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The Kiwi PM who helped beat the Aussies

Sir Sidney Holland survived the Battle of Messines and was an eight-year post-war PM, but made his name in sport as a player, administrator, manager and coach. Tony Smith reports. Sid Holland – then 19 – made his Canterbury senior representative debut in

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Looking for a sports quiz stumper? Then name the New Zealand prime minister who once coached a national sports team to thrash the Australians on their home turf? Helen Clark might have been Mt Albert rugby league patron, Rob Muldoon was a NZ Football Association vice-president and Kiwi Keith Holyoake and Jim Bolger were keen on their rugby, but the answer to this particular political puzzler is the National Party’s first prime minister, Sir Sidney Holland.

The World War I veteran – best known as the hardline prime minister in the divisive 1951 waterfront lockout – coached a New Zealand men’s hockey team on an 18-match unbeaten tour of Australia. Holland played representative hockey, umpired the New Zealand men’s team first-ever test in 1922, served on the national executive and, according to contemporaneous news reports, was sole selector, manager and coach for the tour of Australia in 1932.

A few months before his election to Parliament in 1935, he was a selector and manager of the New Zealand team in a three-test home series against India’s Olympic Games champions.

Holland’s reputation as a politician is best left to political scientists and historians to judge but no other New Zealand prime minister has a sporting record approximating his.

He faced some big hurdles in high office – the waterfront standoff, the abolition of the New Zealand Legislative Council Upper House and the 1953 Tangiwai rail disaster – but hockey still remained dear to Holland’s heart.

Holland was an administrative contemporary of long-serving NZ Hockey Association secretary Havilah Down, grandfather of Selwyn, Barry and Chris Maister and Brent and Peter Miskimmin (the current Black Sticks men’s assistant coach), who all played for New Zealand.

Selwyn Maister – a 1976 Olympic Games gold medallist and Hockey NZ life member – was aware of his grandfather’s respect for Holland but admitted the wider hockey fraternity ‘‘isn’t very aware of the record of ex PM Sid in our game’’.

The leader of the National Party from 1940 to 1957 was on the centre-right in politics but played his hockey on the left wing.

Sidney George Holland – born in 1893 – played rugby at Christchurch West High School but later joined the strong Sydenham hockey club.

His father, Henry Holland – Christchurch’s mayor during World War I and later a Reform Party MP – was a Canterbury Hockey Association president and patron. His mother, Jane, chaired the province’s women’s hockey governing body and Sid’s older brother, Percy, was a Canterbury men’s representative.

Sid Holland – then 19 – made his Canterbury senior representative debut in 1913, on a North Island tour. Holland was selected for the South Island team’s 4-3 win over the North Island before 3000 fans at Wellington’s Basin Reserve in 1914 and also played in Canterbury’s 2-1 loss to Auckland in a Challenge Shield game at Auckland Domain.

A promising career seemed in prospect for the 20-year-old but the world was at war by the time of the 1914 hockey season and Holland soon signed up, leaving in 2016 for Europe as a second lieutenant gunner in an artillery unit.

In February 1917, Holland learnt Percy had died after being gassed on the Western Front where Sid later saw action at the Battle of Messines alongside other hockey personalities. Sydenham and Canterbury team-mate Teddy Hulbert and 1914 Auckland reserve forward Clive Johns were among the hockey men wounded – Johns was lucky to survive severe chest injuries – while Lieutenant Ernest Madden – the umpire who allegedly awarded 33 penalties against Holland’s Canterbury side in 1914 – survived gassing.

Holland contracted hydatids in France, according to his NZ Dictionary of Biography listing by political scientist Barry Gustafson, and spent six months in hospital and lost a lung before being invalided home. He was back on the hockey field and at the Canterbury Hockey executive table soon after returning to Christchurch in 1918.

In Canterbury’s forward line for a 3-0 home win over Auckland, he delivered the final pass for a goal and came close to scoring twice himself.

Holland became a busy man after the war, serving as managing director of the Midland Engineering Company and Christchurch Mechanical Works, but he still found time for his favourite sport. He was credited with helping revive interest in interprovincial hockey.

A newspaper report claimed he recovered the Challenge Shield from under the counter of a Wellington draper’s shop.

He was the Canterbury team’s player-manager on a North Island tour in 1919 and was drafted into the lineup for a home game against Auckland when Canterbury lost the shield, 1-0.

Holland was still only 28 when nominated by the touring Australian team to be the second referee (umpire) in New Zealand’s first men’s hockey international at Palmerston North.

Captaining New Zealand was future Mt Eden

borough mayor Clive Johns, Holland’s 1914 Auckland rival, now fully recovered from war injuries suffered at Messines.

Holland refereed alongside Wellington’s Harry Hatch (after whom the Hatch Cup national schoolboys tournament is named). New Zealand won a high-scoring game, 5-4, although the Manawatū Standard newspaper noted one of the home side’s second-half goals was ‘‘plainly offside, the [unnamed] referee failing to observe him’’.

Hockey was a major New Zealand sport between the world wars, drawing big crowds to international fixtures at major rugby grounds, including Lancaster Park (Christchurch), Carisbrook (Dunedin), Athletic Park (Wellington) and Eden Park (Auckland).

Holland was one of the code’s highest-profile personalities, certainly in Christchurch where playing numbers were second only to rugby union. He served on the NZ Hockey Association management committee and was Canterbury Hockey chairman and president in 1923-1925, and became one of the nation’s leading coaches.

Holland was convenor of the South Island coaching panel and coached Canterbury during its successful Challenge Cup seasons in 1924 and 1926. He earned international praise in 1926 after Canterbury’s 2-1 defeat before 14,000 fans at Lancaster Park against an Indian Army team featuring the great Dhyan Chand. The Indian management hailed ‘‘the standard of hockey in Canterbury’’ and paid special tribute to ‘the enthusiasm of their players and the very fine training of their coach, S G Holland’’.

Holland chaired the New Zealand selection panel in 1926 and managed the team during the drawn three-test series as well as refereeing the Indians’ game against Otago in Dunedin.

He was still convenor of selectors in 1927 for New Zealand’s unbeaten tour of Australia but the manager’s job went to Canterbury Hockey chairman and NZ Hockey vice-president W Williamson.

Holland remained a national selector and sometime manager until the mid-1930s but his biggest appointment came in 1932 when he was in sole charge for the tour of Australia.

The ‘‘Hockey All Blacks’’ left New Zealand in July, with Egbert, a large musical rabbit mascot presented by the NZ Ladies Hockey Association, but without several leading players, who could not afford to pay their share of travel costs.

But they were very well led – with a future prime minister as manager-coach and Hamilton solicitor Robert Munro (later the first president of Fiji’s Senate) as captain. The team played four to five games a week but swept through Australia unbeaten, winning 15 games and drawing three. They scored 133 goals and conceded 15.

All New Zealand prime ministers like to get one over their Australian rivals and future prime minister Holland had his moment of glory in a 7-0 rout in the sole test in Sydney.

Tom Turbitt – billed ‘‘New Zealand’s answer to Dhyan Chand’’ and later a leading coach – scored four goals and Max Bay bagged a double.

The spirit of the 1932 side was typified by captain Munro, who insisted on playing out the final tour match, a 1-1 draw with New South Wales, despite suffering a blow to his nose.

Holland was photographed at home clutching the Manning Memorial Cup – a trophy named after Bert Manning, who died of pneumonia on tour of Australia in 1923 as New Zealand’s co-manager. Australia’s hockey federation reported the New Zealand team’s success was ‘‘mainly due to the qualities of Mr Holland as manager’’ while Munro and Chas Bollard were among the Kiwi players to give credit to the Cantabrian for creating an incredible team spirit.

Holland and the Canterbury players were feted at a function on their return home.

NZHA secretary Havilah Down proposed a toast and noted: ‘‘Mr Holland had done all he could to win the confidence of the players and his leadership had been invaluable. He had all the qualities which made a successful manager.’’ B Rogers, one of the New Zealand players, said Holland had ‘‘put a wonderful spirit into the team right from the start’’ and had been ‘‘more of a father than a manager’’.

Hockey was not Holland’s sole focus. His business interests led him to become Canterbury Employers Association chairman and he was campaign manager for his father Henry’s successful general election campaigns in 1925, 1928 and 1931.

But Holland was still a selector in 1935 when the greatest hockey team to visit New Zealand – 1932 Olympic champions India – arrived.

During a world tour of India, New Zealand, Australia and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the Indians won all 48 matches, scoring 508 goals.

Dhyan Chand netted 201 – 80 in New Zealand – while his brother, Roop Singh, and Frank Wells both scored over 100.

The New Zealanders held India to 4-2 and 3-2 wins in the first two tests before losing the third, 7-1 – no disgrace considering the Chand-inspired Indians thrashed Germany 8-1 a year later in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games final. The Indian tour was a turning point for New Zealand hockey, with Chand and his compatriots inspiring among others two of the greatest future Kiwi coaches, Tom Turbitt and Canterbury’s C V (Cyril) Walter.

Holland was clearly looking to stay in the sport because he proposed to the NZHA a need for a future international tours policy, including visits by Australian teams every four years.

But the 1935 season proved his last.

He had always insisted he had no interest in a political career but when his father had a fall a fortnight out from the 1935 general election, Sid, 42, took his place as a Reform Party candidate.

He won his dad’s Christchurch North seat by 971 votes from Labour’s future mayor of Christchurch, Sir Robert Macfarlane. Holland was to hold the electorate – later renamed Fendalton – for 22 years.

Reform lived up to its name, rebranding as the National Party, and Holland was elected leader in 1940. (He was still Elmwood Tennis Club president in his first years in the House).

After serving briefly in the World War II Cabinet chaired by Labour prime minister Peter Fraser, Holland became prime minister in 1949 when National swept to power.

Keith Holyoake – a former provincial rugby union and tennis representative and ex-Golden Bay-Motueka Rugby Union president – became Holland’s deputy, probably the first (and so far last) time the New Zealand government was led by such sporty types.

Affairs of state took precedence for Holland but he still managed to maintain his hockey interest as prime minister, hosting numerous visiting hockey teams (and a New Zealand schoolboys side) at Parliament.

Holland called a snap election in 1951 after the waterfront dispute but cut into his campaigning to visit a schools hockey tournament in Palmerston North and visiting a New Brighton Trotting Club meet, a Canterbury-Manawatū hockey game and a Canterbury-West Coast rugby union fixture while on the stump in his hometown.

In 1952, he timed a visit to Nelson to coincide with a New Zealand-Australia men’s hockey international. He held a parliamentary reception to farewell the unbeaten Aussies, noting that ‘‘the standard of hockey played in New Zealand has improved out of recognition in the last 30 years’’ because there was less ‘‘body play, better grounds and better equipment’’ so the game was ‘‘faster and more attractive to watch’’.

In 1956 – while in Sydney for talks with the Duke of Edinburgh’s staff ahead of a New Zealand tour – Holland paid a brief visit to an England v New Zealand women’s hockey test.

He stepped down as leader due to ill health in 1957 and was knighted soon after.

In retirement, Holland maintained his hockey involvement. After watching Pakistan play New Zealand in Wellington in 1958, Holland said he was ‘‘thrilled by today’s game’’, which was one of the best he had ever seen.

When Sid Holland died in 1961, aged 67, newspaper obituaries highlighted his hockey service alongside his political achievements.

Prime Minister Sidney Holland, right, with India Wanderers hockey team captain Gurcharan Singh and J L Squire, NZ Hockey Union liaison officer, at a parliamentary reception in 1955.

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2023-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

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