Man alone Stan Graham was shot dead 80 years ago today. The author of his story marks the anniversary
I first heard the story of Stanley Graham after Erica and I arrived from Australia in early 1970. We were thinking of a year or so working holiday, but we liked Parnell, made friends, and in 1972 I fell in with the film-maker’s co-op Alternative Cinema which, if I recall correctly, was named by Robin Scholes.
In that now dimming past, we all wanted to be film-makers; now many of us – too many of us ‑ have relapsed into writing semi-autobiographical novels. (là!)
I was told the Graham story from Michael Glynn. He was a South Islander, and fellow member of the co-op. He outlined the drama: West Coast farmer Stan Graham had shot and killed seven men, including four policemen, in October 1941. New Zealand's largest armed manhunt caught up with him 12 days later. He was shot and killed.
Michael and I had a natural affinity (beyond our quick friendship), which enabled us to work together, and we knew that at the edge of living memory, the time was ripe for a documentary. It was an opportunity we could not disregard.
We also agreed we would make our film (and it was film, 16mm, no rushes until after filming) by forgoing the standard scripted, voice-over narrative. We would rely solely on the voices of those participants who agreed to be filmed or taped.
That may sound like tying one hand behind your back, but we believed it would force the viewer to look at and listen to, to engage with, those who were shot at and saw men die.
At that time the NZBC was commissioning a few freelance documentaries. In 1974 there were 200 applications. The money stretched to twelve. Michael and I went to Wellington and spoke to the NZBC’s commissioning editor Michael Scott-Smith. Our experience was limited and he didn’t know us from a bar of soap, but Scott-Smith, knowing we were intending a somewhat risky innovation, gave us the money. It barely covered expenses but it did the job.
Our next big lucky break ‑ happenstance, pure and simple ‑ was finding Dave Stevenson and his cache of photographs. Dave had been a professional photographer in 1941 and a member of the Hokitika Home Guard, which was called out to guard Graham’s house and other buildings before the Police and Army could get their men on the ground.
We found Dave, growing orchids in Christchurch, with over 100 unpublished photos taken throughout the manhunt. He was happy to let us use them. I cannot now imagine what our little film - or the book I went on to write - would have looked like without Dave’s photos. He was also willing to go on camera to recount his experience and that cooperation brought a few others to the table.
Two other members of Alternative Cinema accompanied us to Hokitika for our three weeks of filming in the spring of 1974: Geoff Steven, camera, and Philip Dadson, sound. They understood what Michael and I were after and their professionalism put the material we needed on the spools.
Our biggest snake was waiting for us in Wellington when we finally submitted a half-hour final cut. Michael Scott-Smith had been replaced by a turkey, who wanted standard, voice-over product. The stand-off lasted over two years. Our film was finally shown on TV outside prime time. It had its awkward moments, but these, as we had anticipated, actually helped hold the viewer’s attention.
The documentary took its title, Stanley, from a shot of the solitary name on Graham’s grave. A 16mm final print is held by Ngā Taonga, the audiovisual archive for Aotearoa. They apparently believe it would be too expensive to transfer it to an accessible, digital format.
It was, of course, made clear to us, from the place of the dead, that there would be no more commissioned work from the present management. End of film-making careers.
So I wrote Manhunt: The story of Stanley Graham. Mike Newell – later to direct Four Weddings and a Funeral – used it as the basis for his 1981 movie on the Graham killings, Bad Blood.
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Jack Thompson played him right in Bad Blood ‑ a bomb ready to go off. And yet he wasn't that different to many other men with a short fuse. I have known others like him. Friends and family usually keep them in check but in Graham’s case a folie à deux syndrome developed between him and his wife.
When I wrote the book Dorothy Graham was still alive and living in Christchurch under an older family name. My publisher was nervous. Read the book carefully and you will see that the first shot fired at Constable Ted Best has a question mark over it. In the film Bad Blood, although that act is not openly depicted, the finger points even more at Dorothy Graham. I gave my word that I would not name who told me that Ted Best told him Mrs Graham fired that shot. All I can say is that my source was impeccable.
Writing the book produced its own run of snakes and ladders. I needed the Police file but was told only a few documents from the coroner’s inquest had been retained. National Archives’ front office in Wellington confirmed this. I don’t really remember why, but I went out to Lower Hutt to the Archives bulk storage warehouse.
A little old man in a grey dust coat, who seemed to have the place to himself, came to the door and listened to my query. He led me into the maze and there showed me a row of cardboard cartons. Bingo! There it was: the complete file.
“So …” I ventured, “could I get photocopies of all this?”
I remember the way he pursed his lips before mentioning that photocopies were ten cents a page. In the end it cost me something north of $300 (a lot of hay in the mid-‘70s), but that file allowed me to write a detailed, definitive account of who did what when during the manhunt. Never mind what someone in Hokitika reckons they heard Grandpa say when they were a kid – this is what Grandpa and his mates said on the day.
Years later I was told that old fellow at Archives had fought in the International Brigade during the Spanish civil war. Camarada te saludo.
By the time the book was ready for a publisher, the project had gathered its own momentum. Andrew Brown, a New Zealander who had produced successful television dramas in the UK got wind of what I was doing. He secured the rights to Manhunt, and brought on board Mike Newell.
In December 1980 I flew from Hobart to a script conference in Sydney with Brown and Newell. On the plane I sat next to a comradely oldie and told him the story of mad, bad Stan. When I finished, he remarked on Graham’s long-term disputes with his neighbours: “So there was a bit of bad blood in the matter.”
In Sydney, Brown told me he did not want to use Manhunt as a title. I had never been happy with Manhunt myself. Without thinking, I blurted: “Bad Blood."
Brown and Newell merely looked at each other and I knew we had a title. Two novels by Manhunt author Howard Willis, What Comrade Oldie Knew (a comic caper masquerading as a crime novel set in Perth over the summer of 2010-11, the driest on record) and Playing With Mischief (which deals with an early 1960s country town beset by an arsonist; Ronald Hugh Morrieson would recognise the turf) are available online.
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Postscript from ReadingRoom literary editor Steve Braunias: Howard Willis emailed me his story out of the blue on October 8, and wrote, "It is eighty years today since Graham shot all the cops." It was good to hear from him and his direct prose. I have long been a fan of his tense and sometimes eccentric 1979 book Manhunt, still the definitive account of the Stan Graham killings in a farming valley near Hokitika in 1941, and the basis for the 1981 movie Bad Blood, which Willis co-wrote. Neither the book or the film were sympathetic to Graham but neither did they travesty him as some kind of monster. Both stared at him with a steady gaze, and restaged as closely as they could the day when four police officers came to his house – Graham was wearing a rugby jersey, his wife shooed their two kids out the back door - and he shot them dead, then killed a passerby who arrived on the scene. Graham fled for the bush. Two nights later, he shot and killed two civilians during a massive manhunt. He crept around for a fortnight until a policeman sent from Auckland spotted him; acting on orders, he shot on sight. The sheer arithmetic of the slaughter – seven murdered, one executed – make it a historic event, alongside Aramoana and the Bain killings in the dark museum of 20th Century New Zealand death. All of these exhibits have their own particular and deeply felt resonance and with Graham it was the sheer deranged masculinity of it, set in dark New Zealand bush.
As such, his 12 days on the run was a case of life imitating art in the shape of classic New Zealand novel, Man Alone. John Mulgan's book was published in 1939. Its central drama was the shooting of a farmer, and the killer's escape, into the bush. Two years later, Graham went about it for real – here was the actual man alone, surviving in the wilderness. To watch Bad Blood is to watch the film that was never made of Man Alone. All of it serves as New Zealand metaphor: these are white men alone, wild colonial boys up against it in an unpeopled land. Māori are nowhere to be seen in the story of Stanley Graham. His story and the story of Johnson in Man Alone are brutal post-settler narratives of living by your wits as a Pākehā, holding onto the only thing that makes sense in the bush: a gun.
As Willis recounts in Manhunt, when the cops arrived at Graham's house that Wednesday afternoon, they came for his guns. He had nothing else left of value. His farm was going all to hell. He accused neighbours of poisoning his pedigree cattle, and made threats. He was losing it. Constable Ted Best – one of Graham's victims – visited in June. He gave an acute psychiatric assessment in his report, when he wrote, "Graham is generally considered locally to be going mental." And suddenly there were four cops, barging right on in his own home, humiliating him in front of his wife and children, demanding his guns, insulting his pride, treating him like dirt, like he was nothing. Howard Willis reveals in his story that an impeccable source told him that Graham's wife also fired on the cops. Picture that: husband and wife standing together against intruders in their home, the two of them defiant, blasting away at the cops. No doubt it all happened very fast and when the shooting stopped he ran for cover. There wasn't anything glamorous or exciting about his days and nights at large: Graham was a homeless person, sleeping rough. He camped in the hollow of a tree trunk, where he cooked eggs in milk; he also shot a calf, used a knife to remove meat, and fried steaks. After he returned to his house two nights later, and shot two more men, locals wondered why he'd come back to the scene of the crime - did he come for a hidden stash of money, was there some other compelling reason? I don't think there was anything mysterious about it. He wouldn't have known his wife and kids had been taken away. Probably he just wanted to see them. That's the thing about men alone: they don't want to alone. It's not a choice, a lifestyle. It's the end of the line, an exile. Graham put it a better way, in laconic West Coastese, on the night he tried to come home, and said to the men who were guarding it, "It's a bugger when a man can't get into his own house."
Police issued this portrait of Graham when he was a fugitive: "A farmer – European native of New Zealand, in his 41st year, 5'4"or 5'5" in height, strong build with muscular limbs, very fresh complexion inclined to be ruddy, clean shaven, blue eyes, brown hair going bald, nose slightly twisted to one side, artificial teeth." Yes, quite a catch; really just another hard-working Coaster, nothing special, and Willis deflates the stories of Graham as an expert shot, describing him as "only a little better than the average". His wife said in a whisper at the inquest, "He seemed to be quite cheerful that morning." Married for 10 years, a father of two, who shot and killed two policemen with one shot. He forced his third victim, a dying Constable Best, to sign a "confession" that he had come to murder Graham. Best was shot in the right hand, and signed it with his left; the note is published in Manhunt and Best's signature is a pitiful sight. The fourth officer, Sergeant William Cooper, ran down the front path but was shot in the back: "As he went down, Graham fired again…Cooper was probably dead before he hit the ground."
Willis opens his book with an astrological reading of Graham's character. It's an idiosyncratic flourish but the book is mainly otherwise earnest and meticulous. He misses only small minor details, like the Press report during the manhunt that when Graham found shelter in a hut (just like Johnson in Man Alone), owner Charlie Smith knew someone had been there because the door was shut – Charlie always kept it ajar for his cat. There's also a report I found in an online album of West Coast history, sourced by Greymouth mayor Tony Kokshoorn, in which the officer who shot Graham dead, James Quirke, makes a shocking claim. He begins his account of the shooting, "With dusk setting in, I aimed my rifle. He dropped to the ground. On arriving beside him, he said, 'You got me. I've paid in fill.' I then noticed the dead Sergeant Cooper's Colt .32 pistol several inches from his right hand. I moved it further away with my foot." It’s much the same story Quirke gave at the inquest, and to reporters – except that this version has an addendum. "My companions appeared in the position I was in when I shot. An attempt was made by one of them to shoot the man on the ground [Graham]. I brought up my reloaded rifle and warned that I would shoot at him if he pulled the trigger. With that, he slowly lowered his rifle." Graham died the next morning. Manhunt includes a photo of him on the mortuary table.
Between Willis making his 1974 documentary Stanley and writing his 1979 book Manhunt, another telling of the Graham killings appeared when that peerless social historian Jack Perkins produced a 1977 Spectrum documentary for National Radio. The half-hour programme has one special quality in its favour: the voices of old Coasters who knew Graham, and took part in the manhunt. Everyone talks in slow, quiet, sing-song speech, and always g-drop their "-ing" suffixes, eg, "He had his cows penned up around the house and there was that much cow manure that they were runnin' back into the cowshed." When Graham was finally captured, locals celebrated and "the school bells were ringin'."
Manhunt refers to a 1943 folksong written in Graham's honour. Spectrum go one better, or worse: they play a recording of it. It ends
I wish we had a million more like good old Stan today
The Japs would never have the guts to come onto our shores.
The songwriter, Jim Case from Kumara, was plainly a fucking idiot. Soldiers don't care who they kill and Graham regarded all of his victims as enemies. Armed and dangerous, a "mental" case with his false teeth and sense of failure, he was less an invading army than a retreating force but he had no reasonable cause to massacre the seven men aged between 26 and 54. The Äshburton Guardian reported the funeral of Constable Jordan: "The casket bearing the remains of Frederick William Jordan reached Ashburton by train this morning. Senior Sergeant JF Cleary and four constables from the Ashburton Police Station met the train, wearing ceremonial white gloves, and the casket was placed in a hearse, which conveyed it to the chapel at the corner of Cass and Victoria Streets, where the constables again acted as bearers." Elsewhere in its October 10 edition, the newspaper's daily casualty list from fighting in World War II carried the names of Ian Macpherson of Timaru (died while taken prisoner) and Lennox Douglas of Oamaru (presumed killed in action). There's no other information about the fallen soldiers; in peacetime, on a Wednesday afternoon in the dreamy West Coast, "good old Stan" went at the cops with his 7mm Mauser, and Willis was able to reconstruct it in Manhunt: "Tulloch and Jordan were in the passage when they were shot. Jordan was in front of Tulloch. The bullet passed right through both their bodies to strike the wall beside the front door. Its velocity had been reduced so much by this stage that the bullet bounced off the wall and on to the floor. The force of the shot flung the two constables back so that Tulloch ended up with his head on the doorstep with Jordan lying beside him. Not surprisingly, Tulloch's wound was considerably larger than Jordan's. The bullet had passed close to the hearts of both men."
Graham had been shot twice during the manhunt. His shoulder wound had gone septic and so had his left hand, which swelled to twice its size. Searchers who found the cattle he shot for meat discovered that he'd spilled a bottle of medical disinfectant. Gangrene had set in. He was as good as dead by the time Quirke shot him. Graham was placed on a farm gate, and carried to an army truck. They gave him a bed of straw. He was transferred to an ambulance and a nurse made him a hot water bottle for his last ride.
Manhunt by Howard Willis (Whitcoulls, 1979), later reissued as Bad Blood (Fontana, 1981), is sometimes available in second-hand bookstores.
