Philip Boswell

I left the bakehouse at the end of the war and my first trip to the South Island was with three other companions and we came to Lake Rotoiti and went to Molesworth deer stalking and skin hunting. From there two of us hitchhiked down to Invercargill, Queenstown and back up and we worked on Tom Hayman’s farm for six weeks grubbing thistles in return for bed and breakfast and dinner at night.

I came back to the North Island and went to work in the bush on a logging team, worked a bit in a timber mill but I had a desire to come back to the SI so I came back the following Christmas and did a trip to Mt Cook, went up the Tasman Glacier, climbed Mt Chudley came back crossed the Copland Pass back up the West Coast back home.

The following year I was down to the south again in the Dart, Rees, round Earnslaw over into Milford, went up into the Keplers hunting. I came home from that and went back to the timber mill very dissatisfied - to put it bluntly I’d suffered a dash of mountain madness.

The following year in 1950 I left and came south with all my gear intending to get a track worker’s job on the Milford. I got to Franz to go over the Copland Pass with my brother and four others to do a bit of climbing at Mt Cook. I met up with Harry Ayers who I’d known from previous trips at Franz, Harry and Peter McCormick. Harry said why all the gear and I told him where I was going, and he said why don’t you come back to Franz and get a job with us on the glacier for six weeks guiding tourists.

I had made an attempt to get into the guides training school but at that time it had been closed, they weren’t accepting any more. The job at Franz turned out to be one of the steps in my life which governed virtually all my outdoor life from then on because I got virtually two surrogate fathers in the Graham brothers, Alec and Peter. I became a member of the West Coast community.

The manager at the Hotel at the time was Dick Brooks who came from Masterton, his wife Dawn was one of the Donalds and I’d gone to school with her brothers, whether this had any bearing on my acceptance into the guide training school I don’t know but it was 18 months till I left Franz to go home on holiday and by that time I had joined the guiding staff and I continued on at Franz until the Hotel burnt down.

Being the only single guide at Franz I was transferred over to the Hermitage and there I became a great friend of Mick Bowie who at that time was Chief Guide at Mt Cook. My years at the Hermitage were very good. I met and married Lorraine and unfortunately it was one of those marriages which turned to custard through the advent of her mother coming to stay for a fortnight and staying three years. Mother-in-law jokes are not really jokes - they are reality, and when you’ve lived through it you too might comment.

The Hermitage burnt down, and everybody was moved on, the guiding system collapsed, Mick was left behind and myself and at one part I had the distinction of having been the manager, the barman, the postmaster, the head barman, the rouseabout and the gardener, and the shithouse cleaner at Mt Cook. I was the only Departmental man left there and was in that position when Fletchers moved in to start rebuilding. Mick had gone away on leave for a while, when Mick came back he did the odd glacier trip. Harry and Murray Douglas were both away in Antarctica. The National Park at Mt Cook had been formed some time previously and Mick had become an Honorary Ranger and was paid 100 pound a year as a Ranger on top of his government salary.

At that time we were employed by the Tourist Hotel Corporation. When I first started guiding I was employed by the Tourist and Health Dept. When the National Park was formed the Park Board members of that time Tommy Preston and co came up and Henry Connor remarked to me that the house being built for the Chief Ranger was not to be filled by anyone else bar Harry Ayers, they had decided on Harry Ayers because of his name in climbing circles, and it being a high alpine park, he was the man for the job.