Old Jimmy Grant

My father had a friend called Jimmy Grant, so I guess he was my friend too! I was but a lad then but I remember him well, however, Jimmy was one of those countless people who are forgotten and of the past.

Jimmy was a council worker who drove a horse and cart picking up rubbish from the side of the road. Sweeping by hand the gutters and cleaning the gratings so storm water would flow away thus preventing surface flooding.
Sometimes as I walked home from school, I would encounter Jimmy and his horse as they were heading homeward too - he lived at No.1 Domain Terrace - he would give me a ride on the cart. He walked beside his horse.
I have no idea if the horse was his or the council's but my father grew a small paddock of potatoes and he would get Jimmy to plough the area, mold up the shaws and scuffle the rows to keep any weeds down.

Just how my father came to know Jimmy, I'm not too sure and I have no idea of the old fellow's history. My father respected him and that was enough for me.
I have no doubt that when Jimmy retired - or maybe he was made redundant - he faced financial hardship, so my father had him work in our very large vegetable garden or on other projects. He didn't take too kindly to be paid - the respect thing again - so Dad would top up with produce. We kept hens too, so he took a few eggs.
Jimmy taught me to kill and dress chooks [poultry]. From time to time we would have a chook for Sunday dinner and Jimmy would prepare it - because Dad was too squeamish! Usually there were two and one would be given to Jimmy to take home.

Jimmy became too crippled with arthritis to cycle the distance to our house, but Dad would send me in our old Austin 8 truck to visit and take produce.
Jimmy lived with his two sisters - I thought they were spinsters, but I don't really know. They were lovely people and always made a fuss of me. One sister was handicapped - a problem with her leg. But they cared much for each other and seemed to love caring for each other - genuinely.

The House was neat and old fashioned. I can't be sure that they had or used electricity. The interior walls were polished wood veneer, stained rather darkly and their heating and cooking was by a magnificent coal range - shiny black and as clean as a new pin.

There was a slow-flowing river at the back of the house and the cut grass sloped down to it and they liked to feed the ducks and watch the ducklings.
The oldest sister used to worry that her handicapped sister might slip and fall into the river and often warned her. But disaster pays tricks and it was the older sister who fell in and the handicapped one who found her!
Of course old Jimmy was used to his able bodied sister looking after him, and he was unable to nurture his ailing surviving sister and she soon gave in.
Jimmy too missed the company and I knew that while he could see, his eyes were vacant and his broken, empty heart took him.
Walter Brennan's song makes me remember. 'One of these days I'm gonna climb that mountain'.

Posts & Post Cutters

Thinning trees for some sort of production is economically sound - on paper at least. Usually though the material available is not that good because thinning is done to enhance the crop trees, the best of the trees. The other thing that counts against post production is the time it takes to to thin the area. If the area had been thinned to waste, the value of the extra wood grown can often outweigh the value realised in the through post production.

These points are true at least as far as we at Herbert were concerned because we were really on a smaller scale.

We liked to provide employment and generate revenue, so we generally were not too concerned if the thinning was a trifle late. In fact the pruning was late anyway. This was because at about age 12 the gorse was suppressed and easy to push through - so we developed the technique of doing a one hit lift 0 - 6m at age 12. This was against the idea of 'good forestry husbandry' but pushing guys into green gorse and a visit to a tree three times [o-2m, 2-4m & 4-6m] did not seem the right thing to do in our circumstances.

Still not always were the post of good quality - straight and fat.
The new wooden posts were in demand because the gorse hedges were being removed and post & wire fences replaced them.

There were areas of Pinus nigra var laricio [generally called nigra these days] that were not fully stocked so at about age 15 we began clearfelling those for posts - they had a marked taper but were of good quality.

There were two main players in the market:
a) Concrete Products - later to become Waiareka Industries, then Great Southern. These people were making concrete fence posts and had turned to these wooden ones. They had their own treatment plant and Charlie Crisp was the owner and his assistants were the Stanaway boys - Doug was to become the manager of Waiareka Industries. These guys used a Skilling post peeler.

b) McCullum & Co - later to become Fletchers with various name changes to become Placemakers. This was a building supplier and hardware company and they later bought and sold the Herbert sawmill. Bernie McMullan was the manager and his sidekick was Stuart Renalson. Their peeler was a Cundy.

The first post cutter on the forest was Frank Ford who contracted to McCullum & Co. - he was Adrian's older brother. Frank had done things the hard way and he had a wheel tractor with a modified trailer to haul the posts out to the fire break. Manual work - those green posts are heavy. He would peel the post on the firebreak and stack them to dry.
I recall he employed Mike for a while, and one day Frank said to me, 'Mike's bloody rough! he seems to be always breaking something!'
Mike told me, 'Frank's patient, I'm trying to get him to sack me - but he won't!'.
The situation was that if Mike was sacked, he would be entitled to an unemployment benefit, but if he quit, he would have to stand down for 6 weeks!
I facilitated a happy end.

Talking about ends - the payment for the posts was by the cubic metre ( well foot in those days). So we had to measure the small end diameter of each post and apply volume tables. Later we took a sample of 100 post and measured them to gain an average, them just counted the posts.
Frank used to stack the posts to dry and sometimes it was difficult to find which end was the small one, then difficult to tell if you had tallied them all!

McCullum & Co had a truck to transport the dry posts to the treatment yard, and Skippy was the driver (Skippy was an Auzzie). He used to load the truck by hand! I suggested to Bernie that they purchase a Hiab, a sort of crane built on the truck. They bought on and I found Skippy loading the grapple manually. I suggested that he work it how I had seen in my travels - I had never operated one! He became an excellent operator and could almost make the machine talk! One day a log slipped out of the grapple and smashed his leg - after that he preferred not to operate the machine.

We had some adventures along the way - one time he left his Hiab up! The bridge over the Waianakarua river had a frame on top, and the Hiab smashed into it! Never hurt the bridge at all! Another time he had too many posts on and became jammed under the bridge frame - so we let his tyres down and that got him across but we had to pump them up again at HQ.
He lifted the concrete slab I had made for my water tank stand - one of the eyes I built into it for lifting slipped out! But good old Skippy managed to wangle things for a good outcome.

When Frank Ford moved on, the team of Ross Ewing (Russell's son) and Henry Wedderall took over. These were a team of hard workers and hard players as well. Prone to taking the odd crop tree as well. But these guys had targets and worked hard to achieve them.
Perhaps they did the odd dopey thing - one time they were following me up Queen's Road. I was driving the old Commer with a load of men, so progress was slow and I had no where to pull over. So they attempted to pass! With no room to do so, there truck toppled over the road batter. We checked to see if they were ok - they were drunk but otherwise fine. We left them to it. [You would wonder why they were drunk at 8 o'clock in the morning, but anyway.
They used a Cat D2 crawler tractor and a trailer to extract the posts. And later changed to various types of tractors. Their tenure was long and they earned enough money to buy starter farms and contributed to the wider community.

Along came Brian Arbuckle. He was working for Waiareka Industries and had bought a near new 4X4 Ferguson tractor that he modified for the job. Brian was a bit of a larrikin really and he employed a few as well! They could produce a few posts as well but Mondays were a loss because they were 'too crook [with the piss]' to work. But they usually made up for it. The Skillings peeler worked off the PTO and so was quite powerful, but reduced the size of the post considerably. Much later he bought a Skidder and because such machines have a winch, it was possible to extract posts from much steeper areas.
Arbuckle ended up working on his own or with his son and they used to take advantage of the forest access to hunt for deer and pigs - illegally really. Brian lost a leg in a logging accident [off the forest] but continued to operate his Skidder.

Bob Clark, Max Speed and Chopper Johnston took on the Fletchers contract and they were a stable hardworking crew - reliable. They too bought a Skidder (first a Timberjack from Bert Bennett) One time we were looking for an access track through a steep area of bush and the Skidder could not back out! Bob was driving and he was an expert. We tried hooking trees on to the winch, but they were simply pulled over. We had to dig a trench and put in a solid log as a dead man. This pulled the machine out.

Of course the demand for fence posts petered out and the people moved on - Fletchers/Placemakers went out of timber treatment. Posts became a byproduct of the larger logging operations.
These were colourful times and the people involved were colourful but those times have largely been forgotten.

Uncle John

\Jack Williamson was appointed O/C late 1966 and he came up from Conical Hills Forest where he was in charge of post production - for the uninitiated, that's felling trees to be cut into fence posts, or larger - telephone/power poles.
Old Jack had done his time, starting at Hanmer Forest, working in the bush and had seen the evolution from horses, tractors, bulldozers & skidders to extract the logs.

I was asked to 'look after' Jack as this was his last assignment before he was to retire and from our first meeting we knew we were going to have a good relationship.
Jack was a wiry, balding man with a large nose and a warm smile. His bones were stiffening because of the work he had done and the cold conditions he had worked in. The reason I was asked to look after him was that he had not been trained in a managerial role so I was asked to help him with the nuts and bolts that was involved there. Things like yearly estimates - budgets.

Quite quickly we three in the office became a team - Albert, Jack and myself. We had some adventures that may now never be known - suffice to say 'we were good mates'.

Jack always kept a store of Oddfellows, large peppermints on hand and his main delicacy was a thick slice of fruit cake (baked by his good wife) that he ate daily. He didn't eat much else and I suspect his health was not that good, but he never really shared that with us. He took his responsibilities seriously but generally left me to do the day to day running of the forest.

The forest workers soon came to know him and he was well liked. We all called him 'Uncle John' and never hid the fact.
I could always tell if there was a problem, or if he was upset because he would hum and perhaps rub his forehead. I would try to read him, figure out the problem as he saw it and address it as best I could.

One day at the top of Hoods Creek we were siting a water tank as a quick-fill for the Wajax tankers. Skippy drove the Waitaki Transport truck loaded with the tank, but the site we had chosen was too difficult for him to get to without the danger of the concrete tank slipping off. We had a number of men there and they all had their suggestions of what should be done. Mick was there too with the D6.
Old Jack began to hum and rub his head, not sure of what should be done.
I told the men to have an early smoko, but told Mick to stay. Instead of the original position, I suggested we level a closer site with the D6. Make it like a loading bank so the truck could back into it, put a strop around the tank and pull it into position using posts as rollers. Jack was happy there was a solution and left us to it. Well it worked fine and the tank was soon in operation.

From time to time we held a Forestry Ball in the Herbert Hall and these were attended by the locals. We used to enjoy it when Jack, encouraged by a couple of whiskeys, would sing for us. This embarrassed his wife, but actually he was very good. He used to sing at our end of year drinking sessions as well.
'Old faithful.' was one of his favorites followed usually by 'Take my books off when I die.'

Old Jack was very sheepish when the day after we had been burning off on the Fraser's Block, he showed the D.fir plantings below the Headquarters was burnt out!
He and Albert had decided that it was such a good day for burning that they would burn off the cut gorse on the area that later became a picnic area. It was a good day for burning all right! The fire quickly became out of control and of course we had all the fire suppression gear with us at the proper fire! Actually once the cut gorse and the D.fir area were burnt, there was nowhere else for it to go so it simply burnt itself out. It took the pair a long time to live that down.
Jack enjoyed the Headquarters site and teamed with Albert they carried out a lot of the development and planting over perhaps 10 acres.

The day of Jack's retirement function showed the esteem he was held in because the 'Big Noises'
from District and Conservancy offices as well as O/Cs from other forests attended. They gave me a budget to buy drinks, but I had coerced the forest workers to bring food and we had hired a tent.
Oh well, the visitors wanted a tour of the forest didn't they? This left the forest workers with two hours to fill in - and there was all that food and drink! Spencer King's mother had make a huge bacon & egg pie 3" thick! It was gone by the time we came back. The keg was three parts empty and during the speeches a beer-fueled, Herbie complained to the visitors that this forest did not receive the resources it should. Three times I tried to shut him up and pull him away but each time he gave me a gentle shove, saying he had not finished yet.
They took it in good humor though and at least we could offer them a cup of tea!

I'll not forget Jack, he was one of God's gentlemen.

I Built a House

Sometime in 1967 I bought an area of land just on the south side of the Herbert Hill. It was in two blocks, one on each side of Breakneck Road (though the cadastral map says it is Middle Ridge Road). I bought the land because I was interested in raising animals, mainly beef-breed cattle. It never entered my head that I could make money from it and actually you don't make much out of a small block of land.

The top block was 8 acres and across the road was 14. I remember it was 1967 as decimal currency came in then and my lawyer, Margaret MacKay could not get her head around the purchase price because she was more used to pounds.

Some people advised me against farming cattle because of the drought. It was the tail end of a five year dry spell and our local MP Alan Dick had sourced funds to try seeding clouds with CO2 ice in an effort to make it rain. Well it did! At the end of the drought!
Freddy Robertson had farmed cattle - Jerseys. He had a show bull and treated it as a pet, often seen giving it hugs and kind treatment. He didn't believe the adage that Jersey bulls could not be trusted, so he did - and it killed him!
Eddy Thourghgood farmed dairy cows and sold cream to the butter factory, I think in Waitati.
So I didn't see the problem in raising beef.

The property was not actually on the market, but had been abandoned because of tragedy. Don Blakebourgh had built a sailboat with his kids and took it to the Waianakarua River mouth on its maiden sail. Three of their children were drowned.
Margaret MacKay was his lawyer too and when I went to him - in the signal box at the railway where he worked - he was pleased for me to take the place off his hands.

There was a cottage on the property and it was in a dilapidated state. It had no value to me, and I largely ignored it until Mags came along and I chased her until she caught me!
The old cottage was going to be our home and I needed to refurbish it, but a builder's quote made me rethink. It was going to be a huge cost.

So there were three very big Rimu trees close to the road on Diamond Hill and they would be burnt during our land preparation fire. So I felled them and hauled them with the D6. Bert Bennett was going to saw them into timber for me, and Bob Yates arrived in the GMC logging truck to load the logs. The Hiab could not lift them, so we used the D6 to dig a pit and backed the truck into it, then, using the D6, rolled the logs on.

Bert Bennett and Bob Yates are characters of other stories.

The sawmill had not been updated in those days, so my mate Keith Gibson, used the breaking down bench to cut flitches that the breast bench could handle. They produced some very nice timber for me - 6 x2, 4 x2, and 6 x1 (inches as we weren't quite into metrics yet).
Mel the builder was going to work with me for a week, then I was to carry on by myself. I actually hadn't built a house, but poverty is a magnificent teacher.

While the timber was drying, I tore down the old part of the cottage. Albert helped me when he had the time - I used to help him too. There was not much salvageable and the renovation became a rebuild!
But the cottage was very old! The studs and top & bottom plates were 4 x 4 Totara held together with dowel, rather than nails. There were newspapers lining the walls and they were old Otago Witness! Sarking on the walls was Kahikatea - riddled with borer. And scrim slackly held the wallpaper in place.

Well I learned about building and bought the window frames from Smiths City Market in Christchurch. Albert helped me fit those and I did the glazing myself. A mate did the wiring and another did the plumbing. I had intended to use the 6 x1 timber for weather boarding, but the expense of dressing (planing) put me off, so I nailed them on a 45 degree angle covering 50% and then covered it with tar (building) paper and netting, then roughcast the outer wall. Lex Kennedy taught me about roughcasting.

By the time we were married, we had a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. The rest I completed at night after work - that's how I did the first part as well. I usually worked to 9:00 pm.

One of my cows was sold so Lex could make a nice fireplace in our lounge. Just to point out that all was not plain sailing, I lost three cows moving them from the Hill Block to the River Block. They were on the railway line when the express (steam train) came roaring around the corner. It killed the three outright!
I rang an Oamaru butcher to see if he would take 'farm killed beef' and he said he would. So with a system of blocks and rope and my tuck, I hoisted the the carcasses into a tree where I skinned and butchered them. The smell of the meat was not too good in my truck, but I took it into my butcher.
One look and he said, 'This meat has not been bled properly - bruised meat does not bleed well!'
He pointed out that if the beast was not bled properly, the meat can be toxic.
So I rang the Rabbit Board who had a lot of dogs - they would not pay for the dog tucker, so I donated it to them. Those dogs did not know what a feast they had!

So I learned little techniques that have stuck with me over the years, ways of doing things - that may not be the way trained people do it but more importantly, not to be daunted about anything! Perhaps I did it the hard way, without the proper gear, but I got it done!

Ergot

At my workplace part of our business is producing trees that have edible fungi growing on their roots. For those who do not know; trees need a fungi - mycorrhiza - to help locate food and this fungi has a fruiting body, either a mushroom or a puffball, is edible. Not only edible but in some cases greatly sought after!

One day while talking about the uses for fungi, Ergot came to mind. Nobody knew of it, and I have asked around and it seems that I am the only one who remembers about it. That won't be the case, but in my little circle, nobody knows about it.

I only ever heard about it as 'that's what was done in the past'. Ergot is a fungi that grows on ryegrass and cockfoot seed heads. It is like small blackish brown specks. Now this fungi was used to treat burns and help to coagulate blood.
It was easily found on road verges in the countryside and during the war years, it was collected by children as their contribution to the war effort.

Now I do not know any more about it - how much was produced and where most of it came from. All I know is children in the area ot Herbert township used to collect it.

I would be interested if any others have heard about this or have collected it. This is one of those small things that becomes a forgotten part of history.

Funny thing though, if you research Ergot, you will find that it is a source of the drug LSD and as a fungus it is dangerous to ingest. It may also have has a role in the bubonic plague (of all things).
I suspect it is the cause of 'ryegrass staggers' in cattle and this can cause death.

So the collection of Ergot is now a bit of a mystery and something interesting to contemplate.

Strange Things

There is a rich history wherever you go - a recent visit to the UK reinforced the fact to me - and just talking today made me remember some things worth recording.

Andy Paterson lived with his wife, at the end of Mile Flat Road - just on the Southeastern boundary of the South Block (previously known as Fraser's.
Andy had a lame leg and he was affectionately known as 'Hoppy' to his friends. Andy was a keen dog trialist [for those who don't know - competitive use of dogs to round up sheep to make them behave appropriately - to go through gaps and into pens. The dogs are worth a lot of money!] He had a cabinet full of trophies including some of his father's who also had the passion.
Andy was also keen on pig hunting and (I thought) put expensive dogs at risk in this pursuit. He had a few mates who joined him from time to time - Jim Jamieson, Shorty Hyland, Bill Pile and Nig Gloag to mention a few. Of course when we took over the Fraser's Block, they were deprived of hunting area - so they just carried on hunting the area - some may say 'poaching'. Not really though, I knew they were doing it and were doing no harm nor annoying anyone.

Actually we all became friends and hunted together - swapping yarns.

Anyway... when Andy built his house, he logged some Rimu trees from his property and had them milled, then used the timber to build his house.
Time went by and poor old Andy died. His house was rented out by a Maori fellow, whose name eludes me. His son thought that his bedroom was haunted! This happening was frequent and sometime the boy received injury. There were several attempts at exorcising the place but this seemed to have no effect. So the family decided to move out.
Now I'm not into the spiritual world but things have happened that made the hair on my neck stand up - so I have an open mind.
However, I read later that those small insects the wood borer when attacking Rimu timber, give off a gas that is hallucinogenic. So could that have happened in this case? I have no idea as I haven't been able to make a followup.

Then there were the brother who went hunting together and stopped in the bush gully below the beehive. Somehow one brother's rifle discharged and his sibling was hit. In panic and without thinking, the first brother fatally shot himself! The real tragedy was that the first shot was a graze to the head and he came to finding his brother done this terrible deed.

Oh the Beehive was a big bluff, yellow in colour that could be seen from the coast. It is now quite overgrown by gorse. When we were roading and carrying out land clearing, we found many artillery shells - with lead shot (shrapnel I guess) and timers. During the war years, the reservists used the bluff for target practice from batteries by the coast. We did find some that had not gone off but on checking we found them to be safe/unarmed.

Albert William Moir

I have fond memories of Bert Moir. He was drove Dorothy the forest grader but first was employed as a Rabbiter.

I respected Bert for his guts! He had a fearlessness and control that earned my respect in the early days - and I have a tale or two to tell about him.

He was a scrawny old bugger. Short, skinny and bandy with it - always smoked a pipe [Sherlock Holmes type - and he smoked it until he had to give up for health reasons] and always wore a hat - a bit like Indiana Jones!

Strange thing though - Upendo reminded me of him! Nah, not by looks, by attitude - guts if you like. Upendo, a graceful young woman, but prepared to clean out the cow manure form the cow's banda/hut using her hands.

Bert should have been born a century or so earlier. One night drinking with his mate Doug Wilkie, they had this argument, a serious one actually. Bert challenged Doug to a duel using .22 rifles. They were to meet on the hill at 7:00am the next morning. Bert waited there for Doug next morning - in vain. They remained friends.

Bert and I used to walk our dogs to the hydatid dosing strip. This was a strip of land where dogs were sampled (stools) and dosed to prevent the disease occurring in humans. All the farmers took their dogs and the Council man did the dosing/testing. A social time for the farmers and the dogs!

During one of those walks, Bert told me how practical Doug was. If his sheep were getting out (onto the road), he would find the hole in the fence and shoot the first sheep he saw going through it. This did two things - first it killed the leader making the rest unlikely to follow; next it automatically plugged the hole in the fence. Most would repair the fence - not Doug, he used his logic!

Some buffoon made the decree that hard hats had to be worn by everyone [on the forest] all the time! There was resentment about this because in the heat of the summer, there was no air in the gully bottoms and a hard hat just made life unpleasant. I made representation to had the decree lifted. Even Bert had to wear his in the cab of the grader! But he loyally did - not to suck up to the [twits] head office people, but for me - he felt that if he set an example, then the others would follow. And he was right! His actions made things just a little easier for me. The decree? Like most, we just forgot about if and continued to wear hard hats in hazardous conditions.

Bert was my regular firelighter. He would carry the knapsack pump [those bass ones] filled with kerosene, or sometimes diesel to light the fires for our burn-offs. He was reliable and because we clicked, he knew exactly what I required and would light up accordingly.

The County Council established a rubbish dump in the dip on Breakneck Road. This was the cause of distention as it attracted rats and the toxic juices flowed into the Waianakarua River. Environmentally bad - but not as bad as dumping straight into the sea as previously. Bert and I discussed the need for a fire in the dump many times. Well one day Bert was having a cup of tea with neighbors Keith & Pat Gibson, and they were talking about the dump. Bert said nothing, but left his tea and walked the short distance to the dump. There he lit a fire. He returned and said nothing. Well we were called out to put the fire out but we did not expend much energy doing so because of the 'toxic smoke'. We knew it couldn't go far. This of course caused the County to find another location for the dump. Bert never 'fessed up' - he could keep a secret.

Reminding me that he was keen to 'play fight' and often with Colin Bartrum. One day Colin broke one of Bert's fingers, but he said nothing and nobody would had know had not his wife made mention of it.

He didn't like to show pain. One day at the old headquarters, he was taking shelter from the rain with the rest of the workers and Russell Ewing brought in a new pair of Porter Pruners - loppers if you like. Russell was flashing them around because they were a new tool on the forest and snipped them too close to Bert! He nipped the piece of skin below Bert's nose dividing his nostrils. He never moved a muscle, just took out his pipe and allowed the drip, drip of the blood to his the floor.

'Stupid old bastard.' he muttered, waiting for the blood to congeal there by itself.

Bert had a farm on the forest boundary, but he was a rough farmer. He could put an immaculate fence up for me, but his own was as rough as guts! There was a lot of gorse and we helped him by bulldozing it and burning. He used gorse though because young, soft gorse is nutritious for lambs and lambs also like to eat gorse flowers. The trick is to keep it short!

He liked horses and he had one that silhouetted by the bright sun, you could see through it's ribs! Well it was skinny!

Bert told me of a time that he was working with a horse and it kicked him in the chest knocking him out. When he came to, he kicked the horse back, but it kicked him again, knocking him out!

I would often look after his place while he was away and he would look after ours. I had the odd adventure there.

He had bantam chooks including a mad rooster who used to attack. Bert would catch him and hold him under the water in the small creek nearby - once he screwed its head around and let it go like a wind-up toy. One time I was in the hen house and the thing attacked but few up my Swandi [for the uninitiated a bush shirt that is fairly long]. Well he was flapping up there and I was jumping around trying to get rid of it! It was quite a performance!

His ram was a problem too - I took my son with me, who was a toddler and we had just shut the gate when the ram charged us! I tossed my son back over the gate and cleared it myself, just as the ram crashed into it!

Then there was the prison escapee - he had been seen walking down the the railway line, so as I was in charge at Bert's, I rang the police to tell them there was nobody home and the baddie could be hiding out there. They asked me to go and have a look - not me! I may be silly, but not that silly!

I have enjoyed jotting this down for Bert is a hero and one of mine!

Oh I want to add this. His mother called him 'Sonny' or 'Sonny Jim'. We heard about this this, and we too called him 'Sonny' but the ever inventive Mick Hill changed that because Bert was not afraid to 'pop you on' or have fisticuffs, so he was given the name 'Liston' after the boxer.

There is every chance I will add to this because old Bert was one of the guys who helped shape my own character.