Out of India

From quarry to conservation park; HUGH DE LACY recounts the tale of the iconic Canterbury firm of Isaac Construction.

She was the epitome of the English country rose and he a cheeky New Zealander who refused to queue for her attention, and together they built a civil construction and quarry company owned and operated by a wildlife conservation trust.

That’s the remarkable story of Diana Lady Isaac and her late husband Sir Neil Isaac (pictured right), whose 1200 hectare Isaac Conservation Park in December had its management plan unanimously approved by the Christchurch City Council.

It was the culmination of an eight-year battle by Lady Isaac for formal recognition for the extensive safe breeding area she and her late husband had established three decades earlier for endangered plants and animals. The land, between Christchurch International Airport and the Waimakariri River, is also the site of both Lady Isaac’s home and Isaac Construction’s base. It is a predator-free area whose continued development is integral to the company’s core quarrying business.

The city council’s acceptance of the management plan came just days before Lady Isaac was honoured with an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit Medal for her contributions to business, conservation and the community in the 2009 New Year’s honours list. It follows Sir Neil’s being knighted for the same reasons in 1986, just months before his unexpected death in May of 1987.

The unprecedented marriage of quarrying and conservation by the Isaacs has already contributed to the survival of one of New Zealand’s most-endangered birds, the kakariki or orange-fronted parakeet among others. Another aspect of conservation is the saving of historic buildings that have been moved to the site and are being restored to form the basis of a heritage village.

It was the quarrying that gave rise to the conservation on the bony former riverbed land at Harewood where the Isaacs had found their dream home soon after coming to New Zealand from India in 1950. The house, in the English country style reminiscent of Lady Isaac’s birthplace, was built in the 1920s and came with 11 acres of land destined to be the plant park for the construction company’s equipment. Over the years this has been extended by the purchase of adjacent land.

Sir Neil was born in Timaru and had already launched his career in the civil construction industry when World War II broke out. He volunteered for the New Zealand Army and served overseas with the 21st Mechanical Equipment Company. During the war, when most of his compatriots were yearning to return home, Sir Neil was selected for a command with British Army officer training and joined the British Royal Engineers as a second lieutenant.

At the war’s end he volunteered for service in Japan as part of the British Army’s occupation force. On the same troopship that left Liverpool on what she recalls as “a cold, grey miserable winter’s day” in 1946 was British Women’s Army Captain Diana Gilbert, who was heading for service in India where the British colonial administration, the Raj, was being wound up.

Two days out from Liverpool Diana became sea-sick, and “a very cheeky man made a point of getting to know me”, she tells Q&M. “He had a thing on his shoulder that said ‘New Zealand” and I said, very scathingly, ‘How on earth did you get into the British Army?’ He had two pips on his shoulder and I had three.”

Despite the junior Kiwi officer’s cheek, the two became friends on the voyage, but had to say goodbye when the ship reached Bombay (now Mumbai). Diana continued on to Delhi, “and that was the end of that” – or so she thought.

“I was a bit on the glamorous side and within five minutes [of arriving in Delhi] I had dates for the next six months. I’d been there about six months when the telephone rang in my quarters and a male voice said, ‘Guess who?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, bother, he’ll just have to join the queue.”

Initially Neil Isaac did just that and had to watch as Diana was escorted to all the events in Delhi to which lowly lieutenants were generally not privy.

“He became more and more aware of the fact that he was in the queue, and he suddenly said to me, ‘I’m a New Zealander; we don’t queue up’.

“I said, ‘Oh, really?’ and he said, ‘Well, I like being with you and we’re going to do something about it, and if you say no I shall go back to Japan.

“I said ‘Yes’, and we were married in Delhi at the Church of the Redemption, which is now the Cathedral, and we just continued doing the jobs we were there to do.”

Neil Isaac’s engineering skills were in strong demand, and in the army Diana had gained administrative experience. The United Provinces Government saw their potential as a husband-and-wife team, and in 1947 offered them the opportunity of building irrigation dams.

“We could hire any equipment we needed from the army and tender for the work.”

The Isaacs took up the offer and spent the next three years building dams while the political situation descended into chaos as the partition of India took place. By then Neil Isaac had been away from home for 10 years, and his reluctance to return was offset by his eagerness to start his own construction company, and New Zealand seemed the best place for him to do it.

Though she loves England as regards herself as “English through and through”, Diana had no hesitation in accompanying her husband to the furthest possible point on the planet from her own home. “I believe in marriage – it was a very long time ago – and wives went where their husbands went, and I was perfectly happy to do what he wanted,” Lady Isaac says.

So in 1950 they arrived in Canterbury, bought a house in Geraldine and formed the Isaac Construction Company. Because of the waterfront strike, they had to wait  seven months for their tractors from India to be off-loaded, but won their first major contract soon afterwards, building the four-mile stretch of State Highway 1 from Domett to Cheviot in North Canterbury.

Lady Isaac then spent two years looking for an English-style house in Christchurch on which to establish the sort of extensive country garden she’d known in her youth. She found it in Harewood, and about that time the young company nailed the contract to build Memorial Avenue from the airport to the city. Testing showed the Harewood gravels to be ideal for the fill – but just as importantly quarrying them created the freshwater lakes that are the mainstay of the conservation park.

And so was born the expansive conservation concept that is now part of the Christchurch City plan, and whose governing Isaac Wildlife Trust, formed in 1977, that owns Isaac Construction. Quarrying at Harewood remains a core part of the business, which has grown to employ 140 staff, and operates in the surfacing, bitumen products, transport and salmon farming industries as well as all aspects of civil construction.

Lady Isaac continues to have a day-to-day involvement in the company as a director, as well as chairing the trust. She and Sir Neill had no children, and the company will remain in the trust’s ownership after her death.

Sir Neil’s sudden passing in 1987 was a terrible shock to Lady Isaac, and for a while she considered returning to her beloved England.

“But I thought, no, we’ve got a good company, and I can carry on with the conservation project,” Lady Isaac recalls. “So I stayed."