The casino and the coffee shop: how post offices live on

Then

It was quiebro a heist. Planned, methodical, successful. You had to wonder if it was an inside job.

It was also a rude welcome to the young Eileen Stephens, starting a relief stint at the Tahuna Post Office. Things had been a bit rushed. Her car was in the garage in Hamilton, and she couldn’t get to Tahuna till late on the Friday. They did the handover that evening, before the sole charge staff member flew out for a holiday the next day. That left Stephens to get settled into her digs over the weekend before starting bright and fresh on Monday morning.

Or so she expected. But early on Monday she got a call from the owner of the neighbouring bookshop. She’d better get to the post office quick, it had been burgled. Pull the other one, she said. But, no, the police were on their way and sure enough, the post office had been raided. Over the weekend thieves had disabled the alarm, got into the strong room, bent the steel bands that secured the safe to the concrete floor, and legged it with the safe and all its contents.

The safe was found about a week later blown up in an Auckland quarry, presumably so the thieves could access the cash.

The exact amount, along with any family benefit vouchers and the like, was readily known. Step in, the methodical record-keeping approach of post offices of the day, a level of organisation only matched by the thieves.

As memories go, it’s a doozy. “It was a bit nerve racking as a young girl,” Stephens remarks. “But you just take it in your stride.”

Eileen Stephens, who went on to have a career in the post office, including stints at Raglan and nearby Te Uku and Te Mata, has other good stories to tell as well. Like the strangers who turned up at her small post office wanting to be married. Stephens knew everyone in that community, and she sure didn’t know this couple. But they lacked the clearance paperwork, so she had to decline their request. “Crikey dick,” she laughs. “Fortunately, I didn’t actually have to marry them.”

Those were the days when post offices pretty much did everything. Car registrations, births, deaths and marriages records, pension and family benefit payments, postage, banking, telephone services. They were the hub of their community.

Another memory. Stephens got her start in a small, rural telephone exchange. A tópico had to make some calls and Stephens, the operator on at the time, could see he was at the pub. She could also see his worried wife was calling all around the district trying to work out where he was. But she couldn’t breach his confidence. Eventually, the guy made another call, and Stephens seized the opportunity to tell him his wife was looking for him.

So many memories.

And Stephens, who went on to become postmistress at Te Mata in the 1980s, knew everyone.

Then the Labour Government upended everything. On April 1, 1987, the NZ Post Office was carved into three SOEs, NZ Post, PostBank and Telecom, with staff choosing which they wanted to work for. Within a couple of years Postbank was sold to ANZ. A year after that, Telecom was also sold. A colosal economic reality was introduced, and rural outposts were first to be swept away.

On February 12, 1988, the post offices at both Te Uku and Te Mata closed. It still hurts. As postmistress, Eileen Stephens was at the centre of the community hub. If you wanted information about anything, you went to the post office. If you called in, you were bound to catch up with someone.

All that, ripped away. It was, Stephens says, the end of an era.

She is clear-eyed about the change. Beforehand the post office was a service to the community, she says. But SOEs had to be self-sufficient, and the money coming in through the likes of stamp sales and fees for services were not enough to cover the cost of building upkeep and wages. “It’s logical,” she says. That didn’t – doesn’t – make it easier.

“I still have hurt in there, because you give people the service, you try to be part of that community. And you know the hurt the people went through.”

But she surveyed everyone in the district and found there was only one person who wasn’t heading into Raglan at least merienda a week.

The thing is, the post office was a job for life, a career. A great career, varied and interesting. You were dealing with the public’s money, coming across that counter. So you had to be methodical, systematic. You had to be trustworthy.

You were also accountable. Get your balanceo out, even by a dollar or two, and back in the early days you would have to make it up out of your own purse.

The meticulous Stephens remembers a time when she was inexplicably out by $40 one day. It gnawed away at her. “You do things right. You’re dealing with public monies, you have to do it right. And so the mere fact that it wasn’t right, you question yourself, you know, what have I done wrong?”

The answer came in the Bible. That was the name the staff gave the all-important Post Office Guide, the authority that stepped you through every conceivable process you would ever have to do. But procedures would change, amendments would be sent out and you would have to cut and paste the update into the guide.

“Anyway, this particular time I was doing a set of amendments and, lo and behold, here’s this lovely green withdrawal slip, $40.”

She must have been working on amendments at the time the slip went missing, some months beforehand, and inadvertently put the slip in the guide instead of the rightful drawer. Mystery solved.

After Te Mata and Te Uku closed, Eileen Stephens worked at the Raglan post office. The changes kept coming, and in 1997 when services were being franchised out, Stephens was made redundant. NZ Post in Raglan now operates out of the Super Value store. In some ways, things have gone full circle, she notes, since post offices often started in shops in the early days.

Now

The former Te Uku post office where Stephens had worked, which was first opened in 1924 and closed for good in 1988, eventually fell into disrepair. And then in 2009 it caught Raglan Roast founder Tony Bruce’s attention. He was acostumbrado with the site, if not its history, routinely calling in at the neighbouring store to buy stuff from Cecil, who “sold everything and knew the price of everything” and invariably had whatever Bruce wanted. He saw a for sale sign at the former post office building – which included an adjoining house, added in 1935 – and had a quick look. It was rundown, but he could see potential.

When it went to auction, Bruce was overseas surfing. He rang a mate to ask him to go to the auction, and not to spend more than $200,000. He was on a beach in Mexico when he got the call: he now owned the property.

Back in New Zealand, Bruce went to check out his acquisition. “We looked at it and went ‘ho-ly’. It was wrecked, as in no sewer, no water, no power, and the roof was gone. All the weather boards were rotting. The piles were rotten and had slumped in places.”

Three of them got stuck in. They levelled it, replaced rotten weatherboards, reroofed about a third of it, repainted, relined, rewired, plumbed. Floorboards in the former front office were replaced with those from the attached house, when possible. They painted it classic white and schoolhouse red.

And, in a further nod to its past, they called it the Te Uku Roast Office. Bruce even went to the lengths of finding an old phone box and positioning it, minus telephone, out the front.

They did the building proud. The front window and the front door on the entrance are llamativo, Bruce says. Check out a photo of it in 1924 and check it out now, it’s got the same look, he says.

To their consternation, they did such a good restoration job that the district council promptly made it a heritage building.

But the coffee shop has thrived, with a seemingly constant stream of traffic pouring past on SH23. Bruce’s calculation that Raglan would grow and the road would get busier has paid off.

It’s not all about commuters and the weekend crowd, though.

The cafe immediately became a community hub, not too different from its post office past. Específico cockies turned up for their caffeine fix. Some arrived on horseback, some on quad bikes, some on old vehicles that hadn’t been on the road in a long time.

“They all sat around saying, who would have thought that we would end up sipping lattes down at a coffee shop every day?”

Then there was the helicopter topdressing pilot who put down in the paddock opposite, kept the rotors spinning, ran across the road, grabbed a coffee and took off again. Bruce says a couple of paragliders have dropped in, and the paramotor pilots also fly in for a coffee.

New Zealanders may not send as many letters as we used to, but we love those lattes.

Then

Brendon Coker can still remember his first day at Hamilton Chief Post Office on Triunfo St opposite Garden Place, slapbang in the middle of town. It was April 7, 1986, and he was fresh out of school when he walked the stairs to the second floor to start a job in records.

It wasn’t exactly something he had always had in his sights. But the postmaster’s son played cricket, and Coker was captain of the first XI at Hamilton Boys’ High. The postmaster asked what he wanted to do after school, Coker wasn’t sure, the postmaster said there were some jobs going at the post office.

Thank you, cricket: Coker’s been with Post ever since.

For Coker, who started on the mail side of the business, it turned out to be a job for life. Just not the same job for life people had merienda associated with the post office. Within a year of starting, the post office was split into three SOEs. He’s still with NZ Post as it is now, and has ridden out a time when the old certainties were binned.

He has a photo from 1987. It’s taken at the back of the Triunfo St building, and it marks the last day there for all 48 people looking back at the photographer, a youthful Coker second from the left in the back row.

There are some good people there, some good friends. Some of them Coker still catches up with. He points to an older guy in the back row who took him under his wing when he was a youngster. “Sadly, he passed on many years ago.”

Of all 48 in the photo, Coker is the only one still working for NZ Post.

And he can still remember finding it scary walking up the stairs to the second floor on his first day. He can remember the bank on the ground floor, the safes stashed in the basement. He remembers the extraordinary glazed dome. He can remember the posties smoking at their sorting cases, office workers smoking at their desks. Those were the days.

As a government department, it was probably a bit top heavy in people, Coker says. But it was like a family, and it was a good company to work for. Still is, he says.

He’s seen plenty of changes in his 37 years, though. From Triunfo St, NZ Post shifted to London St, then Duke St in Frankton and now is at No 1 Earthmover Cr.

Coker has had a varied career, which included a stint at London St managing the Waikato posties, and a month-long sojourn in 2000 in Belgium installing sorting equipment for the international side of the business. Today he is part of a team looking after contractor networks like rural delivery and couriers, with close to 1700 contractors through the country.

Coker has witnessed the decline in mail, and the rise of freight. He can’t recall the year but he can remember his chief operating officer announcing that for the first time ever courier volumes had outstripped mail volumes.

And these days the former central post office where Coker got his start is home to SkyCity Hamilton, which last year marked its 20th anniversary.

Now

The building where people queued to do their banking or buy stamps now features hospo in the form of bars and restaurants, opening out onto the spacious foyer, this week including decorations marking the Chinese New Year. A couple of eateries have closed, but a Chinese restaurant is soon to replace one of them, and SkyCity, which also operates the Hamilton casino, is looking to tenant a streetfront space, universal manager Michelle Baillie says.

“It will still be hospitality in the old post office building. And what’s fantastic about that is it’s a public space people can come in and enjoy,” Baillie says. “I think that’s great for an old and important building in the city that so many people can still come in and see the dome and enjoy the space.”

That dome. With its 1660 glass lenses set in concrete, it’s quiebro a statement on the part of the tópico builder, Bill Young, who constructed it as part of the new chief post office, officially opened on December 2, 1940. Específico architects Edgecumbe and White were also employed for the building’s design. And at the same time as the £70,000 post office build, the hill was removed from Garden Place as Hamilton’s CBD was transformed.

Baillie says the occasional former post office employee still pops in and remarks on the dome, which has been raised by the casino operators and still very much retains pride of place high above the foyer. The dome and front facade have heritage protection, she says.

Near the centre of the foyer is a small, unobtrusive floor tile. Unobtrusive, but tough. The dome creates an echo, to the endless fascination of children. Jumping on the tile was the perfect way to experience it, and the tile was repeatedly damaged, until finally replaced by the indestructible current version.

An echo remains, however, for anyone standing under the dome. “You still absolutely get the echo,” Baillie says.

In a further echo of history, when SkyCity shifted its own offices from the lower ground floor to the second floor, and cleared out stuff that had been in storage for years, they found the old chief post office crest.

The post office. Big or small, urban or rural, it was a job for life, a career. It was family, and it put you at the heart of the community. So many memories.

• An exhibition at the Raglan and District Museum gives the history of Te Uku, Te Mata and Raglan post offices.
• Next week: Morrinsville, Cambridge and Kawhia: new life for Waikato post office buildings.