History – Puhoi remembers

It is Anzac Day 2022 and people stream across the Puhoi River bridge to our war memorial gates – only the second time we have been able to do so since 2020, and we are rejoicing in this freedom. It doesn’t seem so very long ago that early risers huddled in the morning gloom at their gates, straining to hear faint notes, as up the valley someone with a radio played the Last Post. Today, our friends and neighbours, almost 200 of them – uniformed firefighters, little scouts and their big brothers and sisters – wait till bugler Oliver Furneaux, standing straight and still, raises his instrument to his lips in this most precious of ceremonies

Our war historian Richard Hern reads his two-part dissertation on New Zealand’s most decorated war hero and the sacrifice of the coast watchers, a little-known episode from New Zealand’s war history. We lay our wreaths and parade to our centennial hall for morning tea.
A Red Cross report from WWI says:

“On Thursday 12th, the SS Kotiti took to Auckland the second case of garments made by the Puhoi Red Cross Guild. The previous case contained 75 garments. This time the work of two months resulted in a case containing 140 garments comprising 26 suits pyjamas, 20 flannel shirts, 48 flannel singlets, 30 pairs flannel underpants and 16 balaclava caps. A number of ladies are preparing feathers for making pillows. We hope to have a good case of pillows to send off in about a week’s time.”

But for the Puhoi Bohemians it started long before: A correspondent reports in 1882:

“On Monday last, we buried one of the oldest soldiers in this colony and, I dare say, one of the oldest in Europe. John Pittner, a native of Bohemia, was born in January 1795. He joined the Austrian Army in 1813, and was a year before the battle of Waterloo in the camp at Dijon France, after the first resignation of Napoleon. Pittner arrived in New Zealand in June, 1863, and has since then been living in this settlement.

“The large attendance at his funeral showed the high respect in which he was held. Pittner during his long life never was attacked by any illness with the exception of a sore leg, which terminated fatally in gangrene. He leaves an aged widow, Elisabeth, and two married daughters, Mrs W. Sharpe and Mrs J. Christmann in New Zealand and two married sons in Bohemia. He retained his mental faculties up to the last, and passed away quietly in his sleep on Sunday morning.”

On his headstone in the Puhoi Cemetery it says that our ancestor was a Waterloo veteran, but that might only be loosely true. Richard Hern believes it would be more correct to say he was in the penultimate campaign against Napoleon in 1814.