Hills Carrying Co. of Bulls and Hunterville
Part 1
First published February 2009
by Noel Hill and the late David Lowe
Around 1870 the Hill family arrived at Petone, at the end of the long sea voyage from England, and while members of the family established a brick yard and a hat manufacturing business in Wellington, William Thomas Hill travelled further afield and settled in Feilding where he went into business carting metal. William and his family lived in a villa in Giesen Road.
From Feilding, the Hill family moved to Palmerston North where they lived in Albert Street and continued carting metal with a horse and cart. While in Palmerston North William Hill would sometimes work on metalling jobs with ‘Brummy Smith’ whose sons later had T C Smith Metal Contractors.
William Hill and Brummy Smith contracted to cart metal throughout the surrounding district, from the Oroua River, to surface roads around Mount Stewart, Feilding and the Sanson and Ohakea area. They also carted metal for the Manawatu County from a metal crusher at the Rangitikei River just south of the Bulls’ Bridge.
The Hill family moved to Bulls in 1917, when William obtained a contract from the Manawatu District Council to cart metal from the bed of the Rangitikei River and load it into the wagons of the Sanson Tramway. The tramway was a council built and operated railway that ran from the south end of the Bulls’ Bridge to Himatangi where it joined the New Zealand Government Railways line that ran from Longburn to Foxton.
In the late nineteenth century there was a breaking down mill on the outskirts of Bulls to which Dan Coglan was hauling logs with a wagon and teams of horses. After the turn of the century his business changed hands and became known as Walker and Nolan, they established a stables and ran a coach between Bulls and the railway station at Greatford. The partnership did not last long and Mr Walker took over the running of the business.
While William Hill was on the Sanson Tramway job in 1917 the stables operated by Johnny Walker came on the market and the Hills purchased them together with the associated carrying business and “Hillside”, a villa on the top of the Bulls’ Hill heading down toward the river, which became the family home of William and Alice Hill and their family of six boys and two girls.
Walkers Stables (J.E.Walker Proprietor), Bulls
Walkers Stable even offered a hire car.
This business has been established for many years. The stables contain sixty stalls, twenty eight loose boxes, a waiting room, and an office and there is also a large amount of yard room and a paddock accommodation. Forty horses are constantly on hand, and the vehicles comprise eight gigs and buggies, four coaches (chiefly engaged in the Bulls – Greatford service), and six heavy haulage brakes. A motor car is kept on the premises for hire, and an expert motorist is employed. In conjunction with the stables there is a saddlery business conducted in the well-appointed apartment on the right side of the entrance. A large and varied stock of saddlery is carried and one experienced tradesman is employed in connection with the business. (Source: The Cyclopedia of New Zealand 1908)
Sadly William died in 1919 at the age of forty six and sons Les and Kim took over the running of the business, to be joined by their brother Bob, who after attending the Bulls District High School had been working for a short time at the Bulls Post Office.
Both Les and Kim drove teams of horses but it fell to Bob to drive the first truck owned by the firm, a Model TT Ford.
Besides road metal, the day to day work included general carrying and running a firewood yard. Hills also bought railway wagon loads of coal from the Glen Afton colliery near Huntly and the drivers would bag this up at Greatford railway yard before carting the bagged coal back to the yard behind the stables where it was stored, along with the firewood, ready for sale during the winter. Each day in winter there would be a delivery around town with bagged coal and later carbonettes.
In 1922 Bob Hill took a truck with a pig crate on down to the Parewanui Road property of Mr D W Wilson and, with the aid of macracapa boughs tied with twine to form rough pens, loaded one of the first loads of fat lambs to be carted by motor lorry for the Gear Meat Company at Petone.
Locally lambs would continue to be taken by drovers to the rail at Greatford, but it now became an accepted practice that a motor truck be available to follow the drover and pick up the lambs that fell by the wayside.
With an increasing number of trucks working for Hills and no fuel tankers delivering to Bulls it became essential that every few days a truck make the trip to Wellington and back for a load of ‘case petrol’ to keep the trucks running, a long trip on metal roads and up over the ‘Paekakariki Hill’.
In the difficult years of the depression Hill Brothers were involved in carting metal from various pits on contracts to form and metal many miles of back country roads in areas that had never seen a motor truck. With labourers who had been manpowered to them from the dole, and little more than picks, shovels and explosives to work with, they camped out under fly tents wherever they went. They worked up the Waitotara Valley, later at the Ruatiti Valley, north of Raetihi, and were on the east coast near Porangahau at the time of the Napier earthquake.
In about 1935 the Hill Brothers purchased an old children’s home building in Hunterville and at that time the Hills Carrying Company was formed. Les and Bob stayed in Bulls and Kim went to live in Hunterville and operated the newly formed branch of the company with help in later years from Lyn Snellgrove, and then Trevor Downs, who had married Kim’s daughter Gloria.
With the building of the Ohakea air force base, that began in 1937 and became war work two years later, the job for Hills included carting reinforcing steel from Greatford rail to the base and with no truck big enough to carry the long lengths of steel they just allowed them to drag along the road causing quite a fireworks display of sparks following the truck and its load along the way.
Les Hill retired from the Bulls branch after the war to concentrate on his farm and Bob took over as managing director of the company. Later, in 1955, Bob’s son Noel joined the firm after a short spell of working for a firm of public accountants in Palmerston North.
By the early 1950s there were eight trucks operating in Hunterville, increased to ten when the Rata business of W F Wilson was purchased, and they were kept busy with wool and livestock and the cartage of bulk fertilizer from Kempthorne Prosser’s fertilizer works at Aramoho in Wanganui. It was a long dusty trip, carting 7 tons at a time, and making only one trip per truck a day. In a single trip oil bath air cleaners would hold so much dust that the oil would no longer be fluid but resemble a very thick mud.
They also extracted river metal from the Rangitikei River at Vinegar Hill and stockpiled it in the yard on Onga Road for later delivery onto various farm tracks. Winters would see trucks from both Bulls and Hunterville working for the Rangitikei County Council on road works in the back country.
Fat stock was carted from the various farms and stations into Hunterville for later loading onto rail wagons for shipping to freezing works at Petone and Ngauranga. Wool from various sheds was also loaded onto rail or, if there was not enough to fill a wagon, stored in the top floor of the depot, lifted from the truck deck to the floor above by an electric lift one bale at a time.
In Bulls there were seven trucks operating increasing to ten with the purchase of Sanson Transport Ltd. A daily freight service was run between Bulls and Palmerston North, the main freight being kegs of ale from the two Palmerston North based breweries, Burtons and Standard, as well as general rural cartage.
And there was always work for Flock House, both sheep and wool to be carted and in season the produce from their various cropping farms. Then there was the hay which for Flock House included loads to be carted to Taupo and loads down to the Petone wharf for on shipment to Soames Island. And a furniture shift to Auckland the truck driven on to a barge to be towed to complete the delivery to an island in the Hauraki Gulf.
The Flock House
Flock House was an agricultural training establishment that was originally created after the First World War as the ‘New Zealand Sheep Farmer’s Acknowledgement of Debt to British Seamen’, where the sons of British naval and merchant seamen killed or disabled during the war and later the 1939/45 conflict were brought to New Zealand and trained to be sheep farmers.
Bob Hill picked up the first group to arrive, from Palmerston North railway station in 1924, and took them to Bulls on a truck fitted with a kind of removable bus body that the company also used to transport local rugby teams. It would have seemed such a long way from home.
Photos: Noel Hill, Trevor and Gloria Downs, Jock ‘Jack’ Devlin, Bob Jarratt, Nicky Plane, The Bulls and District Museum, the Hunterville District Museum and Anthony Spelman.