A Sourdough Looks Back

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 814, 4 March 1955, Page 7

A Sourdough Looks Back

ES HEN the gold bug bites it bites hard. It was biting both hard and often on, the West Coast 60 and more years ago when it encountered a youngster named WHumphris. Young Humphris never recovered from. the meeting. A few weeks ago The Listener ran into hit at the studigs of 3YA, listening ‘to a playback of one of a series of talks he had recorded about the old days on the prospecting fields of Tasmania and the Yukon. The youngster’s hair was undeniably on the grey side, and he admitted he could give Sir: Winston Churchill a year or two, but: "How do I feel about it now?" he said. "I’d’ go tomorrow if I had the chance." "The old diggers’ stories of adventure had a strong effect on the minds of youngsters, and good parents, homes, prospects or friends couldn’t deter us from driving blindly into the dangers and privations of a gold rush," says Mr. Humpbhris in the first talk of his series, Chasing the Pennyweight, to be heard from 3YA at 7.15 p.m. on Wednesday, March 9. "I grew up to be with it. Before I’d left school I'd panned the bonny dust and combed the beaches of Westland for the fine gold washed up by rough seas." : Greymouth as Mr. Humphris remembers it as a boy-he was born there, in Tainui. Street, in 1872-had 6000 to 7000 people: "No, it wasn’t a wild mining centre, more of a country town," he assured us. "My father was a builder there; he built the first wooden house in Greymouth. I went to Grey Main School-I think I must have been just about one of the foundation pupils. I was in Grey at the time of the maritime strike, and I remember the flood of 1887. That was a flood! It washed a hole in the road as big as this room, and came up over the counter in a shop in. Boundary Street. They put telegraph poles.out to keep the ships off the wharf-they might have capsized on to it. And I was there when they built the Cobden Bridge, too. . ."

Young Humphris was 14 or 15 when he first went after gold. He had a pony and used to ride out to Marsden and to Kumara and South Beach. You didn’t need much experience, he said. By degrees your little leather bag of gold dust would swell, and with it the desire to become a prospector. "The Tasmanian Minefields" is the itle of the first talk by Mr. Humphris. e was about 18 when he went to Tasmania soon after silver was discovered, and he found his experience on the West Coast had just fitted him for the new country. For one thing, the place was knee-deep in mud. But Tasmania was only one episode in the long prospecting life of young Humpbhris, and soon he was to be off to Canada, where all roads led to the Yukon. "I didn’t 0 direct from Tasmania to the Yukon,’ Mr. Humphris said, when we asked him about his next move. "I had, first, another spell in New Zealand. I went up into the Waihi district intending to prospect, and did a good deal at different places around there, as well as working on the Waihi battery till the Klondyke rush started in 1898." The story of his adventures in the Yukon is told by Mr. Humpbhris in the other five talks of Chasing the Pennyweight. Skagway, where Mr. Humphris went ashore at the start of his stay in the Yukon, was the scene, right away, of one of his most exciting adventures in* the north. His search for the contractor who was to take his outfit over the Chilcut Pass led to an encounter with the notorious Soapy Smith, the gangster boss of Skagway. Mr. Humphris wasn’t to discover till much later that it was Soapy he had met; and when, in Soapy’s presence. he opened his wallet to show about £30 in English money he found himself looking down the barrels of two Colt 45’s. Soapy, who was to meet his match in an encounter with a Canadian surveyor a few months: later, didn’t know then that young Humphris had £80 strung in a leather bag inside his trouser leg. The further adventures of that £80 provided the climax of the second talk in Chasing the Pennyweight. The story of the journey over the pass and down river to Dawson City makes

exciting listening. Mr. Humphris endured almost incredible . hardships. And when he reached Dawson and questioned some of the thousands of miners who crowded Main Street he found that there was no ground left to stake, no work to be had-and that 20,000 men roamed the streets day and night with nothing to do. All who were asked had the same advice to offer: "Get out while you can." But it was five and a half. years before Mr. Humphris did. Chasing the Pennyweight comes to an end where Mr. Humpbhris left the Yukon. But surely, The Listener suggested, there was something to be told after that which would round off the story for those who would be listening to him. Had he,

for instance, continued his quest for gold? Or had he got married and settled down? : Mr. Humphris grinned at that: "I was married before I went away," he said. "My wife said she knew I’d come back. We had lots of friends between us -in Tasmania, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Cambridge-and while I was in the Yukon she kept on the move between them." And as for gold* seeking, Mr. Humphris has found time between building houses in Christchurch and starting a transport service between that city and Timaru to interest himself in some developments on the Wataroa River. and in a mining company at Arrowtown. We gathered from the look in his eye that it hadn’t been exactly a passive’ interest, either. For the last 20 years or so he has’ lived on the hill above the sea

at Clifton, Sumner. "I fix up the garden," he said, "and sometimes my building knowledge is helpful to other people. But I don’t do much: except stay at home." As for Chasing the Pennyweightwhich was edited for broadcasting by Bernard Smyth-Mr. Humphris said it was a very small part of what he had written about his prospecting adven-tures-enough, in fact, to make qa book. "T didn’t think it could be done," he said. "I tell you straight, I was always the biggest dunce in the school." On the other hand, he had always been able to write a pretty interesting sort of letter, and it was in the form of a letter that he had first started to tell his story, sitting at the foot of the bed of a sick friend who insisted that he should give it a go.