Sue | Devonport

“This one day I was in a play with my friends, and I had been asked by this lady, my surname, and she said, oh you’re not related to this man? And, I said, yes he’s my father. And, I said, do you know him?  And, she said he was in the conscientious objector’s camp with my husband.

And, that day, I discovered what my father was truly like, and I was 18. So I suppose that really started my whole thinking along the lines of why you would put yourself in that situation where you get given white feathers and get called a coward.

During the war, anybody who objected to the war, or objected to being conscripted for the war was put into a camp and there were several camps. He went to one in Whanganui, where he was interred with all these other like-minded rebels. Some of them quite famous people in New Zealand, and he was kept there for the whole of the war, because he was a ‘danger to society’, as they said. He was engaged to my mother at that stage, so he had a long engagement, and then when he came out, he was a printer, and a very all-round man. He would do all sorts of things.

He came out to New Zealand when he was 10 years old on a ship, by himself, because his mother had died, and his father had moved to New Zealand. So, quite strong influences of independence and clear thinking, and not shaped by too many people in his family, but by outer influences. I think it created a feeling of being able to stand up for your beliefs, and your feelings of what was important to you, and that was something that I felt quite strongly about. It was nice to have that affirmed from something that Dad had done, and maybe I’d subconsciously picked it up as a child. I don’t know. He never talked about it until that time. I’d asked him, what did you do during the war, Daddy?  And, he said, I was too old to go to war. That’s all he ever said, because he didn’t think I’d understand what a conscientious objector was until quite late in my life, and when I asked him. 

I was born in Devonport. I’m still in Devonport. Became interested in theatre. My mother was a ballet teacher, and I did singing, and ballet and acting, and then I became interested in cooking. I trained to be an actress and a singer and a dancer, and ended up as a cook. So, there you go.”