'A most wonderful eccentric'

HE WAS "the man on the bicycle" who wobbled elegantly to art gallery openings from his rented bedsit in Barbadoes St, Christchurch.

He never drove a car. His furniture was second-hand or homemade. He agreed to get a telephone just five years ago. And when Norman Frank Barrett said he was off to see his stockbroker, people just smiled.

Barrett, 87, died on January 6. He requested no funeral, specified no death notice until three days after his burial – and left $1.8 million to the Christchurch Art Gallery.

Outwardly, there was not a single clue to Barrett's wealth. Some of his friends knew, some of them suspected, but none of them talked about it. This was Christchurch. And these are gentle men and women from kinder days.

Barrett's extraordinarily unexpected bank balance grabbed the headlines 10 days ago. Slowly, his very private life is also becoming public. As the Press obituary recorded, "Many people knew Norman Barrett, but only a few knew anything about him."

Count barrister Michael Knowles among that number. Five years ago, an ailing Barrett engaged his services. "I was on the fringe of a group he belonged to that included a couple of legal colleagues. We'd meet for a drink or a meal." Knowles doesn't know why Barrett chose him to manage his final affairs. "Maybe I was the only lawyer he knew who didn't have a lot of money? Norman was a guy, who as far as I could tell, to whom relationships were like a transaction. You always held something back. It was almost a kind of investment, that he would release so much, but there was a guardedness in his dealings.

"Some people put that more crudely: that he was a straight-out miser." But Knowles liked this man: elderly, eccentric and elegant, who adhered to republicanism, socialism and atheism.

"There was an irony in all those things, because as a socialist he used the great tool of capitalism, the stockmarket, to gain his wealth. And he completed the circle, as it were, by leaving that wealth to the public, for the common good. He was kind of a double agent against capitalism."

Knowles and former art gallery curator, now independent valuer, Neil Roberts, will manage the purchase of works from Barrett's bequest. Its terms allow Christchurch Art Gallery to use his fortune to buy Canterbury works, from the period 1940 to 1980 – with a little leeway in the case of William A Sutton. That's Bill Sutton, iconic Canterbury artist, who once painted Barrett's portrait. Barrett was there when his friend's ashes were scattered near the Bruce Creek bridge that featured in the Sutton work Dry September. A few weeks ago, when Barrett was buried, another friend quietly slipped a framed portrait of Sutton into the grave site. A friendship, gone full circle.

"In accordance with his wish," read the death notice, "Norman has been buried without ceremony. His friends are invited to gather in memory of him at the Christchurch Art Gallery on Thursday, January 21, at 5.30pm ... "

Jenny Harper, Christchurch Art Gallery director, was in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, when the news broke. At an exhibition of work by Ron Mueck, the hyper-realist sculptor whose touring show arrives in Christchurch in September, her cellphone rang."It was quite astonishing. I'm afraid Ron Mueck took second place for the rest of the evening."

Barrett's bequest is the single biggest donation the gallery has received for the purchase of art works. Adjusting for inflation, it is only $300,000 short of Robert McDougall's founding grant, in 1928, which allowed construction of Christchurch's first public art gallery.

"In New Zealand," says Harper, "a bequest of this magnitude is very uncommon at this time. When our galleries were first established, there were a range of civic-minded people who did make bequests... I'm not aware, in recent history, of this kind of public-spirited gesture, and it's all the more unusual because no one seems to have known what he had, and he lived very simply."

IT'S POSSIBLE to retrace Barrett's life through the piecemeal recollections of friends and acquaintances. There is general agreement he came to New Zealand aged about 16, born to an English mother and a French father, which earned him the nickname Napoleon.

His mother ran a sweet shop near Hagley Park, his father returned to live in Europe. It is believed that, back in London, Barrett had had a public school upbringing, riding the top storey of double-decker buses so he could see into the cricket grounds at Lords.

In Christchurch, he sang with the Christ Church Cathedral Choir, acted under the direction of Dame Ngaio Marsh, and socialised with the likes of artists Sutton and Rita Angus (of whom he was "very" fond, confides one friend). His penmanship was immaculate, when he directed plays he was "tremendously intense", and – it is alleged – he could get more tea out of a single teabag than any other person.

Elric Hooper, former Court Theatre artistic director, remembers a production of Julius Caesar in Christchurch's Great Hall.

"Norman Barrett played the fortune teller. The first act ended with him throwing a pack of cards in the air and uttering "Beware the ides of March'." Hooper has never forgotten the power of the moment. "I was about 10 or 12. Maybe I'm kidding myself, and if I look it up, I'll be 26. The self-regarding failures of memory... " More memories: At Claude Neon, Barrett sold illuminated signs, he designed electrical fittings for HCUrlwin and, it has been reported, eventually formed his own signage company.

He rode his bicycle everywhere, clad in a Savile Row-style suit with a pocket handkerchief. South to Templeton, for the best pies; inland to Rangiora to cover women's cricket matches for the Christchurch Star.

If locals remember him, generally, as "the man on the bicycle", his friends describe a singularly wonderful eccentric. For one police officer, however, he was Lord Lucan, the English earl missing since the brutal murder of his nanny in November, 1974.

It's a story oft-told by retired solicitor and actor Mervyn "Sticky" Glue and remembered by his wife Jenepher. "This detective used to come into the Working Men's Club, and he said, `Oi, Sticky, whose your friend?'... we know he's Lord Lucan." There was no truth in it – but compare old photographs and there is certainly a resemblance.

Jenepher digs out theatre reviews and anecdotes. The time in his 20s when Barrett worked at Turners & Growers and was asked for bananas and replied, "Madam, there are no bananas – not even straight ones"; the way he'd push the vegetable trolleys, proclaiming, "mind your nylons Mum"; and the theatre reviews from the Canterbury University production of Dr Faustus: "Nowhere was this tragedy better expressed than Mr Barrett's speaking of the lines, `Why this is hell, nor am I out of it'." She has a pottery milk jug Barrett made. Recalls that, in his New Zealand lifetime, 11 of his bicycles were stolen. That he would pore over newspaper stockmarket listings. "I think he was just canny with his money. As he once said, `If you want to do things, you do them properly and you do them every day."'

"Norman," she says, "Was a most wonderful eccentric, a marvellous friend, and money is not the sort of thing one talks about and Norman wouldn't have talked about it anyway."

NEVILLE CARTER was Barrett's Barbadoes St neighbour. Towards the end, when his friend was in care at St Helena's rest home, he visited daily. Barrett's faculties were failing, he recorded his daily routines in a notebook – but he maintained an interest in Canterbury art, visiting the recent Seraphine Pick show in a wheelchair.

"He wasn't very keen on Seraphine," says Carter. "But he knew her paintings... he knew all the local artists, and in fact there was probably a lot of artists who didn't know he knew them.

"Actually, the funny part was that we didn't have anything in common. I'm not into art, but he was interesting, because he could look at art and see things I couldn't. He'd look at a painting and explain it, tell you what it was all about.

"I often wondered, when we went into the gallery, why he hadn't been recognised, because he spent a lot of time there. Anyway, I thought, `That's you Norm – just the man on the bike."' Before he went into care, Carter cooked for his neighbour. Huge bowls of porridge for breakfast, with wheatgerm, brown sugar, cream and yoghurt. He collected art magazines from the library, and once, bought him a gourmet rabbit and red wine pie. "He never stopped talking about it... I'll never forget him. Never."

Barrett is missed at Caffe Roma, the Oxford Terrace coffee shop he frequented until the stairs got too difficult. Manager Heather Miller describes him as a "classic old English gentleman".

"He would park his bike across the road... and comb his hair in the hallway before he came in. He drank tea. English breakfast tea, and a wee sweetie, something out of the cabinet or a scone." Caffe Roma provided an informal secretarial service. In the days before Barrett got a phone (his friends discovered he lived in a bedsit only three years ago), messages inviting him for tea would be left at the coffee shop. He sat at table number seven, with an assortment of legal-minded friends, discussing changes in the law, or the court case of the day. "The boys" commandeered the big table, the one by the fireplace, under a huge painting of horses and dogs. Miller goes to check the art work's title: Hounds of Heaven.

Architect Peter Beaven is, perhaps, Barrett's oldest friend. They met when Barrett would call into his office to sell signage – and chide him on the quality of his biscuits.

"He was," says Beaven, "the kind of individual that, since 1984 and deregulation, really, we've got rid of. We all worry so much about legalities and money. He was one of those people who could dwell on life with ruminating happiness. A boulevardier, in the cafes and talking to people. We don't have those people on the streets now.

"In New Zealand, everybody is celebrity now and publicity and nonsense. By being private, he was a much more interesting man." Beaven pauses. "Just a thought... Barrett was married once, briefly."

"Six months – but it felt like six years," another friend jokes. No one knows what became of his wife. There is another, as yet unnamed, lesser beneficiary to his estate: the daughter of a friend, who lives overseas.

"He was a person who lived, really, his own life," says Beaven. "It is," he says, "a story that says so much about life here and what we've lost."

Sad, perhaps, that a man's life emerges only after his death?

"Oh no," says Beaven. "It all comes out. Everything works properly in the end."

Blenheim businessman Arthur Harrison has left $10m to Canterbury Museum in his will.

- © Fairfax NZ News