Vegetable grower Alan Wilcox remembered for lifetime of service
Pukekohe vegetable growers farewelled 101-year-old Alan Wilcox in late July, celebrating his many achievements and reflecting the widespread respect in which he was held.
One of the most interesting was about being on board when the first airfreighted kiwifruit were sent to Europe back in 1975.
While his father was a dairy farmer at Harrisville, when Alan and his brother Graham left school they started vegetable growing. But by the 1970s Wilcox got involved in kiwifruit, which he thought would be a good semi-retirement project, planting up 20 hectares.
He became a grower director of Turners and Growers in 1973. Two years later he received a phone call from fellow director, Roy Turner, asking if his passport was up to date. It was early in the season and the price of fruit was high and a plane – which had arrived in Auckland – would have returned to Europe empty if a suitable cargo hadn’t been found.
A couple of days later Wilcox was at Auckland Airport at 4am to get on board the flight carrying its cargo of kiwifruit and feijoas.
“We sat in with the fruit in overcoats but every hour or two we were allowed up on the flight deck to get warm,” he told a morning tea put on by the Pukekohe Vegetable Growers’ Association (PVGA), of which he’s a life member.
The trip, which took three days, made stops in Singapore, Dubai, Istanbul and finally Schiphol in the Netherlands. At the first stop, Wilcox noticed an engineer travelling with the flight putting a ladder up against the side of the plane and carrying up cans of oil.
“So that was my job from then on, to hand the oil to him,” he told Hort News
At the end of the 1980s, Wilcox saw the writing on the wall with seven different kiwifruit exporters competing with each other, driving down overseas returns. By then his sons, Garth and Robert were also involved in vegetable growing.
“They were making money and I was wasting it,” he said.
So, the kiwifruit vines came out, the posts and wire were sold and the land went back into vegetables. Wilcox joined the PVGA in 1943 and attended the first meeting of the Vegetable Growers Federation (VegFed). From 1967 to 1970, he was coopted onto its wage negotiations committee, and in 1982 was elected vice-chairman of the Potato Growers Federation.
The next year, he was appointed to the Horticulture Export Authority (HEA), which was cut short with the election of the Labour government the following year. He particularly enjoyed mixing with different growers from around the country in all these roles.
“A potato grower from out of Invercargill used to bring me Southland swedes in his briefcase,” he recalls.
Wilcox remembers several very wet growing seasons in the 1960s – “but not as bad as this one. It’s been one out of the box.”
Recently, Wilcox passed his driving license test again for another two year term, making him one of only 23 drivers in the country aged over 100. “I’m a bit lucky, aren’t I?”
