The day the ground shook: Memories of the Napier Earthquake

Wednesday, 3 February 2021

A dozen primary school pupils were playing on a back country field when it struck.

“We had such a huge shock,” Oliver Candy said. “The ground was rolling – a big roll, like sea waves.”

At 10.47am on February 3, 1931, the earth moved. The 7.8 magnitude Napier Earthquake flattened the city and nearby Hastings. In Napier, fires broke out, destroying 11 blocks of the CBD and killing people trapped in fallen buildings.

The death toll was 256.

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* Brothers at arms recall World War II bombs, malaria and poisoned wine

* Flashback: Hawke's Bay's 1931 earthquake claimed 256 lives

* Civil Defence worried Hawke's Bay not prepared for post-earthquake tsunami

**

It was a black day in our history and one, 90 years later, Candy remembers with colourful clarity.

Speaking at his Levin home, the 97-year-old’s memories are of a different time – of dirt roads, riding horses and isolation.

Candy, one of six boys, lived with his family nestled against the ranges near Tūtira on farmland his father, Jack, was given after World War I as a returned soldier.

They were about 50 kilometres from Napier, but a world away. A trip to the city would take almost a day. After a trek on horseback to Tūtira, the horses would be secured and a service car caught.

The day the quake struck was hot and fine. The local school, with lessons in a wool shed turned into a classroom after previously being in a tent, was on its morning break.

The school’s 12 pupils were playing rounders in a field when the first wave struck. Then another. And another.

Candy recalls the children grabbing fence posts, worried they’d fall into the cracks opening before their eyes. The teacher, Mr Brenton Rule, held on to a post on the porch as the ground rocked.

“I remember the chimney was dancing round and round, but it never fell off,” Candy said.

For an hour they came, wave after rolling wave. In the distance the pupils watched as the hills split and cliffs crumbled.

One rock that came down from the hills crashed through the empty girls’ toilets. At the school, nobody was hurt.

“That was the end of the teaching for the day. We went home.”

As Candy headed off he remembers seeing a neighbour, Mr Hays, riding his horse along one of the dirt track roads as the aftershocks kept coming. As the ground moved, Hays would disappear and then his hat would pop up before he was taken down again. Somehow, the horse wasn’t scared.

The family home wasn’t damaged, but Candy’s parents were worried about aftershocks, so they spent the next three weeks living in a tent, returning inside only to cook.

The tremors continued for three months, including one that struck as Candy sat on the outside toilet.

“I remember being thrown out with my pants around my ankles, and a bare bum.”

News from the outside world was slow to filter in, but the severity of what happened was immediately obvious.

“We knew it was a bad one all right. The way the ground opened up and [the] rolling, whole sides of hills came down.”

The landscape had changed. Napier rose and the city expanded to its newly claimed land.

“Before the earthquake we couldn’t see the sea, but after the earthquake we could, looking out across Hawke’s Bay.”

Stories from the epicentre emerged. One of Jack Candy's cousins was saved from certain death by his good manners when leaving a Napier bank. The cousin stood atop the stairs to let a woman past as the quake struck, sending falling masonry on to the woman, killing her instantly, right where he was about to walk.

In the weeks after Candy remembers seeing an aeroplane for the first time, as it dropped bread and other supplies.

Times were hard, though, and months after the quake Jack Candy decided he and the family would leave the farm and head to Masterton.

By then they had a car and, on the drive south, Candy had his first glimpses of post-quake Napier and Hastings, the ruined centres of Hawke’s Bay.

Hastings was renamed “Hey Stinks” because of odour coming from the ruins.

The Manawatū Standard of February 4, 1931, wrote that “Palmerston North quivered and then rocked under the influence of a tremendous earth movement”. There were reports of minor damage in the region.

“It was at once apparent that, if it were not a local earthquake, a serious disaster had occurred, assuming of course that its centre of origin was near a populated area.”