery. In particular that one polling place - Tuapaki - was offering beers to voters and the allegations said the beer was in return for votes and that at one hotel - the Falls Hotel in Henderson - people were shouted beers and told to vote by Ernest, the son of Richard Monk.
It led to an inquiry in the Supreme Court in which one witness said there was ‘oceans’ of beer.
A lot of the talk was about who had done what, were the votes actually bought if the beer could be considered refreshments?
There were similar allegations about money being offered although it was unclear whether that was for the beer or for the votes.
It caused quite the fuss. Even if it could be considered innocent it looked bad and newspapers of the day covered the inquiry in great detail.
In the end the election result was overturned and a by-election ordered.
William Ferguson Massey had lost the election in Franklin in the same election. But he was asked to stand again for the byelection.
He stood and won - and the man who would be one of our greatest prime minister entered Parliament.
Massey had been born in Ireland on March 26, 1856 to John and his wife Mary Anne.
His family came to New Zealand in 1863 although Massey stayed behind to finish schooling and came out in 1870.
The family were farmers and Massey worked on farms before leasing his own 100 acre property.
He married the daughter of a neighbouring farmer, Christina Allen Paul in 1882.
His original wooden farm house burnt down and he bought another home in what would become Massey Road in Mangere.
In his first term in Parliament Massey was in opposition to the Liberal government of the day but he was a conscientious worker.
In 1909 he announced the creation of the Reform Party which in 1911 won more seats than the Liberal Party but did not hold outright power. The Liberals held power for a year until they lost a vote of confidence.
Massey was sworn in as Prime Minister in 1912 and guided New Zealand through the war years, only retiring in 1924 when cancer forced him to give up some of his duties.
He died in 1925 and was buried on 14 May at Point Halswell at the entrance to Wellington Harbour.
Massey University was named for him.
Picture by Engin Akyurt.​