Feature
Into the Blue
by Nick Smith
In ex-cop Paddy Wilson’s family, the tour “is the subject that dare not speak its name”.
Mrs Wilson is a bustle of activity this August Saturday morning in 1981 as she readies both her sons for the second test against the touring Springboks at Athletic Park in Wellington.
Bernard Wilson has his protester’s motorcycle helmet, padded clothing and sturdy boots, as much a uniform as that worn by his younger brother, Patrick, a member of the Wellington team policing unit and, for the tour, the Blue Squad.
Mother Wilson gives both brothers lectures, Patrick recalls: “If you see your brother, don’t hit him.” Then she turns to Bernard. “If you see [Patrick], stay out of it, go somewhere else.” Then she leaves for church.
Like most New Zealand families with split loyalties, the tour “is the subject that dare not speak its name”, says Paddy Wilson. “So you speak about everything else apart from the most important thing at the time – don’t mention the elephant.”
Today, Wilson is a veteran of the New Zealand stage and small screen, most popularly as Eric, the meat factory owner on Mercy Peak, Spin Doctors’ Ron “Rooter” Baylis, and soon to star as Arthur Short, the left-for-a-lesbian father of two daughters in Rude Awakenings.
But in 1981, he is 25 and two years out of police training college. Blue Squad comprises team-policing units from Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. The “notorious” Red Squad features similar personnel from Whangarei and Auckland, and the controversial Ross Meurant, later a National MP, is their leader.
Soon, lifetime “desk-jockeys”, raw recruits, whoever is fit and able, join the two squads. Early on, it’s fun and the new members are “taking the piss and calling themselves the frilly-panty squad and putting on little black lace around their epaulettes because they don’t have an official name”.
Wilson’s first taste is the Manawatu game at Palmerston North. Meurant, whose Red Squad handles the early matches, briefs Blue: “He’s busy screaming at us: ‘It doesn’t matter who’s in front of you; if it’s a nun, a woman, even if they’re putting pregnant women at the front – go over them and mow them down.’”
It is a performance uncannily evocative of the malevolent, old-school rugby coach in Greg McGee’s classic evisceration of macho rugby culture, Foreskin’s Lament. Police now engage protesters as if “running on to a rugby field”, Wilson reports.
There are early indications of command ineptitude, particularly in Wellington’s Molesworth St, which sets the tone for the violence to follow. Ridiculously, says Wilson, police chiefs keep Blue Squad in reserve and send raw recruits, just recently banktellers and insurance people, to hold the front line, a situation with which experienced police struggle. “So, then you suddenly get all these horrible images of cops truncheoning people.”
The Hamilton game is the tipping point. Blue Squad handles the perimeter, and, when protesters invade the pitch, into the arena step Red Squad chanting, Ziggy, Ziggy, Ziggy – for the other policemen, it is embarrassing, Wilson recalls. With protesters threatening to fly a hijacked plane into the stands, chiefs call the game off. But the tour goes on.
Christchurch, first test. Lancaster Park ringed with barbed wire and skip bins: “Remember that movie, [Zulu], where they are in their fortress in Rorke’s Drift? Someone says, ‘Oh, look, there’s a Zulu’. And you look, and there on the mountain is a sea of people …” For Blue Squad, some 30 members spread behind a thin line of razor wire and sundry skip bins, and facing hundreds and hundreds of protesters, it is something like Zulu.
Nothing like Auckland, though. The nation is in a state of siege, Wilson says. “I remember the Brixton riots [in the UK], watching that on telly and going, ‘Great, that’ll never happen here.’”
These days, “they call it a riot if 15 to 19-year-olds on the North Shore are throwing bottles at police”. For the third test, there are tens of thousands of people wearing protective clothing and helmets; many bear shields and some carry weapons.
“Getting up there and facing hockey-masked people is really surreal.” And from some of the protesters’ shields protrude, about an inch, sharp rivets. “They’re now coming forward and actually slicing us, so guys are having their tunics ripped and arms gashed.”
One such rivet slices the top off one cop’s finger, others suffer broken limbs. “How do you describe it? Violent, dangerous, one of the scariest times in the police. Adrenalin pumping and rushing; all of those things.” Nobody, policeman or protester, can believe the day does not claim a life.
Paddy Wilson loves footie, still does. After all the Auckland violence, the Blue Squad retire to Eden Park at the end of the match in time “to see the last kick – we get to see Hewie kick the last goal [to win the match and the series for New Zealand]. It may not sound much, but it’s a perfect feeling.”
