PIONEER OF INDUSTRY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 July 1943, Page 4

PIONEER OF INDUSTRY

THE LATE MR H. A. HORROCKS FOUNDER OF WHAKATANE PAPER MILLS. MEMORIAL UNVEILED. WHAKATANE, This Day. A memorial stone to the late Mr H. A. Horrocks, founder and first managing director of the Whakatane Paper Mills, was unveiled at the mill yesterday by Mr W. Sullivan, M.P., in the presence of a large number of shareholders of the company and friends of deceased. Henry Alexander Horrocks was a New Zealander, having been born at Inglewood, Taranaki, in 1893. He descended from the well-known Horrocks cotton manufacturing family, and his parents were early New Zealand settlers. He was educated at Kaimata and at King’s Colege, and served overseas in the Great War. He was a qualified barrister and solicitor. Speaking at the unveiling of the memorial, the present managing director of the company, Mr G. H. Mackley, C.M.G., said the industry which Mr Horrocks had fostered so well and so successfully was probably the most highly concentrated industry operating in New Zealand, producing as it did an essential commodity 24 hours daily for practically seven days a week. This intensive production had resulted in another year of record figures. For the financial year ended last week the mill’s output amounted to 14,656 tons of all grades of cardboard, an increase of 3248 tons over the previous year, and more than twice the tonnage produced during the first full production year of 1940. The company, by means of its own resources and efforts, under the direction of the late Mr Horrocks, had planted some 50,000 acres of trees, which today were ready for pulping. These trees were growing on the freehold property of the company, which, but for Whakatane Paper Mills, might still be producing nothing but bracken and inkweed. Operations were commenced this week on the plantation at Matahina. Yesterday was inaugurated the company’s own railway transport service providing direct communication between the mill and the plantations 22 miles away. This service would be maintained by the company’s own locomotives and rolling stock, and would be manned by its own staff. These activities called into active service the whole of the company’s latent resources as planned for in the original conception of the Matahina scheme by Henry Horrocks. The long-term planning associated with the scheme that he had in mind as the major objective of Whakatane Paper Mills was no doubt often difficult and trying, entailing great personal effort and sacrifice. The striving and waiting periods were often long and full of anxiety and worry, but toward the end, by his perseverance and patience, he brought success within sight. Today his long-term planning had reached a stage which was destined to prove that the future was more hopeful than even he himself ventured to dream of. For a man of his comparatively early years, his commercial and industrial experience was probably unique, and those whom he gathered around him in the early days of his planning testified to the value and soundness of his unerring advice and organising capacity. *