MARRIAGE AND A NEW LIFE

I went for a medical for the army but was exempted because of a weak left eye. By the time I finished the apprenticeship they were only taking people who passed the medical A1 and later they stopped National Service altogether. Some of my friends went, and served for two years in Kuala Lumpur. Whenever they were home on leave we would go out together and go dancing. Wendy's brother, Ashley Swasbrook, took Wendy along, and I first met her when she was sixteen. She and I teamed up until six years later we were married. Wendy was very good at Rock'n' Roll as well as ballroom. There were at least five Dance Halls in Southampton to go to on Saturday and Sunday nights and we'd go up to Winchester or Brockenhurst. We had an old V8, a Canadian Staff Car, a shooting brake, and we used to all get in this and nine times out of ten it would break down. It would only do eight to the gallon and we often ran out. We never had enough sense to take extra petrol. If it was foggy someone would walk in front of the car to show the way was clear. Once we had to go and pick up Wendy's grandmother for Christmas and the weather was so bad it was sleet, and the windscreen wipers broke. We had to have a piece of string on each of the windscreen wipers, with the one on the passenger side pulling to the left and then the driver pulling to the right. We laughed all the way!

Wendy Swasbrook, aged 18, January 1958

Often on Saturday nights a group of us, about six boys and three girls, would go Frank, Kenny Ranger and Tony Fairfield dancing at Marlands Hall, or go to the pictures or dog racing, and afterwards for steak and chips to the Silver grill - which would keep its doors open late for us - and then we'd all go on to Wendy's house and play cards until we went to sleep on the floor in the lounge. Often some of us would have to get up and go to work from there in the morning.

Sometimes Wendy and I would go out with our friends Maureen and Eddy late at night on to the pier and fish. Maureen's mother would make us a curry, and we'd catch flounder and eels from the oil jetty. The lights from the jetty attracted the fish.

In 1960 Wendy's family had moved to New Zealand. They went in a group of twenty-eight people in Dormobiles and Commer Vans, most of them traveling across through India, and emigrated to New Zealand. It was a big event and the newspapers published their photos and wrote a story about them when they arrived in New Zealand.

Because by then Wendy and I had an understanding - we never did really get engaged! - Wendy stayed in Southampton with her Aunty Aileen, and on the 1st July 1961 we were married at the Holy Trinity Church, Freemantle, in Southampton. We went to Jersey for our honeymoon and liked the place so much we went back again the next year for ten days. I remember going through an underground hospital there built by the German P.O.W.'s during the war - it was an eerie sort of a place.

Frank and Wendy, with best man Kenny Ranger, Ashley Swasbrook, and Patsy, Pauline & Janet	Frank and Wendy, wedding breakfast	Honeymoon, St Brallard's Beach, Jersey July, 1961

We lived at first in the top half of a house in Shirley, but Wendy's mother kept telling us what a great place New Zealand was. After three years we had to decide whether to put a deposit on a house or to emigrate to New Zealand, and we chose New Zealand.

By then I had been working on the Southampton Docks doing contract work. We had a pool of fitters and when a big boat came into dock for ten days we went aboard and did the repair work on it. When the job was finished they would pay us off and we'd wait for the next boat. It was like a casual job. I did that for a couple of years. Then I worked on the Fawley Power Station that they were building at Calshot, working on the pipes that hold the hot steam.

We left for New Zealand in 1964. We paid our way to come to New Zealand, as because of my eyes we couldn't get on an immigration scheme. With all my relations here I had no trouble getting assurance of a job here. My first job in New Zealand was at ReidRubber in Penrose as a maintenance fitter. After six months with ReidRubber I went to D. McL. Wallace in Maurice Road, Penrose near where Erikson Stadium is now. They made gearboxes and pumps for slashers that went behind a tractor. I used to make up the gear pumps to drive them.

One day we had an opening of a new section of the firm and Barry Crump came to open it. I'd never seen anything like him. He came along in his old Cadillac, all roughly dressed, and he opened the boot and out jumped a couple of dogs; it was an eye-opener for me to see some guy like him come to do an official opening!

I continued with the weight lifting and I joined the judo club with Wendy's brother for a while before we had children.

We lived in St George Street Papatoetoe. Wendy worked for Peach Products that were part of Hellabys along the Great South Road at Westfield. They were the main butchers and Peach Products was a sideline. She never really settled into New Zealand life then, with her mother too close and we decided to go back to England. I never really had a long-term programme, we just decided to go.