THE ULTIMATE ENGINEER
One of the perennial arguments in biology is why living things turn out the way they do.
Is it a matter of inheritance or environment? In humans, for instance, which is more important — nature or nurture? Bob Hayes is firmly of the belief that his skill from a very young age in technical matters is a legacy handed down from his parents and grandparents.
His maternal grandfather was the famous railway engineer Robert West Holmes (1856–1936), who was responsible for the 1889 design of the celebrated Raurimu Spiral on the North Island’s Main Trunk railway line between the National Park and Raurimu.
Bob not only inherited his first and middle name from this illustrious ancestor, but also, he thinks, his engineering talent.
Stranger than fiction
Bob left school in 1941 at the age of 12 and started work in a bootmaker’s shop in his hometown of Shannon in the central North Island.
In a sequence of events worthy of a Charles Dickens’ novel, his employer killed himself and
