His pay jumped from two shillings a week to 25 and 12 months later he shifted again to Michael Gordon’s Taurapa Station at Ocean Beach, just south of Cape Kidnappers, for an even better pay packet of two pounds, or 40 shillings, a week.

When he was 18, the prospect of deer and pig-hunting took him to Big Hill Station for two pounds 10 shillings a week. He had never been hunting before so he bought himself an ex-army Lee Enfield .303 rifle.

A local firm was paying five pounds a deerskin but Murray had a better plan. He laid his skins on the woolshed floor, covered them with sacks and hosed them down.

“They’d grunt like hell lifting them into the truck because of their weight,” he said.

The scam paid off with Murray pocketing 10 pounds for his “heavier” skins.

The novelty of hunting wore off and Murray turned his sights on his long-term ambition to become a fat-stock buyer.

“I had no show of owning my own farm but I wanted to deal with quality stock.”

It was while he was at Big Hill Station in 1946-47 that he was offered a job in the yards of the Tomoana Freezing Works in Hastings.

His keen eye for stock gave him the ability to calculate the weight of an animal to within a few pounds.

With as many as 30 mobs coming into the yards each day to be killed, he soon became an expert, checking his estimates against the actual weights at the end of the day, earning the nickname “the walking weighing machine”.

His drafting skills served him well and he recalled working from 5am to 7.15pm on a Taihape Rd farm drafting 3500 lambs, before driving more than an hour home to Hastings.

In 1954, he joined well-known Hawke’s Bay stock firm de Pelichet McLeod and became its stock manager in the 1960s, when it had branches in Central Hawke’s Bay, Taupo, Reparoa and Wairoa. But when the stock firm mergers began, de Pelichets was absorbed into the Crown Farmers group, headed by Rod Weir.

Murray realised he was becoming “a computer number” so after 30 years as a buyer, he gave it all up.

But Hawke’s Bay’s saleyards and their clients had not given Murray up. He was asked to do stock sale reports for the Napier Daily Telegraph and continues to provide them for its successor, Hawke’s Bay Today, and other media outlets.

Murray’s long tenure has given him a good insight to the industry and he believes a lot of stock going under the hammer at saleyards should not be there. When agent commission, cartage and yard fees are added in, he thinks many farmers would be better off sending them straight to the works.

A lot of prime cattle sold in Hawke’s Bay are carted to Waikato and buyers don’t do that unless they can make money on them, he said.

After more than 50 years assessing livestock, Murray said today’s beasts are superior to those of past years.

The introduction of exotic breeds and crossing them with Angus or other traditional breeds has produced better-quality stock.

Murray brought the first Charalois bull to Hawke’s Bay from Waimate, putting it in his stock firm’s holding yards at Stortford Lodge for clients to have a look at.

The massive, cream-coloured beast took many farmers by surprise.

“It was as long as a man o’ war,” he said. “You could see skid marks outside the pen for a month.”

His years of dealing with clients and picking prime stock for them were made easier by the unpaid secretarial work of his wife Dawn. At one time they had four phone lines to their home.

But he doesn’t want to sit home and admire the stunning view over the Heretaunga Plains to the ranges from his lounge windows.

Going to the saleyards keeps him alert and it’s a place he knows better than anywhere else, his second home.

“I’d get bored. I can’t read and play golf every day,” he said.

“Anyway, I tell people it’s cheaper than a divorce”.

brendan@webbz.net.nz