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Two of the area’s longest-serving St John volunteers, Warwick and Wendy Moore, were recognised by Warkworth Rotary last week when the couple were presented with certificates of appreciation. Quietly spoken and modest about the 30 years he’s dedicated to service, Warwick says he was initially motivated to join St John by the simple desire to help people. He’s seen the introduction of better communication, from two-way radios to cellphones, and better ambulance equipment such as onboard defibrillators that are helping to save lives everywhere, every day. The calls he’s responded to have been as simple as helping to remove a vase stuck on someone’s hand to horrific highway crashes. As he tells Jannette Thompson, a good ambulance officer needs empathy and a sense of humour, but more than anything else “commitment” …
I’d always had a lot of respect for the St John service, which in those days was comprised of three separate divisions – the ambulance service, the training arm and the community service division represented by the brigade. The decision to combine the divisions into one service happened after I’d been in the brigade a few years and it made a huge difference, giving volunteers access to a much greater range of training. It also meant we got to work alongside highly qualified ambulance officers. I was Warkworth’s first Voluntary Ambulance Officer (VAO), or honorary assistant as we were sometimes known, and for the first 10 years I was the only VAO. We covered an area from Puhoi to Wellsford, coast to coast, so it was not unusual to be called out at any time of the day or night, three or four times a week, and each callout could take three to four hours. Sometimes it felt like I was never at home.
Wendy and I moved to Warkworth shortly after we were married. She was a Wyatt from Leigh and I was a third generation farmer from Tapora. My grandfather Frank was born at Makarau, one of 13 children, and moved to Tapora to manage the Seaview station. He later bought a 100-acre dairy farm, which my father Kenneth eventually took over. My sister and I went to Tapora School before finishing our secondary education at Wellford High School, as it was then. Tapora was a great little community to grow up in and we might have stayed there, but the farm was really too small to support two families.
My first job in Warkworth was at the telephone exchange where call were connected manually. A shutter would drop to show someone wanted to make a call and we’d ask: “Number please?” We’d then make the connection and unplug them once the call was over. There could be up to eight homes connected to one party line so there were occasionally disputes if someone spent too long on the line when someone else wanted to use it. Emergency calls, of course, were always given precedence over social calls and if it was a fire call, it was up to us to sound the fire alarm. Wellsford was a toll call in those days, and at midnight the Kaipara Flats and Leigh exchanges would close and their calls would be transferred over to Warkworth. Our service operated 24 hours a day, all year round. One of the busiest times I remember was during the foot and mouth scare in Warkworth. We had hundreds of lines but the board was totally clogged. The area was closed off and people were panicking, and it lasted about a week.
After four years at the telephone exchange working with people such as Betty Nelson, John Prosser and our supervisor Bruce Osborne, I took a job at the Warkworth Cheese Factory in Woodcocks Road. It was part of the Albertland Dairy Company and we made 20kg blocks of cheddar cheese, mostly for export. Graham Woolford was the manager, and I worked with Frank Murphy, Jim Bell and Jock Jelliman. But, after 10 years with the company, I decided to join the Waitemata Electric Power Board as a trainee linesman. That’s where I had my first introduction to St John because safety training was an important and regular part of our job. It was very dangerous work and electrocution wasn’t uncommon, but it was mostly the result of men just not obeying the safety rules. I worked from the depot that used to be in Bertram Street with the likes of Clive Berger, Rodney Russell, Dudley Green and Graham Munro. Concrete poles were beginning to replace wooden poles and it was the beginning of undergrounding lines in the area. Storms always meant long hours and cleaning up after Cyclone Bola was a real challenge. Everybody was exhausted from working such long hours. There was a real sense of urgency to get power back to the dairy farms so they could milk their cows. I worked for the power board until I retired and the thing I remember most is the comradeship of the other workers. We were often in situations where our lives depended on one another and it made for a close bond.
I was invited to join the Warkworth St John Brigade in 1981 when meetings were still held at the Methodist Church Hall. John Miller was the superintendent and our duties were to provide first aid at events such as the Warkworth Rodeo, rugby, motorcross, show and Kowhai Festival. We usually did the duty in pairs and it was normally an all-day commitment. The rodeo used to have a wild cow milking event which always kept us busy – I was actually quite glad when they decided to discontinue it. Once I became a VAO the sorts of accidents and callouts I attended broadened. I still find road accidents probably one of the hardest things to cope with, particularly if children are involved. We have de-briefings if there have been multiple fatalities, which helps, but still there are a few that just seem to stick with you. We are taught never to judge people and our priority is always the patient – it’s the job of the police to find out what happened and who’s to blame. But I admit that there are times when I feel quite angry inside when I see senseless carnage because children have been travelling unrestrained, people in the car haven’t been wearing their safety belts or a driver has taken an unnecessary risk.
Over the years the service has changed from being basically a transport service to a self-contained medical service. The equipment on board is quite sophisticated and the training means ambulance officers can treat a lot of the injuries and administer pain relief at the scene. Medical callouts still make up the bulk of our work. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that people’s pain tolerance varies widely. I’ve had people with broken bones who can still laugh and have a joke. It amazes me how high some people’s pain barrier is. Believe it or not, ambulance officers also come in for a lot of abuse at times and a number of officers have been assaulted. Some people are really aggressive, particularly if drink or drugs are involved.
St John is a great way of learning life skills and I’m glad both my children, Brenda and Darren, were cadets. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my years with the service and still do. You get to see people at their best and their worst, sometimes its sad because you witness how lonely some people’s lives are and then at other times, you get to see people recover from horrendous injuries and go on to live happy and independent lives. I think St John has helped me to understand people, perhaps better than I would have otherwise, but if there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s to appreciate just how fragile life really is.
