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Joke if you like about the West Coast’s occasional bouts of dampness, but the weather was Gib Beynon’s chief ally as he successfully fought to ensure a local contractor scored a decent share of the region’s roading dollars. BY HUGH DE LACY.  From Karamea to the Haast, GJ Beynon Contracting fought off incursions from bigger “away” companies for 60 years, and by the time its assets were sold to Fulton Hogan late last year, Greymouth-based Beynons had cornered 90 percent of the sealing contracts south of its hometown.
The secret to Gib Beynon’s success was simple: “The biggest opposition is not the other contractors but the weather,” he used to say, and he was better than anyone at keeping the work up to date in between the bouts of rain. In the context of the West Coast’s steady decline during the 1900s, which began to reverse itself only about 2000, Beynon’s success, consolidated by the four sons who took over from him, is the classic tale of the small-town operator making good against the big outside opposition. The Beynon family goes back to the Coast’s colonial roots, having arrived from Kilmarnock, Scotland, in the second half of the 19th Century. Gib’s mother Grace initially married a New Zealand-born miner, Harry Deterte, from Lawrence, Otago, only to lose him in the 1896 Brunner mine disaster that killed 65. About four years later Grace married a Welsh miner, Joseph Beynon, and Gib was born in 1906, the second of three children. After an education at Greymouth High School, Gib Beynon joined the local branch of the Public Works Department, the forerunner of the Ministry of Works and Development. He married Mavis Cameron in 1935, and continued working for the Government department until 1946 as an overseer, mostly on the Greymouth-Hokitika highway. Until then the only sealed roads on the Coast were through the actual towns, but Peter Fraser’s Government was planning a big roading spend-up in the Labour Party’s birthplace, and it was Harry Hutchinson, a Public Works engineer, who told Beynon, “There’s an opening here, Gib.” Beynon needed no further invitation. He tendered for work while family friend Joe Bruerton of Cobden built him his first tar-tank and hand-sprayer. Adding a couple of second-hand trucks, he was in business. By then Gib and Mavis had a growing family: Jimmy born in 1936 and Jack in 1942, while the birth of Beynon Contracting itself coincided with the arrival of Gilbert junior, nicknamed “Gibbie”, in 1946, and Donnie in 1947. Jimmy was to go straight into his father’s business from Waitaki Boys High School in the mid-1950s, while Jack took on an engine reconditioning apprenticeship at the local Ford franchise, Greymouth Motors, before joining Gib in 1963. Gibby followed later the same year and Donny joined them in 1966. In the beginning, sealing tar was mostly manufactured in Greymouth, Hokitika and Westport, with some coming over the hill from Christchurch. It was delivered in 44-gallon drums in its thin raw state, and the first coat was applied in that condition to create an initial seal. For the main part of the operation the tar had to be heated by burning waste slabs from sawmills under open kettles to 93ºC (200ºF), with care being taken not to let it reach boiling point (212ºF) or it would boil over like milk. In the late 1950s Gib Beynon installed a bulk bitumen-handling facility at Sergeant’s Hill, Westport, receiving the already-heated tar in 20,000-litre or 20-tonne railway wagons called bitumen bulls, from Lyttelton. The Westport plant served Beynon well for a decade but, with the business growing strongly, he replaced it in 1969 with another in the heart of Greymouth, on the site of what is now The Warehouse. In 1984 this plant was moved out of town to its present site in South Beach, and given a capacity upgrade. Shell was the initial supplier of the bulk-railed bitumen, but was later replaced by Caltex. Then, when Caltex eased out of the bitumen business in the late 1990s, Shell won the contract back, supplying Beynon through its Wellington-based Shell Bitumen NZ. In 1974 Beynon set up a joint asphalt plant venture, called Westland Asphalts, with the late Bill Singer’s Christchurch company Road Carpets, at McLeans Pit between Greymouth and Runanga. Fulton Hogan later bought Singer’s 50 percent share of Westland Asphalts but the McLeans Pit remained one of Beynon Contracting’s three main depots. About three years ago Westland Asphalts put in a new 40-tonnes-per-hour mobile plant at Coal Creek on the north bank of the Grey, the third main depot besides Macleans and Greymouth, and the old Anderson plant was scrapped. The company didn’t get its first gang-sprayer until 1956, and from 1973 when it was pensioned off in favour of a refurbished American-built Littleford, Jack and Gibby sprayed 45 million litres of bitumen while Jimmy kept supplies up to them and Donny laid the chip. Beynon Contracting was crushing metal for both base and chip near Ross as early as 1953, but frequently shifted its quarry sites to be nearer the job. The crushing plant was set up at Mokihinui, for example, to supply the Karamea Bluffs contract in 1969, while the Westport aerodrome contract involving the equivalent of 22 kilometres of road-seal, and the new main highway diversion to the Buller Gorge in 1971 were both supplied from a quarry at the Waimea turn-off. From the start Gib Beynon showed himself to be an adept businessman, but he had his soft spots too. At a time when Jack Stanton and Graeme Williams were both crushing metal near Greymouth, Beynon ceased his own crushing operation because he was worried that “Someone’ll go hungry.” Stanton was subsequently bought out by Transport Nelson, and a shortage of railway ballast in 1984 saw the Greymouth County Council’s engineer, the late Doug Forrest, talk Beynon back into crushing at Coal Creek. Beynon acquired 30 hectares from farmer Athol McGeady and crushing continues there to this day. Beynon’s original crusher was an ancient Goodwin Barsby with steel wheels, and it took a day and a half to tow it behind a Fordson tractor from Greymouth to Ross, over the Rimu Hill and the Kaniere bridge, because it couldn’t fit across the old Hokitika road-rail bridge on the main road. Personal disaster struck the extended Beynon family in 2005, when Jimmy’s daughter and grandson were killed in a car accident near Domett, North Canterbury. Five weeks later the youngest Beynon brother, Donny, lost a four-year-long fight with cancer. The tragedies set the surviving brothers to thinking about their future, and the following year they took up a standing Fulton Hogan offer to buy them up. The implications of such a deal on competition in the West Coast civil contracting sector attracted the interest of the Commerce Commission, and it was not until late last year that the deal gained the approval of the business watchdog. By then the company was turning over $7 million a year and employed 18 staff laying 40,000 litres of re-sealing a day. The old hand-sprayer had long since been retired, its place taken by Matthews Brothers equipment on a Mitsubishi prime-mover that Jack brought in from Melbourne in 1988. Four chip trucks, usually Nissans, complemented the work of two Hitachi loaders and Dynapac or Bomarg rollers. Gib Beynon died in 1987, a little more than a decade after incorporating his four sons as equal shareholders into the contracting company and the bitumen off-shoot Westland Asphalts. The sale to Fulton Hogan involved Westland Asphalts and the Beynon Contracting assets, but not the company name, the Greymouth depot or Gib’s old homestead in front of it. As a postscript to the buy-out deal, Fulton Hogan’s Blenheim manager, Peter Shannon acquired the Beynon’s first gang-sprayer which was rusting away in a shed at McLeans Pit. Shannon is now restoring the ancient machine, so even though the name Beynon Contracting has disappeared from West Coast roads, the sprayer will remain as a link with the past. |