Eve Poole
Eve Poole
Mayor of Invercargill 1984-1992
Eve as the leading lady in Invercargill Operatic Society’s production of Showboat
Credit: Invercargill Operatic Society
By Vivienne Allan
‘We write not only for parents but also for their children. They too are serious children.’ (Isaac Bashevis Singer)
Eve, born Eva Auerbach on 29 December 1924 in Frankfurt-am-Main, was the ninth child and the fourth daughter of Helena and Nachman Auerbach. She was a sickly child who suffered from rickets and spent time in a sanatorium before the family moved to Berlin in 1927. Inflation was rampant and the family was very poor. Germany was suffering from having lost WW 1 and having to pay huge and unaffordable reparations to the Allies. When the US stock market crashed in October 1929, banks began to call in their loans. Germany was ripe for an uprising and for finding a scapegoat on which to blame their ills. Right-wing extremists were already agitating for political ascendency and the existence of the Nazi Party gave them the power they wanted. Even before Adolf Hitler became its head, the Nazi party’s groups of thugs and extremists were promulgating the myths that Germany’s ills were due to Jews and Bolsheviks.
When Eva was three years old, the family moved to Berlin where the 10th child and fifth daughter was born. They lived in a crowded tenement building in a poor Jewish neighbourhood. Life was no better than it had been in Frankfurt; in fact it was worse. Historians have written about the financial and economic crisis in Germany throughout the 1920s and ‘30s – the ersatz pfennig and the ersatz Mark, usually made not from metal but from paper.
With this political upheaval as a backdrop, Eva started school, walking the two kilometres to and from, always accompanied by an older sibling for safety. Her father Nachman was accosted and beaten by a gang of Hitler Youth while walking his youngest daughter to kindergarten. He returned home, bruised and bleeding and told Helena that they must leave Germany as soon as possible.
Naively, they believed it would be relatively easy to go to Palestine, but they hadn’t reckoned on the complex problem of accessing the necessary papers. Without sufficient money to buy them, Nachman decided to go to London, first via Bern for a month, then Paris for seven months, eventually reaching London, finding lodgings and starting the protracted effort to obtain papers. Helena meanwhile took the boat to Haifa with eight-year old Eva travelling on a visitor’s visa. It took two long and difficult years before the family was reunited in Jerusalem. While the immediate family was safe, cousins, aunts and uncles weren’t so lucky and many perished in concentration camps.
Eva started school in Tel Aviv and added Hebrew to her languages as well as a slight smattering of English. She wanted to become an actress and while still in her teens, enrolled in the Habima Drama School. However, war had broken out and the British Army was recruiting young women in Tel Aviv. Eva enlisted in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS)[1]. She wrote on her enlistment form that she was born in 1921 instead of 1924, to make sure she was accepted and she was determined to train as a driver. It was the most prestigious job in the ATS and she joined 511 Company, as Private (Pte) Eva Auerbach W/PAL Driver 195779, one of 120 young women. It was 1942.
Eve in ATS uniform, 1942
Training completed, Eva was sent to the British Tactical School at Dir Suneid and it was there that she met her future husband, Capt Vernon Poole from Invercargill New Zealand. Vernon was a member of the 2NZEF 20thBattalion, which had already fought in the battles of Greece and Crete. Eve and Vernon married in a Cairo registry office on 1 March 1943. Both returned to their individual barracks managing time together on weekends and when they could both get time off together. In July 1943, the Italian campaign began. Vernon was now a tank commander and part of the movement of forces up into Orsogna. He developed severe conjunctivitis and his commanding officer sent him back to Egypt at the beginning of 1944.
When Eva became pregnant, Vernon organised for her to travel to New Zealand on the hospital ship HMS Wanganella. She was met at the Wellington wharf by her father-in-law Arthur (Arty) Poole and they travelled by train to Invercargill. It was April and very cold. Eva was installed into the family home and taught the basics of cooking, home-making and preparing for the baby’s arrival by Arty’s wife Maud. It is fair to say that she was a curiosity. A very attractive and pregnant foreigner.
Vernon arrived home a few weeks before baby Helen was born in October 1944. She was now known as Eve to avoid confusion because Vernon’s sister was also called Eva. Two more children were born in quick succession – Vivienne in 1946 and Clive in 1947. Eve, as a young mother, was determined to improve her English and to continue her interest in the theatre. While Vernon built their home in Dalrymple Street, Eve focused on raising the children and studying English with the nuns at St Catherine’s Convent. She became a teacher of speech and drama after gaining her ATCL, LTCL and FTCL. Acting was her passion and she both produced and acted in several plays with the Invercargill Repertory Society.
Her political career began in 1971. Her two older daughters had married in 1970, her son was living in Australia and her youngest daughter Michele, born in 1960, was at school. She decided to stand for the Invercargill City Council because it had been publicly mooted that the City Council intended shifting the Troopers Memorial, an historic monument that had been built to commemorate the Southland men who fought in the Boer War. Moving monuments to the dead was anathema to Eve and she successfully campaigned to become the first woman on the Council. It was a time of the early feminist movement in New Zealand, and there were many women who supported her as well as returned services men and women.
Vernon and Eve visiting with her brother Leo and his wife Miriam in Israel
After three terms on the Council, she campaigned unsuccessfully for the mayoralty and spent the following three years fund raising for the Cancer Society and serving on the QE11 Arts Council (Creative New Zealand) and the New Zealand Committee on Women, the forerunner of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. In November 1983 she became the first woman mayor in Invercargill. It was, she later described as a ‘baptism of fire’, because barely two months into the job, Invercargill and Southland were ravaged by massive floods that created chaos and havoc and years of restoration and repair work.
‘A disaster is a disaster,’ she wrote in a booklet commemorating the floods. ‘Just as a small country cannot economically maintain an armed force of sufficient magnitude to efficiently defend itself against possible attack of undefined force, equally, it isn’t possible for a local body to so organise itself to protect its area, its citizens and its industries from major disaster, whether flood, conflagration, earthquake, tidal wave or nuclear attack. Its ratepayers would protest vigorously against the cost of such required forces and organisations. The most that can be expected of local bodies is that they have the nucleus of trained Civil Defence personnel, around which communication, transport, both road and air, and assistance from the Army, Police, may be concentrated and organised.’
Governor General Sir David Beattie presents Eve with the QSO.
As always, Eve wrote her own speeches and commentaries, a testament to her grasp of the English language. The 1980s were an enormous challenge for local government in NZ with the Labour Government’s determination to redesign and reform both services and their method of delivery. Efficiencies of scale were critical to Minister Michael Bassett and he established a Commission which would be responsible for the eventual reconstruction and amalgamation of local bodies throughout the country. Eve led the change process in Invercargill, debating with Commissioners and her fellow Southland politicians about the preferred way forward.
Her greatest achievement, she said, was the new library for Invercargill. At its official opening she said: ‘This building embodies the spirit of Invercargill and its people, who throughout its existence have triumphed over adversity, in one shape or another. Always striving to make this place a city worthy of its name. A place in which to settle, to take root, where children and adults will enjoy a quality of life.’
In July 1992, Eve announced she would stand for the mayoralty for a fourth term. She felt she had achieved a great deal for the city and wasn’t yet ready to step down. Interviewed ahead of the election, she said: ‘Invercargill cannot afford to stand still and no mayor achieves anything of value without the support of council and staff. I do believe in team work.’
She was re-elected and a month after the election, she made an appointment to see her rheumatologist in Dunedin. Rheumatoid arthritis had caused her significant problems since 1960 and although she never talked about it publicly, she often experienced severe pain. Her specialist was unsure the current pain was due to arthritis and admitted her to Dunedin hospital where tests showed she had cancer. Although treatment would begin immediately, the medical team wasn’t hopeful of a positive outcome. Eve died in hospital in the early hours of Boxing Day, 1992.
The city organised a memorial service on 29 January. The keynote address was given by Bishop Boyle who had known Eve for many years. ‘As a leader of council and councillors, Eve was a hard task master to those who didn’t do their homework or who were perceived to be working against her view of what was best for the city. In most cases, those who stood to challenge soon learned they were up against a person of astute political judgement, always in full possession of the facts, who was determined to see what was right prevail…’
‘All this was necessary to achieve the policy of leading by example, of having a strong, progressive, positive attitude towards all things that mattered in running a city and caring for its people.’
In the book of memories that the Invercargill City Council produced after Eve’s death, there were many comments which reflected the way people saw her. Tom Greenwood from Otarara, a former Council employee, wrote she was a ‘Leading Lady.’ It was an apt commentary, acknowledging both her commitment to the city and to her acting achievements in decades past. She was remembered in many ways. The Invercargill Altrusa Club commissioned Southland artist Peter Beadle to paint her portrait which was presented to the city in November 1993. Currently it hangs in the foyer of the Invercargill library which was renamed the Eve Poole Library. The Anderson Park Art Gallery purchased Rita Lovell Smith’s painting Spring Blossom to commemorate Eve’s commitment to the arts, and three years after her death, the Poole family launched an arts fellowship in her name. It would fund a Southland student in any of the visual or performing arts with a $5000 grant per person for a specific period of time.
In his 2012 memoir ‘Almost a Family’, American author John Darnton wrote:
‘How paltry are the traces left behind by a life, even one concentrated around those supposed things of permanence called words. We spent our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one thousandth of what we were lasts. We send all those bottles out into the ocean and so few wash up on shore.’
Eve’s younger daughter, Vivienne Allan
Notes and excerpts from Leading Lady, Eve Poole, A Life in the Spotlight, by Vivienne Allan, Quentin Wilson publishing, 2020.
It is worth noting that Eve Poole, although the first Jewish woman mayor in Invercargill wasn’t the first Jewish mayor. Abraham (Abe) Wachner was an Australian who served in WW1 and was wounded in Gallipoli. In 1919 he opened a boot and shoe store in Tay Street. He was renowned for his philanthropy to the city’s poor, often giving them shoes rather than see them walking barefoot. He held office from 22 June 1944 until 1950 when he died and during his term established the custom of opening council meetings with a specially commissioned prayer. His widow Mabel (May) Wachner became Eve’s mentor and friend. May provided the funds for Wachner Place in Dee Street Invercargill to commemorate her husband’s commitment to the city. Read more about Abraham Wachner.
[1] The ATS was British Army, as the WAAF was the British Air Force and the WRNS (known as ‘Wrens’) were the Navy.