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From Heritage New Zealand, Summer 2004

Cradle of Invention

by Don Donovan

Creativity was key to living in the Maniototo.

Hayes Engineering Workshop, Oturehua. Photo: Don Donovan

Although there was some evidence of past Maori occupation of the Maniototo Plain, it was, when it was first surveyed in the middle of the 19th century, so isolated and empty, so lacking in even a verbal history, that very few features had names. Because of difficulty of access, settlement by Europeans came later than in other parts of Central Otago, but by 1858 the Maniototo's potential for carrying sheep and cattle had been identified and had lured the first pastoral runholders into the county.Within a year, all 17 defined runs had been taken up and the inevitable transformation of landscape that became associated with pastoralism commenced.

Further interest in the Maniototo and its surrounding hills and streams flared up with the discovery of gold at Naseby in 1863 - and has smouldered ever since. (But it would be true to say that,while less dramatic or romantic than gold, it's the long-term exploitation of pasture that has made the Maniototo what it is today.)

It was into this remote, rough-hewn, rural backwater of colonisation that a man who was to make a longlasting impact upon farming arrived in 1882. He was E. Ernest Hayes, born in Warwickshire in 1851, and apprenticed in his youth as a millwright and engineer. At the age of 31, with his wife,Hannah (Pearson), and their baby son, Llewellyn, he emigrated from England on the Shaw Savill & Albion Company's emigrant clipper Taranaki to join his uncle, Josiah Jones, a flour miller, who owned the Vincent Flour Mill at Ophir. It's hard to imagine what Hayes and his wife's first impressions would have been, but any dismay they might have experienced would rapidly have turned to determination, as their subsequent history proves.

Hayes Parallel Wire Strainer, invented 1906, patented 1923, doing what it does best. Photo: Don Donovan

In 1884, Ernest branched out to manage his own flour mill, two kilometres south of Rough Ridge (re-named Oturehua in 1907) in the Ida Valley. He also took possession of 60 hectares of farmland, where he and Hannah set up home in a mud brick crib. He soon realised that the mill and farm he was running were days, weeks or months away from sources of manufactured goods and so, his milling and engineering training standing him in good stead, he began to invent and fabricate tools and artefacts that would make agricultural work more efficient.

He established a workshop - the kernel of what grew to become Hayes Engineering Limited - in 1885, in a shed sized 7.75 square metres; therein he produced, as need arose, tools and implements to aid self-sufficiency. As time went by, demand for his inventions came from his near neighbours, then from farther afield, and subsequently from around the world.

Hayes Works Stables. Photo: Don Donovan

Among the more notable of his innovations were disc-cutter tools for cutting up pollard, a bran mixture used for poisoning the rabbits who were already a pest on the pasturelands of Central Otago; by 1897, he had built a lathe out of a gate post and chaff cutter wheel and thus was able to increase production of the disc-cutter. Meanwhile, the formidable Hannah travelled, on a bicycle, the wide area surrounding Rough Ridge, even as far as Lindis Pass, getting orders for an increasing range of tried and proved products from the works.

Ernest built a schist-stone section on to his workshop in 1902, and then went into serious engineering production, which was enhanced when he built a forge in 1905 to produce his standard lifter, the famous wire strainer branded Monkey, a cart jack and wire coiler. In 1906, he invented his best-known gadget, the parallel wire strainer for farm fences, which was patented in 1923.

In 1910, he constructed a windmill, 12 metres high with sails 6.7 metres in diameter, to produce electric power for the works (but wind was unreliable despite being augmented by an oil-fired generator, so he eventually replaced it in 1927 with a Pelton wheel powered by water stored in a reservoir, which he built on top of a nearby hill).* In the meantime, around 1912, with predictable logic, he started making and selling windmills from his Hayes & Sons Windmill Works, Oturehua, delivering them on the tray of his 1910 Buick lorry.

Other Hayes inventions were pulley blocks, cattle stops and the ratchet-tightened Triplex permanent wire strainers that have been indispensable to all farmers ever since and are still seen all over New Zealand.

Ernest Hayes retired in 1926, after which his sons carried on the business. He died in 1933, aged 82. In 1952, the modern Hayes business was transferred to Templeton, near Christchurch. The Oturehua buildings were bought by Clive Hayes, Ernest's grandson, and his brother-in-law Doug Smith, and they kept a business going there until 1975, when Hayes Engineering was sold to the New Zealand Historic Places Trust.

Nowadays, as one drives along the valley of the Ida Burn between Oturehua and Poolburn, no doubt the hills look much the same as they did ten years after the pastoral modifications of the first runholders. This is to our benefit, for had Hayes Engineering Works been sited in, say, Dunedin or Auckland, "progress"would have obliterated it by now. Instead,we are treated to a late 19th-century colonial example of the Victorian succession to Britain's industrial revolution. It's in working order, preserved because of its astute acquisition by the Trust. The original 1885 shed didn't survive, but the 1902 stone workshop is still there with sun-dried brick additions of 1908-09 and a corrugated iron wing of 1914. The base for the windmill of 1910 survives, as do the Pelton wheel and numerous other buildings, including the later Hayes family residence.

*The "Pelton" water wheel was designed by Lester A. Pelton (1831-1908). Pelton built his first turbine in Camptonville, California, in 1878 but subsequent important contributions to Pelton-wheel technology were made by William A. Doble, a San Francisco engineer who patented improvements in bucket forms and nozzle designs. Doble became chief engineer of Pelton's company in 1912, and it was probably one of his patents that Hayes installed at Oturehua in 1927.