1. Art and Academia

Michael Stevenson stepped slowly back to the perimeter of the church. The marble and stone floor and walls kept the building mercifully cool, as the temperature outside hovered in the low 30’s.

La Maddelena had stood here, just back from the Grand Canal in Venice since the 17th century. Despite an expensive restoration it had remained mostly closed until the New Zealanders arrived in 2003.

In 2003, the Trekka is an International artwork, pulling the crowds and critics at the Venice Art Biennale. Lending its name to past socio-economic policies, in lectures at the University of Auckland. All of this from such unlikely beginnings, 40 years earlier and half a world away.

 

Joseph Glossop, didn’t return from the battlefields in France, to the family home in Ambergate, Derbyshire.

It was the beginning of the end in that chapter of Cissie Glossop’s life. She had been born Maria Holmes in the village of Heath in Derbyshire. Her father George a professional gardener, who after finishing his apprenticeship at 21, had moved from village to village, estate to estate, tending to the properties of the areas wealthy industrialists.

Left fatherless after the First World War, Cissie Glossop and her three young children leave Derbyshire with Arthur Turner for a new life in New Zealand. A trucking business in Wellington, the building industry in Auckland, and in the Great Depression a milk run, help create a new life for the young family.

The modest Bradford van which was earning the Turners some serious money, had been the type of vehicle produced by Jowett for nearly 40 years.

Jowett was about to add to the Bradford line, one of Britains most impressive saloon cars to come out of the immediate post-war era, the Jowett Javelin.

By the start of the 1950’s the Turners had the stylish new Jowett Javelin to build. A new factory was set up, but then back in England – Jowett shut down. Arthur and Noel Turner make a desperate trip to Europe to try to salvage Jowett. They visit Volkswagen, a little known German make, once under British military control, but come back to an empty factory in Auckland.

Arthur and Noel Turner returned from Europe still without a car to put through their new assembly plant, but the timing of their trip proved to be perfect.

While no deals were done in Germany, the Turners trip does lead to them securing the VW franchise for New Zealand. The first six “Beetles” are imported, mocked by motor industry rivals, but by 1954, Jowett Motors is renamed VW Motors, and VW Beetles and Kombis are rolling from the Otahuhu factory.

If you stood Noel Turner in front of a mirror, there’d be more than one reflection. There were many Noel Turners, Noel the family man, Noel the incorrigible deal maker, Noel, the godfather of the assembly plant, Noel the fisherman, Noel the entertainer. Few people saw more than one or two sides of him.

Arthur Turner and his stepson Noel are joint managing directors of VW Motors (NZ). So far it has been the “old man’s” business, chairman of board and the main link to the Germans at head office, for whom Noel has little time. Noel didn’t get far at school, but has a hands-on feel for the game, and he wants to get his hands more firmly on the old man’s company.

The Volkswagen Beetles began to roll from the former bus depot in Otahuhu in April 1954, and the Transporter vans, or “Kombis” in July.

The Turner’s Otahuhu factory turns out VWs throughout the 1950s, as fast or as slowly as the Government will allow them to be imported. The Turners are becoming seriously wealthy. A kid called David Lange becomes a regular fascinated visitor to the plant. But by the end of the 1950’s Noel has become fixated with the perils of building just one make, with the Government turning the import supply on and off. He’s determined to change the game.

It isn’t clear when the feud started. But it is clearly remarkable that the Turners flourishing business VW Motors, survived it, and made it intact into the 1960’s intact.

While the VWs and the profits are flowing through the 1950s. Arthur Turner, his stepsons Noel and Harry, and VW’s regional boss Baron von Oertzen become locked in a family feud for control of the company. Noel fears they are plotting against him, he manages to topple Arthur as chairman. But control still eludes him.

The dream of building a New Zealand motor vehicle had been around almost as long as cars themselves.

In the 1920’s an entrepreneur in Gisborne on the east coast of the North Island boldly began production of the Carlton. This was an almost entirely New Zealand product, with its engine and gearbox, and other major mechanical parts made locally.

People had tried since the 1920’s to build a New Zealand car. Inside the industrial fortress created by Sutch and Lewin, Noel Turner revived the idea with French manufacturer Renault. Amid great secrecy he and Harry prepare to build an entire new plant for the Renault-based New Zealand vehicle. But doing a deal in the boardrooms of Paris is a far cry from scheming in his modest Otahuhu office.

The Andrews family had been in the car game in Palmerston North since 1912. Oscar Andrews had set up a workshop thought to be the region’s first Chevrolet dealership.

In its native Czechoslovakia Skoda was an industrial giant. But in the 1950’s only handfuls of its cars reached New Zealand. In Palmerston North Phil Andrews picked up the franchise and soon decided to approach Noel Turner about having Skodas assembled locally. Andrews also saw potential to use the chassis and mechnicals from the Octavia saloon, as the basis for a simple farm vehicle. And journeying between the Manawatu, Wellington and Prague pulled together a deal to import mechanical kits as well as the saloon cars.

During 1964 and 1965 while the to-ing and fro-ing continued between Motokov and the New Zealand Government, work began on building trial models of the farm vehicle Phil Andrews envisaged.

Noel Turner hadn’t expected Phil Andrews to succeed in persuading the Government, and the communist owned Skoda concern to pull the deal together. Work was already advancing in developing a jeep-like vehicle on the Skoda chassis. In December 1966, the first mass -production motor vehicle to be designed In New Zealand, rolled from the Otahuhu plant. The Trekka.

The Trekka may have been a simple vehicle, but a big sales effort went in behind it.

Dealers around the country got out selling the newcomer. The original canvas top concept gave way to a range of fibreglass canopies – the Trekka became a pick-up, a van, station wagon – for some families the first affordable new vehicle on the market, thanks to it’s low deposit finance plan.

It was no accident that in post World War Two New Zealand, the motor industry had become one of the best money making games in town.

The motor industry in New Zealand wasn’t just a business. It was a real-life extension of Government policy and regulation. Civil Servants and ministers decided what models of car could be imported, and how many, whether the hubcaps had to made in New Zealand. Without the bureaucrats and ministers behind them, a car firm had nothing. Relationships, friendships with the right people were everything, and Noel Turner was a master of the game.

In the 1960’s in New Zealand, buying a new car was a major step in life. Popular models were in such short supply, a hopeful buyer without access to funds in a foreign currency might never make it to the top of the waiting list.

From Kevin Watson’s Mangere Fish ‘n Chip shop, to the Gisborne rural mail run where Tom Hindmarsh put 300 thousand miles on a single Trekka, the awkward looking jeep became for a time, part of the New Zealand streetscape.

There were those who were wary of claims about Trekkas offroad ability. But Roger Taylor and his mates weren’t among them.

Roger Taylor and his Trekka driving mates took off-roading seriously around the southern lakes town of Wanaka. River fording and tracks hours from roads were all in a weekend’s outing as they went hunting in their Trekkas. And then came a film crew shooting Battletruck, looking for a vehicle.

In New Zealand he became Mr Skoda. Josef Kaplan had nearly a quarter of a century with the Czech carmaker under his belt, when he and his family landed in New Zealand in 1968.

The Skoda and Trekka business in Otahuhu saw friendships – sometimes lifelong – built despite official frowning. Josef Kaplan and his family fled just before the 1968 Soviet crackdown in Prague and for two years became a part of Skoda folklore in New Zealand.

The Trekka’s claim “Goes most anywhere” was put to the test in July of 1969. Five of the vehicles were flown into South Vietnam at the height of the war in the divided country.

Trekkas would serve with a New Zealand-run civil hospital, as runabouts and impromptu ambulances. Heavy rain and rough roads would prove a challenge, but at least black marketeers chose to ignore them, stealing and plundering the more ubiquitous Jeeps and Land Rovers, where there was a ready market.

The 1960’s was Noel Turner’s decade. During the 1950’s he’d struggled against his stepfather Arthur to gain a free hand in the running of the company. But in those year’s he’d built up a solid core of loyal employees.

Noel Turner relished being outside the motor industry “establishment”. Free from alliegances to a “big name” he and a close circle of loyal workmates built a diverse motor assembly business through the 1960’s. They built the first Japanese cars, and Turner saw early on, just where the future lay. But by the end of the 1960’s the Government started to unwind the game he played so well.

While the Trekka was selling steadily in New Zealand, Motor Holdings began to eye up the possibility of becoming an exporter.

Government to Government negotiations saw the Trekka gain duty-free access to Australia in return for an equivalent value of duty free Holdens. Pakistan ordered one to assess for local production. But the biggest deal of all saw the first shipment of 100 Trekka kits to Indonesia for the start of what was hoped to be a major export trade.

The perfect market conditions into which the Trekka had been born in 1966, had been decades in the making.

There had been the ascendency of Bill Sutch and his philosophy of fostering greater industrialisation.

By 1971 the dream run of Noel Turner and the family empire was in trouble. A major Japanese car franchise, the key to the future, had eluded him. The European makes Fiat, VW and Skoda were struggling. Noel and his closest circle of associates met one weekend to put together the deal for a new future for the firm. The Trekka’s days were numbered.

The Trekka didn’t die with Noel Turner’s departure, but it’s life support was unplugged. Noel had been its champion, but even so hadn’t been able to protect it from a more demanding and competitive marketplace.

Noel Turner’s departure co-incided with the start of major change in the New Zealand motor industry. It was increasingly about Japanese vehicles, and about adapting to a less regulated, less protected environment. Local car assembly had once been dominated by wealthy “old” families and overseas car makers, with Noel Turner and his firm’s Kiwi ingenuity carving out its place in the game. The assembly industry though was doomed.