Sylvia's story

At the end of World War II, thousands of women sailed to New Zealand in `bride ships' to join their husbands – Kiwi servicemen they'd fallen in love with. One war bride reveals the trials and tribulations of 'Mr Jones' wives'.

APRIL 30, 1945: Adolf Hitler and his new bride Eva Braun shoot themselves in their Berlin bunker. The following day in England a much happier love story unfolds: Derby girl Sylvia Walker marries New Zealand flying ace Leicester Smith from Rangiora.

Sylvia became a "war bride", the term for the 3700 women from 37 countries who married Kiwi servicemen and travelled to the outer reaches of the empire to be with their husbands.

They were also known colloquially as "Mr Jones' Wives", after minister of defence Frederick Jones, whose job was to oversee their immigration.

Now, 66 years later, a photograph of Sylvia, looking very much the English rose at 21, graces the cover of the brochure for a new exhibition which opens at the Auckland War Memorial Museum this weekend.

It tells the women's stories, including their long journey aboard "bride ships" and their experiences of settling in a strange land.

Today Sylvia, 87, and Leicester, 92, live in a spacious apartment in a retirement village in Titirangi, West Auckland, a far cry from the single room they were forced to squeeze into when they arrived in Auckland in 1946 and found all the housing had been snapped up.

The lack of government support still rankles with Sylvia all these decades later.

"This was a boy [Leicester] who had a mid-air collision over enemy territory and very nearly didn't come back – and they wouldn't give him a state house."

Life in mid-1940s New Zealand was not easy for Sylvia and other war brides – they encountered resentment and discrimination – and Sylvia nearly chucked it in and returned home.

"It was shocking really to see the way Sylvia was treated," says Leicester. "They seemed to resent the war brides. My mother was very religious... they wanted me to marry a New Zealand girl and I came back with an English war bride."

SYLVIA MET Leicester in 1944 when he was based at Upavon, working as a flying instructor. As soon as she laid eyes on the dashing young RNZAF pilot, she knew he was the one. "I had the funniest feeling, I thought, `this is it, this is my destiny'. He thought the same thing. We both knew instantly."

They wanted to get married straight away. Sylvia's father said, "I'd do anything for Kiwis, they looked after me at Gallipoli." Sylvia's mother said, "Wait until your tour of duty over Germany has finished, I don't want my daughter made a widow." So they waited, and Sylvia almost lost him.

Leicester was flying a Mosquito bomber over Holland when it collided at 25,000ft with another Mosquito. The other plane crashed and the New Zealand pilot and his navigator were killed (in 2000, after many years of searching, Leicester and Sylvia found the men's graves in Holland).

Leicester's Mosquito went into a spin and dived to 16,000ft in a few seconds. He managed to straighten her out, release his bomb on to farmland, and nurse the plane, with an engine on fire and most of the nose sliced off, back to mother England. It happened on his 26th birthday. He won a DFC (distinguished flying cross) for that bit of bravery, but Sylvia didn't find out about it until later.

When the war ended, the couple tied the knot, Sylvia able to fulfil her dream of a white wedding thanks to Leicester's clothing coupons. As an officer (he'd made flight lieutenant), he got 80 coupons a year, and civilians only 22. Bridal gowns and veils were in rare supply at the end of the war, but with the extra coupons, Sylvia was able to buy one. "Leicester always says I married him for his clothing coupons."

In September, 1945, the National Cash Register Company, where Leicester had worked before the war, invited him to attend a year-long training course in the US, which would enable him to return to New Zealand on a higher salary.

Sylvia was heartbroken – as the New Zealand government was paying for her fare, she had to travel direct to New Zealand on a "bride ship". Several months passed before a ship was arranged, a backlog of angry brides built up, and some of them eventually marched on Australia and New Zealand House in London in protest.

Finally a ship was arranged, the Athlone Castle, and 800 brides – 400 heading to Australia and 400 to New Zealand – set sail, many with children in tow. Immediately there was tension on board, as officers' wives were given cabins and non commissioned officers' wives were down below, some even housed in the swimming pool area.

"They didn't like the idea of being segregated," Sylvia says. "Why should an officer's wife get better accommodation? They'd all flown together in these aeroplanes."

It was a resentment some of the women carried with them for decades. Fifty years later, at a war brides reunion in Auckland, Sylvia went to register at the cubicle for passengers who'd sailed on the Athlone Castle.

"The lady said `before you come into this cubicle, were you an officer's wife or an NCO's wife?' I said I was an officer's wife. She said, `Well, this is no place for you, you'll find the officers' wives down further.' She was telling me I wasn't welcome – they were still carrying that stigma 50 years later."

DAYS ON board the Athlone Castle during the five-week journey to New Zealand passed slowly, and the women were bored to tears. "I said, `Why don't you call for talent?"' Sylvia was made chairwoman of a committee which organised three variety concerts. They went down a treat.

The women also discovered that the only male passenger on board also happened to be a bone fide war hero, the legendary Major-General Howard Kippenberger, who had commanded New Zealand troops in North Africa and Crete before having his feet blown off by a land mine in Italy.

Invited to the captain's cabin to celebrate the success of the concerts, Sylvia got chatting to the major general's wife.

"She said, `Where are you going to my dear?' I said `I'm going to Rangiora.' She said, `Who did you marry?' I said, `I married Leicester Smith.' She said, `Oh my goodness not Amos Smith's son? Howard, come over here, look who we've got here, Leicester Smith's wife.'

"He [Kippenberger] turned out to be their family solicitor. She told me all about Leicester when he was a little boy."

Sylvia's life has been full of happy little coincidences just like that.

But it was not all frivolity – tragedy intervened when a baby died and had to be buried at sea. "We were told to keep away but we managed to go to the end of the deck just to say we'd been present. It [the casket] was wrapped in an Australian flag because the mother had married an Australian, and it was slid off a board into the sea. It was agonising, really. The authorities flew the father from Melbourne to Fremantle to meet the ship."

Sylvia shared a cabin with an Irish girl from Belfast, Pat, who was travelling to Australia. A year later, her husband wrote to Sylvia to say Pat had died in childbirth.

SYLVIA'S FIRST experience of New Zealand was not a happy one.

The Athlone Castle sailed into Wellington Harbour on Anzac Day. "The wharfies wouldn't bring the ship in because it was a holiday. So we had to sit out in the stream for another 24 hours. All the servicemen who were married to those 400 girls were all on the wharf waiting for their wives who they hadn't seen for nearly a year, a lot of them with children. That made me very angry."

When they finally disembarked, Sylvia spotted her father-in-law, who was chatting to the prime minister of the day, Labour's Peter Fraser. "He announced over a mic that we were all now New Zealanders, and we would be able to vote at the next election. In other words, `vote for me'."

Still angry at Fraser's lack of intervention over the wharfie incident, Sylvia's vote went elsewhere.

Sylvia and her father-in-law sailed to Lyttelton, climbed in his large Studebaker (he had a successful engineering company that made farm machinery and washing machines) and drove towards Rangiora.

Sylvia was not impressed. "Leicester had said `you're going to find it very difficult in Rangiora', and I certainly did. It was a market town and that was about it."

She had a few "blues" with her mother-in-law, but only had to stay a few months because Leicester joined her and took a manager's job in Auckland. The couple were finally embarking on their married life together.

AT FIRST, Auckland was tough. The couple couldn't find anywhere to live. All the land agents in Queen St said they had nothing on the books, and no state houses were available.

"I said `look Leicester, the next stop is the New Zealand shipping Company, we're going home, I've had enough'."

An agent overheard her accent, and asked if she was English.

"I said `yes I'm proud of it. But nobody round here seems to be very proud of the fact these boys have been overseas – they can't get anywhere to live'. I started to speak out then.

"They should have put up prefabricated houses or anything just to see all their servicemen settled. No girl wants to live with a mother-in-law."

The agent offered to let the couple stay with him in Herne Bay. They accepted, and a few weeks later he found them a single room in a house in Mt Eden which had been divided into self-contained flats. They had no access to the hall so for a year had to use a ladder to climb over a balcony to get inside.

Sylvia took a job at the department store Smith and Caughey's. One day she noticed that the other staff were paid a pound a week more than her. She confronted the manager.

"I said `I want to know why I get a pound a week less than the other girls'. He said `oh well you're English and you haven't been trained like our girls have been trained'. I said `well in that case I'll leave', so I left."

She then took a job managing the vegetable stand at the city markets. Meanwhile, they struggled on in their little room in Mt Eden. One night their lamp exploded all over their dinner, and Sylvia exploded too. "I said, `That's it, I've had this bloody country, I want to go home.' It was the first time I'd sworn."

Life gradually improved, and when one of the adjoining flats was vacated, they bought it, staying for the next 30-odd years.

In the early 1950s the couple returned to England for a couple of years, to ease Sylvia's homesickness. They had two children, and today have five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Sylvia wouldn't live in England now: it does nothing for her. She's a Kiwi, and happy that she made such a good choice of husband 66 years ago.

Leicester was always conscious he'd taken his bride to the ends of the earth, away from friends, family – everything she knew – and did all he could to make her happy. His eyes fill with tears as his wife says: "Leicester has been the type of husband who knew he'd done that, he'd brought me all this way, and he's been the best husband anybody could ever have."

LOVE IN A TIME OF STRIFE

Sylvia's recollections of life as a young war bride is one of about a dozen stories in Auckland Museum's exhibition Mr Jones' Wives: War Brides of New Zealand Servicemen.

The exhibition began life as a PhD topic for then Auckland University student Gabrielle Fortune, who had met the Smiths by chance and been inspired by Sylvia's story. Fortune pitched a thesis on war brides, and interviewed Sylvia as well as about 60 other brides during four years of research.

"Finding women interviewees is traditionally difficult," says Fortune. "Most say, `I'm just a housewife, I don't have much of a story.' But I found that the war brides knew they had a story to tell. They all said that it has taken a long time for someone to ask."

Fortune suggested an exhibition to Auckland Museum mid last year, and exhibition developer Georgina White produced it based on the thesis. The exhibition draws on the museum's own collection, as well as photographs, letters, telegrams, news reels from the time, and treasures such as Sylvia Smith's veil.

Fortune is now a research fellow in Auckland University's history department, with a special interest in the social aspects of military history.

"The focus [of the exhibition] is on the impact of war on couples, on keeping love alive during the war. For me it's exciting that [the war brides' stories] are going out there."

Mr Jones' Wives: War Brides of New Zealand Servicemen is on at Auckland Museum's Pictorial Gallery until September 4.