Apr 8, 2008
This is actually a story of my Uncle Murray's. He was born in 1882, so grew up during Seddon's time as a politician, and as he worked for the Post Office in Westport when Dick was MP for Westland, I guess he was familiar with many of the stories, apocryphal or otherwise, concerning him.
Anyway, Lord Onslow was Governor General of New Zealand from 1889 to 1892. He was appointed during Atkinson's conservative administration, but had scarcely taken up his post when Atkinson's government was replaced by Balance's Liberals, with whom the governor found himself in disagreement so he resigned and went home early.
Be that as it may, in his initial familiarisation tour of the country, he was escorted down the West Coast by Dick Seddon, who took the opportunity to introduce him to some of his old cronies as they went along. Somewhere in South Westland they stopped for the night with an aging prospector that Dick knew, and he prepared a meal for them. The governor was a little nonplussed to see the old fellow shaking the contents of a tin of Keating's flea powder into the stew, and cautiously enquired about this practice.
"Oh," said the old man, " I used to use it against the fleas, but I found something better, so I just use it to flavour the stew now. I found that if I keep an old sheep skin in the hut, the fleas all go to that and leave the rest of the place free of them. That's it, that you're sitting on."
The governor leapt up in alarm, and Dick brushed him down, while the old fellow laughed and explained that he was just having a joke. He actually kept curry in the flea powder tin. He had long since got rid of the fleas and the flea powder.
Later on, at Jackson's Bay, the locals put on a civic reception for the governor. The local schoolteacher composed an address, but he was too diffident to actually read it out, so that task was assigned to a large confident fellow with a big voice and a small education, and to make sure that the proper formalities were observed, the teacher had written instructions in the margin. However, the spokesman doesn't seem to have understood this, and read out the instructions along with the rest of the address. Furthermore he pronounced the word "bow" to rhyme with "crow" rather than "cow", so the address began with "Bow to the governor, bow to King Dick", and ended with "Bow to the governor, bow to Dick again, and suggest we all adjourn to the pub."
Lord Onslow asked if he could have the copy of the address. The locals said they had intended to send it up to Greymouth to be all typed up proper, but Dick said to leave it with him and he would get it done for them in Wellington. Of course he didn't, because the governor wanted the original, and in fact Dick said that when the governor returned to England, that illuminated address from Jackson's Bay was the only one he took with him.