From the Mayor

Martin Connelly

I feel as if this is the first of these articles that I have written when the weather was fine. The recent better weather lets me take longer walks with Carlos, and to finally confront the garden.

Just as the good weather seemed to be settling in, the bad weather returned with a vengeance last weekend with truly frightening winds closing the hill road and also doing a lot of damage. I am told we should expect much more windy weather before the spring is over. Please take precautions.

People sometimes ask me how does the council support economic activity in the district? The short answer is that we help to fund Destination Wairarapa and the Wairarapa Economic Development Strategy. Both organisations are collaborating at the present time to help us reap the benefits of having become a Dark Sky Reserve.

A recent event that the Council supported was the Wairarapa Rebel Business School. The Rebel Business School supports regional economic growth across Aotearoa. It does this by providing free entrepreneurial training courses to (primarily) young people wanting to start their own business. The recent Wairarapa Business School was the first time such a course has been run locally, and it was very well attended. By the end of the course many attendees had developed their business plans and others were implementing their business ideas.

Alongside initiatives such as this, a lot of what a council does day in and day out also supports the local economy. Roads are fundamental to most businesses, as are many other council services. Importantly, enabling new people to come and live and do business in the district also supports economic activity. … Continue Reading

P&K: Years with glassless windows

U.S. Marines on furlough from Guadalcanal with malaria were deployed to Martinborough after the 1942 earthquakes (Magnitude 7.6) to help demolish parts of the main P&K store structure which had been badly damaged and partly destroyed. 

Part of the demolition job called for wire ropes tied to trucks, then the Americans brought in explosives to move some of the wrecked building facade.

David Kershaw said one unintended consequence from the blasts: they blew out all the remaining glass windows on the Square and Jellicoe Street frontages.

Result? At a time of World War, at a time when Europe was using all the glass it could produce to repair war-damaged buildings _ and when all glass was imported _ P&K had no front windows on its building for six years.

Solid wooden shutters improvised for all that time, with glass finally installed in the last months of the 1940s.

P&K: Weevils in the dates

During and after WW11 imported Middle East dates were always infested with weevils.

Staff would break up the cakes of dates and put the dates into water to drown the weevils.

They would scoop off the dead weevils and put the dates on sacks on top of the shop’s bike shed to dry in the sun.

The dates were then put into a mixture of hot water and golden syrup, and stirred to coat with the mixture before drying them a second time.

The staff would bag and sell them to customers who said, as David Kershaw reported: “they are the best dates we’ve ever had.”

David insisted nobody ever reported finding a weevil in the repackaged dates – dead or alive.

P&K: Veterans on “The Live Edge”

Architects call the Eastern or Square side of the P&K building its “Live Edge” as its windows face into the open square “where stuff is going on” and the morning sun shines into the relocated fashion store and new cafe.

David Kershaw explains that “my old man used to say it’s such a warm spot that a lot of the Second World War vets – the old guys that also did all the heavy (local) fencing work _ the guys who lugged all the concrete posts to the top of hills putting fencing up – all their hips gave out.”

“They were in pain all the time,” so in the early mornings “they would shuffle into town and sit on our window sill all along (the eastern wall) waiting for the sun to warm them up.”

“That was the only thing that would get rid of the pain. If there had been hip operations (in the day) … they’d have all been fixed.”