Local Folk – Marjorie Blythen, A&P champion

My first experience with agricultural shows was at the North Kaipara Show at Paparoa. Mum would be busy making sponge cakes while we kids would be entering flower posies, aqua bowls and the handwriting competitions. Years later when I was married, I started entering the home craft section of the Warkworth Show and after a couple of years I joined the Ladies Committee. It was our job to clean up the Warkworth Transport shed, which was our Exhibitors Pavilion. We’d line the whole building with white paper so it looked clean – it was a massive job. The committee also did all the catering and found the judges for the various sections. I became the Ladies Committee delegate on the general committee and was, for a time, on the Northern District Council of the Royal Agricultural Society. In the 1980s, I gradually took over the role of secretary/treasurer. In those days, the job involved dedicating about a fortnight either side of the show, attending monthly meetings and paying the odd bill throughout the year. Now, it’s nearly a year-round job. It takes about three months to get a show completely wound-up and you have to start making bookings for the following year almost immediately a show ends.

I was born in Kaitaia where my family on my mother’s side has a connection going back three generations. But my real childhood memories are of our farm at Paparoa. Dad served for three years in World War II, mostly in North Africa, and when he returned, he and Mum won a ballot for a small dairy farm on Pahi Road. Frank Blackwell whose sister was the pioneering botantist Ellen Blackwell – she jointly published Plants of New Zealand in 1906 – once owned the farm. We think she may have been responsible for the huge range of plants and fruit on the property. The orchard had all the staples such as apples, plums, pears and peaches, as well as figs, wild grapes, tamarillo, currant and date palms, and persimmons. We sold some of the fruit, but Mum also did an enormous amount of bottling every summer. When she turned 95 a few years ago, we took her back to the old farm. It’s been subdivided into lifestyle blocks but it was lovely to see that many of the old trees were still there.

When I was 14, we moved to a farm on Omaha Flats Road, about where the bread shop is now. I was in the first intake of students at the Mahurangi College in Woodcocks Road but didn’t stay to sit my School Certificate. Instead, I got a job at McDowells Bookshop, where Winscombe Mall is now. McDowells also had a drapery and grocery store. In those days, the social event of the week was the Saturday night dance at one of the local halls. My husband Dean and I knew each other through our families, but it wasn’t until his sister Rosalie set us up on a date that we really started going out together. Dean came from a well-known family in Matakana – his mother was a Vipond and his great uncles established the water-driven timber mill on Matakana Valley Road. I was 19 when we married. I got a job at the Matakana Dairy Co-op Store, while Dean was a driver for Matakana Leigh Transport. Later, he worked for Keith Hay Homes, delivering houses but he eventually went into business with his Uncle Snowy at the mill and they started the timber yard in Warkworth, now Carters. When we moved from Matakana to Warkworth, I worked at the telephone exchange, where Mr Farrell was postmaster. We were desperately saving for a house so to save on rent, we moved into a little cottage where Robertson’s Boatyard is now, which cost 10 shillings week. The ASB gave us a loan for $6200 – one of the first ASB loans out of the Auckland city area – and Brooker and Whitmore built us a brick house in Whitaker Road. Mark was born a few months after we moved in and two months before our seventh wedding anniversary. We stayed a couple of years in Warkworth, but Dean had always hankered for a farm so we sold some land we owned at Omaha Flats, as well as our house, and bought Stuart Smith’s 29-hectare dairy farm on Kaipara Flats Road. We sold the timber yard to Carters in 1986 and bought the neighbouring Dyson property, which added about another 200 hectares. Our timing couldn’t have been worse. There was a financial recession and farm subsidies were removed so the first few years were pretty hard going. We had to forget about the weekly wage and learn to budget around when the money for the beef and sheep came in.

We’d been on a trip to Malaysia six weeks before the timberyard was sold which was lucky, because there weren’t too many holidays in those early years on the farm. Our holidays started to become the trips we’d take transporting cattle to the various beef expos around the country. We were in the Stud Hereford Association by this time and then Dean became an All Breeds judge with the Royal Agricultural Society. In 2004, we won the Champion Hereford in New Zealand. That is about as good as it gets. We were also runner-up in the All Breeds Champion of Champion, missing out to an Angus by just two points. We met a lot of great people through our involvement with the cattle and it wasn’t unusual to do nine shows over the summer. But around 2008 we decided to downsize. We gave up showing altogether four years ago, after 34 years, and Dean has also resigned as a judge after 20 years.

Because I competed in shows, I think I was able to see both sides of what was involved in putting on a good show for both the competitors and the public. There’s always a lot of work in the background that most people are unaware of. The 150th show in 2017 will be my swansong. No-one is indispensable and I am working on shepherding someone into the role, but I don’t intend to sever my ties completely. I’ll still be around to help but it’s time for someone else to shoulder some of the load. As far as what I’ll do, Dean and I are on the Hospice Fundraising Committee and Dean is vice-chair of the Landowners and Contractors Association, so I don’t think we’ll find ourselves twiddling our thumbs! Time to travel, garden and meet up with family and friends sounds pretty good to me. Both our sons are in the NZ Army – Mark is a colonel who is currently serving with the US High Command in Florida, while Anthony is a lieutenant colonel and explosives engineer, based in Wellington. Their tours overseas have given us some worrying times. Between them, they’ve served in Bosnia, East Timor, Laos, Cambodia and Afghanistan. We also have five beautiful grandchildren. You’ve got to make the most of each day because when your number’s up, that’s it.