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For most of his 77 years, Guy Hopper has lived on Whangaparaoa Peninsula. He grew up here with his family when the peninsula was farmland, from hills to beach, supporting the livelihoods of just a few families. The changes he has seen in the area have been dramatic in his lifetime and he has played an active part in this, running Orewa Pacific, a property development company, for many years. Here he reminisces on some events in those early days ….
I was born in 1931 in the General Store and Post Office, the only one in the area, on the corner of what is now Homestead and Whangaparaoa Roads. My mother Edith and father Kenneth moved here in 1926 and mother ran the store. My two sisters and three brothers were born there too. There were 11 or 12 farming families living here then plus one or two baches at Stanmore Bay and Manly, and a boarding house at Arkles Bay, so business wasn’t exactly brisk at the store. There was no transport to speak of, Whangaparaoa Road was just a metal and dirt track, and we had no power until about 1936.
Gradually my parents bought up land to farm adjoining the shop, a 10-acre block, then a 150-acre block off the Polkinghorne family. We finished off with about 260 acres altogether, but only a small area that touched the coast – right in the middle of Manly Beach where the sailing club is now. We used to grow watermelons and pumpkins on the land just behind Manly Beach during the war, but eventually gave it to the Council to make into a reserve. Most of the land was covered in manuka and gorse, 10 or 12 feet high, and that was all cut down and burned. On the flat areas were a lot of big cabbage trees and we eventually cut those down and dragged them away using horses so we could turn it into pasture for dairy farming. We had 130-odd cows – the cowshed was on the right hand side of the entry into what is now Edith Hopper Reserve. I tell the tennis club people that we used to keep our truck on Court 2!
That truck was quite important because my father used it to start the first general goods haulage business in the area, and a passenger service off the peninsula too. We could take two people in the front and two in the back of the truck. Apart from that, people mostly travelled around by bike or on horseback. People also came in from town by ferry to the wharf at Arkles Bay, as the road was still just a clay track. That wharf was there until I fell through it when I was four years old. There was a trolley on it that three or four of us kids would get on and ride and I jumped towards it, missed it and fell right through a gap in the planks, breaking my leg. The wharf was dismantled then because it was considered a danger.
I was just a child during the Second World War, but I can remember the American army being out there at Army Bay where the navy is now. There were about 10,000 of them practising firing, shooting and army manoeuvres, but there wasn’t a lot of security and we could go in and out as we needed to. When the soldiers first started coming in, they were making a lot of waste so father started putting 44 gallon drums out there and picking them up three or four times a week and feeding the contents to our pigs. Where Edith Hopper Reserve is we had over 1000 pigs, all getting fat on American leftovers. The army held dances too and would send a truck down to pick up the ladies, including my older sister, and there’d be about seven of them go out there for the evening. The road was pretty rough then and funnily enough I remember the army wanted to help by building the road and bridge that is now called Penlink, but Council said no.
We kids used to entertain ourselves swimming and so on and some of the older ones used to get into mischief. I remember from time to time jellyfish would invade Manly Beach – they’d be all over the beach – so guys would go down there and have a jellyfish fight.
It was pretty good clean fun by today’s standards. There was just one school, in Stanmore Bay – the same building that’s now used by the Girl Guides. It was a primary school, which was all that most people needed back then. A few would go off the peninsula and board so they could attend secondary school but most finished with primary. About 34 kids were at that school in my day. Alec Craig was the main teacher and his wife taught too. At the age of 14, I spent some time down country working in the Ureweras driving trucks delivering totara fenceposts. The government was developing land down there for returned servicemen. I came back in 1948. Our farm was being subdivided and little bits were being sold off for quarter acre sections, so I helped with that. That’s how my interest in property development began – with selling off the family farm. Sections would sell for say 1000 pounds each and that was a lot of money in those days so they weren’t easy to sell.
I met Vilma in 1950 and we married in 1952. We met at one of the regular dances they used to hold at Silverdale Hall. Mrs Stevens used to play the piano and there was a guitar sometimes too. And of course the occasional drink outside. We lived in a cottage on the farm for the first few years of our married life, because I was milking for my father. Eventually that 50-acre block was sold to the Council for 50,000 pounds. I presented the original deed of sale and the five pound note that was given as a deposit to John Law when he was Mayor and it was hung up in the Council offices. For a few years we moved around, then in 1958 my brothers Tony and Ian, who had started a building supplies contracting business here, asked me to move back to the peninsula and work for them. We carried sand, shingle, scoria, tiles and cement. All the sand and concrete came on barges into Stanmore Bay or on the Jane Gifford up to Silverdale and was unloaded there on the wharf. There was a reasonable amount of work about with people starting to build holiday homes on the beaches. This business grew to become Hopper Developments and my business, Orewa Pacific. I’ve helped develop Pacific Parade and many other areas – I can’t remember all of them.
They were difficult years, involving a lot of hard manual work. I wasn’t sitting in an office – I was out there putting in the roading and drainage. It was hard physical labour, breaking in the land for housing and so on. Vilma and I brought up our five boys here, I’ve been involved in a lot of community groups and clubs, and I don’t intend going anywhere else now. I’ll probably die here. Things are a lot easier living here now, with the transport and so on, but looking back it was a pretty good place to grow up.
