The questionable vices of Taranaki businessman Newton King were built into his day with clockwork precision. He smoked cigarettes, drank Scotch whisky, was a tireless gambler and may have had an eye for the ladies. His descendants say it all came down to timing.
Grandson Vivian King, who lived at Brooklands with his grandparents for a year in the late 1920s, says Newton's day began with breakfast at 7.45am. "Then he would go out and meet the head gardener Tom Boulton and they'd discuss what they were going to do for the day."
About 8.30am his car and driver turned up to take him to work. "He never drove you know," Vivian says. Newton King had the motorcar agencies for English-made Morris Cowleys and Oxfords, plus the American Dodge. "He also had the agency for another American car called a Jordan. That was a very swanky big car. I think I remember vaguely that the Jordan used to come and take him away. It was a six-cylinder car - most other cars were four cylinders" Vivian says.
Just before slipping into the back seat of the car, gardener Tom would pick a flower for his boss' buttonhole. "You never saw him without a buttonhole, even in his passport photo" Vivian says. This minor vanity was emulated by Harry Ashton, manager of the Newton King Ltd garage.
Smoking was one of Newton King's worst habits. "I can't remember my grandfather without a cigarette in his mouth. In fact his moustache, in the centre part, had gone sort of 'nicotiney'. I think he had a cigarette in his mouth most of the time."
When Newton King arrived at the company's registered office in Currie Street, his cigarettes were waiting for him. "Tom Eddleson, who used to be the janitor, told me that his job was to put a 50-tin of Savory Cigarettes [an English brand] on his desk every morning" Vivian says. "Don't forget we used to have a grocery warehouse so we used to import tobacco and that sort of thing. I don't think that you could imply that he smoked 50 cigarettes a day."
After dinner every evening, the businessman would retire to the library in the Brooklands residence. There, he would read the newspaper until his nightly outing. "At half-past seven, the car would come to take him to the Taranaki Club and then he spent the rest of the evening playing poker" Vivian says. "They [family and friends] have always said that Newton King's business was based over the card table at the Taranaki Club."
While many say the worldly man often stayed gambling until the small hours of the morning, Vivian's accounts are different. "At half-past ten, the car would be back at the club to take him home. If he were later than half-past ten, my grandmother would ring up the club wanting to know if Newton King had left yet."
Vivian isn't certain why his grandmother, Mary King, was so vigilant. He dismisses any suggestions his grandfather was a womaniser. "But on the other hand, my grandmother was an extremely jealous woman. "She used to prohibit my grandfather from riding his white horse down to my Uncle Eliot's house because she did not like to think that he should be casting eyes on my Aunt Dorothy. I don't think anything ever came from these things" he says. "My mother told me that when Grandpa went to Noradene private hospital to have an operation, Grandma didn't trust the nurses, so she took a bed in the same ward so she could keep an eye on the goings on."
But there were times when Newton King did stay out.
That happened when he visited the Stratford branch of his company. "After the day's business, they used to go to the Masonic Hotel and they probably played poker again and they would have Scotch. And about 10 o'clock at night there was a loud bang, bang, banging on the door and Newton King would call out 'Is that you Fitzgerald?' You see the town policeman was Fitzgerald and he used to come in and they used to shut the door."
Together, Newton King, the publican, the policeman and others, would drink and gamble with no fear of prosecution. "They used to spend the rest of the night there, probably until about 2 o'clock in the morning."
Newton King also owned racehorses and was quite keen on a flutter. He even put money on his own racing abilities when two doubters from Auckland didn't believe he could drive his two-horse buggy from New Plymouth to Urenui and back in four hours.
The Aucklanders, saying it was ‘impossible’, backed their beliefs with a £20 wager.
Another grandson, Miles King, wrote this about that race against time: "At the appointed hour Kitty and Comet stood quietly in the dusty main street of New Plymouth. King climbed in, and in a cloud of dust disappeared up the hill of Devon Street, across the rise and out of sight.
"The road was rude and rough and the pair made good time to Waitara, where they stopped at the hostelry and were watered and rubbed down. Whilst they rested, Newton King drank his favourite whisky 'Four Roses'. Then on again to Urenui, where again the horses were spelled and attended to, and some more 'Four Roses' was consumed while the hotelkeeper wrote his certificate of visa.
"Meanwhile, back at New Plymouth, the word had spread like wildfire, the townsfolk gathered at the town, businesses closed their doors, and the original challenge of £20 was covered a thousand-fold between the townspeople. The excitement and the gambling reached fever pitch as the third hour passed and within the next 30 minutes, virtually all the population lined Devon Street, and most business doors were closed. Then quietly, almost sedately, Kitty and Comet calmly and proudly trotted down the hill to the huge acclaim of the crowd, just three hours and forty minutes since they had left, and Newton King went up to the Taranaki Club, which he had founded, and celebrated his modest but historical win."
And while he played hard, Newton King also worked hard. New Plymouth woman Adrienne Tatham says her grandfather was a tireless worker. "They say that he did in one day what other men did in three" she says.
And he believed in others. "My grandfather was a wonderful judge of men" Vivian King says. "He lent a lot of money to farmers to start off and in turn they had to buy a lot of their farm requirements through the company - that was part of the deal."
A handshake was all Newton King needed to seal a deal. "I think my mother said he only ever made two mistakes in his whole life. Only two people ever let him down" Vivian says. "He had a tremendous number of friends and, of course, as a result you were a Newton King's man."
This loyalty was passed down from generation to generation.
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