In memory of H Westfold

Wellington readers of this blog may recognise the name H Westfold. Hector, to give him his full name, was a well-known writer of letters; or to be more specific, letters to the papers.

He died in Wellington Hospital on June 3, aged 87, and was buried last Saturday at Makara Cemetery.

I first met Hector in the 1990s. I was then assistant editor of the Evening Post and my duties included editing letters to the editor, a well-read section of the paper that sometimes ran over two broadsheet pages.

I can’t recall whether it was my idea or that of Sue Carty, the editor, but we thought it would be interesting to put on an afternoon tea for a select handful of people whose letters we regularly published and whose names were therefore familiar to readers. It was partly a gesture of thanks for their contribution to the paper but I admit we were curious – or at least I was – to meet them face to face.

They were, as might be imagined, a varied and idiosyncratic lot. Most were emphatically of a leftist disposition, although Hector Westfold was positioned firmly at the other end of the political spectrum. Unsurprisingly, most were men; older men. A notable exception was the engaging Shirley Smith, widow of Dr Bill Sutch.

My memory is unreliable but I recall that the other guests included Don Borrie, Jack Ruben, Bryan Pepperell, R O (Rene) Hare, A P (Arthur) Quinn. Tom Shanahan and Brian Connolly may have been there too. 

Don Borrie was a motorbike- riding Anglican vicar from Titahi Bay who chaired the North Korean Friendship Society; the crusading right-wing weekly NZ Truth would have called him (and very likely did) a red reverend. Jack Ruben and Bryan Pepperell were trenchant critics of the Wellington City Council, both of whom (possibly goaded into action by an editorial that I wrote criticising them as armchair critics) successfully stood for the council themselves. Rene Hare and Arthur Quinn, diehard socialists from the Hutt, were leading lights in the Waiwhetu Peace Group and staunchly anti-American. Tom Shanahan, a retired trombonist for the NZSO, was a man with a strong moral conscience. Brian Connolly's pet subject, if my memory serves me correctly, was the right of appeal to the Privy Council.

All were intelligent, intellectually active people with firm opinions and the ability to write a pithy letter, which is why they so frequently made it into print. All, sadly, are now dead, including Jack Ruben, whose death notice appeared only a couple of weeks ago.

It would be fair to say it wasn’t a riotous afternoon tea. I suspect most of the attendees were themselves there out of curiosity and they circled each other warily. Letter-writing is a solitary activity, so it should have been no surprise that they were not (Shirley Smith aside) a very gregarious lot.

Anyway, that was when I first met Hector Westfold. In fact it was the only time we met face to face. I probably wouldn’t have recognised him if I’d passed him in the street, yet I knew him well. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but he phoned me often over a period of more than 25 years and often wrote me long letters.

I don’t feel uniquely privileged by this, because he did the same to other people. Hector was a bachelor who lived alone in a Wellington City Council flat. In our many conversations I never got the impression he was lonely, but I think he did value human contact.

Plenty of people knew of him by name only. It would be fair to say that Hector became a Wellington identity on the strength of his inflammatory letters. That was confirmed when a co-worker of my wife, on being told last week that we were going to the funeral of a man named Hector, gasped: “Not Hector Westfold!” It turned out that she and a friend had once been so enraged by something Hector wrote to a paper that they jointly wrote an angry letter in response.

Hector would have been delighted. He loved to rark up those he regarded as his ideological enemies.

He was not an easy man to like. Hector was deliberately, gratuitously provocative in his opinions and wilfully at odds with a world that he considered unholy and decadent. Curmudgeon is the word that comes to mind. He stubbornly adhered to old-fashioned values and standards, to the point of reprimanding any younger person with the impertinence to address him by his first name. It was Mister Westfold.

His letters – both the private ones and those that he submitted to newspapers – revealed recurring themes. He was a staunch monarchist and a strict traditionalist who despised liberalism in all its manifestations. He was fiercely intolerant of feminism and strident in his denunciation of lesbians, or “dykes” as he insisted on calling them (assuming, I suspect mistakenly, that the term would cause maximum offence). It would have been easy to dismiss him as a textbook misogynist, yet there were some women he spoke of respectfully and admiringly.

He reserved an especially intense detestation for Catholicism, which he saw as corrupt and Satanical. He rarely sent me a letter that didn’t include derisive references to papists and popery. He did this knowing I had been raised a Catholic and obviously intending to taunt me. It didn’t matter how many times I told him I had renounced religion; the jibes about popery kept coming. Hector couldn’t help himself.

He could be unpleasant. More than once I hung up on him or binned his letters – always hand-written and running to several pages – in disgust.

How his entrenched attitudes took root was never clear. The youngest of seven kids, Hector grew up in Taranaki; I can’t recall whether it was Stratford or Inglewood. He talked little about his childhood, though he was proud of his origins and used the email moniker “taranakiboy”. As far as I know, he spent most of his adult life in Wellington, where he worked for what was then called the Consumers Institute (now Consumer NZ).

He was a devout Christian and a regular worshipper at the Reformed Church in Brooklyn, whose congregation adopted him and gave him a warm and musically rousing farewell. How Hector reconciled his Christian beliefs with his often offensive denunciations of people he disapproved of was never clear to me.

I certainly don’t think for a moment that his fellow worshippers shared his extreme views. They simply accepted him as an imperfect human being. In a kind and thoughtful eulogy, a senior member of the congregation acknowledged that Hector “sometimes went too far”. That was putting it as gently as anyone could.

He was an intelligent and educated man, but not always well informed. His sources of information were often narrow, the more so as he got older and withdrew from engagement with the wider world.

In the end, he made it easy for papers to reject his letters. They were obviously judged too excoriating by editors whose commitment to freedom of expression seems insufficiently robust to withstand the incursions of cancel culture.

Hector regarded non-publication as a vindication of his belief that the world had changed for the worse, and I couldn’t entirely disagree. His fault was that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tone down his unfashionable opinions to render them acceptable to a new generation of editors with little tolerance for ideological non-conformists.

Postscript, June 15: After I wrote this obit I stumbled across the following interview with Hector by my former colleague Joseph Romanos. It captured him well.

The Wellingtonian interview: Hector Westfold | Stuff.co.nz

I particularly like the fact that tone of the interview is non-judgmental, which wouldn't happen today. If such an interview was published at all in 2023, which is highly unlikely, it would be done in such a way as to present the subject as a pariah.