Staunch troops not forgotten

5:00AM Saturday April 21, 2007By Catherine Masters
Sandra Coney is not one to give up searching.

Ninety-three years ago a group of tough kauri bushmen came out of the forest at Piha and went to war. A third of them never came home.
Over time their lives faded into little more than names on a plaque at Lion Rock. Now even the names have faded and can barely be read.
But the men who cut down the kauri have not been forgotten. Each Anzac Day a service is held for the men of the State Sawmill in Piha who were so quick to sign up for war in 1914, and for those who fought in World War II.
On Wednesday, people will gather at 2pm at the Piha RSA and march down to the beach and across the black sands to lay wreaths.
The Last Post will echo across the valley and the men who came out of the forest will be remembered. This year is no different except that now - thanks to one woman's painstaking research - a lot more is known about the bushmen.
At the service will be Sandra Coney, former campaigning journalist and now chairwoman of the Auckland Regional Council's Parks Committee.

Coney's family has a long association with Piha. In between council duties she has pursued an enduring passion to find out as much as she can about Piha's history, especially about the men from the sawmill.
She visits graves, trawls through archives, tracks down descendants, and has spent a small fortune on birth, death and marriage documents. In four years she has found out a lot. She would dearly love to know more.
Coney is not sure of the exactly when she became so intrigued, or in her words "obsessed", by the names on the plaque.
There are the names of 49 men - all now dead. But at least one bushman who went to war was not listed. Jack O'Donnell was shot in the head at Gallipoli before he had fired a shot.
His brother's name is there. Bill was killed in France. There could be others not listed, says Coney. And some who were listed as dead were not killed.
Coney wondered, "Who were these men?" She started asking around. No one knew.
The men left their mark on the landscape before they went to war. Nearly all the giant trees were cut down. After the war those who had worked at the sawmill scattered to the winds.
The mill had opened in 1910 when there was nothing at Piha. It was one of the last to be set up because it was so hard in that area to get the timber out. Coney reckons the men loved the forest and the birds, except perhaps the tui, which mimicked the bullock bells.
But when war was declared in August 1914, half the mill's workforce went to war, many among the first to step up. They were among the backbone of the first troops to go to Gallipoli. By the end of the war the mill was winding down and closed in 1921. Without jobs at Piha, many of the World War I survivors went to Mamaku to work the forests there. Everyone left. Piha was empty once more.
While researching, Coney became intrigued by the industry the men worked in. Milling was huge in New Zealand's pioneering history but as the kauri disappeared the industry vanished.
Coney has found all sorts of stories. Originally, there were 48 names on the plaque. J.E. Shine's name was added later. Jack Shine was a real character, Coney says.
The family story goes that Shine either had an interest in the mill manager's daughter, or that he had jilted her.
"But whatever, the mill manager said Jack Shine's name is not going on the plaque so it didn't go on the plaque and he [Shine] agitated for years, apparently."
Eventually, he got his way.
Coney cannot say exactly how many men died. Among the names of those listed as killed, she has discovered that three were not killed, and some listed as injured did die.
Neil Matheson was a survivor who ended up on the dead list."He used to say to his mates, 'If you want to see a dead man walking go and see that roll of honour at Lion Rock 'cause it's got me down as dead".
Matheson's explanation was that he had swapped the regimental number worn around his neck with that of another man."He certainly came home scarred, emotionally scarred, but certainly not dead and got married and had four daughters and led a long life."
Coney is moved and humbled by what she is finding out. Many of the bushmen came from early settler families. Life was a struggle.
Some were the children of men from the British Army who had been brought to New Zealand in case war broke out with Maori. In return they were promised of a little land and a pension.
The land was not particularly productive so many of the sons became bushmen.
Coney has found that most of the bushmen were not loners. The Piha men were part of big social groups who formed friendships for life, who moved around together, and whose families intermarried.
One of the men on the plaque is Bob Gibbons, who had a reputation for being the best bush contractor in the land. Gibbons was in his 50s and too old to enlist, so he "lied dreadfully" about his age and signed up.
What began as a relatively small project has become a huge genealogy task that provided Coney with plenty of excitement - such as the time she was at the library and found a photograph of Freddie Backholm, from Finland, who jumped ship and ended up at Piha.
She had found out that Backholm had not married and had no children and Coney feared she would not be able to discover much about him. But among miscellaneous photographs at the library, labelled as groups of bushmen, there he was.
"I just wanted to grab somebody in the reading room and say 'I've found Freddie Backholm'."
Since then she has found out more about him than some of the others. Backholm became great mates with Ebenezer Gibbons, a master dam-builder, and stayed with the Gibbons family for the rest of his life, living out his days on Bob Gibbons' land in Weymouth where he used to cook pipi for his cats, and come home a little tiddly on pension day. She has also found out he had a married "woman friend".
One of the saddest stories is that of the O'Donnell family. Jack and Bill, who were killed while at war, were the sons of Catherine O'Donnell, a nurse. Along with the two boys her daughter's husband was killed and another son lost a leg.
In 1924, Catherine O'Donnell went on a quest to visit Jack's grave in Gallipoli. She was the first mother to go.
How she afforded the trip, Coney does not know. They were a family of very modest means but Catherine O'Donnell was determined. She set off in the boat and got to Britain, where authorities tried to deter her. "And she says, 'No, I'm going to see my son Jack's grave."
She carried on to Turkey, where the Turks said, "What are you doing here?" There was a language barrier, Catherine O'Donnell couldn't make herself understood and she was told she was not allowed off the boat.
"So she went downstairs. She'd brought all the way with her a wreath for Jack's grave and she kneeled in her cabin and prayed they would understand what she wanted. Then she brought the wreath upstairs and just showed it, and they understood."
Catherine O'Donnell made it to Jack's grave and laid her wreath. Written on a photo of her leaning against her son's cross are the words: "Dear Jack's resting place, Plugge's Plateau, Dardanelles, Gallipoli, visited 29th July, 1924."
Coney thinks she has at least another four years, perhaps a lifetime, of research before she knows enough. She had thought she would write half a page on each of the men. Now she plans a book.
Roll call for more details
Sandra Coney needs help finding out more about the Kauri bushmen from the Piha sawmill who went to World War I.
She asks anyone who knows about the following to contact her by email.
Daniel Mitchell. Came from Puipuhi to Piha, died of wounds in 1917.
James Seal. Son of a bootmaker who lived in Commercial Rd, Grey Lynn. Killed in action in Belgium in 1917.
Arthur Warren. Mother was Fanny Gundry from Opotiki. Related by marriage to the Mitchells. Recorded as dying, but in fact lived.
Jim Hastie. From a Mt Albert family. In later life worked as a butcher in New Lynn.
Stanley Reece. After the war, worked as a drainlayer in Onehunga.
Ned Storey. Born in Huia, died in Hamilton in 1963.
Hugh Norman and John Onslow Wheeler, sons of a master mariner.
J. Stitchbury. Coney believes the spelling on the plaque is wrong. The only person of this name who died in World War I was Nicholas Colin. Could be J. Stuchbery, bushman, whose father was at Paparoa.
J. Allen. Listed as having died.
And:
William Condell
Stanley Elder
E. Constable
H. Belcher
V. Bowdler
A. Smith