I could feel the bricks starting to bury my feet'
The Hawke's Bay earthquake rumbled for a terrifying 2½ minutes. When it finally stopped, towns lay in ruins. On today's 75th anniversary of the disaster, survivors tell their stories to Bernard Carpinter.
'Situation appalling. Whole town appears to be on fire'.
The HMS Veronica, docked at Napier, sent that message by morse code to naval headquarters at 1.31pm on February 3, 1931. It was two hours and 45 minutes after the killer quake had struck Hawke's Bay and caused New Zealand's worst natural disaster.
The commercial centre of Napier, comprised mainly of masonry buildings, had collapsed to the extent that when special policeman Ernest Vogtherr arrived there he could not even find his way around: "There were just no streets left," he said.
Hastings and other towns throughout Hawke's Bay were also devastated. In total 258 people lost their lives.
May Blair, nee Forrest, was just 13½ years old and starting her first day at Napier Technical College, proudly wearing her first pair of court (dress) shoes.
"When the quake struck I was on the second-storey sitting about in the middle of the room," Mrs Blair, now an 89-year old widow, recalled this week.
"I remember the building seemed to lean over at an alarming angle before the walls started to collapse. My first thought was the boys in the lab had made some terrible explosion."
As luck would have it, Mrs Blair was in the safest possible place: she had dropped a fountain pen and was on the floor under her desk.
"I think that saved me from a lot of damage. Nine people were killed at the school."
She managed to thread her way through the carnage and arrive safely at her sister's house in Latham St.
"It was then I noticed one of my lovely court shoes was missing and that I had a deep cut on my neck and shoulder."
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The family home in Battery Rd had not been badly damaged – wooden houses survived the quake very well, apart from their chimneys – but with strong tremors continuing the residents were scared to stay indoors. The Forrest family slept outside under a tarpaulin.
"About three days after the quake I went to the grocer and a big crack appeared in the ground in front of me. I turned round and there was another one behind me."
May's brother Bill was in the navy and in Napier for the quake – but seamen were forbidden from leaving the service to check their families.
"After three days he did come to see us – and he got 90 days in Mt Eden jail."
When Mrs Blair returned to school it was housed in tents in Nelson Park and then, briefly, at Napier Girls High.
"We Tech girls were not liked at Girls High so I would not go back."
Despite witnessing first hand the earthquake's horror, Mrs Blair has stayed in Napier: "I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, although I have travelled a lot".
She raised seven children, became a JP, married 950 couples, was president of the Napier branch of the New Zealand Council of Women and was awarded the QSM for volunteer work.
February 3, 1931 was also Gordon Vogtherr's first day at school, the Hastings five-year-old started that day at Mahora School.
"It being my first day, I didn't know which doors went where and everything was rocking but eventually I managed to get out and I immediately took off for home," he recalls.
"The water overflowed from the swimming baths. One girl was killed at the school.
"I told my father to `Spear him!' – I thought it was something like a serpent moving under the ground.
"The chimneys in our house came down and there was this awful smell from it. In the kitchen all the jams and pickles were strewn about. My grandparents lost everything."
Gordon's father Ernest later took a job in Nelson and the family moved there for 3½ years. Seven years after the quake the family returned to Hastings – "my father had a great yearning for Hawke's Bay" – and started what is now called the Holly Bacon Company, still run by the family.
Ernest Vogtherr wrote about the earthquake in his autobiography, No Regrets. The first shockwave knocked him down in the street in central Hastings.
"When I recovered from the initial shock I realised that I was right under the Cosy Theatre, and I could feel the bricks from this building coming down at me like snowballs," his book says.
"They started by burying my feet and I could feel them creeping up my body and I thought 'this can't last much longer' as only my head was by now uncovered." Suddenly the bricks stopped and he eventually managed to wriggle free.
"Fortunately the theatre was extremely badly built and the bricks had just fallen apart and came down on me one at a time. Had a portion of the wall held together I would have been crushed to death like so many other unfortunate victims of nature's bad-tempered upheaval.
"The main street was a shambles and impassable. Buildings were cut completely in half leaving bedrooms, etc, exposed whilst the fronts of the buildings lay in the street below."
Ernest Vogtherr had trained as a territorial and was called into the special police force as an inspector. Officers had to deal with a few looters and thieves, and had to keep people out of dangerous areas.
He ordered his men not to let anyone through the picket lines, "not Jesus Christ himself". They even blocked the commissioner of police, which caused some fuss.
Maori from local pa came in to help: "They were magnificent," Mr Vogtherr said in his book.
Another survivor, Dorothy Hollay, now 94 and living in Te Awamutu, has won a competition for recollections of the quake. She was 19 when it struck and was working in the Napier hospital laundry. "The new nurses' home, only built the previous year, was reduced to rubble killing all the nurses who had been on night duty," she said in her memoirs.
"I knew one of these young ladies, it was her very first evening on night duty. This home contained no reinforcements whatsoever, a shocking example of the lack of an enforceable building code in those times."
Though dazed, Mrs Hollay spent the day helping at the hospital on the hill. Down in the town centre the fire station had collapsed and there was no water, allowing fires to rage unchecked.
Many who survived the earthquake died, trapped in the fires.
Mrs Hollay recounted one story about a man who was trapped by his leg as the fires advanced. He begged rescuers to cut his leg off.
"No one had the heart to cut off a man's leg, but the dilemma was soon solved – he yelled again, 'Cut the bloody thing off, it's only a wooden one!' Now that was his lucky day."
Despite the widespread destruction, order was restored surprisingly quickly, with crew from the Veronica and other naval ships working round the clock.
The special police force was disbanded after only three weeks and each member received a personal letter of thanks – Gordon Vogtherr still has his father's.
While the city centre was being rebuilt, "Tin Town" was set up in what is now Clive and Memorial squares. Most of the new shops and offices were built in the style of the day – art deco – which is now one of the region's icons and tourist attractions.
The Government offered up to £100 to each household to repair quake damage. Applications had to be made on a single sheet of paper, with a quote from a builder.
Government officials drew up national building codes to ensure that future buildings would better withstand earthquakes. Many homeowners could afford to rebuild only one of their chimneys and simply blocked off other fireplaces.
The weekend before the quake Dorothy Hollay went sailing on the lagoon just outside Napier.
"It was a perfect day for sailing, and I now find it is hard to believe that there is now no sea on which to sail," she said.
Land rose by up to two metres, so the quake had the effect of providing more land on which Napier could expand.
After the earthquake, many people left the area for different reasons and differing periods, some never returning.
Mrs Blair chose to stay. "We just got on with things."
