24. - The Angel of Tangiwai


Nursing Sister Lt Theresa Mortimer (later Mrs Holder) was the unsung Angel of Tangiwai.

On Christmas Eve 1953, Waiouru Camp chaplain Father Tom Duffy and three of his congregation, Sister Mortimer, medical officer Dr Fraser MacDonald, and duty officer Lt Irene Hanman (later Mrs Rollo), were keeping each other company while staying up for Midnight Mass. Just before 10pm they heard a strange sound like rolling thunder from out towards the Karioi forest. Then half an hour later came an urgent telephone call - the Limited Express had gone into the flooded Whangaehu River at Tangiwai.

Together the doctor and padre raced to the scene. Doc McDonald sprinted across the shuddering road bridge just before it collapsed into the torrent. While he did what he could for the dozen survivors found on the northern bank, Padre Duffy comforted the living and gave the last rites to the dead on the southern side.

Sister Mortimer and Lt Hanman had headed for the camp hospital. They gathered the skeleton camp staff together and sent men out in two ambulances loaded with blankets. Other soldiers and naval radio staff were sent after them with recovery vehicles, emergency floodlighting, gas-cutting gear, a bulldozer, shovels.

The locomotive crew and most of the passengers in the first five carriages had been swallowed up by the floodwaters, but the sixth carriage had teetered on the river's edge before tumbling into the torrent, and survivors from it soon started arriving at the camp hospital. Although not badly injured, they were shaken and shocked, and needed washing, dressing and comforting. "The silt was unbelievable, in the seams of their clothes, everywhere," recalled Mrs Holder at the memorial service 50 years later.



She told how she got the 21 survivors from the 6th carriage into warm pyjamas, then tucked them into bed with hot water bottles and a cup of tea. “I was surprised how quickly they all went off to sleep, but later I discovered that the soldier pouring the tea had laced it with whiskey,” she chuckled.

By 4 am on Christmas morning no more survivors had come in from the Waiouru side of the Whangaehu River, but then the rescue teams started arriving with the dead. So the camp hall, incongruously decorated with crepe paper streamers for the children's Christmas party, was turned into a makeshift morgue.


A civil defence structure had not yet been organised in 1953, but Prime Minister Sid Holland had arrived at Tangiwai not long after dawn after a high-speed car ride down from Auckland, and by mid-morning he had set up an impromptu group at Waiouru called ‘The Relief Organisation Committee.’ This included the police, railways, army, navy, ministry of works, coroners and undertakers.

Sister Mortimer took the brunt of all this. She fielded telephone calls to the hospital from all over New Zealand, asking about relatives on the train. And a phone call from the Prime Minister, “If there’s anything you want, from anywhere in New Zealand, just take it.” What she really wanted was sleep, but more and more bodies kept arriving. The hall became filled with endless rows of half-opened coffins. "I can't even explain what went on. It just went continually," she sighed.


Mrs Holder and Richard Canty in 2013

50 years later, Fireman Richard Canty recalled how they had to use fire hoses to flush the silt off the dead victims arriving from the riverbanks. He helped clean more than a hundred bodies, lay them out, identify them, embalm them and then load them into railway wagons with big white crosses chalked on their sides. Many people can still remember that train pulling out of the Waiouru camp railway platform on the afternoon of the 27th.

As the survivors regained their strength, Sister Mortimer had to organise clothes for them and arrange ways for them to get home. "We told the Navy boys from Irirangi we had no civvy clothes, and they gave their own, as did many of the women at the camp."

She had been working three days and three nights without sleep when a bustling matron arrived at the hospital with nurses from Whenuapai air base and insisted on being taken immediately to ‘whoever is in charge.’

"We're here now. What do we need to do?" she demanded. "Nothing - it's all done," Sister Mortimer wearily replied.



The Samoan soldier’s lemon squeezer

At the 50-year memorial service former MP Sgt Pat Ryan told of how a soldier’s battered felt hat was found amongst the debris as search teams were combing the flood-torn riverbanks for bodies. Inside the hat was the name of a Samoan soldier. He had been heading home to Auckland for two weeks leave before deployment to the war in Korea, and had boarded the train at Linton.

His name was not on the survivor’s list, nor was his body identified among the victims who had been recovered. Many bodies were still missing, buried for miles downstream in the river silt. His family and camp comrades were in grieving for him.

But at the end of the leave period a familiar figure turned up at the camp gate. It was no ghost. Riding in the carriage closest to the locomotive, he had been flung out of a broken carriage window onto the far bank of the river. He had found a ride to Ohakune and had then hitch-hiked to a friend’s house, where he had spent his leave in a state of shock
.


Mangamahu rescue efforts

I was a 12-year-old at Mangamahu, 70 km south of Tangiwai.
Here are my own memories of that Christmas.
     Pillows of the Dead


website metrics