Eulogy for the Rt Hon Sir Owen Woodhouse

Capturing the essence of Owen Woodhouse makes demands. He was a complex, multi-faceted human being, blessed both with penetrating insight and human empathy. His compassion for people was perhaps his most salient characteristic. The number and range of his friends and acquaintances both in New Zealand and overseas was astonishing.Owen had the gift of friendship. He inspired enormous loyalty and affection among those with whom he interacted and worked. He laboured in some tough situations. He was a leader. He had the capacity to weld a disparate group into a team and produce high quality outcomes. Everyone wanted to help him. He also knew how to run a social occasion and was a great host, if a trifle heavy handed with the whisky.Owen had a warm-hearted social vision. He was a visionary with judgment and wisdom. He believed those in distress should be helped and the well-being of each one should be of concern to all. He looked into the future and tried to see how it would be. These qualities were reflected not only in his court judgments but also in the reports he wrote both in New Zealand and Australia.In all of this, he carried his message through a unique prose style. Always spare, his prose had a limpid and crystalline quality to it. It was the result of painstaking drafting and redrafting. The Woodhouse Report in Australia went through nine drafts. He wrote these reports himself. They were powerful, clear, elegant and persuasive. From Owen I learned it was fine to start a sentence with "and." He was always critical of lawyers with a turgid style.Owen Woodhouse was devoted to his family. He and Peggy were such a great team and they nurtured a family of six wonderful people - Roger who predeceased Owen but not Peggy, then Susan, Peter, John, Tim and Margaret. Those five are all here today with their families. When Peg died in 2000 Owen was sad beyond consolation.They married in Napier in 1940, seven years after Owen had set his cap at Margaret Thorp, when he was not yet 17 years of age, a law clerk in Napier earning ten shillings a week, having left school early during the depression. She invited him to tennis at her home and that was, as they say, the ball game. In his privately circulated "A Personal Affair" he says "And at an early age I had my eye on the girl next door. Our marriage has been my life." Notice that sentence begins with "and." He spent the years from 1935 until 1939 as a full time but underpaid law clerk in Auckland for several law firms studying part time for a law degree at the University of Auckland, from which he graduated in 1940. He was for a period law clerk to Alfred North. He also found the time to edit the University newspaper "Craccum."Apart from his family, four primary forces shaped Owen Woodhouse's beliefs and values - Napier, the 1931 earthquake there, the great depression and Second World War.* Napier, where he was bom in 1916, was a tolerant and happy community. There he was brought up, there all the Woodhouse children were bom, there he practised lawThe Earthquake of 1931 that thrust the land mass up by nine feet visited terrible suffering upon Napier, with 256 deaths and many injuries. Owen was then at Napier Boys' High School and was outside when the earthquake struck since it was the beginning of cadet week. He saw directly the physical min and human desolation that event caused in the town.* The depression that he lived through and from which he directly suffered made its impact on his outlook - the retrenchment, the unemployment, the poverty, the hunger, the soup kitchens and the dislocation of people's lives.The ranks of the Second World War veterans like Owen, who left such a heavy imprint upon New Zealand life, are thinning now. Their values, their courage and their sacrifice were real.Owen joined the territorial artillery and was called up in 1940. He decided it was better to join the Navy and be trained in England. …