Arthur Hooks

Arthur Hooks was born in 1899 and died 1981. As the original owner of the land at Stony Batter he played a key role in a legal dispute over The loop road even after he had died.

His memory has been preserved in the court files on the case:

Who was Arthur Hooks?

As Justice Anderson of the High Court of New Zealand describes him:

Arthur Hooks was born in the last years of the 19th century and he died in a rest home in Devonport in 1981. He seems to have been a man who valued the privacy of his fairly isolated farm, who did not take kindly to strangers presenting themselves on his land without introducing themselves, and who had an old fashioned farmers diffidence to bureaucracy.

..... This was not to say that he was eccentric or pig-headed. The recollections of his grandson, Mr Harris, as well as other witnesses suggest that Arthur was not unkindly but insistent on manners and respect for private rights. He would challenge a stranger but accord hospitality on introduction; register a protest about unnotified activity on the legal road in his property near Careys Bay, but discuss matters for resolution with his solicitor and Mr McIntosh; resist signing an electricity easement which had been imposed without his approval, but discuss arrangements for a road on a courteously negotiated basis. There was nothing to suggest that Arthur Hooks was a vindictive or unjust man, rather he was a just and proper man. In all the circumstances I think it inconceivable that Arthur Hooks would have asserted, contrary to his acknowledgments by his solicitor that the Council had not acquired the right to such parts of the road that he had consented to. Such a stance would contradict the rectitude which was a feature of his character. It would envisage him dishonestly taking the benefit of public moneys and effort which not only the public and his neighbours at Waiti Station had depended on for years, but which had been of direct benefit to the farm management by his reluctant son, for Arthur's own benefit. It would bring him, hoping to return as he was, into deserved disrepute in the community he had farmed amongst for decades....