‘Council of Six’ plotted Frankton mutiny at Hamilton Hotel

The Hamilton Hotel’s Victoria Street façade and many of its internal fittings are being preserved in the new Waikato Regional Theatre complex because it is a listed heritage building, a status bestowed in part because it has been the scene of some key moments and stories in the city’s history.

Some of those tales are told in the timeline mural along the site fence currently in front of the heritage façade, including “The Greatest Day in Hamilton History”, as it was then dubbed, when Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip appeared on the Hotel’s balcony to greet the local crowd on her Coronation Tour in December 1953.

A little-known Hamilton Hotel story has recently been bought to our attention, in the form of a moment in a video on the NZ on Screen archival website – ‘The Ruapehu Affair’ from the ‘Encounter’ documentary series made by the newly launched TV2 in 1976.

The 45-minute film tells the story of the ‘mutiny’ by thousands of New Zealand troops who had returned to the country in 1943 from fighting in the Second World War in the Middle East. They were back for a temporary ‘furlough’, but after returning from three years of fighting, the battle-scarred soldiers became resentful of the men who had stayed home to work in vital industries, demanding that any such men who were capable should replace them on the ships back to the war, while plotting to refuse to return themselves regardless.  

The principal and most well-known confrontation of this ’mutiny’ came in January 1944, when months of discontent at army camps around the country culminated in a confrontation at the Frankton Railway Station, as supportive crowds of released returnee soldiers and civilians encouraged and allowed transported troops to refuse the order to return to the war. No one was hurt, but a dramatic and heated situation unfolded, with hundreds of soldiers successfully refusing to re-embark on the trains taking them to Auckland to sail to Egypt. They were subsequently punished but the ongoing political storm eventually led to their exoneration.

Events were significant enough they allowed a Nazi propaganda radio station in occupied Europe to describe Hamilton as being ‘under siege’ from mutineers.

That simplified retelling has featured in local newspaper articles and museum exhibitions in recent years, but the 1976 TV2 show adds much detail and reveals the Hamilton Hotel angle. It states a “council of six” army mutineers met to plan on the first floor of the Hamilton Hotel during 1943.

After learning of that, our further inquiries led to a University of Waikato thesis, ‘The Hamilton Furlough Mutiny’ written by Shane Harold Capon in 1986. It makes no mention of a ‘council of six’, but the reasoning for the Hamilton Hotel being an “unofficial headquarters” is explained in a quote from Capon’s interview with veteran R.R.V. Challiner.

“At that time there were about five hotels. There was the ‘Frankton’ – a straight railway and travellers’ hotel, but it had its own clientele down there.

The ‘Commercial’ had recently been rebuilt and was considerable improvement on what it had been. But its private bar was an aisle bar. When you went in the door, there was a bar on the left, bar on the right, and the toilets straight ahead, and it wasn’t a very good bar for meeting in.

There was the ‘Royal’… the ‘Waikato’…

The ‘Hamilton’ bar however was an island bar, and when you went in you could simply walk up to the bar, look to the left and right, and more or less see everyone standing around the bar, so if you were looking for somebody it was very handy for meeting.”

Challiner’s explanation for why Hamilton was a hub for information distribution is a description that could still apply to the central city today.

“Hamilton was big by some standards, small by others. But it was just the right size for its purpose. Small enough for everyone to know every street. Compact enough to quickly visit any street by pushbike or there was a reasonable Frankton and Hamilton East bus service.

Our society knew quite a number from school days. With them we knew the actual names and homes, but we ‘half-knew’ – I wish to distinguish this word from ‘recognised’ – very many more.

Yet Hamilton was far too big to know everyone else. But it was big enough for us to half-know a very large number.

So… Hamilton the paradox… the big city, the compact population, the (well almost) small town.”

‘The Ruapehu Affair’ TV doco (so called because the Ruapehu was the troopship that bought the furloughed men home) is a window into both the 1940s and the 1970s. The photos in this article are screenshots from it showing the Hamilton Hotel’s frontage and signage as they appeared in the mid-1970s, just a few years before it ceased operation as a hotel in the early 1980s. See 19m50sec in the NZ on Screen online video.

Other 1970s scenes in the video show the Army Depot that was then on Knox St (see 19m16sec), and the original Frankton Railway Station, then also still unchanged since the war, with its island platform situated where the Massey Street Overbridge now stands (see 22min19sec).

Most striking though are the filmed testimonies of the men involved in the mutiny, including at least one from the Hamilton Hotel meeting, who at that point were looking back thirty years, and all of whom will now be gone. They are a type of now-departed character familiar to those who remember the 20th Century, older men possessed of a staunch and dignified shell encasing a psychically scarred soul.

The furlough mutiny is just one story that marks the Hamilton Hotel out as a major city landmark, a pile of bricks and mortar built in 1923 that’s rich in the sort of tales that inform and enable placemaking.

It sat for nearly forty years after the hotel operation closed down in the early 1980s, under-utilised and allowed to crumble. Until the Waikato Regional Theatre project came along, providing the means to save and re-activate its interior elements and its unique-in-NZ ‘Beaux Arts' façade as part of the South End’s streetscape into a second century.