Early Manhood - NZ Customs Service

I had now left school and needed work. My lack of discipline was a worry and my father suggested that I should join the Public Service where it was quite difficult to get the sack. He reckoned that I wouldn’t last very long in private employment. I got the forms and set about deciding which Government Department  I wanted to join. I put down Railways and Post Office which I later realised were not in what was known as the Public Service and included the only ones I had ever heard of such as Public Trust, Health and Education.
One of my brothers came in and said that one of the officers in the 21st Battery was in Customs and that they got plenty of free booze there. I didn’t drink at all but put it down anyway. In the end that was what I got. Import Licensing had just been introduced and Customs needed a lot of extra staff. It also seemed that Public Trust got the highest achievers particularly those with good marks in English while Customs got the next best.
With a University Bursary I was among the more preferred applicants. On 28th March 1939 I presented myself at the Customhouse in Customs St with my lunch tucked under my arm. The Chief Clerk who interviewed me and helped me to complete the formalities of joining the service had a thing about signatures. He was in charge of what was known as the Long Room named after the similar room in the Customs in London. It was where duty was paid and the cashiers were required to sign hundreds of Customs Entries each day. He had me write my signature which I had seldom used before. He was horrified and told me that I should condense it. This I did, soon nobody could decipher it and so it has remained to this day.
I was posted to the Wharf Office in Shed 15 Queens Wharf where the Examining Officers were stationed. My first job was to ‘write off’ ships papers. When an overseas ship arrived the master produced a manifest setting out all of the cargo. This was sent to Shed 15 and given a Rotation Number. The importers or mostly their Customs Agents would first attend at the Long Room and lodge their Customs Entries. They would pay the Customs Duty they had calculated and then take them to Shed 15 where the Examining Officers sat at desks behind counters with screens around them for privacy.
The E.O.s as they were called would examine the entries and if they were satisfied sign a release for the goods. They kept the top copy known as the E.O.’s copy and the following morning the Assistant Sub Collector in charge of the Wharf Office would sit with each E.O. and compare all the entries he had handled with other copies that had been sent down from the Long Room. This was to prevent tampering by the importer or agent. The top copies were then handed to the Writing Off staff who entered the entry numbers against the items on the manifest. If there were queries the E.O. would hold on to the entries sometimes for weeks and I soon learned which E.O.s were likely to hold ones that I needed to finish writing off a manifest. I would sneak into their offices during lunch hour, find the entries, write them off and return them before they came back from lunch.
My next job was known as ‘blue ticking’.  After a manifest was written off and a list of items not accounted for was made out another officer would repeat the process using a blue pencil. This had been introduced many years before when it was found that an officer had deliberately entered false numbers to enable an importer to evade Customs Duty. The work was very simple and I was soon promoted to man the telephone exchange. It was an old fashioned system with holding keys  and I became good at it. To fill in the time when I was not answering the phone I had a job seeing that all the proper documents were attached to each manifest and that the blue ticker had done his job properly. I was known as the ‘Clerical Jerquer’ which was an old fashioned term handed down for the British Customs.  
 
I was then transferred to the Enquiry Office in the Customhouse. There the public could seek help with Customs matters and disputes with importers and agents were handled and often referred to Wellington for a decision. I attended at the counter and had some filing jobs to fill in my spare time. The second in command was a rather gruff man with whom I had dealt at Shed 15 and who’s desk I had often searched for missing entries. He was hard to understand and most of the clerks were scared of him. I soon fixed him however as when he barked a request at me I would pick up the nearest file and take it to him. He would then have to repeat his request so that I could understand it. We actually got on quite well after that and I think he liked my style.
I had enrolled at University before I found that I was not selected for Training College.
As I thought that I would be assured of time off to attend classes I took three subjects, French, my best subject, Pure Mathematics and Applied Mathematics all at stage 1 level. Once I started full time work things became much more difficult. I was studying for Bachelor of Arts whereas Customs was more interested in students studying for Bachelor of Commerce or more usually Accounts Professional which was carried out at Seddon Tech. Both of these courses recognized that students worked and the timetables were arranged to suit. I found myself attending five nights a week and on Saturday morning. After my leisurely study habits at Grammar this was a shock to my system. It was hard enough attending the lectures but I also had little time for study and never got to the library to read the books recommended by the Lecturers. My Saturday morning lecture was in French Pronunciation. We had to speak only French during the lecture and I found it boring and time wasting so I dropped it. Unfortunately the Assistant Professor, a woman considered it an essential part of our education.
Towards the end of the year I stopped attending Applied Maths which I found interesting but couldn’t devote the time to it. I decided to sit only French and Pure Maths and when the marks came out for the Term or internal exams I found that I had been failed in French because I had not attended enough pronunciation classes. As you had to pass in two subjects I was not allowed to sit any degree examinations. Further than that as a failed student I had to pay enrollment fees for the next year. I enrolled for only two subjects in 1940 but the outbreak of war and my army commitments soon put an end to my University aspirations.
It was established practice for junior staff to spend time in Wellington generally in Head Office. This was dreary work compiling what was known as the Blue Book. In those days trade statistics were prepared manually and many hours were spent transcribing details from import and export documents to forms for collating into reports. With so many young men boarding away from their home towns they got into a mischief. Lots of overtime was worked for which after making up the two and a half hours to forty hours they were paid the equivalent of 15 cents an hour. As beer was 5 cents a glass and they sometimes got access to duty free spirits a certain amount of drinking went on.
In 1941 I was sent to Wellington but due to a shortage of local staff I was posted to the Port Office. It was a different set up to Auckland as instead of the agents having favourite E.O.s they lodged their papers at a desk and the E.O.s picked entries up at random. I was one of two clerks receiving and recording the documents and putting them into folders. The work was dull but I quickly got to know many of the staff and of the public as well. I will never forget my arrival in Wellington and my introduction to boarding houses.
A shy young guy who had been transferred a few months earlier offered to find me a place to stay. We were allowed two nights in a hotel and the day after I arrived he took me to Berhampore just past Athletic Park after work. His old landlady had agreed to take me in for a couple of weeks until I found somewhere permanent. It was cold and windy as we waited for a tram in Lambton Quay. An Island Bay tram came along but he said that we should take the next one. When it came it was a double decker one open at the top. He led me up the stairs and we sat a few feet under the power lines. It was the coldest tram ride I ever had and I was glad when we reached our stop. It was a very clean comfortable house and I was warned to be on my best behaviour. Mrs Yeats was getting old and was giving up taking in lodgers so she was only doing me a favour.
I soon found a permanent place through family friends. A fellow in the Ellerslie Athletic club who worked for Adams Bruce the cake and chocolate firm had been transferred to Wellington and needed a room mate. The boarding house was in Hawker St above Oriental Bay. It was off Marjoribanks St and only a few houses down from St Gerards the large Catholic church overlooking the harbour. It was quite rough and ready and lacked privacy. Our room was the largest and slept three of us so all the other boarders used it as a sitting room. My room mate brought home from work some sort of malted milk drink which tasted pretty ordinary but in our financial state was more than welcome at supper time.
My board was thirty two and six a week while my salary was about four pounds ten paid twice monthly. This meant that in months were there were five week ends my board came to more than my pay. In the three months I was there I struck one of these months. I had taken five pounds with me and at the end of the time I was just about broke. To save money instead of buying lunch I would run from the office in Customhouse Quay around the waterfront to Oriental Bay and then up the several hundred steps to Hawker St. where my landlady reluctantly gave me a spartan lunch. My athletic training stood me in good stead on this occasion.