There are references to Jack and Annie Baugh throughout their son Cliff’s stories from the time he left home aged twelve through to his wartime service, but I had a deep affection for them and I want to add something of my own.
In a word, they were our loving grandparents.
Grandpa was a quiet, retiring man, so it’s no wonder Nana features more in my memory than he does. Dad had a troubled relationship with her, but to us she was always caring and affectionate. My favourite photos by far are of her nursing Stephen. Strangely, I can find none with Colleen, Lynne or I.
Nana was rather “loud”, like her visitors. Most of them were fellow Lancs — coal miners and their wives.
Waro was a real community, so we’d walk up the road to visit Mrs Ackers, Mrs Laurie and the rest in their little workman’s cottages. They all kept their Lancashire accents until they died.
She seems to have disliked having her photo taken — a trait I’ve inherited — and there aren’t many to choose from. It’s good to have that one of her at nineteen, but that’s the lot until Cliff was already a growing boy, when you’ll find one or two that include her at the beach, or up in the Waro Rocks.
The best are where she doesn’t seem self-conscious — comfortable in what she was, a strong working class woman.
The only formal family grouping including her that I can find is the one above, when Evelyn was a young girl and her mother in her forties.
According to the Maori Dictionary the word waro means “deep hole, pit, abyss (due to natural causes), chasm, mine”. And it was in the Waro — or more broadly Hikurangi — mines that Grandpa worked until they were closed by flooding. At that stage he moved to the Kamo mines, and eventually to the Public Works Department until he retired.
As a little kid I remember seeing him dropped off in front of their house after work, and the truck heading up the road to deposit the other miners. He started work early and arrived home early too. “Tea” would follow soon after, maybe 4.30 in the afternoon. Afterwards he’d be happy to sit in his chair with his pipe and humour me. In Winter the coal fire would be lit. They’d have supper later in the evening. Every meal was accompanied by strong tea from a teapot, served in cups and saucers, with or without milk and sugar.
In latter years, after we were married, the little boy coming to visit was Paul, Evelyn’s younger son. Evelyn and Bob had bought the neighbouring house, and Paul would come over after school. The love the three of them shared was obvious.
I say Grandpa was quiet but I do remember him chiming in at the odd neighbourhood shindig with a piano accordion. Heather reckons it was a rather more modest concertina and now there’s no one to settle it. But I know for certain that his drink was a shandy.
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We weren’t with either of them when they died. We had a young family in Auckland when Annie passed away in 1972, three years after that photo with Stephen was taken. Adrienne was only a few months old, but we drove up to the service in Whangarei, where we found Joe Wellington, a school friend of mine, playing the organ. Afterwards a surprising number drove down to the committal in the Waikumete crematorium chapel. It was our first time there, and I recall the dreadful finality of her coffin suddenly sinking out of view. We gathered outside. There was quite a crowd, and Grandpa looked frail and grief-stricken in his suit. Suddenly there was a plume of black smoke from the crematorium stack and I saw him glance up and look away.
When he followed in 1980 we were in the Solomon Islands. His son made sure he got a good send-off with an obituary in the Northern Advocate — the last of his era and a man of unwavering principle.