Blood & Money

The ongoing prosperity of a family business or trust ticking calls for a fund of fresh ideas, succession planning and even dodging lawsuits.

- Pattrick Smellie

My uncle plumped himself down in the rental car at Dunedin Airport, looked me in the eye and asked: “So, Patt, is the feud over?”

It was August 2006 and the whanau were gathering for a historic reunion of four branches of a family dating back to the arrival of the original 36 Smellies in 1886.

Yes, 36 of them. With their own iron-rolling mill. The business model, roughly speaking, amounted to collecting scrap iron from the Otago gold rush and turning it into railway lines.

Today, the only clue left to that early industry is the sign for Irmo St in Green Island, a suburb between Dunedin and Mosgiel, named for the telegraph address of the Otago Iron Rolling Mills. A shed still stands that used to be part of it, too, if you know what to look for.

Another urban pioneering family, the Harraways, had been producing milled flour and oats from a site next door since 1875. The Harraways brand still adorns a grain silo there, though the family long ago sold to the Hudsons, another Otago clan once connected to a company called Cadbury Schweppes Hudson.

The establishment of minor business dynasties was common among early settler families in New Zealand’s newly forming cities. Leading the Smellies’ exodus to the Antipodes were William Orr Smellie and his wife Agnes with their four adult sons and their families. The business initially thrived, but tragedy struck early.

One year in, one of the sons, my great-great-grandfather, fell from a train near the Caversham tunnel and died, leaving a widow and three children, two boys and a girl. Within a couple of years, the widow had sold the shares she’d inherited in the iron-rolling mill back to the family and returned to Britain with only her daughter. Even 131 years on, family sensitivities prevent full disclosure of her reasons.