Sep 4, 2002
I recently saw again the Grand Pacific Hotel, languishing after ten years of neglect, with green algae growing up its once immaculate walls, and bidding fair to meet up with the streaks of black mould descending from its ornate parapet. The massive archway at its entrance was stopped up with ill fitting corrugated iron and access to the semicircular driveway which curved beneath the now enormous sago palms to its collumned portico was discouraged by a length of black electric cable stretched between the gate posts.
When I had stayed there briefly in the late 1958 it was without doubt the grandest hotel in the Pacific outside of Hawaii, a proud example of what conservative British colonialism could offer in the way of gracious if somewhat dated comfort. The government building across Victoria Parade, now the General Assembly Building, still retains its impressive solidity in its spacious surroundings. In the days when it housed the governor and his dignified staff I imagine the Grand Pacific was occupied by visiting dignitaries from the other British Pacific colonies, the Gilbert and Ellis Islands, the New Hebrides and the Solomons, come to hobnob and lobby and strike deals with his Excellency and his officials. Those were gracious days.
In the late 1950’s I was the Government entomologist in Western Samoa with a good deal more authority than my age or experience deserved. The newly established South Pacific Commission had arranged a conference of agricultural interests in Suva, to which I and the new entomologist in American Samoa, a nondescript young fellow called Herring, were invited. For some reason we were unable to go. I forget why. Perhaps the fortnightly plane that would have taken us was delayed by the weather or by some mechanical misadventure. I was not unduly disappointed. International conferences are not often as useful as one might hope. Returning participants are usually obliged to write in their reports that the chief value lay in the contacts they were able to make. . In those days it was called “rubbing shoulders”. Today it would be called “networking”.
That is to say that they enjoyed some of the parties they had attended after a long day of largely irrelevant and poorly presented papers
Our Director of Agriculture in Western Samoa was a shy and kindly man called Baynard Parham. He had previously been a senior agricultural officer in Fiji and of course he had many contacts there. He felt that Herring and I had missed out on something, and that we should visit Fiji anyway to see what we could learn. There was a Royal New Zealand Air Force transport plane due to come past on a calibration flight and by pulling a few strings, at which he was pretty adept, he could get us on it. I’m not sure what it was calibrating, but I suppose in those days before satellite navigation it was necessary to adjust from time to time, the charts and navigation tables to make allowance for changes in the earth’s magnetic field. It was no good flying from Auckland to some Tokelauan atoll if you couldn’t find it when you got there.
Be that as it may, he got us on to this plane, a troop carrier called a “Hastings”, where we sat facing aft in canvas seats, as cheerless and as uncomfortable as lightweight metal frames could make them. The plane was pressurised, but was without heating or insulation and in our tropical gear at 30 000 feet over the Pacific it was bitterly cold. One of the crew brought us some coffee in a paper cup. I wondered if an auxiliary purpose of the plane was perhaps to get the troops battle hardened on their way to the theatre of operations.
We landed at Nadi and went to a hotel before going on to Suva by taxi. Herring was already well on his way to becoming an alcoholic, so we spent most of the time in the lounge bar. I on the other hand seem to have contracted hepatitis and soon discovered I could not face alcohol; in any form, and was feeling decidedly weak and seedy. My attitude to illness generally is that if you put up with it for a while, it will sooner or later go away, but Herring, being an American, believed that whatever ails you, there must be someone who can put it right, so he took it on himself to call a doctor, using the phone in the lounge bar. Americans take an excessive pleasure in discussing their metabolic functions and I was somewhat embarrassed to hear him on the phone shouting my symptoms for all the lounge to hear in his loud and peevish Southern accent. “His urine is very discoloured!”
An old Indian doctor finally appeared with his small white beard and rimless glasses and a little white hat like Mr Nehru. He checked me over and then told me off for coming into the colony in a diseased condition, but he sold me some pills and we got a taxi to Suva.
Though Herring was from the deep south, he was not of the southern aristrocracy, but rather of the common clay. Like many people who find themselves in strange surroundings he was inclined to regard the unfamiliar as a form of ostentation intended to patronise and belittle him and he reacted accordingly especially to anything he regarded as excessively British. So the Grand Pacific he saw as a continuing affront, and the Indian staff didn’t help either. We got to our rooms alright, but the dining room was another matter. It must have covered the best part of an acre, and the tables, set with a glittering silverware, half a dozen different types of glasses and an array of cutlery which included bone handled fish knives and curliqued fish forks enough to frighten the horses. That would have been enough, but Herring had neither jacket nor tie in his luggage, and we had scarcely got past the doorway before a waiter glided up to us to remind us that such attire was obligatory. Herring informed him brusquely that he had neither item and that he just wanted some food. The waiter retired politely but we had not gone five paces before the head waiter approached us, and made the same request as if he had not already seen our first encounter. He got the same response and withdrew. A few steps further on two more waiters approached us simultaneously from different directions and put the matter to us once again. Herring only just managed to keep his temper. But then the head waiter came back in a mood of reconciliation, and found us a table behind a great pillar, where our dreadful appearance would not affront the other guests.
That wasn’t the end of it of course. The pillar also made it difficult to attract the attention of the staff, so we waited excessively between courses, though there were few other guests. Furthermore whether we asked for mild or medium curry we got served a dish that you could have lit a cigarette off, and the waiter with the water jug could never see us until we were scalded almost speechless. Thus do the serving classes rule their betters.
We did have some useful discussions though with the resident entomologist, a capable and helpful Australian called Barney O’Connor. He had worked in New Guinea before he came to Fiji, and he knew the tropics and its entomological problems from end to end. He also introduced us to his entomological predecessor, the venerable if somewhat shrunken old Hubert Simmonds, a living legend in Pacific entomology. He was an English gentleman of the old school, soft spoken, hospitable, and meticulously correct. He drove Herring and me about in a prewar Austin, never exceeding 30 mph, (about 50 kph), and with great caution, getting completely off the road and stopping whenever he saw another car approaching. Fortunately the other cars were few.
He took us home to afternoon tea, where dainty old Mrs Simmonds served us tea from a silver pot, in cups of the most delicate and ornate china, and with loaf sugar selected from a silver bowl with little silver tongs. Joy of joys, there were also genuine cucumber sandwiches. It was a perfectly preserved piece of Victoriana. Herring managed to keep his mouth shut, but afterwards he made it clear to me that he had been spitting tacks throughout the occasion.
Alas! I fear that much of the grandness has now evaporated from the Pacific. We shall not see its like again..