From Greenhills to Singapore: The story of one of the Palembang Nine

By James Sutherland

The story of a young man named John Kerle Tipaho Haberfield from the very south of New Zealand. In World War Two he enlisted in the Royal New Zealand Naval Volunteer Reserve and after training as a pilot in England and Canada he joined the Fleet Air Arm. Late in 1943 he was posted to a fighter squadron and joined to the Far East completing further training in India and Ceylon. He was then posted to the aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable and was shot down during a bombing raid on two oil refineries on Palembang in Sumatra. He was captured and sent to Outram Road Prison where he and another eight aircrew were executed. His life from this period is recorded in letters sent home to his family during the war

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris NZ
• Release date: Jun 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669880431

James Sutherland

Writer of the 'Norbert the Horse' series, Frogarty the Witch, Ernie, plus a whole host of other silly nonsense!Here's a bit more about him...James Sutherland was born in Stoke-on-Trent, England, many, many, many years ago. So long ago, in fact, that he can't remember a single thing about it. The son of a musician, he moved around lots as a youngster, attending schools in the Isle of Man and Spain before returning to Stoke where he lurked until the age of 18. After going on to gain a French degree at Bangor University, North Wales, he toiled at a variety of regular office jobs before making a daring escape through a fire exit in order to concentrate on writing silly nonsense full-time. Happily married, James lives with his wife and daughter in a small but perfectly formed market town in Staffordshire. In his spare time, James enjoys playing his guitar, reading history books, and discussing the deep, philosophical mysteries of life with his goldfish, Tiffany.To contact James, please don't hesitate to email [e-mail], or visit www.jamessutherlandbooks.com for all the latest news!

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CHAPTER 1

John Kerle Tipaho (always affectionately known by his family as Boy) Haberfield was named not only after his grandfather but also after his great-great-uncle.

John’s great-great-uncle and namesake Sir John Kerle Haberfield was born at Devonport on 23 October 1785, the son of Andrew and Mary Haberfield, and died in Bristol on 27 December 1857. He was baptised in the parish church at Stoke Damerel (which is now part of Plymouth City) on 27 November 1785. The family later moved to Bristol and by 1804 was living in Guinea Street. In 1802, the young John was articled as a clerk for five years to Thomas Jarman of Bristol, a solicitor in His Majesty’s High Court of Chancery. He qualified as a solicitor and married Sarah Dupont, the daughter of one of his wealthy clients. John rose to prominence becoming six times Mayor (Chief Magistrate) of Bristol in 1837, 1839, 1845, 1846, 1848, and 1851. He was also seven times Governor of the Poor. When he became Chief Magistrate, he declined the salary, much to the delight of the Bristol ratepayers. He was knighted in 1851 for his services as Mayor of that busy port city.

It is reported that Sir John was a convivial man who enjoyed presiding over banquets, dinners, and other festivities, all of which came his way as Mayor, and his ‘showy equipage with postilion, in the old style, was familiar with most inhabitants’. On one occasion, when he was sitting on the bench, a question arose about the water provided in the courtroom, and a sample was handed up for the opinion of the magistrates, but Sir John declined, saying he ‘had not tasted water for 30 years and did not feel qualified to pass his judgment upon it’.

Sir John is entombed in the vaults beneath the Anglican Chapel in the Arnos Vale Cemetery. His memorial is on the wall inside the chapel and reads:

In memory of

Sir John Kerle Haberfield Knight

Born 23rd October 1785 Died 27th December 1857

He served the office of Mayor of the City of Bristol six times

And was seven times Governor of the Corporation of the Poor

The generous hospitality and bountiful charity

which distinguished his life will

Long be remembered in the city the interests of

which he was always the first to promote

He was ever ready to assist those struggling with

pecuniary difficulties and relieve the poor

He died universally beloved and lamented in an

affectionate regard for his memory.

His friends have erected a monument in the Mayors Chapel in Bristol

To perpetuate his worth and their loss

His widow pays this last tribute of deep affection to her husband

In the place where his remains

Also in remembrance of Sarah widow of the above Who

died at her residence 41 Royal York Crescent Clifton

‘Full of good works and alms deeds’ she died IX ACTS.36.

Sir John and his wife had no children, but his brother Isaac, who had become an officer in the Royal Navy, had several children. Isaac’s son, John’s great-grandfather William Isaac Haberfield, was born in Bristol on 3 June 1815, just ten days before the Battle of Waterloo took place. Being a Navy man, Isaac senior apprenticed his son as a boy seaman. After attending a school in Greenwich for the sons of naval officers, William joined a brigantine and travelled the Mediterranean, trading fruit from Spain and Portugal. He even took one journey across the Atlantic to Newfoundland and back.

Having learned the art of seamanship, he was posted as a midshipman to Her Majesty’s brig Snake. Some of his first journeys entailed hunting pirates and slavers off the coast of Brazil. He then joined another ship that brought male convicts from England to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). After landing in Australia, he heard tales from other sailors of opportunities in the whaling industry in New Zealand. Many of those sailors had arrived at Dusky Sound some twenty years before, only two decades after James Cook had landed there.

The first of these whaling stations was established at Preservation Inlet on the rugged south-western coast of Fiordland in 1829. Stations were started at Dusky Sound, and in the decade between 1830 and 1840, others were set up at river mouths at Aparima (Jacobs River), now Riverton, Oreti (New River) near Invercargill, Awarua (Bluff), Toitois (Mataura), Waikawa (Catlins), Matau (Molyneux near Balclutha), Taieri Mouth, Otakou, (Otago Heads), Purakanui, Waikouaiti, and Moeraki.

By the time Isaac Haberfield landed at Otago on 17 March 1836 aboard the Micmac, he had crammed a lifetime of experience into his twenty-one years. For the next six years, he worked as a whaler along the south-eastern coast of the South Island before settling in Port Moeraki in 1842. He had taken a Maori wife, Mereana Paahi (also known as Teitei), in a Maori ceremony. This was later formalised in an Anglican ceremony by the Reverend Creed at Moeraki on 27 September 1847. When Teitei died in 1852, he married Catherine Ariki Price at the Waikouaiti Methodist Mission House later that year.

Isaac’s relationship with Teitei produced five children—namely,

(a)Mere Pi Haberfield (known as Mary), born in Moeraki in 1837; died in Little River on 16 August 1893;

(b)Mereana Putere Haberfield (known as Annie), born in Moeraki on 27 February 1840; died on 23 April 1884;

(c)John Kerle Haberfield, born in Moeraki on 26 April 1845; died in Greenhills on 20 September 1902; and twins,

(d)Joseph William Haberfield, born in Moeraki on 23 January 1849, died on 1 May 1879; and Meriana Haberfield, born in Moeraki on 23 January 1849, died in October 1850, aged one.

Isaac was one of many well-known whalers such as Dickie Barrett, George Fyfe, Paddy Gilroy, Thomas Habbert, ‘Happy’ Jack Greening, John Hughes, Manuel Lima, Jacky Love, William Morris, James Spencer, Philip Tapsell, and Edward Weller, all of whom married Maori women.

By 1839, John Jones of Waikouaiti controlled most of the whaling stations between Riverton and Moeraki. Jones was a man of great practical ability and natural shrewdness and soon grew wealthy on whaling. He bought large areas of land from the Maori. A man of great force of character and devoted to his own way of thinking and aware of his virtues and failings, he was qualified to play a prominent part among the men who surrounded him. He lived on until 1869, and his muscular figure, dressed in a black coat and topped by a tall silk, hat was well known to the local settlers.

By 1842, Isaac had exchanged his life of whaling for sailing around New Zealand with other coastal traders. He joined the schooner Rory O’Moore sailing between Akaroa and Wellington. On one trip, the ship had the misfortune to run aground at Palliser Bay in fog and was wrecked. The crew saved the cargo and walked to Wellington in three days.

Isaac continued to ply his trade as a seafarer around the New Zealand coast. He bought a twenty-five-acre property in Moeraki and named it Clifton after the area he’d lived in his home city of Bristol. He died in Oamaru on 9 September 1906 at the grand old age of ninety-one following a life full of adventure. Ariki, his faithful second wife and companion of fifty-four years, died in Moeraki just four months later.

John Kerle Haberfield,¹ Boy’s namesake and grandfather, moved south to live in Bluff and married Elizabeth Honor.²

CHAPTER 2

Boy’s father William had married Ritea ‘Ruby’ Rehu¹ with whom he shared a four-year-old child.² In mid 1907, he had moved to Port Chalmers to work at the port’s new graving dock. He had only been in the job for three weeks when he was joined by his wife and child. The family was renting a house believed to be the oldest in Port Chalmers with no fire escape and which was infested with rats. Mrs Haberfield also brought her eleven-year-old daughter Hine (Kathleen) Rehu³ to live with them.

Two days after their arrival, tragedy struck when a patrolling police constable noticed flames issuing from the two-storey dwelling where the Haberfields were living. When Constable Smart reached the scene, he discovered William Haberfield and his young stepdaughter lying on the footpath severely burned and injured. It seems that the Haberfield family had been awakened by the noise of the fire. William rushed to a front window overlooking the street, telling his wife to throw their child into his arms after he jumped down. He leapt about fifteen feet and, finding that his wife had not appeared, climbed back into the property searching for his wife and child. He was driven back by the smoke and flames before he could reach them. He did, however, stumble over Hine crouching in a corner of the room. William picked her up and dropped her out the window onto the pavement before jumping out again. He was badly burned and had suffered severe scalp wounds and lacerations from the broken window panes, whilst Hine had been so severely burned that she was beyond hope of recovery. Sadly, she did not recover, and, after the funerals of his family, William returned alone to live in Bluff.

Boy’s mother, Frances Mary Haberfield, was born in Invercargill on 2 August 1883. Her parents were Frederick Percy Bailey⁴ and Elizabeth (Bessie) Cunnack Bailey (née Toman),⁵ both of whom had been born in Penzance in Cornwall in 1859. Frances was the fourth eldest of eleven children.

The young couple had immigrated to New Zealand in 1880 after an eighty-seven-day voyage from Gravesend to Port Chalmers. They had hoped to establish themselves in Dunedin, but on arrival, they learned that their contact, Bessie’s maternal uncle, had died while they were at sea. They then moved to Riverton where, from 1882 to 1884, Frederick worked at the port. Their next move was to Invercargill, and, after more than a decade there, Frederick moved to Bluff in 1898 to work as a seaman and watersider.

Their married life was not easy in that while the Tomans were a moderately wealthy Anglican family, Frederick was from a less well-off Methodist family. Frederick’s mother had died when he was fifteen. By the time he arrived in New Zealand, the country was entering into a depression with the end of the gold rush and a severe decline in commodity prices. Indeed, by 1891, Frederick was working as a self-employed firewood cutter and carter but sadly went bankrupt.

In 1904, Frances, then aged eighteen, married George Greig Spencer.⁶ George’s grandfather James Spencer,⁷ a sealer, whaler, and trader, was regarded as Bluff’s proverbial founding father and the first European to settle there. A Waterloo veteran, he arrived in Bluff in 1823 aboard the St Michael whilst a member of Johnny Jones’s Waikouaiti-based whaling team. He returned to Bluff the following year, making his permanent home there. Bluff was a settlement that survived and became a town and has a longer history than any other in New Zealand.

James Spencer married Meri Te Kauri at Waikouaiti in 1841. The bride was of Kai Tahu descent, and the marriage, which was conducted by the Reverend James Watkin, was the first Christian marriage celebrated in the Otago/Southland area.

Their son William⁸ married Louisa Te Memeke Coupar, who had been born at the Neck on Stewart Island in 1846. She was one of twelve children of Stewart Coupar and his wife, Te Mahana, a Kai Tahu woman.

Boy’s mother, Frances, or Big Nana as she became known, therefore became connected to the prominent Bluff-based Kai Tahu families through her marriage to George, and this brought her within the ambit of their tribal affairs.

As it is known, the intermarriage between Maori women and Pakeha men had a tradition stretching back for almost seventy-five years. Interracial marriage and cohabitation was a common practice; Frances and George’s marriage was confirmation of this and was significant in the fact that she, rather than he, was Pakeha.

It is true that Europeans who lived on the coastal fringe had more reason to interact with local Maori than their inland and more agricultural cousins. In ports like Bluff, there was much demand for men to work as seamen, watersiders, and fishermen, and, consequently, there was a much greater interaction between Maori and Pakeha. Adults and children, both Maori and Pakeha, mixed together with the children sharing the same classrooms and following the same interests and pursuits. This daily contact would have left few thinking of each other’s racial backgrounds. By the early twentieth century, there was a suggestion that many Kai Tahu felt that both culturally and physically they had become more European than Maori.

A century later, it is interesting to note that 43 per cent of Bluff residents self-identified as Maori compared with less than 12 per cent of Southland as a whole and 15 per cent throughout New Zealand.

Frances and George had known each other as children, and falling in love and marrying seemed to be the outcome of growing up in a small town. Following their marriage, the couple lived with George’s parents, which in turn brought Frances into contact with the Maori culture. Among these traditions were the harvesting and eating of wild foods, many of which formed no part of the European diet.

Foremost among these foods were mutton birds. The sooty shearwater, or titi as they were known to Maori, were to be found on a small number of islands off the coast of Stewart Island, which collectively became known as the Titi Islands. Preserved titi had become an important winter food source for Maori before and after European settlement and continues up until the present day. Maori serving with the New Zealand forces during World War II keenly awaited shipments of this delicacy from home.

As the spouse of a Maori, Big Nana had a legal right to participate in the harvest. She became proficient in the traditional methods associated with the harvest including the preparation of kelp bags used to store and then transport the mutton birds back to the mainland. Big Nana was also taught by her husband how to cut and prepare native flax and weave it into baskets in preparation for the season.

Frances and George’s marriage, however, was to be short-lived. In August 1900, three years after marrying, George died of tuberculosis and rheumatic fever, aged just twenty-four. Six months after his death, Frances bore her second son, George Greig Spencer, named after his father. She continued to live with her parents-in-law for a further three years.

George’s son George Greig Spencer,⁹ commonly known as Greg, became a fine rugby player. Playing mainly out of the Pirates Club in Invercargill, he became the second player (after his good friend Alistair ‘Ack’ Soper)¹⁰ to play more than 100 games in the Southland jersey. Soper debuted for Southland in 1954 as an eighteen-year-old, and, in 1955, he captained the Under-21 New Zealand Rugby Team to Ceylon. Two players in his team were to become great All Black players and captains—namely, Sir Colin Meads and Sir Wilson Whineray. Soper himself became an All Black in 1957, touring with the team to Australia, playing in eight matches, but he never won a test cap. The following year, he was a member of the New Zealand Under-23 touring team to Japan under Wilson Whineray’s captaincy. Ack Soper went on to play 103 times for Southland.

Greg Spencer debuted for Southland in 1958 and played 107 games for his union before retiring in 1967. In 1959, he played twice against the touring British Isles team. The first occasion was for Southland on 11 July 1959. Southland lost the match 11–6 but had the satisfaction of outscoring the tourists by two tries to one. The second match was when Greg played for the New Zealand Juniors as a prop at Athletic Park on 2 September 1959. Notwithstanding that five of the team, W. A. Davies, T. P. A. O’Sullivan, B. A. Watt, K. A. Nelson, and J. N. Creighton, all later became All Blacks, they were soundly beaten 29–9 by the tourists. The cartoonist Murray Ball of ‘Footrot Flats’ fame was also a member of the team’s backline, representing Manawatu.

However, the disappointment of these losses was put behind Greg when three days after the NZ Juniors match, he was a member of the Southland rugby team, which lifted the Ranfurly Shield from Taranaki, winning by 23–6 in a resounding defeat of the holder. Southland had last won the Shield in September 1938 and held it throughout the war years before losing it to Otago in August 1947.

While it was expected that on their performance against Taranaki, Southland would have a long tenure, they lost it in their first defence against Auckland. Southland would not hold the Shield again for another fifty years.

Greg also played for Southland against four more touring teams: France in 1961 (lost 14–9), Australia in 1962 (won 16–11), South Africa in 1965 (lost 19–6), and British Isles in 1966 (won 14–8). With the exception of the 1966 game when he reverted to prop, Greg played the remainder of his matches as hooker.

CHAPTER 3

Through her brother-in-law Tom Spencer, Frances met William (Bill) Isaac Haberfield. The Spencers encouraged Frances to remarry, and she and Bill did so in Bluff in 1910. The couple was to have three children: Mouru Caroline (1911–1999), Koa Gladys (1916–2009), and John Kerle Tipaho (1919–1945). Bill raised his two stepsons as his own. In addition, the couple customarily adopted two Kai Tahu kin, a brother and sister, Buku and Taura Hemara from Colac Bay. At various times, Bill’s mother (Noki) and his single sister Elizabeth (Lulla) Haberfield¹ and Bill’s nephew Carl Haberfield also lived with the family. Later, their grandson Nicholas Graham (Tiny) Metzger also came to live with them as part of the family.

Mouru (nicknamed Bubba) attended Greenhills Primary School before going on to attend Southland Girls High School. She showed academic ability and wanted to be a journalist but became a photo developer. She went on to marry Nicholas James Metzger in 1932. Nick’s grandfather was German but was educated in England before coming to New Zealand. Their first son, Nicholas Graham ‘Tiny’ Metzger, was born the following year, but another child was not born until 1943. Bubba had her hopes pinned on a dainty little girl, but instead she gave birth to a 13 lb 4 oz boy who was named Gary James. After Mouru’s husband, Nick, died of multiple sclerosis on 8 April 1967 at the relatively young age of fifty-seven, Bubba remarried long-time oysterman Joseph Pasco. They lived in Bluff until they were forced to move in 1996 to Calvary Rest Home in Invercargill when their large home and garden became too hard for them to manage. However, Bubba loved returning to Te Rau Aroha Marae in Bluff for kaumatua dinners and hui. She loved seafood and was known to get quite insistent on