Random House - $44
My review copy arrived in the mail this morning so over a double shot trim latte at Agnes Curran, my splendid local cafe, I read the first four chapters which took me through to the point where Hubbard enrolled as a part-time student at Otago University.Until recently I had hardly heard of Allan Hubbard, now I know a great deal about his early years which were abusive and impoverished.
This is a substantial biography running to over 430 pages and if the first four chapters are anything to go on then it is going to be an interesting and well-written book.
Here for your interest is the author's Preface from the biography kindly supplied to me by publishers Random House:
"Allan Hubbard remains an enigma even to his close associates, but I was fortunate to meet him at a time when he was opening up about the hardships of his dismal childhood. He had read my earlier book on the father of New Zealand’s electronic industry, Angus Tait, a man Allan admired and who was related to Allan’s wife Jean. I asked if I could see him and perhaps persuade him to work with me on a biography of his own. He said by all means come, but he doubted a book about him would be of interest. So late December 2005 I met Allan for the first time. He was in the office on a Saturday and opened up the doors to me dressed in the shaggy brown hand-knitted jersey and roman sandals that make up his unvarying weekend attire. He kicked off our meeting by saying that he was just ordinary, but the story he told me was anything but.
Allan survived an impoverished childhood in Dunedin by turning to petty crime and running a gang that controlled whole swathes of the Leith stream and surrounding hillsides. With no money even for coal to cook meals, he became very resourceful in meeting his and his family’s needs. His dance on the wrong side of the law might have developed into a fully-fledged life of crime if it hadn’t been for the Knox Church community that embraced him, challenged him with rigorous scouting activities, tried to strong-arm its moral code into him and finally succeeded by giving him a book that transformed his life.
Allan didn’t agree to do a biography in 2005, but he did lend me his precious copy of ‘the book’, a memoir of the Reverend Fergus McLaren, a fallen war hero who was the kind of man he wished his father had been. On a subsequent trip to Wanaka, I visited the Hawea Flats church and sent Allan a photo of the memorial there to Fergus. He wrote to me that he was moved to tears by this photo, because it reminded him of the pilgrimage he’d made as a 17-year-old to the Central Otago churches Fergus had preached at.
Our correspondence continued and he sent me other books that were important to him. Finally early in 2007 he agreed to embark on this book together. He spoke with great gusto about the experiences of his youth, and I learned what entertaining company he could be. He spoke in less detail about the businesses, but we sketched out a plan for how to approach them — a chapter for each of the major businesses he was associated with. It was only later I realised the sheer scope of my assignment: to condense the history of five major businesses into single chapters. Not to mention the expanse of Allan’s philanthropic activities, his assistance to the South Canterbury region and farming, and not least the friendships he’d nurtured since his childhood. The only area that was off-limits was his family. Jean Hubbard was happy to be interviewed but I agreed to her request to maintain the privacy of their daughters.
A comprehensive biography would have taken ten years and several volumes. I decided to show representative examples of Allan’s work and focus on the people stories that expressed the unique way that Allan worked as a businessman and as a philanthropist.
So this book has developed over the last few years, from interviews with Allan during regular visits to Timaru, interviews with his associates around the country, and from other research. From time to time Allan would express reservations about publishing his biography — that it would seem like ‘skiting’. I was able to reassure him that many, many people were keen to hear his story. Late 2009, when South Canterbury Finance looked shaky, Allan asked me to delay the end of the book until events played out. Neither of us could have imagined the ordeal he would endure in 2010. It’s worth remembering that SCF had a long and profitable history; it was the good news story among finance companies until July 2009. It became important to me to examine the causes of SCF’s problems and ultimate failure, and to ask why the government chose to move against Allan Hubbard at the time when he had a real prospect for rescuing the company. The conclusions I came to are my own, and not Allan’s".
Virginia Green
October 2010
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