Downer's founder still in touch

Press, 5 July 1983, Page 31

Downer's founder still in touch

Mr Arnold Downer, C.8.E., founder of Downer and Company, is still deeply interested in the giant construction business that carries his name.

Now 88, he retired as managing director 21 years ago and from the Cable

Price Downer board 13 years ago.

He is still a regular visitor to the company’s head office in Wellington, keeping in touch with its activities.

Mr Downer was born in Victoria, Australia, in 1895, and came to New Zealand in 1903.

After leaving school, he took up an engineering cadetship with the Public Works Department, fore runner of today’s Ministry of Works and Development, and worked in Otago and Southland before spending three years and a half overseas during the First World War.

On discharge, he took time off to study in England and Canterbury University, Christchurch, for registration as a civil engineer. The P.W.D. used his skills on railway construction projects in Northland and

Hawke’s Bay in the early 19205, before he went to Wellington as engineer-in-charge of the Tawa Flat rail deviation project, consisting of two long tunnels on the outskirts of Wellington city. Excavating large tunnels is never easy, and ground conditions were difficult close to one of New Zealand’s largest fault lines, but the experience served to strengthen Mr Downer’s growing underground construction expertise. He left the P.W.D. to work for a Wellington contractor building the Mt Victoria Tunnel in 1930, and in 1934, the first contract won by the newly-formed Downer and Company was for tunnelling work at the Waipori hydro project, near Dunedin.

Tunnelling remains a real power in the Downer armoury. Little is going on in New Zealand today but the company has joint ventures

’building tunnels in Papua-New Guinea and Fiji.

When he retired, Mr Downer had developed a highly-diverse business, experienced in every form of civil engineering construction from coal mine over- ■ burden stripping to the erection of industrial buildings.

Tributes paid by staff at the time of his retirement from the C.P.D. board give an idea of the respect and affection they felt for him.

Mr Leighton Nanson, who first worked with Mr Downer on the Tawa Flat and Mt Victoria tunnels and stayed with Downer and Company until his retirement in 1967, said his reputation as construction engineer and tunneller was especially high. “My main impression of him is of a man with immense energy and determination to carry a job

through, of a man who was a leader of men, who, while he expected hard work from his employees, worked equally hard or even harder himself,” Mr Nanson said. Mr Callum McLean, Mr Downer’s successor as managing director and an original shareholder, said working for A.F.D. — as Mr Downer was known — was quite an experience.

“With a man like him, who has carved such a chunk of New Zealand construction history, it is a bit difficult to sort out what facet to comment on. His achievements are legion and his reputation for giving the client a good job at a fair price within the time desired is so well known as to be obvious,” Mr McLean said. "There are all sorts of reasons for his success, but my bet would go to his touch with people being the most important.”