Stout Street Remembered
Mr Micheal Lulich talks to long time Defence employee and Senior Security guard Gideon Robati about his memories of the Stout Street building.
The Stout Street building in 1939.
It has just been over a year since the Defence Force took down the flags at Defence House in Stout Street in a ceremony to mark the closure of the building. At the ceremony LTGEN Jerry Mateparae said it was a ‘historic occasion for Defence which marks the end of an era.’ It was historic, in that the building was the Defence Force’s home for over 65 years.
For me, the Stout Street building is one of the most recognised buildings in New Zealand. The image of the building was beamed weekly into many New Zealand homes during the early 1980s on the popular television comedy programme ‘Gliding On’. Watching the programme I did not expect that one day I too would get off the train each morning and enter the building like my favourite ‘Gliding On’ characters Jim, Beryl and Hugh. For me, and many New Zealanders, the building is a living New Zealand icon. Watching the programme then I wondered about the building’s history and who worked in this distinct looking building?
The Stout Street ‘Departmental Building’ was built in 1939-41. It was the largest office building in Wellington at the time. The building contained five acres of floor space and was expected to house 1,800 employees, of whom the Income Tax Department would make up the majority. This all changed with the outbreak of World War Two where the building became New Zealand Defence Headquarters. The Defence Force stayed as a main tenant of the building until 2007.
The building was built by Fletcher Construction. It was framed in steel, with reinforced concrete walls and an exterior stone cladding which was used as permanent formwork for the concrete. The building steel framework was put up by using electric welding instead of riveting, which was new at the time. The distinct sculptural qualities of the building were influenced by the work of a number of prominent British architects of the time such as Francis Lorne’s Mount Royal Hotel (1932) in Oxford Street, London. In 1989 the building was gutted internally and a major refurbishment was undertaken.
The Stout Street building now.
Senior Security Guard, Gideon Robati, was one of the longest serving employees in the Stout Street building. Gideon started working in the building in 10 February 1975 and has seen a number of changes over the years. When he started there was no Freyberg building and most Defence Staff worked in Stout Street. I asked Gideon what the building was like when he first arrived there: ‘...the building then was called the “Departmental Building” and the offices were not open plan. On the ground floor there used to be the Births and Deaths (the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry of the Justice Department), level 4 was Audit, level 5 Treasury, level 6 you had Air Staff Engineers, and Accounts on the other level. The building has been totally refurbished so many times. I liked the old days because you had solid rimu door frames. You don’t have many buildings with the interior like that.’
In the 1970s people were allowed to smoke in the building. ‘People were smoking in their offices. People smoked at happy hours. When the law on smoking came in they had to go out and smoke.’ Also at the time ‘Treasury had a café where we were allowed. On each floor tea ladies brought their trolleys to your desk. They got rid of the tea ladies in the 1980s.’
The Stout Street building also faced a bad flooding problem in the 1990s. ‘It was that bad. You had to shift half of levels 4, 5 and 6, and level 2 had to be shifted to another building. You know how high the Air Comm is? Well on level 5 the water actually went out of the window. That was how deep it was. The problem was the pipe they replaced. The overlap only had four big bolts. What the contractor should have done was waited until the water was pumped up to fill up the tanks. But there were so many litres of water coming through that it jolted the joints out of the way and it burst out.’
When the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9 September 2001, ‘… there was a lot of action. All of a sudden there were a lot of people coming into the building left, right and centre at 1am in the morning. They said aren’t you guys watching the TV, so we switched it on to see what it was.’
I asked Gideon how the old building compared to the new. ‘It might be new now but I see renovations in the Defence departments constantly.’ It seems to go in a cycle where in one year things are done in open plan then in two years time the walls come down. ‘That is where they are having big problems with the Air Comm. Now the Air Comm is designed for open plan but when you build walls and offices it is not going to work. I do not think Defence is suited to open plan.’
Not many people know this but ‘the new building was meant to be the communication building. The Freyberg building was supposed to be the Defence Headquarters in 1978. The building we now work in was supposed to be the communication centre and only three to four floors high. The Chiefs of that era didn’t want to shift up here because they did not want open plan.’
The Stout Street building was a secured building: ‘…the first and second floor actually had guard boxes and you weren’t allowed in there unless you had business there. You couldn’t get upstairs without a guard letting you through using a foot pedal. When carrying confidential files around you had to use an internal staircase. You also didn’t have meeting rooms on the ground floor, where people could look around and see that you were having a conference.’ There were also fewer problems in getting Defence Staff cleared to work in the Stout St building. In the past ‘there was more respect. You saw a lot more people saluting in the 1970s and early 1980s.’
Gideon saw many changes in command in Stout Street over the years. ‘You have a different Chief every three to five years. From the first to the last, AVM John Hamilton, would have been the thirteen or fourteenth CAF I met at Stout Street. Same with Army General Staff and the Navy. Of course in the 1970s the big boss was Secretary of Defence and now it is the Chief of Defence Force.’
He also met Boutros Boutros-Ghali who was the United Nations Security General (from 1992 to 1996). ‘He was good. I talked to him in the lift. Of course I have talked to a whole lot of foreign big Chiefs.’ Gideon also saw every Prime Minister and Minister of Defence since 1975. When I asked Gideon who was the nicest Prime Minister he met at Stout St he said it was Sir Robert Muldoon who was ‘very, very, very nice.’
The funniest thing he saw over the years was the drunks at the Christmas party. You had a couple of people that walked into walls and people doing things they would regret the next day. He also saw a few characters over the years, particularly a lot of security guards who had been through the Service.
It was also funny to see protestors then who are now well known politicians. ‘Of course you have a lot of protests outside the building. It is going to be an ongoing process for Defence. The protests have simmered down but I hate to say it quite a few are politicians now.’
I asked him if he encountered any serious troublemakers that entered the building. ‘You always got disgruntled people. People hard done by the Army, Navy and Air Force. We are quite lucky because not a lot of them were violent people. Half the time they just needed someone to talk to. Mainly I got to talk to them and listen to their part of the story. I would then find someone for them to talk to. They were easy to satisfy and then they would go away. There are a lot of them but it is how you approach them and talk to them which is important.’
Gideon was away on the day the Defence Force finally moved out of Stout Street. ‘I was away for a month, when I came back I was in the new building. We took a couple of flags down and had a few guards, that was all.’
This was the end of an era of a building that has served the Defence Force well for a longer period than many had expected.