A First World War field gun stands beside Rora Street, Te Kūiti, as the late Albert Shearer rides by around 1921.
The mystery of a field gun being buried in Te Kuiti has deepened.
Since The News reported Te Kūiti and Districts RSA vice president Ross O’Halloran’s tale of a field gun buried beside Mangaokewa River during the Second World War, retired electrician Russell Shearer has recounted his late father’s tale of a gun buried in Rora Street before the war in around 1936 – and former Riverside Lodge owner David Jones shared another tale of a gun being buried by the river after the 1958 flood.
Shearer presented a photograph of his grandfather Albert riding up Rora Street in about 1922 showing a field gun positioned behind the town clock. Another family photo taken in the mid to late 1930s show the gun has gone.
According to family lore the gun was buried in situ in either 1936 or 1937 – two or three years before the outbreak of war – and Shearer’s father Keith watched men with pickaxes dig the hole and roll it in.
“Dad never gave me a reason for it,” Shearer said. “He just said that’s what happened.”
The late Keith Shearer spent the Second World War in prisoner of war camps in Europe and later served the RSA as secretary. His father, who served in the First World War, served as RSA president from 1921 to 1944.
A field gun was allocated to Te Kūiti Borough Council in November 1920, according to Great Guns: The Artillery Heritage of New Zealand by Peter Cooke and Ian Maxwell, which O’Halloran has seen this week.
The King Country Chronicle reported a German 110mm Howitzer field gun had arrived on February 20, 1922, and mounted on the on the lawn opposite the Bank of New Zealand on Rora Street. It had been captured by the NZ Mounted Brigade under General Edmund Allenby at the second Gaza offensive in Palestine.
When the soldiers’ memorial obelisk was built to commemorate the fallen, and dedicated in January 1924, the gun was repositioned to face it, Cooke and Maxwell said in their book.
“I see the Borough Council has decided to shift the German gun from the Rora Street lawn to the river bank,” wrote a correspondent to the King Country Chronicle editor in the February 6, 1926, edition. “Why not pitch the thing into the river, provided a deep enough hole can be found, and be done with it?”
In August 1926, another letter to the editor shows the gun “has lately been removed from Rora Street” with “its muzzle appearing above the flooded Mangaokewa”.
O’Halloran understood the gun had been buried following the fall of Singapore in 1943 for fear of it falling into enemy hands, but now thinks it is just as likely that the authorities might have feared it could have been buried for fear of being mistaken for an active military installation.
Shearer wondered if a second gun had been allocated to Te Kūiti before being buried.
Jones called O’Halloran with the tale of a gun being buried after the river was widened following a flood in 1958.
“The late plumber Doug McDonald showed me where they buried a First World War gun following the 1958 flood,” Jones said.
He was shown a spot on the riverbank by a streetlight.
Jones thought it was possible it could be the same gun the late Jim O’Halloran had told his son of.
The News understands two guns were excavated in Pirongia in recent decades and taken to Otorohanga for restoration.
“The plot thickens,” O’Halloran said. “This certainly gives me something else to research.”
There are dozens of stories of buried guns, and even tanks, but many are hard to corroborate and have become folklore.
Do you know more? Email editor@goodlocal.nz with ‘field gun’ in the subject line.
