600 CAKES A DAY

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 3298, 9 August 1943, Page 3

600 CAKES A DAY

WORK ON NEW CALEDONIA I HOME-MADE OVENS USED REFRESHMENTS FOR TROOPS (Official War Correspondent N.Z.E.F.) New Caledonia. Ivan Williams, one-time Timaru pastry-cook, bakes fifty dozen small cakes a day for consumption by New Zealanders who may pass through a certain area in New Caledonia in the course of duty or leisure. He works in a hastily-constructed shelter with a duck-board flooring and a tarpaulin roof. His shelves are overpacked with flour, raisins, and a great variety of cooking ingredients and utensils. He made his own ovens with oil drums and bricks and clay. He turns on his cakes and biscuits from early morning until late at night.

Williams works with Bob Wardlaw, a Y.M.C.A. secretary who, before the war, managed the Auckland branch of a big advertising firm, and whose enterprise has started this roadside refreshment station on the way to great popularity. Bob Wardlaw is a live wire. He found it impossible to serve the whole of his scattered regiman by keeping to headquarters, so sought and gained permission to establish himself at a reasonably central point

where the men could come to him for

the recreational, rest, and refreshment facilities that all Y.M.C.A. personnel help to provide.

Very soon he will have a wooden hut to house his reading room and cafeteria. Just now he runs the cookhouse in the shack and distributes his refreshments in a tent. There isn’t any notice board pointing the way to the tent, yet at any time of the day or evening from half-a-dozen to two dozen New Zealand boys can be found here, some from adjacent camps and some—always welcome, too—who may be passing by on duty. The homemade cakes and the hospitality of this station are their own advertisement.

Let it be said that Ivan Williams has a wider assortment of ingredients at his beck and call than most of his

fellow pastry-cooks at home in New Zealand can obtain to-day, and it will be appreciated how excellent are his products. He and Bob Wardlaw are delivering the kind of goods that New Zealanders like. Their manna is high in this part of the world.