Gisborne sportsman’s dreams extended beyond playing fields

“I was a delivery boy in the mornings for Jackson Brothers butchers in Gladstone Road. Barry Middleton and I started in the third form.

“We’d get up at 6am and start delivery on our bikes. We’d have a big meat tray in a wicker basket balanced on the handlebars.

“My area was all Elgin and Te Hapara up to the aerodrome.

“I got my licence the day I turned 15. I got this beautiful Chevrolet pick-up to drive for the Jacksons.”

At Gisborne Boys’ High School, MacErlich had four years in the First XI and two years in the First XV.

“When I left school, Ross Williams, an insurance inspector who played rugby for High School Old Boys and Poverty Bay, recruited me for National Insurance.”

MacErlich passed his insurance exams and said if he was ever stuck, he could always get an insurance job.

He played his Gisborne rugby for HSOB, usually at first five-eighth.

Two supporters stood out: HSOB fan Dick Francis and Marist follower Jack Smith. Their voices carried.

After a game against Marist at Rugby Park, MacErlich walked into the HSOB clubrooms and Francis called out: “Mack the Knife ... you carved them up today.”

The compliment had legs. Years later Thames cricket teams MacErlich coached had the name “Macdaknife” on the back of their social club shirt.

MacErlich never played representative rugby, although he went on tour and was picked to play for Poverty Bay against King Country.

“A couple of hours before the game the coach called me aside and said, ‘How’s that knee. We noticed you were limping.’

“I said it wasn’t too good. He said he’d stand me down and play me in the next game. It didn’t happen. I was picked for Poverty Bay three times but, because of injury, never played.”

An operation for a childhood injury meant MacErlich limped.

He’d spent the school holidays in Tokomaru Bay, where his grandfather was a foreman in the freezing works at Waima.

“When I was 7, I fell under a carriage of carcasses for export,” he said.

“My left foot was trapped under the back wheel. I managed to drag my foot out of the way, but the top was ripped off. I was taken to Te Puia Springs Hospital and was there for three months.

“Dr G. A. de Lautour – he’d been a war surgeon – grafted skin from my shoulder, thighs, wherever he could get it. My foot was good enough for sport but I think it affected my knee eventually.”

MacErlich was “lucky” with cricket, though.

At 15, he was 12th man for Poverty Bay on a trip to Nelson for a Hawke Cup game.

He joined the Rugby Old Boys cricket team organised by Neil “Chopper” Summersby, who was factory foreman at J Wattie Canneries and got MacErlich a job there.

“At one stage I had three jobs – meat deliveries, insurance work and, in the evenings and at weekends, the Watties job.”

Playing for ROB, he had his career-best club score – 150, against an HSOB team that included local cricket luminaries Hook Barbour, Arthur Taylor, Don Lewes, Ken Williams and Len Roderick.

MacErlich was a left-handed opening batsman and specialist slips fielder, and played for Northern Districts Under-17, U19 and U23 teams.

He practised relentlessly with the Boys’ High slip-catching cradle. The wooden slats and whaler boat shape of the cradle would take a ball thrown into it at one end and spit it out the other at unpredictable angles for a second player to catch.

Club players who finished work at 4.30pm joined him to practise with it. One, John Turnbull, had been picked from Gisborne to play for Auckland in the mid-1950s before Northern Districts came into being.

He had played for New Zealand Colts against the West Indies and had a Windies cap that MacErlich coveted.

“In the end I bought my own [cricket] catch rebounder,” MacErlich said.

“I’d get it out in the back yard a couple of months before the season to toughen my hands. A new, hard cricket ball coming to you at close to 90 miles an hour ... every finger of both hands was either broken or cracked. They’d fracture lengthways.

“After I turned 21, I went to Bluff to work in the freezing works, much to my parents’ disgust. My father was a meat inspector and my mother’s father was a butcher at the Waipaoa works, then got transferred to the freezing works at Waima, Tokomaru Bay, became foreman there and came back to Gisborne when it closed.

“My dad met my mum when he was at the freezing works at Tokomaru Bay. She was in the telephone exchange.”

Money drew Ian MacErlich to the Ocean Beach freezing works near Bluff.

“At the insurance company, I got three pounds 10 shillings a week. On one of my paydays at the works I got 55 pounds, and my board was one shilling and sixpence.”

Workers came from far and wide, and Southland had a pre-season rugby tournament for the Southland and South Otago freezing works.

MacErlich was in an Ocean Beach team that included four Southland rep players and three Māori All Blacks.

“We won the competition unbeaten. That team was the best I ever played in.”

After a season – October to April – at Ocean Beach and a spell labouring in Gisborne, MacErlich headed to the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Jamaica, where he boarded with a family.

He made his way to London and joined a group of Kiwis in a Golders Green flat of mixed nationalities.

For most of the 1967 summer four Gisborne guys – MacErlich, John Gumbley from Manutūkē, Win Hustler from Matawai, and Peter Pritchard – toured Europe in a van.

Having returned to London, MacErlich headed to Edinburgh to see the All Blacks play Scotland at Murrayfield.

On the way, he attended the wedding in Manchester of a Kiwi Golders Green flatmate to a teacher from the flat above, and at the reception met the woman who, years later, became his partner.

MacErlich got a ticket for the Edinburgh test from Childers Road Reserve athletics sprint rival Ian Kirkpatrick.

In summer, 1968, MacErlich backpacked around Scotland, down Ireland and ended up at Gisborne friend Dudley Arthur’s place in London.

“He took me down to the south coast and I caught a ferry to Portugal.”

MacErlich hitchhiked down Portugal and Spain, crossed to North Africa and travelled across Asia by way of Nepal and Thailand to Malaysia, where he was in hospital for two weeks with hepatitis.

“I hadn’t eaten proper food for 12 months. Every day for over a week they pumped me with injections.”

When he got out of hospital, he was broke. He owed his father the $55 that bought his passage on a cargo boat to Fremantle. An “old widow” on the ship lent him $A10, and he found work, through a newspaper advert placed by a stock agency.

The boss there gave him money to get to a station near Northampton.

“I paid the old lady back and went up to this station of 17,000 acres of sand.”

MacErlich worked as a rouseabout for the summer, then returned to Perth.

He hitchhiked across the Nullabor Plain to Adelaide and on to Sydney.

“About 100 kilometres out of Perth the road forked to Kalgoorlie in one direction and to the desert in the other. I waited two days and two nights to get a ride. I entertained myself by throwing stones at empty beer cans.

“Three times the police wanted to take me away.”

But the A$3000 he’d saved over summer and kept in his pack convinced the police he had means to make his own way.

Eventually “a couple of guys in a ute” stopped.

“They said they couldn’t take me because they had an esky full of beer in the front. They came back five minutes later and said they’d put the esky in the back and give me a lift if I paid a third of the cost of the petrol and the beer.

“I willingly paid, even though I couldn’t drink alcohol because of the after-effects of the hepatitis.”

He made his way to Gisborne then, as the 1970s dawned, an insurance job took him to Te Kuiti, where he played rugby with and against Colin and Stan Meads, and cricket for Waikato. An innings of 90 against Poverty Bay at Harry Barker Reserve was a 1973/74 highlight.

In 1975 he became New Zealand Insurance manager in Fiji and in 1977 played a two-day game for a Fiji select against a Pakistan team that included Javed Miandad, Zaheer Abbas and Intikhab Alam. When Pakistan decided on batting practice instead of imposing the follow-on, MacErlich was tossed the ball – he almost never bowled – and took 3-42.

After three years in Fiji, he transferred to Napier and made the Hawke’s Bay cricket side.

His club, Taradale, were promoted to first division and in 1977/78, their centennial year, won the championship.

In 1979, MacErlich took a job as Port Moresby manager with the Papua New Guinea government insurance office “for the money”.

“I had two cars stolen in one week. One, I never got back. I found the other in a squatter settlement. The motor had been taken out.

“People had migrated from the highlands to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and it wasn’t there.

“Driving to work after a tropical storm, I saw a guy on the side of the road with a cake of soap, having a wash in the rain, in his shorts and sitting in a huge puddle up to his ribs.

“I couldn’t break into the Port Moresby rep team, but I had one knock of 111 not out in about 50 degrees, on a concrete wicket with canvas spread over it.”

MacErlich left Port Moresby in 1984 and attended the Los Angeles Olympics. He couldn’t get to the canoeing to witness “Gisborne’s golden Games”, but watched the women’s hockey team. He knew one of the players – Rangitukia-born Harina Kohere.

At the end of 1985 he was back in Gisborne, following five months’ travel in Canada and bar work in Twickenham, London.

The next year, he coached the HSOB U19s and filled in for the reserve team. He played his last game of rugby at 42, a stand-in first-five for the social team.

Around this time, the Gisborne man whose Manchester wedding he attended in 1967, Dallas Atkins, told MacErlich that Vanessa Parkes, the woman he met there, was single again.

MacErlich got in touch through her mother, whose address he had.

“Vanessa came to Gisborne for six months and didn’t go back [to the UK] for over 20 years,” he said.

“We had a son, William [Will], in 1988, and we went to Papua New Guinea in January 1989 when he was only six weeks old. NZI couldn’t get anybody else to go there.

“I was in Lae, the second-biggest city and a very busy port. It was a little safer than Port Moresby but still very dangerous because of the poverty.

“We came back in 1992. We wanted Will to go through the New Zealand education system, and we settled in Thames.”

MacErlich retired from insurance, and in 2004 was appointed manager of the Northern Districts cricket team.

“I’d played with Pat Malcon, who was a Northern Districts selector. He played cricket for ROB and rugby for HSOB.”

Then, in May 2005, Will got Hong Kong Influenza B and died at the age of 16.

Will had won a scholarship to attend Hamilton Boys’ High as a boarder. He had played rugby for the school on the Saturday morning and felt sick.

Vanessa, who had watched him play, took him back to Thames on Sunday.

“He was wandering around on Monday morning before I went to work but was pretty ill,” MacErlich said.

When he got home from work, Will was dead.

Hamilton Boys’ High’s First XV play a memorial game for Will every September.

A left-handed opening batsman, he was the youngest player – at 15 – to represent Thames Valley in senior representative cricket and was in the Northern Districts high-performance squad.

MacErlich continued as Northern Districts manager until 2008.

“In one year we had four international captains in the team – New Zealand’s Daniel Vettori, Kane Williamson and Tim Southee, and England’s Andrew Strauss.

“The hardest thing was the logistics of getting the team and all the gear to the next place on time.”

In 2008 he and Vanessa moved to Essex in England.

“Vanessa was teaching at a primary school; I was house manager.”

MacErlich was co-opted as a sports coach – cricket, athletics, touch rugby, “anything they wanted”. He wouldn’t accept payment, and coached in his own way.

In 2012, MacErlich returned to New Zealand to look after his mother in Shannon, and Vanessa moved to Manchester to look after her elderly brother.

That year, Vanessa was diagnosed with secondary cancer. MacErlich left his mother in the care of his sister to go to England to look after his “best friend”.

Vanessa died in September 2015, two months after her 70th birthday, and MacErlich went walkabout, to the West Indies and South America.

In Buenos Aires, Argentina, he learned that his mother had died, in January 2016, aged 95.

He came back for the funeral, and has lived in Hamilton ever since.

These days his passion is racehorse ownership. He has shares in horses in New Zealand and overseas.

But he also follows cricket and rugby, watches cycling at the Cambridge velodrome, walks most days, rides his own bike and meets old sports mates for coffee.

He has two brothers in Australia and a sister in Shannon so, yes, he still travels.