Excellence on land and water

Alistair Dryden won a world rowing championship gold medal, then a decade later became the first winner of a Contractors’ Federation construction award.   BY GAVIN RILEY

Thirty years ago a young owner-operator contractor as tall and sturdy as a kauri earned himself a place in industry history by winning an inaugural Contractors’ Federation construction award.

His name was Alistair Dryden and he won his prize the hard way, spending some five months 2000 metres up Mt Ruapehu between Labour Weekend and March laying the foundations for the Waterfall chairlift.

The American director of the firm supplying mechanical equipment for the chairlift said the foundations were the best he had encountered in 16 countries. And the award judges remarked on the managerial organisation, skill and courage required to complete the unusual and challenging contract successfully.

Outstanding achievement at a high level was nothing new to 35-year-old Dryden, who was 1.93 metres tall (6ft 4in) and weighed 100kg. As an oarsman he had been a member of the New Zealand eight that won gold at the 1967 world championships in Montreal and had competed at both the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (the fours) and the 1968 Mexico City Games (the eights).

Dryden, now a land and property developer living in St Heliers, Auckland, says that when he entered the 1978 construction awards he sensed he was in with a chance.

“It may not have been the best-executed contract but I was reasonably confident it would make a good story. I felt it didn’t depend on how good a contractor you were. You could work twice as well on a subdivision round town, a perfect subdivision, but you wouldn’t make a good enough story out of it to win a construction award.

“I was probably slightly surprised to win, but I wouldn’t have entered with a run-of-the-mill contract. I was just fortunate that at that particular time I had a contract that satisfied the criteria.”

Dryden’s management talents included choosing the right people to help him – in this case a skilled carpentry foreman and an able drilling and blasting foreman. A bit of old-fashioned Kiwi ingenuity also surfaced when fog prevented a helicopter from ferrying in concrete and the team had to hand-mix about 600 cubic metres on site.

“I got an old wool-scale off a farmer and had an old two-bag concrete mixer, which I think I got from a Ministry of Works auction,” Dryden recalls.

“We put all the builder’s mix into sugar bags and we would throw the bags onto the wool-scale about 10 at a time – like a very amateurish weigh-batch. We had a couple of labourers to put the concrete into the sugar sacks.

“I was working on the second chairlift and we carted the sugar bags up the first chairlift. Then we carried the bags, which weighed about 70lb (32kg), across to the base tower.

“Shovelling the concrete into sugar sacks and moving the sacks around was fairly labour-intensive. We did quite a lot of walking up there. But we didn’t regard the work as a major problem. People just enjoyed the challenge of being out in the open.”

Dryden was probably destined to be a contractor from an early age. His father Jim was head of Dryden Construction, his mother Lynda was in charge of the company’s administration, and his aunt June (since 1994 a life member of the Contractors’ Federation) was married to the legendary “Baldy” Margan.

“It was like living in a contracting school from the time I was about five years old,” Dryden recalls.

“A lot of talk around the house was about how the contracts were going or not going. I learned a lot out of that background. ”

But before becoming a contractor he had to get competitive rowing out of his system. He took up the sport at the age of 15 or 16 at Kings College, was unbeaten as a schoolboy, and was a member of the Kings eight that twice won the coveted Maadi Cup.

At only 18 he won a silver medal at the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth when the New Zealand eight lost to their Australian rivals by a foot (30cm), and he went on to amass half a dozen

New Zealand titles as stroke of the Auckland Rowing Club four. His club coach was Jack Stevenson, of the famous contracting family, and at national level he was coached for the 1967 world championships and 1968 Olympics by the celebrated Rusty Robertson, who he says resembled Robbie Deans in his ability to get the very best out of people.

Dryden was training and racing with such intensity that he was reduced to studying part-time for his civil-engineering degree at Auckland University and one year even failed to sit any exams.

He began his contracting life with his father’s company, where he says he gained a lot of valuable experience. But eventually he struck out on his own, sometimes adopting a project manager role and employing casual labour and subcontractors.

Typical contracts involved drainage, rock-blasting, sheet-piling, and bridge foundations and underpinning. Tunnelling and piling were done by hand – “very labour intensive”. His plant included an International 250 traxcavator (which he won by tender after it had been operating on an Auckland tip), a small Hamilton digger, a couple of compressors, and the concrete mixer that earned its keep on Mt Ruapehu.

Dryden brought to his work qualities and attitudes honed during his rowing career – discipline, determination, a formidable work ethic, a knowledge that results are dependent on effort, and viewing contracts like a rowing race: “If you got off to a good start with a few good strokes, and worked reasonably hard in the middle, the finish looked after itself.”

He says his transition from contractor to land and property developer was a gradual process. In 1993 he became involved as a contractor-owner in the development of 250 sections at Omaha, north of Auckland, and from then on did not have time to price contracts.

“The land development was less demanding in a way than contracting because there was less tension – it was a change to be in charge of the engineer for the contract rather than the other way round,” he says.

“Since then I’ve been doing a bit of land development and a lot of building. I’ve been employing builders rather then doing the building myself, and I’ve kept a fair few of the buildings. I’ve become a land and property owner.”

Despite his success in his second career, Dryden says he misses the buzz of contracting – though, of course, he doesn’t envisage returning to it.

“There are a few more unknowns in contracting, not so much financial ones, but each time you dig a hole you’re never too sure what you’re going to find. There’s probably a bit more rush too – you’ve said you’re going to do something when you price a contract, so there’s a certain amount of pressure to perform.

“I admired a lot of contractors – Malcolm McConnell would be one. I never quite worked out how he could do 20 contracts all over the place that were much more complicated than I ever did. So he was a role model.”

Dryden says he hasn’t kept in touch with any contractors but he remembers with nostalgia the camaraderie he enjoyed and the good down-to-earth people he met through Contractors’ Federation gatherings. (He helped organise the Contract ’86 exhibition that was held on his Manukau City land, was opened by Prime Minister David Lange, and was notable for contractor Don Wilkinson landing his self-built plane on a runway constructed that day.)

Outside work, Dryden divides his time between family and rowing interests. He and his wife Shane have four children and two grandchildren, with a third expected. In rowing administration he had 10 years as a hands-on captain of Auckland Rowing Club, during which he oversaw the building of a magnificent 20,000 square foot clubhouse, was subsequently president of the club, and for the past two years has been facilities organiser for the 2010 world rowing championships at Lake Karapiro. Not surprisingly, his recreational rowing sessions are currently restricted to about one a week. 

Dryden says that 30 years on, his construction award still gives him a great sense of satisfaction because contractors have few opportunities to be recognised by their peers and “you don’t really expect to be the best”.

As for his many rowing accomplishments, it’s the one that got away that he still thinks about. The world-beating New Zealand eight went to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics as favourites (despite the known difficulty of having to compete at an altitude of 2000 metres), won their semi-final, were leading in the final by a length at halfway, then blew apart in the second half to finish fourth and out of the medals.

“We should have won,” Dryden says simply. “To this day I have no idea why we didn’t.”