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HUGH DE LACY checks out an old family quarry firm that is as iconic as crayfish in the South Island settlement of Kaikoura.
Five kilometres south of Kaikoura township, the Kowhai River – where Fords have a couple of mobile crushers working a 10,000 cubic metre resource consent just west of the bridge – flows under State Highway 1. It’s fairly typical of South Island east coast rivers in following a meandering course over an extended flood plain to reach the sea. Ten kilometres north of Kaikoura there’s a very different sort of river, the Hapuku, which looks and behaves more like a West Coast torrent, plummeting 3000 metres from the mountain to the sea in just 25 kilometres. Ford Brothers’ manager Brian Ford, the son of one of the founders, describes the Hapuku as “a conveyor-line: no matter how much rock we use from it, it just keeps bringing more on down to us.” The rocks the Hapuku delivers from the mountain are big and hard, an entirely different crushing proposition from the usual smooth pebbles to be found in the Kowhai, no less than in the Clarence and the Conway. Fords has resource consent to take 40,000 cubic metres of rock out of the Hapuku a year, and they get it all from a kilometre stretch spanning both sides of the State Highway 1 bridge, on the north side of which sits its big stationary crusher.
Ford Bothers was started by Brian’s father Bruce and uncle Buster, two of four brothers whose own father, Wally, operated trucks all round the South Island in the years before World War Two. Wally had started out in business in Mid-Canterbury and South Canterbury, supplying ballast for the Main Trunk line and metals for the first big irrigation schemes all the way down the eastern coast and into Central Otago. While Bruce, Buster and the eldest brother, John, went overseas to fight Hitler, the fourth brother, Basil, had to stay behind keeping the home business burning by operating the trucking licences that were required in those days. The licences, in the days before crushers, were to transport screened river metals for the Ministry of Works which then had charge of all road and rail building and maintenance. Bruce was the first of the Ford brothers to come back from the war, in 1945, and Buster arrived home the following year. Initially they separately operated the licences Basil had held for them, but in 1947 they purchased a couple more and teamed up to form Ford Brothers. One of their first jobs was metalling the stretch of State Highway 1 from Domett to Cheviot, a project whose earthmoving component was the first major contract won by Diana and Neil Isaac, the founders of the big Canterbury firm Isaac Construction.
It wasn’t until 1963, however, that they moved up from merely screening metal to crushing it, using a machine manufactured in Christchurch by Paintin and Nottingham Ltd, and sited next to the sea beside the Main Trunk rail bridge on the Hapuka River. Before that, nationwide firm British Pavements and Hughy Brothers of Cheviot had operated crushers supplying the Kaikoura district, but the county council had been keen to have a crusher sited locally. When the new State Highway 1 bridge over the Hapuku was built, the county had Ford Brothers move the stationary crusher to its present site alongside the bridge to guard against the ever-present danger of flood erosion. As well as the Hapuku, Ford Brothers operated on the Kowhai River with a screener loaded by an International TD24 they’d bought in the late 1950s. Its job, as much as shifting and loading metal, was to cut anti-flooding trenches up the middle of both rivers and, being too big to transport, it had to be walked the 15 kilometres between the two. About the time they bought the TD24, the brothers expanded their operation with the purchase of the BP service station, then sited under the overhead rail bridge in central Kaikoura, acquiring with it the International Harvester and General Motors agencies, selling tractors and balers as well as Bedford, Vauxhall and Holden vehicles. It was a big operation employing two full-time mechanics who also serviced the contracting fleet based at its present site just up Kaikoura’s main Beach Road thoroughfare.
Today Ford Brothers remains a family firm with Brian’s wife Barbara handling the office work, Buster’s son Pete being assistant manager, mechanic and machine operator. Brian’s brother Ken, who lives in Christchurch, is a shareholder. Buster’s two other sons, William and Tony were also in the firm until being bought out about five years ago, and Ken’s son Clint operates a contracting firm in Christchurch. For years now Ford Brothers has confined its activities to the area between the Clarence and the Conway, keeping the operation steady with 10 permanent staff operating half a dozen trucks, four diggers and three loaders as well as the stationary and mobile crushers. A good 60 percent of the company’s revenue comes from the crushers, and a third of the remainder is associated with cartage of the crushed product. Fulton Hogan and Downer EDI are the company’s main clients these days, along with the sole local concrete plant, Harmac. Also, apart from two brief intervals, Ford Brothers has been supplying most of the railway ballast for the entire South Island main trunk virtually since the company was formed. “We’ve twice been beaten for the railway ballast contract, but both companies later pulled out: one went broke and the other couldn’t make any money. The Hapuku rock’s perfect for the job, but it’s tough on machinery and, in the long run, our experience has told,” Brian told Q&M.
Though Ford himself, as a keen hunter and fisher, is a strong supporter of the region’s clean water policies, he concedes that some of Ecan’s environmental officers have been “over the top.” Twice they threatened to close down the Hapuku operation, the first time because the trucks were crossing the water channel by bridge instead of culvert. Ford was able to bring about a stay of execution by pointing out that, be it a bridge or a culvert, “they both go over the water rather than through it, so what’s the difference?” On another occasion an Ecan inspector was outraged to see vegetation on the banks of the Hapuku had been bulldozed aside, and all that stopped the operation being terminated then was Ford pointing out that the plants concerned were noxious weeds, which the council itself at the time was spraying out of the Kowhai River by helicopter. With such environmental extremism being squeezed out of Ecan by the government spruce-up, Ford Brothers can look forward to many more years as a Kaikoura icon.
Q&M Vol.7 No.2 April-May 2010 |
From the Clarence River in the north to the Conway in the south, Ford Brothers Ltd has held sway over the Kaikoura Coast metal and aggregates business for 60 years, but it is two smaller and very different rivers in between that provide the basis for the business.
Former All Black Brian Ford (pictured) was the star of Marlborough’s greatest day in the sporting sun, scoring from the wing the vital try that in 1973 wrenched the Ranfurly Shield off southern neighbour Canterbury, coached by Grizz Wyllie, in possibly the biggest upset in the Log-o’-Wood’s now century-long history.
The Ford brothers chased contracts all over Canterbury, another big one being the metalling of Porters Pass.
Bruce Ford ran the service station and Buster the contracting business but, after Buster died in 1971, Bruce sold the service station and returned to contracting until retirement and his own eventual passing in 2005.
The Hapuku operation, so visible beside State Highway 1, has however not been free of bureaucratic interference from elements within Environment Canterbury (Ecan), whose days appear to be numbered by a National-led government upset at its controversial administration of regional water policies.