History of Auckland City

Chapter 3: On the trail of the modernising city (1919-1945)

The quarter-century separating the ends of the two World Wars was as disorienting for the Council as for the general populace. The booming prosperity of the 1920s was obliterated by the retrenchment of the Great Depression and then the austerity imposed by six years of all-out war. Throughout these blasts the city kept expanding -- 65,000 in 1918, 128,000 in 1945 --, as did the demands on municipal services and facilities.

Arrival of the motorcar

The inexorable influx of motor vehicles -- their number doubling to 25,000 in the six years ending 1920 -- made the Sabbatarians campaign to halt the continentalising of Sundays quaintly irrelevant. It compelled both an end to the toleration of laizzez-faire behaviour by drivers and a complete review of roading policy. From 1923 pedestrians were compelled to 'keep to the left' on footpaths. In 1926 control of moving traffic was reclaimed from the police, but warfare over the regulations of taxicabs was endemic and the Council was relieved when it surrendered this thankless task to the Transport Board in 1937. The most startling change in roading was not in new major thoroughfares (only one, the Waterfront Drive, made possible by the Tamaki railway deviation, was built), but in the width, surfacing and ambience of streets. The 1920s were the era of concreting, and the 1930s of sealing hitherto gravelled residential suburban streets. The Council was also a prime mover of a project located ten miles beyond its boundaries, the Centennial Memorial Drive (1939).

Reflecting changing preferences in recreation

From earlier commitments to widen and diversify facilities for outdoor recreation and enjoyment the Council never wavered. It acquired or upgraded a string of parks, including Motuihe Island, the Parnell Rose Garden and -- most significantly, invaluable stretches of the bushclad Waitakere Ranges later to form the nucleus of the Centennial Memorial Park. Two facilities enterprisingly built with unemployment relief labour in the mid 1930s were both at Western Springs -- the Chamberlain Park golf course and the motor camp. The latter was a war victim, converted into a transit camp. On its opening in 1922 the zoo at Western Springs already ranked best in New Zealand. Holdings were regularly augmented by the generosity of private donors. A cause celebre was the 1925 escape of a leopard which remained free for a fortnight and titillated many a conversation. In 1930, the mayor, George Baildon, delivered the first known mayoral radio broadcast, his topic being the future of the zoo.

On the indoor front, the physical shortcomings of the library became increasingly distracting for John Barr, the veteran Librarian, although another six branch libraries came on-stream. For art lovers, prospects were even gloomier: between 1921 and 1945 six separate initiatives to establish a gallery of decent standard and space foundered. For a while music lovers enjoyed richer fare. The City Organist presented to declining audiences an annual average of forty `severely classical' recitals during the 1920s. He persuaded the Council to subsidize a 120-voice choir which he conducted until its dissolution in the mid 1930s. The Municipal Military Band pumped out 200 concerts a year, for a period being featured on radio. It was that same medium's soaring popularity, together with the advent of talking pictures and the fiscal retrenchment of the Depression, which ended the Council's support of public musical entertainment.

The citizens want -- the City Council provides!

The 1920s were the heyday of the Council as owner of utilities and commercial entrepreneur: at one stage it sold water, electricity and fish, operated the tramways and an abattoir, and even commenced the process of acquiring the Auckland Gas Company. Already a victim of the `tall poppy syndrome' of uncooperative neighbouring boroughs, it was repeatedly forced to decide between the interests of its own citizens and those of greater Auckland. Forbidden to make a profit as such, the abattoir could exact fees for stock killed at private works for domestic consumption and this often placed the two on a collision course. Major extension to chilling facilities and stock accommodation were in train by 1945. By contrast, being in the fishing business lost its appeal as deficits mounted. In 1924 the trawlers were sold at a substantial loss, although the retail fish market continued.

Supplying water and electricity: operating the trams

Space permits only the sketchiest account of the water, electricity and tramway ventures. With the demand for electricity insatiably climbing, the Council in 1920 formulated plans to triple generating capacity. However, suburban bodies were energising a two-pronged campaign aimed at getting the Government to construct hydro stations and retailing the electricity through a system of elected power boards. They won, with the Council graciously serving as a willing midwife. In 1922 all its assets were transferred to the Auckland Electric Power Board for Ł525,000. As regards water, the Council so diligently expanded its Waitakere sources as if to make supply shortages a thing of the past. However, buoyed by their electricity triumph suburban bodies started complaining about overcharging and impure water, citing the creation of a water board as the best solution. They had sufficient pull to procure a Royal Commission of Enquiry in 1927, but its report vindicated the Council's position and performance. With daily consumption almost tripling between 1920 and 1945, some shortages did recur during wartime, but plans to tap the copious Hunua catchment were already being developed.

The Council ran the nine-route 27 miles tramway system for a decade from 1919. It completed several major extensions and double-tracking and in the mid-twenties waged a vigorous war with private pirate buses, resolved only when transport licensing was introduced nationally in 1926, a year when the Auckland trams carried 63,000,000 passengers. Following a 1927 poll defeat of an expansion loan proposal, the whole question of isthmus public transport became enmeshed in inter-authority local politics. A Royal Commission of Enquiry held in 1928 recommended the creation of an independent directly-election Transport Board, a solution in which the disheartened City Council unenthusiastically acquiesced. The undertaking was transferred without compensation, John Allum, who chaired the City's Tramways Committee, becoming the first chairman.

Planning houses but not a Civic Centre

Driven by social conscience, the City Council became steadily more involved in housing and its planning. In 1924 it built fifty workers' homes in Grey Lynn and was a pioneer in doggedly working towards its first town planning scheme, which was adopted in 1938. Its first upheld objection to a building application on town planning principles occurred in 1929. A 1934 survey showed that one-third of the houses inspected were structurally defective, thus beginning a focus on blighted inner-city areas and insanitary overcrowded housing. Another survey in 1944 revealed 3,000 desperate cases. From 1945 the Council acted as guarantor for some 110 approved mortgages where lending exceeded normal bank limits.

The stillborn civic centre of the 1920s illustrated that attention to planning but not to politics is a recipe which courts disaster. Following the shifting of the city markets, the City Engineer, Walter Bush, ambitiously suggested its use for a civic centre. Even downgrading into a municipal administration block failed to get ratepayer approval in 1921, but undeterred the Council continued to acquire and raze properties and sponsored a design competition. The winning entry envisaged two massive buildings fronting a huge formal square. Ratepayers were less entranced and decisively rejected it. Subsequently, a Civic Centre Commission produced an even more monumental scheme, but thoroughly embarrassed, the Council in 1927 washed its hands of the whole idea. For the Council it was an inglorious chapter best quickly buried, although three elements -- the location of the central library, the underground carpark and a major auditorium -- actually became reality more than fifty years later.

The final throes of 'Greater Auckland'

Having gathered in nine surrounding local bodies, the impetus driving the `Greater Auckland' movement was not entirely spent. With costly residential development imminent, Point Chevalier voted for amalgamation in 1921. Diehard resistance by Avondale Borough's councillors in 1927 did not sway its citizens from opting to link up with Auckland City, a union which swelled the City's area by 40%. Heavily influenced by the proposed Waterfront Drive and the Government's development of a garden suburb, the Orakei Road Board, with its rural neighbour, Tamaki, willingly in tow, consigned its future to Auckland City in 1928. There territorial expansion ceased, although but for imposing an ill-thought condition, the City could have gathered in Mt.Albert Borough in 1931. Suburban local bodies for whom preservation of existence was paramount notwithstanding their inadequacy to cope with development, grasped the lifeline of the special purpose board model exemplified by the drainage, electric power and tramways arrangements.

Coping with depression and World War

In many respects the pushful, achieving decade of Sir James Gunson's mayoralty (1915-25) was to represent the pinnacle of endeavour in the first century. A succession of major loans was approved, new functions borne, and the Council's receipts first passed Ł1,000,000. Much of the succeeding twenty years were to be blighted by depression and then the Second World War.

For the City Council, the Great Depression (1929-35) mean three things -- managing an increasing complexity of Government-subsidised relief projects (involving 1,700 men in 1933); floating almost no new loans; ruthless retrenchment in every corner. Average annual rate increases of nearly 9% in the 1920s plummeted to 1.6% in the early 1930s - no surprise, when in 1930 20% of rates were unpaid and defaulters were allowed to expunge arrears by serving as unskilled labourers for the Council. Sixty staff were made redundant while others took a 10% salary cut in 1931. Senior officers lost another 5% in 1932. It was a grim holding operation, with the Council prominent in organising food and clothing appeals, but there was the spin-off of new parks, widened roads and the Western Springs Stadium.

Because of the threat of Japanese invasion, the presence of American troops, the severe shortage of supplies, and its duration, World War II disrupted Council activities more comprehensively than had World War I. Staff numbers dropped by 40%. A vast array of works and initiatives were shelved or scaled down. These included the introduction of traffic lights, extension of the Centennial Memorial Parks, construction of the Grey's Avenue flats, planning of an airport, and work on a metropolitan planning scheme. Other casualties were existing amenities: Military bases occupied parts of parks and the margin of water supply over water demand shrank alarmingly. The Council was involved in almost every facet of civil defence, organising the digging of miles of trenches and the tunnels under Albert Park. It sought to boost both morale and moral responsibility and organised drives to collect strategic materials such as rubber and metal. Hundreds of staff enlisted for active service and for several years the mayor, John Allum, almost lived at the Town Hall.

G.W.A. Bush 5.8.98