Warrington McCarter Taylor born 4th July 1905.
Birth notice
Taylor to James and Louisa Taylor on July the 4th, a son
Warrington Mc Carter at 368 George Street. Both well.
This is the story about my Dad. Suzanne Taylor
My earliest memories of my Dad were sitting on his knee while he read stories before bed.
In the morning he was always up early having breakfast and then riding on his bike to the Train Station at Wingatui and catching the train into town to work.
We lived in a 3 acre life style block on the corner of Wingatui and Factory road.
My Dad was always busy we had 3 cows ,lots of hens who roamed where ever they wanted to and a cat called “Toby” to whom we all loved.
We had a hugh vege garden to which both Mum and Dad were always busy in. I have vivid memories of my Father’s large strong body and hands wielding a huge pitch fork bringing compost into the garden and turning it over so effortlessly. We had everything in that garden that you could ever think of.
He built Brian a tree hut high in a hugh tree which over looked one of the paddocks.
Brian also had a play shed with a steering wheel in it.
If he wasn’t busy in the garden, milking cows or at work he would always be mucking around with machinery.
I remember going with Dad almost every Saturday morning to the Garage in Mosgiel while he worked on a motor, or some part of a car. He would ask the mechanic about something he wasn’t sure of and then go and work on it himself.
Sometimes he would take me into the pub on the other corner to get a well earned beer and then we would go home.
Also on a Saturday afternoon he would visit the local Presbyterian Minister in his Manse and they would discuss in length matters pertaining to the Bible and Christianity.
I remember Brian and I going to Sunday School but Mum and Dad were never there.
When I was 4 years old I remember Dad hiring the services of a Draught horse and rider to help with harvesting the hay. It was a long hot day and all the men worked really hard to cut and bale the hay but my most vivid memory was Dad’s huge strong body with the pitch fork all day tirelessly working to get the job done. Mum I think actually making scones for the men working. There may have been a beer at the end of the day too if I remember.
Previous to the Hay making day Brian and I would run and hide in the hay growing and make hiding places even although we were told not to flatten the growing hay.
Often too Dad had to go looking for Duncan our Uncle who would sometimes go for a walk and not come back. We usually found him some where near 3 mile hill but one time he got as far as Wakari which was a long walk.
Renovations were also a big thing in our family life and Dad pulled the whole front of the house out and modernised it to the 50’s look. I have photos of this.
At night I could hear him in the Lounge playing our Player Piano and I would drift off to sleep listening to some piece of Classical music.
In one of our cars that we owned I found a pipe one day and I asked him what it was for. He told me that he was trying to learn how to smoke but couldn’t quite get the hang of it cause it made him cough. Good job he didn’t eh.
In the School holiday’s Brian and I would catch the train into town and go and visit Dad at work. He would buy us a pie for lunch which was a real treat and we would sit in Miss Tate’s room and have lunch. That is where I met George Bell a great friend of my Father’s and they would play the Cello together and that was quite exciting too. Dad also had and played a Recorder he had a big one at work and a smaller one at home. Mum said he wasn’t very good at it but at work there was no criticism.
I only saw my Father cry once when I was a child and that was after a phone call telling him that his Father had died. We all stood together in a circle and had a big hug while Dad cried.
Dad often went away on Business trips to Wellington and he would visit his Father who lived there with his Third wife.
Every time Dad came home he would bring us a present and I came to wait impatiently for him to open his suitcase up to see what his gift was going to be .He bought me lots of dolls because he knew I loved them and I think even when I was 12 all I wanted for my Birthday was a doll.
Thursday, 19 August 2010
Friday, 6 August 2010
Hiroshima 65 years on
What an influence Warrington Taylor had on me.
Karitane beach 40 km north of Dunedin, is a peaceful place. In January 1965, I sat on a sandhill with Warrington Taylor (photo left), watching fishing boats returning with the morning's catch. Warrington told me about Hiroshima, and how we must do everything within ouir powers to ensure no one ever uses an Atomic bomb again. I was 17 and more interested in rugby, athletics and the beautiful young girls that took their holidays at Karitane. Little did I know that this man would shape my life and I would spend 39 years doing humanitaerian work through his encouragment and inspiration.
Let us salute this remarkable man from Dunedin who shaped NZ anti-nuclear stance, Warrington Taylor, who did so much to ensure that NZers were made aware of the horrors of nuclear weapons, and who contributed to the NZ Government banning nuclear powered ships, has been forgotten as a man who stood up to the fickle politicians of the day, was called a 'crank' by many of them, but his legacy is large. I leave it to Warrington's closest friend, famous cricket commentator Iain Galloway to tell us a little about the late Warrington Taylor.
" After the war, as my law studies had been delayed by five years of war, my father Bryce Thomson could think of no-one better than Warrington Taylor to take me for tutorials and our peacetime association only strengthened my wartime impressions of him as a man of complete integrity and sincerity, outstanding intellectual gifts and blessed with a delightful sense of humour which stood him is such good stead when he faced from time to time rejection of his innovative if unusual plans and principles. Those lawyers here today will well remember how, for a period, Warrington signed all his cheques, trust account and personal, with the proviso that they be paid provided we weren’t all destroyed by nuclear explosion, how every year at our Annual Meeting he would politely seek permission to introduce a motion relating to nuclear disarmament only to be told that it was not relevant to the business of the Annual Meeting, a ruling he always accepted with dignity and good grace."
I would now like to post further information on Hiroshima today.
On Aug. 6 every year, Hiroshima remembers the 1945 atomic attack on the city. Kyoko Niiyama, who grew up in Hiroshima, is currently doing an internship at the city's Peace Memorial Museum.
Hiroshima was largely destroyed 65 years ago in the world's first attack using a nuclear bomb. The bomb, dropped by a US Air Force plane, killed tens of thousands and destroyed an entire generation in the city. Six decades later, Hiroshima is fighting to keep the memory of the attack alive.
The nuclear bomb and small origami cranes -- for Kyoko Niiyama, the two images are inseparable. "Each of the paper birds tells the sad story of my city, but they also represent its hopes and strengths," the 20-year-old says.
When she was at school, she also tried to fold her own cranes, she says. Just as Sadako Sasaki once did. Every child in Hiroshima knows Sasaki's story -- and entire classrooms make pilgrimages each year to the section of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial dedicated to her, where they hang their own origami cranes on strings.
Sadoko Sasaki was two years old when the first atomic bomb exploded in her hometown. She died at the age of 12 of leukemia, a disease many children fell victim to due to radiation from the bomb. During her final days in the hospital, a friend told Sasaki that anyone who folded 1,000 origami cranes could make a wish to God.
For origami paper, she used packing materials, newspapers and magazines. Other patients and friends brought her sheets of paper. The 12-year-old valiantly folded her origami, day in, day out. She managed to fold 1,000 cranes within the course of a month. But her wish of recovery was never fulfilled. Sasaki died on Oct. 25, 1955. As her parents encouraged her to eat more on the day of her death, she asked for tea with rice. "It tastes very good," were the girl's final words.
Kyoko Niiyama knows the story well, but sometimes she still struggles to control herself when she tells it. Possibly because it reminds her of her grandmother, who herself is a hibakusha, the Japanese word used to describe those who survived the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
One of the stories her grandmother told her about August 6, 1945, is the one about her great-grandfather, whose body was never found. His body was either burned to the point of non-recognition or was completely incinerated by the explosion. "My grandmother still says today that she was never able to accept the death of her father because his fate was never clarified," the 20-year-old says. "It is a pain that never goes away."
Will Hollywood Ever Make an Objective Movie about Hiroshima?
"Hiroshima is a special city with a message," says Niiyama, who wants to become a journalist. She is currently completing an internship at Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Museum. It's an enormous, modern building, filled inside with exhibits on the unimaginable. One exhibit is a glass display case holding cranes that were folded by Sadoko Sasaki. The museum is also filled with photos, giant models and even tiles that were melted in the heat of the firestorm created by the blast.
The exhibits at the museum are very moving, and that is important to Niiyama. "We cannot forget the past," she says. "Of course we must also remember the crimes that were committed by our own military during World War II." Even 65 years after the end of the war, Japan still has a hard time coming to terms with its own history.
It's a problem, however, that isn't exlusive to Japan. Niiyama learned that during a year abroad, when she studied at a college in the United States. "To me, Hiroshima's message is not an indictment, but rather a warning for peace and against the nuclear bomb," she says. "I would have really liked to have told my fellow students in the US a lot about my hometown and its history," she says. But she says people had little interest in those stories.
Niiyama said her experience was that America's telling of history comes through overblown movies like "Pearl Harbor." She says she found there was a lack of any real discussion about the dropping of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "We will probably have to wait an eternity for an objective Hollywood film about the victims of Hiroshima," Niiyama says, sounding a little bitter.
Part 2: Hiroshima Is Slowly Forgetting Its Own History
But even Hiroshima itself, the city where the first nuclear bomb was dropped, is slowly starting to forget its past. "All I have to do is look at my 16-year-old brother," she says. "The dropping of the nuclear bomb is only a thing of the distant past for him and other people his age. He doesn't even take the time to listen to our grandmother's stories," she says.
Niiyama then takes us through the expansive memorial park, which has several monuments including the Peace Bell, to the so-called A-Bomb Dome. The memorial is comprised of the ruins of one of the few buildings whose walls remained standing after the dropping of the bomb, even if the people behind those walls were incinerated. Now the building's steel dome points up toward the clouded sky. The scene still has the power to shock.
"Sometimes couples have photographs taken of themselves standing in front of it, smiling," says Kyoko Niijama, something that she finds "bizarre." An expensive restaurant on the river bank is located just a stone's throw from the peace monument.
On August 6, Hiroshima takes a stand against forgetting. The city holds a large memorial ceremony with tens of thousands of visitors in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park every year on the anniversary of the bombing. "And many schools continue to examine the issue," says Niiyama.
For example, the public Motomachi High School participated in an art project with hibakusha, where contemporary witnesses told students about the bombing. The pictures that the students later painted are disturbingly intense. One student, 17-year-old Miho Tokunaga, created a picture showing people burned in the explosion crossing a bridge. The naked, bleeding figures look like ghosts. It does not look as if a teenager painted the picture.
"It was clear to me that, no matter how hard I tried, I would never do justice to the sad stories of Ms. Watanabe, one of the hibakusha," the student said, looking serious. She traveled to the location that she depicts in the painting to see it first hand. "For the first time I really became aware of what happened back then, because one of the survivors told me about it." Before that, she admits, she hadn't given the subject much thought. "But what will happen when one day there are no more living witnesses? I think many people will forget."
It's a concern that is shared by Hotsuma Abe, a retiree who works as a part-time teacher at Motomachi High School. "I was shocked when I heard that some schools in Hiroshima have cut their peace lessons from the curriculum," the teacher says.
Survivors Still Die of Cancer Today
For Dr. Hiroo Dohy, however, forgetting will be impossible. He is head of the division for atomic bomb survivors at Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital. The hospital was already there when the bomb fell on Hiroshima and was severely damaged in the blast. Although many nurses and doctors lost their lives, and the surviving staff did not know what had happened to their relatives, the hospital remained in continuous operation. That's something the staff are still proud of at the hospital today. It was not until 1993 that the old buildings were replaced by a new building.
In the Atomic-Bomb Survivors Hospital Division, victims were still suffering and dying decades after the bombing. Even today, the hospital still has patients who are victims of the radiation they were exposed to then, who suffer from, among other complaints, cancers of the thyroid, lung, breast or genitals. "The closer they were to the epicenter at the time, the higher was the risk that they would later develop an illness," Hiroo Dohy explains. The fear of cancer is something that has accompanied many hibakusha their whole lives.
Part of the old masonry still stands in front of the hospital's entrance. It was kept as a monument, along with the building's twisted steel frame that reminds viewers of the massive blast wave. "This too is part of my city," says Niiyama. "Most of the tourist sights tell a sad story."
When she was at school, she also tried to fold her own cranes, she says. Just as Sadako Sasaki once did. Every child in Hiroshima knows Sasaki's story -- and entire classrooms make pilgrimages each year to the section of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial dedicated to her, where they hang their own origami cranes on strings.
Sadoko Sasaki was two years old when the first atomic bomb exploded in her hometown. She died at the age of 12 of leukemia, a disease many children fell victim to due to radiation from the bomb. During her final days in the hospital, a friend told Sasaki that anyone who folded 1,000 origami cranes could make a wish to God.
For origami paper, she used packing materials, newspapers and magazines. Other patients and friends brought her sheets of paper. The 12-year-old valiantly folded her origami, day in, day out. She managed to fold 1,000 cranes within the course of a month. But her wish of recovery was never fulfilled. Sasaki died on Oct. 25, 1955. As her parents encouraged her to eat more on the day of her death, she asked for tea with rice. "It tastes very good," were the girl's final words.
Kyoko Niiyama knows the story well, but sometimes she still struggles to control herself when she tells it. Possibly because it reminds her of her grandmother, who herself is a hibakusha, the Japanese word used to describe those who survived the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
One of the stories her grandmother told her about August 6, 1945, is the one about her great-grandfather, whose body was never found. His body was either burned to the point of non-recognition or was completely incinerated by the explosion. "My grandmother still says today that she was never able to accept the death of her father because his fate was never clarified," the 20-year-old says. "It is a pain that never goes away."
Sunday, 6 June 2010
A genius or a crank ? Warrington Taylor. by Iain Galloway
It wasn’t long before I developed a deep respect for his ability, and affection for him and a delight in his charming eccentricities.
Iain Galloway, international cricket commentator and lawyer
Life was always interesting in the company of Warrington McCarter Taylor – always entertaining, often unusual and often surprising and this has not ended with his death! Distress at the news of his passing changed to amazement when his son in law Ross Beckingham rang and told me that Warrington had recorded on tape his various instructions and requests, one of which was that I should speak at his funeral service. I feel greatly flattered and sadly inadequate, particularly as by force of circumstances this brief panegyric has been prepared and is being delivered literally between overs in a cricket match.
Warrington would not have wanted me to recite a curriculum vitae and I won’t do so other than to say that after school days at Otago Boys’ High School he graduated in law at the University of Otago and went on to take a master’s degree. His first job was with Statham, Brent and Anderson and in due course he joined the firm of Sidey and Collier, but for the great majority of his career until he retired a few years ago he practised as sole practitioner giving long and dedicated service to his chosen profession and to his clients to whom he was not only a most competent adviser but a trusted friend and confidant. His long career of almost 60 years was broken only by his service in the Army during the 2nd World War and it was during the War that I first met Warrington. We were the only two officers in a remote coastal battery location and so for some months we spent most of every waking hour in each others company. It wasn’t long before I developed a deep respect for his ability, and affection for him and a delight in his charming eccentricities. He was the only person I ever saw do things completely in reverse. In camp he always dressed fully before shaving and it was fascinating to watch him lathering up immaculate in collar and tie and occasionally wearing his peaked hat, whilst at the other end of the day he always consumed his 2 or 3 sweet sherries after we had had dinner “a deux” in the officers mess and with his sherries he ate a whole 2/6 block of chocolate every evening, these being of the size equivalent to those which I’m assured sell today for $2.30. In Mr Pickwick’s words “The eccentricities of genius”. He accepted the rules and regulations of the Army without question – this was wartime and his country was in peril, but in a matter of fact way he idly described in detail how the accuracy and efficiency of the weapons which were at our disposal could be vastly improved, supporting his claims with some highly complex theoretical calculations. Above all I remember how much the very rare weekend leave meant to him when he would be briefly reunited with his wife Catherine.
After the war, as my law studies had been delayed by five years of war, my father Bryce Thomson could think of no-one better to take me for tutorials and our peacetime association only strengthened my wartime impressions of him as a man of complete integrity and sincerity, outstanding intellectual gifts and blessed with a delightful sense of humour which stood him is such good stead when he faced from time to time rejection of his innovative if unusual plans and principles. Those lawyers here today will well remember how, for a period, Warrington signed all his cheques, trust account and personal, with the proviso that they be paid provided we weren’t all destroyed by nuclear explosion, how every year at our Annual Meeting he would politely seek permission to introduce a motion relating to nuclear disarmament only to be told that it was not relevant to the business of the Annual Meeting, a ruling he always accepted with dignity and good grace. How many of us will forget the settlement of the sale of the final section of a big subdivision in which he acted for the vendor and to which settlement he invited all the solicitors who had acted for the purchasers of other sections in the subdivision over the years and he provided a champagne celebration for us all. He prided himself on drafting the shortest wills and transfers possible – productive furrows on the brows of Justice Department officials – query him they may, fault him they could not. He made a very significant contribution to the Law Society in the field of Property Law and delivered at least one paper to a New Zealand Law Society Conference.
Some who didn’t know him well no doubt regarded him as a crank – I regarded him for what he undoubtedly was, a genius. On one occasion his car brakes developed an extraordinary fault. They worked when going forward, but failed in reverse. Nothing the expert mechanics tried was effective – they were at their wits end. Warrington, knowing nothing about mechanics, completely dismantled the system, fixed the fault and reassembled the brakes. He worked the whole thing out theoretically on paper and then put it into practice.
When I was a member of the Council of the Law Society we tried very hard to persuade him to join us so that he would become President in due course, but her refused – he was essentially a modest, retiring person who never sought publicity but accepted it when it came and no doubt welcomed it if it meant support for one of his particular causes such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or the retention of the trolley buses in Dunedin. Like so many humble and retiring people he was devoted to his family and how marvellous it was that he and his brother, Harold, should meet again last year after 56 years and what unbounded joy it gave them both. His dedicated devotion to Catherine over the later years when she was so frail and the grief of her loss. His pride in his children Suzanne and Brian and their families, Ross and Prue and their children to whom we all extend our deepest sympathy. (Although he took great delight in saying to me “Rugby Football – that’s the game they play on horseback with sticks isn’t it?” We know how closely he followed Brian’s athletic achievements and how proud he was of them.)
Finally, he came to terms with his Church in later years. He was a regular parishioner of Knox Church in his younger days, but his brilliant, searching, questioning, demanding mind could not accept many of its principles and concepts and he became agnostic. I remember his coming to St Paul’s Cathedral not long after Tim Raphael arrived as Dean – a follower of Bishop Robinson the author of “Honest to God”, he advertised his Sunday night sermon as “The Resurrection – Facts or Fiction”. Warrington was there to hear it and as he left he handed his prayer book to me and said “I stood up when you said the Creed, but the only statement I accepted as correct was “he suffered under Pontius Pilate”. He subsequently wrote a most learned treatise in which he claimed that Christ did not die upon the Cross and his argument and evidence based on his interpretation of the Bible is indeed convincing. However, he returned to his Church in later years so grateful for what it had done for his ailing wife – acknowledging and accepting and appreciating its positive aspects and believing that it was the only subsisting force for good.
My tribute to Warrington Taylor has been inadequate – a number of you here today knew him longer and better than I did – George Bell and Bryce Thomson his two oldest friends, the former his partner in lunch hour cello duets in Warrington’s office for many years. The latter the third cyclist on those pioneer motor cycling tours of the South Island, and Miss Tate, loyal and devoted, his entire staff for so long and so much a part of and support for Warrington’s way of life.
One could end by using the familiar cliché “All of us are richer for having known him” for so we are, but I would add to it the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, for I believe that they are singularly appropriate as an epitaph for a gentle man who, when he saw a need did all he could to meet it and if necessary make it a cause. Emerson wrote “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is the genius”.
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
30 Years Ago In The Evening Star (Dunedin)
MONDAY JANUARY 22, 1979 - Evening Star, Dunedin
CHAMPION of Dunedin’s trolley buses, Mr Warrington Taylor, has pleaded once again on their behalf to city councillors, asking that overhead wires on the discontinued Opoho-Shiel Hill route be retained.
‘‘We need to keep the facilities when a crisis is looming and these wires are good for another 20 years or so,’’ he said.
The council wants to remove the wires because they are considered visual pollution. It has 13 trolley buses in running order. Only seven are in use on the St Clair-Normanby route and Mr Taylor wants the other six kept in reserve.
Monday, 26 April 2010
One of the most remarkable men I have known.
When he spoke, his words were clear, well chosen and soft. He ran a law firm in Dunedin from an old office in Princess Street, near the Embassy theatre. I loved going into his office and watching him write legal briefs on quarto sheets of paper, which he tied with green tape when completed. When I was at High School I popped in to see him a few times, and this busy lawyer would always welcome me with a broad smile, with at least one gold tooth.
I think he took a liking to me and we often used to sit down together at his crib at Karitane, and tell me about trips he did in Europe as a young man. He talked of the Swiss Alps, the river journeys and going to famous places such as art galleries and museums.
What moved me about this man was his compassion and an undying belief the world should be a better place. He was a key figure in the Dunedin branch of the CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and campaigned vigorously for banning the bomb.He fought against the Dunedin City Council when they made plans to scrap trolley buses, and in 1960 I think it was, he stood as an independent candidate for the Dunedin Central electorate on the nuclear disarmament platform. Warrington Taylor was a fighter for human rights, truth and a better world.
In 1965 when the Beatles visited Duedin, Warrington joined his son Brian and I and he enjoyed their performance immensely. Most adults of his age were condemning the Beatles as anti-establihment, but not Mr. Taylor. He could see the good in these people and like the lyrics that often promoted peace and love.
Warrington Taylor was a man for all seasons. He was equally at home in a law court, or repairing his old car or lawn mower. His innate ability to break subjects down into component parts, and rebuild arguments or cases, was a technique he used when repairing motors.
I feel that Warrington Taylor was one of those men that somehow the media ignored. Never into self promotion, he quietly did his works behind the scene. I wonder how many clients he did work for and he never charged them ?
I am very proud to help the Taylor family start this blog, especially Brian and Pru, Suzanne and Ross. I hope those of you who knew this remarkable man will contribute to this blog.
Bob McKerrow
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