Bill and Shirley

A memoir

Keith Ovenden

• Publisher: Massey University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780995137882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Bill Sutch and Shirley Smith were two of New Zealand's most significant twentieth-century figures; Sutch as an economist, influential civil servant, and inspirational proponent of innovation in the fields of social and economic development, and Smith as glass-ceiling breaker in the formerly male-dominated world of the law. Keith Ovenden's wise, urbane memoir begins with the early years of his marriage to Sutch and Smith's only child, Helen Sutch, and carries through Sutch's trial on charges under the Official Secrets Act to Smith's death over 30 years later. It offers unprecedented insights into both the accusations against Sutch and Smith's remarkable legal practice and, behind both, some of the dramas of their domestic life. Deeply intelligent and beautifully crafted, Bill and Shirley: A Memoir is a unique and intimate study of two complex and fascinating New Zealanders.

The Lion & the Weasel

A memoir of Bill Sutch

I

There were always going to be difficulties, though I was at first surprised by their number. Loyalty to his wife Shirley, who was deeply opposed to our marriage, meant, inevitably, that Bill sided with her, and felt unable to express what I came to detect as his anxiety about her inability to accept our relationship for what it was. It was immediately obvious that he was deeply attached to his daughter, and the danger of losing her over this controversy of the heart was clearly more real for him than it apparently was for Shirley. He gave us, as a wedding present, a set of Danish cutlery, though he addressed the gift only to Helen and satisfied his evident need — evident to me, at any rate — to apologise for the whole unnecessary imbroglio with the hesitant words, ‘That will be all right, won’t it?’, as though the acceptability of our marriage imagined through a lifetime of eating together might find symbolic expression in his gift.

Then there was the matter of my profession, only then recently labelled, following American practice, political science. At Keele, my undergraduate university, where the subject had been presided over by Professor Sammy Finer, the subject was called political institutions. At Oxford, where I had recently completed a doctorate, it was political studies. At Essex University, where I then taught, I was a lecturer in the Department of Government. I didn’t much like the term political science myself, and had had some entertaining if fruitless conversations on the topic during my year as a master’s student at the University of Michigan. It was in vain, however, that I pointed out to Bill (as I was encouraged to call him from the start) that the word science simply meant knowledge, and that we should leave it at that. For him, political science was anathema, qualifying those it identified as second-class intellectual citizens.¹

This view seemed to extend to political philosophy on which, from time to time, I occasionally attempted discussion, or at least conversation. It seemed to be of no interest to him: a view that was later confirmed by the contents of his bookshelves when, after his death, they became more readily available to us.

Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx and Laski all belonged to Shirley, and dated from her years studying Literae Humaniores and philosophy (also called, with some slight derision, Mods and Greats) at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. I never got the least hint that Bill had ever read any works by these thinkers. He was uninterested.

I came to the conclusion that it was practicalities which mattered, and that in these he had a tendency to autodidacticism. His background knowledge was confined largely to New Zealand and came not from the big ideas of philosophers, but from textbooks and manuals which, almost without exception, were empirical: C. A. Cotton’s Geomorphology of New Zealand, Henry Suter’s Manual of the New Zealand Mollusca, K. A. Wodzicki’s Introduced Mammals of New Zealand, Ferdinand von Hochstetter’s Geology of New Zealand (1864) in Charles Fleming’s 1959 translation, and almost everything on plants and shrubs and trees.

When it came to knowledge, New Zealand was his obsession. And if he needed guidance he went to the top. For instance, we found a letter of early January 1945 from A. J. Healy, a botanist in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, in response to an enquiry from Bill, setting out the literature on New Zealand plants. Thomas Cheeseman, R. M. Laing and E. W. Blackwell, W. Martin on plants, H. B. Dobbie on New Zealand ferns, everything by Leonard Cockayne –– Healy recommended them all. Bill clearly took the advice, because they turned up on his shelves. Healy’s letter he dropped into a copy of the 1927 edition of Cockayne’s New Zealand Plants and Their Story which Shirley, then aged 13, had received as a botany prize at Queen Margaret College in 1929. Family cross-fertilisation, the school prize endorsed by a DSIR specialist as a reliable source.

The evident fascination with the detailed character of his own country of which these volumes speak (I know of no other household with a copy of Thomas Broun’s 1880 edition of Manual of the New Zealand Coleoptera), coupled with his immense retentive memory, could make Bill an indifferent companion. Helen has deep scar memories of summer holidays when she was six, seven and eight, of long hours on dusty roads under a hot sun while her father pronounced monologues on the geology, flora, distinctive bird life and history of each area through which Shirley drove them in their little old car. As children do, she blanked it all out. He was a born teacher, but she was the wrong age.

Helen told me how very different the situation was when, still a young girl, she went to the summertime Student Congresses at Curious Cove in the Marlborough Sounds and, later, the Workers’ Educational Association Summer Schools at New Plymouth, where Bill was invited to give talks and lectures. There would be more than 150 people present, many in family groups, gathered for a camp-style holiday in which informal lectures and discussion groups about topics of current interest took place alongside home-made evening entertainments, charades, dances and community singing. These very happy occasions (I have seen the photographs) were a completely different environment for learning about New Zealand and the world. There Bill was a different sort of teacher.

Similarly with budding adolescent and young adult intellectuals. It sometimes seems as if a whole generation of male students and youthful public servants have recalled to me, over the years, their pleasure at being invited to labour on the site of the Ernst Plischke-designed house that Bill and Shirley were building on the hillside above Todman Street in the Wellington suburb of Brooklyn in the 1950s.² Hugh Price, later a distinguished publisher, remembered unloading and hauling gravel; Rod Alley, later a university lecturer, wielded a pick and shovel; Fergus McLean, later a New Zealand trade commissioner, along with other young recruits from the Department of Industries and Commerce, helped to mix concrete and haul building materials; while Shirley grubbed gorse and laid on the lunchtime sandwiches.

Some probably found the tasks a burdensome intrusion on their weekends, but all those I have spoken to have grateful memories of working beside this knowledgeable, greatly experienced man who was eager to impart what he had learned, and knew how to nurture and sustain their interest. Just as John Ruskin, in nineteenth-century Oxford, took his students roadbuilding with picks and shovels, so Bill secured a place of enduring affection among these young people as their contribution was rewarded with conversation, instruction and advice.

What I lost sight of when first I heard these tales was the reverse: the effect of these young people on Bill. I think now that he found in them exactly the kind of endorsement and recognition of his own value to the world that he very much needed. Their approval eased, without ever completely eradicating, his anxiety, uncertainty, hesitancy and deep insecurity. For some reason I didn’t fit into their mould. I had had significant teachers of my own and did not need another, so that I failed to play back to him, through my grateful attention, his vital place in the world. And besides, my presence in his life really had little to do with him. I was there because of Helen, which must somehow have relegated him to a position of secondary importance — not something he was particularly used to. I was inattentive to the kinds of telling detail that would have led to greater understanding and toleration on my part.

There are always, in people’s lives, apparently little things that may speak volumes about them if we can only notice and focus on them. I write later in this book about Shirley’s pinks –– small carnations that she nurtured. With Bill I later saw that I should have focused on his Buddhas. He collected perhaps as many as 20 small statues of the Buddha, generally in the lotus position and made for the most part of stone or inexpensive metals. Museum shop copies, they represent different strands of Buddhism: Indian, Sri Lankan, Cambodian and Chinese, and different eras. None is particularly valuable in itself. Why did he collect them? Bill had no Buddhist beliefs or tendencies himself. He was one of the least contemplative people I have ever known. His interest in the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas’s theories of ‘primitivism’ in art may have stimulated an interest in keeping one or two examples of Buddhist veneration, but not 20 of them. Was he trying to tell us something? I have no answer, but surely they are suggestive.

One of Bill’s Buddhas, this one made of bronze, 21.5 x 15 cm. Bill collected such things, but no one, least of all Shirley, seemed to know why.

It was perhaps my misfortune to have encountered Bill too late in his day, for when I began to acquire some intimate knowledge of him, from the spring of 1971 to the winter of 1972 when I held a post-doctoral fellowship at Victoria University of Wellington, I was expected to spend many hours in his company. They were never happy. The ritual was dinner on a Sunday evening at Helen’s parents’ home, the spiritual breaking of bread at the altar of family. Present, too, would be Bill’s sister — also called Shirley — who lived almost next door. She was a professional psychologist who had recently taken early retirement from the psychology service for schools. In the family she was commonly referred to as ‘sister Shirley’.

Given Shirley and Bill’s antagonism to our marriage, and the wound this had inflicted on Helen in discovering that her mother’s love was not unconditional, it is hard even now for friends to understand why we saw this ritual endorsement of family as a necessary obligation. Surely we might have said, well, in the circumstances, perhaps we should stay away, or at least go less frequently. It is a testimony to the strength of Helen’s personality, her determination not to let her parents drive her from the family, that we never adopted this option.

The circumstances, already unpropitious enough, were laced with an air of tension so intense that it hung heavy over the table like a Brent Wong geometric sky object, oppressive, angular, a form of mesmeric menace. The situation was not helped by Shirley’s resistance to having outsiders, or even family, in her kitchen, so that any normal participation in the general minutiae of the dinner was denied me. No table clearing, no fetching and carrying, no washing-up. Helen’s assistance, except in the preparation of food, was permitted, but even so there was an unstated threat of possible sudden reversal, of permission withdrawn.

Being left at the table with sister Shirley and Bill meant a desperate search for appropriate topics of conversation, in itself problematic — as the Marxists like to say. Here, the difficulty presented itself in the form of Bill’s unworldly asceticism. His taste in food was solidly grounded in working-class experience and not a topic of interest. A dish of roast lamb, gravy and vegetables, enjoyable enough, hardly lent itself to culinary debate. Bill would not have read Cuisine magazine had it then existed, although I’m pretty sure he would have subscribed to it as evidence of New Zealand’s increasing cultural and commercial maturity, and would have promoted it whenever and wherever appropriate.

Another conversational impediment was that Bill didn’t drink, never had and never, to my knowledge, broke his teetotalism. Loquacity and the ease of social exchange that wine may generate, along with complex matters of terroir, vintage years, palate, grape varieties and so on, were denied us. Some said the reasons for his abstinence lay in his Methodist upbringing, that he had taken the pledge. Others, those with knowledge of his family background, that its sources lay in his mother’s influence in getting him to acknowledge and reject his father’s overindulgence. Part of it, as I came to see, may have lain in his parsimony.

Bill hated to spend money on what he thought of as irrelevant indulgencies. All this must have added up to a bit of a trial for Shirley, who loved a drink and gladly adopted my own views on the merits of wine, as well as her father’s pleasure in good Scotch whisky, once the prohibitions of her spouse were removed by death and the path of our relationship had become less sticky. But again, this did not mean that Bill was against wine or other drinks per se. Entertaining diplomats, businessmen friends, colleagues from Industries and Commerce in the recent past, he served wine and other beverages, professed to being knowledgeable about them and urged their development in the New Zealand economy. He kept their products in his cellar and would occasionally speak with some knowledge about them.

But this, like so much else in his appetite for local knowledge, was book learning, not the transmission of experience and taste. Under his direction, Industries and Commerce published a handbook, Wine in New Zealand, in 1962, the same year that they sponsored a wine exhibition. When his contract as head of the department was not renewed in 1965, when he was still only 58 years old,³ the then industry body Winemakers of New Zealand presented him with two antiquarian books — George Sutton’s The Culture of the Grape-Vine and the Orange in Australia and New Zealand, published in 1843, and William Speechly’s delightful 1790 A Treatise on the Culture of the Vine⁴ — in gratitude for his many efforts on their behalf.

Simpler sources of conversation were also somehow prohibited. Bill had little time for television. One had been installed in the house only in the spring of 1968, after he had been hospitalised with a heart attack. He had a similar indifference to radio. It had never occurred to him to have one in the house, and Shirley had apparently found it a matter of disloyalty when she finally, rather courageously as I think she saw it, went out and bought one. Or rather two. Little Bakelite models that proclaimed their unimportance by their diminutive size. Shirley kept hers in the kitchen for the most part, where she could listen while cooking or washing up; Helen, as a schoolgirl, had kept hers by her bed: popular music, very quietly, after dark.

Indifference to broadcasting was coupled with the cinema and photography. I never heard of Bill going to see a film. And he certainly didn’t own a camera, was never seen to take a photograph and showed little or no interest in it as an instrument of domestic record. But this didn’t mean that he was against films or photography. He was a great supporter of Brian Brake, whose work he promoted and with whom he had some correspondence. And once he became chairman of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council (as it then was) he was quick to understand from Jim Booth and Ian Fraser, two of his young lieutenants, the need to support and develop an independent film industry here. New Zealand’s presence in the world, its social, economic and cultural development, were what interested Bill, and anything or anyone of merit or substance that helped to develop them could expect to get his support.

I took a particular benefit from this through his promotion of the work of Kobi Bosshard, a young silversmith from Switzerland. Bill instantly recognised his work, spotted in the counter display case of the Hermitage hotel at Aoraki Mount Cook where Kobi was working as a mountain guide, as of significant originality and craftsmanship. He bought a piece for Shirley, asked to meet Kobi and then ensured that he was put in touch with speciality retail outlets. Through them Kobi found a market that enabled him to flourish and develop. Helen, who already knew of this connection, suggested we ask Kobi to make our wedding rings. A great and valued friendship has developed with him and his wife, Patricia, across the years. Bill’s capacity to create linkages, personal, commercial, historical, was one of his strongest talents.

So it was that his appointment as arts council chairman by the Kirk government in 1972 seemed at once both rational and quixotic. An inspirational moment of lateral thinking on somebody’s part. Had he any expertise in the field of visual and plastic arts? Bill’s interest in art, as conventionally understood, seemed reserved for the modernist movement and not much else. Somewhere along the way he had befriended the American artist Alexander Calder, possibly in London in 1938 as Calder spent much of that year visiting fr...