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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 8 (November 1, 1934)

Famous New Zealanders — No. 20 — Sir Douglas Maclean — Settler And Nation-Builder

page 17

Famous New Zealanders
No. 20
Sir Douglas Maclean
Settler And Nation-Builder
.

In one of the early articles of this series on notable figures in New Zealand history the writer described the career of Sir Donald Maclean, the great Native Minister of sixty years ago, who had served the country in many official capacities from 1844 to the time of his death in 1877. This character sketch deals with his son, the late Sir Robert Donald Douglas Maclean, who died at Napier in 1929 at the age of seventy-seven years. Sir Douglas was not an official or a politician; he served his country in another way, as a bulwark of settlement and agricultural and pastoral progress. He was chiefly known as the owner of the Maraekakaho station in Hawke's Bay, an estate that was not merely a sheep station but was a great stock-breeding farm, which attained a high reputation throughout Australia as well as New Zealand. Sir Douglas was a devoted patriot and a benefactor to his country in many ways; in particular he was an earnest supporter of the cause of a strong Navy.

The late Sir R. D. Douglas Maclean.

The late Sir R. D. Douglas Maclean.

Statesmen, soldiers, explorers, pioneer settlers, and scientists, have in their several ways contributed to the making of New Zealand and the development of its capabilities as a desirable home for man, and to the country's steadily growing spirit of nationhood. Douglas Maclean was a man of culture and generous views who early in his career found the land-user's activities on a liberal scale more to his taste than the harassing and often life-shortening responsibilities of a place in the country's Legislature. He had seen a little of Parliament in his one term as a Hawke's Bay member. He said that politics had hastened his father's end—Sir Donald was only fifty-six when he died—and his choice was the life of the land. He devoted himself therefore, to the pleasant work of a farmer and stockbreeder and the care of a large estate; politics he regarded with the tolerant and rather cynically amused view of the looker-on who knew just enough of the game to keep out of it. But his outlook on affairs was broad and truly national. He was one of those men who did their earnest best to leave the country something the better for their presence in it.

Early Years.

Douglas Maclean was the only son of Sir Donald. He was born in 1852 in Wellington. His mother died soon after his birth. She had been Susan Strang, whom Sir Donald married in 1850; his wedded life was tragically brief. She was the daughter of Mr. Roger R. Strang, who for many years was Registrar of the Supreme Court in Wellington. Douglas was first educated in the Auckland Grammar School; then his father sent him to England in the Sixties—a voyage round the Horn in a sailing-ship—to gain a college education, which in those days New Zealand could not give. After leaving Clifton College he returned to New Zealand, took up the study of law, and was articled to a Wellington firm, Hart and Buckley. He went back to England to complete his studies, and was admitted as a barrister at the Middle Temple. He did not practice, but returned to New Zealand to join his father, who was then Native Minister, and presently devoted all his energies to the work of sheep-farming and stock-breeding on the afterwards famous Maraekakaho estate, which his father had partly broken in from a state of nature.

Douglas Maclean, in his younger days, was a good all-round athelete. He won the first two bicycle races held in Wellington. In the Seventies he rode from Wellington to Napier on his old-style high bicycle, at a period when the roads were very different from the smooth highways of to-day, and when most of the streams had to be forded. There was a good deal of risk in such a journey; he was the first to cycle across the Rimutaka range. Maclean's bicycle of that era is still preserved by the family. He was one of Wellington's earliest Rugby footballers, and in the early Seventies he captained a Wellington team which won a match against the Armed Constabulary, a body of powerful players, and another against the officers and men of H.M.S. “Rosario.”

My old friend often spoke of his memories of stirring days in New Zealand. As a boy of eight he was with his father at the conference of Maori chiefs held at Kohimarama, Auckland, in 1860, in the time of Governor Gore Browne. Young Douglas slept in the same room in the mission buildings as the chief Tamihana te Rauparaha, son of the great warrior chief Rauparaha—the son was as great a missionary as his father was a cannibal conqueror.

Another memory of old-time was a cruise from Auckland to Wellington in H.M.S. “Fawn,” one of the steam frigates of the early Sixties. The “Fawn” was a full-rigged ship, and it was an exciting sight to watch sail and spar drill. The smart bluejackets of that day could strip the ship by sending down every mast and yard above the lower masts in a few minutes, and send them up again as quickly. There was great rivalry between the Navy square-riggers in this seamanly accomplishment, a thing now of the far past.

Sir Douglas had many such pictures of the old sea-life to recall. He knew the sea well indeed; he had made two voyages to England and back in sailing-ships of the grand old clipper class, when sailors were real sailors; and he acquired in those days an enthusiasm for the Navy page 18
Shearing shed and woolsheds at Maraekakaho.

Shearing shed and woolsheds at Maraekakaho.

and the mercantile marine which he retained to the end of his life.

The Work on the Land.

Sir Douglas Maclean was only twenty-five when his father died, worn out by the strain of public affairs and prematurely aged by the unscrupulous attacks of his political opponents, and he had to unravel the tangle of native leases and incomplete titles and build up the estate that Sir Donald had pioneered. Maraekakaho stood for many a year as the best example of a great all-round station for pure-bred sheep, cattle and horses in the Island. Sir Douglas grew old with the growth of his fine estate, and as he grew old he delighted to see his many employees happy and contented. I have never heard of a more generous employer among the big estate owners. He was no niggard with his wealth, and he expended it to a very large degree in helping on his fellow men. Many a farmer in Hawkes' Bay and outside it to-day owes his start in life to the chief of Maraekakaho.

The estate was not a mere sheep-run, but was steadily developed as a pedigree stock farm on a large scale; the purebred sheep, cattle and horses from Maraekakaho were celebrated in Australia as well as the Dominion. The general management of the estate was on a generous scale, and a great deal of capital was expended in bringing the place up to a high grade of efficiency as a stock-raising establishment. From time to time Sir Douglas Maclean sold parts of the level lands suitable for small farming, and he liberally assisted old employees and others whom he trusted to embark in farming for themselves. He was a patriarchal employer of the best type, who did a great deal for his employees beyond the mere duty of paying their wages.

The Way at Maraekakaho.

“There's one of my guests,” said Sir Douglas Maclean, as we met a swagger on the hill road inland from Hastings, Hawke's Bay, when we were driving back from a visit to Maraekakaho station one day towards the end of 1928. And my good and kindly friend told some anecdotes of his experience with swagmen in his half-century of ownership of the big sheep-run. “Some of the very best men we ever had on the station,” he said, “came here with swags on their backs. A good class of fellow we always took on if we had a job going, and some of them were there for years.”

The standing instruction to the station manager was to give food for tea and breakfast, and a bunk, to every swagger calling there. And sometimes Maraekakaho entertained in the cottage set apart for that purpose as many as twenty—once there were twenty-two—swaggers in a night. Most trampers looking for a job, whom one encountered on the road from Napier and Hastings to the hill country, were bound for the patriarchal Maclean estate.

That day at the station homestead, lying well to the sun among its great shelter plantations and orchards, Sir Douglas took me first to see the community heart of Maraekakaho. Here are a school and a church hall, on a green terrace above the clear little river that flows past the homestead and the woolsheds. Sir Douglas had the church hall put up at his own expense, and he and the residents furnished it. It was the social gathering-place on week days as well as Sundays. Here the Maori word “marae” was particularly appropriate.
Maraekakaho wool goes to the rail-head.

Maraekakaho wool goes to the rail-head.

The marae, or village assembly ground, the square among the houses, was the gathering-place of tribe or hapu. And along the river bank the “kakaho,” the toetoe or pampas grass, once waved its plumes abundantly; hence the place-name which puzzled so many of the overseas and colonial visitors to the Maclean estate.

The chief showed me with mingled pride and sadness the roll of honour of the station and district in the church hall. There were many Highland names on it, good names such as Duncan McPhee, and the list was headed by a Maclean, young Captain Algernon Donald Douglas Maclean, who died at Napier in 1923 from the effects of war service. He was the chief's only son.

At the entrance to the homestead grounds were other buildings which went to make a little township on the station—a post-office and store, and an accommodation house for business travellers. All formed part of the big business of running a great wool and meat and pure-bred stock estate.

His Patriotic Services.

Sir Douglas Maclean was an earnest patriot and a great advocate of a strong Royal Navy. He was president of the Wellington Branch of the Navy League, and a member since the foundation of the league; Vice-President of the London executive during the war period; was elected President for New Zealand at the Dominion Conference in 1922; and was the first President of the Hawke's Bay Branch. He was the most outstanding personality of the League in New Zealand, and by his death the Wellington Branch suffered an irreparable loss.

Sir Douglas was President of the Wellington Early Settlers' Association, and always took the keenest interest in the affairs of the Society.

During the Great War he and Lady Maclean were in England, and lived in London through the anxious period of the air raids. Both of them devoted all their energies to war work. They page 19
The old wheel. The bicycle on which Sir Douglas Maclean rode from Wellington to Napier in the Seventies.

The old wheel. The bicycle on which Sir Douglas Maclean rode from Wellington to Napier in the Seventies.

were very liberal contributors to various war funds, and especially helped New Zealanders on leave and in hospitals. For a time they maintained several motor ambulances at the front.

The Chief and the War Veteran.

Sir Douglas' deeds of quiet generosity were innumerable. He never sought publicity; he disliked making his gifts known to the world. The satisfaction of a kind deed was its own reward. This incident is a typical example of his openhandedness. One evening, when I was his guest at Napier, I happened to mention my old acquaintance Rowley Hill, of Auckland, the sailor and soldier of many medals. The talk turned to Mohaka, the scene of Te Kooti's raid in 1869, when Hill, a lone-handed Constabulary man who had gone to the assistance of the friendly Maoris there, was the leading figure in the defence of the stockade, a deed that won him the New Zealand Cross. I told Maclean of the hard little warrior's naval service at the Crimea, in the Baltic and in the Indian Mutiny, and as a volunteer under Garibaldi, in Italy, and of his Maori war work under Von Tempsky and others. I told him many stories of Rowley, who would not apply for the old-age pension but was living on his small New Zealand military pension and the shilling a day he received as a British naval pension (“Shillin' a day, bloomin' good pay—Lucky to touch it, a shillin' a day!”)

Sir Douglas listened but did not say anything about the veteran that night. In the morning he came to me with a cheque for £20, made out to Hill, and said: “Send that to ‘Rowley with the regards of the son of his old chief.” That was in allusion to the days of the Hauhau war, when Sir Donald Maclean was Defence Minister and directed the operations against Te Kooti.

The Old Order Passes.

The death, in 1929, of the generous - hearted chief was a great grief to the countryside, and it wrought many changes at Maraekakaho. The one great station now provides farmsteads for numerous families, and small stock-fattening farms and dairy farms have replaced the one-management station. The key to this process is found in the very heavy death duties.

So the old order gives place to the new, and Maraekakaho township is today, in its way, a more cosmopolitan place than the old, with its clan-like character.

The Work of a Pioneer.

It can truly be said of Sir Douglas Maclean that he was a pioneer in the work of settlement. The Hawke's Bay country was still in a very rough condition when his father's death threw the whole of the responsibility of a large tract of pastoral territory on his hands. During his life he saw fern and scrub give way to good pasture, rivers bridged, railways built, swamps and lagoons drained, and horse tracks become highways. He was one of the builders of modern Hawke's Bay.

“Te Makarini.”

I must make mention of the Makarini scholarship for Maori boys, in association with the College at Te Aute, which has enabled so many native children to obtain an education. Sir Douglas established this scholarship as a memorial to his father, who as “Te Makarini” was the friend of the old generation of Maoris. A great many boys of promise were the beneficiaries of this generous scholarship, among them the lad of Ngati-Porou who is now the Native Minister, Sir Apirana Ngata. The Maoris will never forget the leadership of Te Makarini the elder or the generosity of Te Makarini the younger.

The Maori of old-time had a poetic way with him. When the elder Maclean died, in 1877, the old warrior chief Paerau, of the Urewera tribe, who had fought against the Government troops in many engagements, from Orakau to Waikaremoana, wrote from Ruatahuna expressing his regret on hearing of Te Makarini's death. In his letter he saluted the spirit of the departed white chief as “te whetu marama o te ata i te wa o te pouritanga” (“the bright star of the morning in the time of gloom and sorrow.”) In a similar spirit, if it is not so eloquently expressed, many New Zealanders have reason to remember and revere Douglas Maclean, the benevolent chief of Maraekakaho.

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