Local Folk – Bob Edwards

Imagine a suitcase falling from your car in Hobson Street, in downtown Auckland, and traffic coming to a standstill while motorists, passengers and pedestrians helpfully retrieved the contents. For 106-year-old Bob Edwards, of Summerset Village in Warkworth, it doesn’t take imagination. The day it happened, a tram was coming the other way and he remembers how it stopped and everyone got out and helped him pick-up his belongings. Of course, that was in the early 1920s when there were hardly any cars on the roads let alone traffic lights. Until last year, Bob was the world’s oldest driver and as he told Jannette Thompson, it still rankles that he lost his licence after a local doctor found him unfit ….  

He said, ‘I can’t recommend you because your thoughts won’t be quick enough’. It really upset me because he was only going on my age – my eyesight is fine and so is my heart. When you’ve been driving for more than 88 years, you don’t need to think because it is just so automatic. In all those years I’ve only crashed once and had one speeding ticket. I should have gone to see another doctor; that guy really upset me.

The first car I ever drove was French and it had a lever instead of a steering wheel. That was in Bournemouth, in England, where I grew up. One of my first memories was of hearing Mum and the other women in the street talking about how the war would be over by Christmas. We listened to the Prime Minister on the radio telling us why we had to fight the Germans. The trouble was that England was so far behind in terms of its warfare tactics. We thought we could beat them on horseback. I used to watch the soldiers practising by riding up to haystacks and stabbing them with their swords. But the Germans dug trenches so the horses were no good at all and the men were just slaughtered. My father was killed in the Battle of the Somme. Thousands of men died in that campaign. When the war was finally over people ran through the streets hugging and kissing. It was quite a to-do.

My first job was working with my uncle selling vegetables out of the back of a truck. I guess I was about 15. Then when I was 19, I saw a big poster that said ‘Come to the Colonies’. The choice was Canada, Australia or New Zealand. I decided Canada would be too cold and Australia too hot, but NZ turned out to be just right. I loved it right from the start. After landing in Auckland, I got a job on Greens farm in Matakana. There was no road north – just a series of horse and cart tracks. Orewa was a mass of lupins and we had to travel north along the seafront.

Matakana had been a big fruit growing area but those days were just coming to an end. Everyone was cutting down the trees, fencing paddocks and buying cows. The dairy factory was built and the butter would go out on the steamer once a week. I worked for the Greens for two years and learned to use the new milking machines that were driven by a diesel engine. I ended up marrying one of the local Patterson girls in 1930 and we had three children. We started on a farm at Omaha Flats, which was full of holes that had been left behind by the gum diggers. We had 20 cows which was enough to make a living with, but I got the idea of buying a truck. It was a modified Dodge and I started carting gum to Auckland for £10 a ton. The road was terrible – a mixture of clay and metal that only started to improve during the Depression when they hired men to build it with pick and shovels. It used to take me six hours to get to Auckland and I remember coming down the Waiwera hill one day and getting bogged in the swamp at the bottom. The storekeeper had two horses that pulled me out.

When I lived in Matakana there was just the post office, boarding house, two churches, dairy factory, store, butcher shop and bootmaker, who also made sly grog. At the dances, we’d buy a box of beer and store it at the back of the hall whee we could nip out and have a drink. Sometimes they’d show movies and one night the policeman carted me off for getting a little too carried away singing along to the movie. I went to court in Warkworth but was let off on account it was my birthday. The first cars on the road in Matakana were Model Ts and you had to carry your petrol with you because there weren’t any refuelling stations. The roadsides were littered with old tins where people had refilled and then thrown the tin away. There was no power and no public transport. When the big flood washed away the bridge, they slung a rope from one side to the other and we had to get across by pulling ourselves over, one hand after the other. It was very dangerous because big logs were coming down in the floodwaters and I couldn’t swim either.

In the end I was running four trucks and carting everything from butter to bobby calves south to Auckland and then returning with groceries and 44-gallon drums of petrol. The business fizzled out when the war came along and petrol was rationed. I joined up and went building engines at a workshop in Remuera but when I developed asthma they moved me to manpower and I started driving the Gubbs bus. Gubbs were also running a new ferry service between Kawau and Sandspit so I got my master’s and engineer’s tickets and that became my job. I loved it. The downside though was that it meant being away from home a lot. Eventually, my wife and I parted. It was the worst thing really as she was a wonderful wife. It didn’t matter what time of the day or night I got home, she would always have a hot meal waiting for me. It was the way she was raised – all she knew was work and cooking.

While I was running the boat, I met Lesley and we eventually married and bought 15-acres on Kawau. We loved the island life and would have stayed there but we had two kids who needed to go to high school. We moved to Taipa to run the motorcamp, but as it turned out our son went to stay with his grandparents in Warkworth and ended up doing an apprenticeship at Rodney Motors. We got our chance to get back on the islands when a job came up for caretakers on Moturoa. We sold the car and bought a boat and spent two very happy years there. But our itinerant days weren’t over yet. I heard that the county was starting a ferry service in Rawene so I applied for the job of running it. I had to fudge my date of birth by 10 years, because I knew they’d never employ a 64-year-old. I ran the service until I retired at 82.

We bought a section in Kaitaia so we could be close to the sea on both sides. Lesley is a wonderful gardener and she turned our block into a tropical garden that hundreds of people would visit once a year. Eventually our daughter persuaded us to move to her farm at Pukenui, where she ran a flower business. Lesley and I thought that’s where we’d live out our days, but then my daughter sold up and moved to Perth so that’s how we ended up in Warkworth, pretty much where we had started off.