Governor William Hobson
Bill Hobson was a character, there’s no doubt about that. I was at Waitangi when the Treaty was being signed in 1840. It was a summer’s day and we were having a hard time of it in the hot sun. He caught my eye and got one of his officials to bring me over a note. I unfolded the piece of paper. He’d written, “Get me out of here, Mr Soper.”
I approached the signing table and said, “Excuse me, sir, but I wonder if you could give an interview to mark this occasion.”
“Very well,” he sighed, “if you insist.”
We caught a ferry over to Russell and retired to the lounge bar at the Duke of Marlborough Hotel.
“Cheers, Baz,” he said, lifting the cold refreshing beer to his lips.
“Cheers.”
He took a long draught, and said, “What do you make of all this Treaty signing business?”
I said, “You are laying the foundations for a colonial state which will last the test of time.”
He took ill not long afterwards and returned to England, where he died. That’s politics for you.
Governor Robert Fitzroy
Bob Fitzroy succeeded Hobson but he never really settled into the job. He was a stranger to the press gallery on account of the fact he didn’t drink. It cost him a lot of support.
He’d had an interesting life, captaining a ship which took a young scientist called Charles Darwin around the world for five years. Darwin formed a crackpot theory about the evolution of the species but nothing ever came of it.
I got on well with one of Fitzroy’s officials, an ambitious young man called Winston Peters. “You’ll go far,” I told him.
“I’ll drink to that,” he said. We spent a lot of time at the Duke of Edinburgh Hotel in Wellington.
Governor George Grey
Grey by name, but not by nature! He succeeded Fitzroy and quickly won the colonials over with a war that gave them valuable tracts of land. He was hard-headed in politics and colourful outside of it. He built a house on Kawau Island, and brought in wallabies and zebras! The zebras died, but that’s animal welfare for you.
I had many a drinking session with him at Kawau. One day he wagered a case of wine that I wouldn’t be able to translate one of his medieval manuscripts, which he collected, from Latin to English, no matter how long I tried. I’m still trying to this day. Heather tells me I can do anything I set my mind to but I’m not so sure. I’ve only got as far as page 1.
Premier Richard Seddon
I gave him his enduring nickname. It came to me one night when I was drinking with him at Queen’s Hotel at Kūmara, which he owned. “To the King and his Queen,” I said, raising a toast. Next thing you know everyone was calling him King Dick.
He was a good premier. Together with Winston, he introduced the Old-age Pensions Act. Winston vowed that it would never be repealed for as long as he lived.
Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage
I don’t think Mickey had the intellectual capacity to understand exactly what he was doing. “The welfare state.” What does that even mean? It’s caused a lot of harm over the years.
Prime Minister Keith Holyoake
Kiwi Keith was a real character. At one late-night session after dinner at the Prince of Wales Hotel in Auckland, I said to him, “Look, I’ll pick up the bill for the meal. You pick up the bill for the wine.”
He thought that was a pretty good deal. He excused himself to go to the bathroom and slipped out the back door.
“Can’t believe you fell for that one,” Winston said to me later. We had a good laugh about it and we’re still laughing today. Dear old Winston. We’ve had our ups and downs over the years but he’s still going strong at 210.
