Brian Thompson - Roots that run deep

He’s rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous, had a yarn with the Queen and Nelson Mandela, and even donned wizard regalia for an Air NZ Middle Earth TV campaign.

All this without leaving the place of his birth.

Brian Thompson’s family roots go deep into Frankton soil… even back to the goldmining era at Macetown, and long before the concrete and metal masses that now occupy his grandparents’ farms.

A ‘Jack of all trades’ for Mount Cook Airlines at Queenstown Airport for 35 years, Brian also spent several years as ground crew for Corporate Jets, loading, manoeuvring and guiding private jets on the tarmac that now covers the paddocks he played on as a kid.

Brian’s local heritage is rich – his great, great grandfather running a hotel in the Nevis Valley in the 1860s before being a bootmaker for the miners at Macetown. “Prior to WWI my grandfather and his friend walked to Dunedin to go to the Melbourne Cup,” he grins. His grandmother panned the Arrow River for gold; her perfect love-heart-shaped gold find exhibited in Dunedin before being stolen.

Brian’s grandfather was born in Macetown, taking over his brother’s dairy farm where Remarkables Park is now, milking cows through WWII. He then bought 15 acres (for 1500 pounds) and ran market and strawberry gardens and a roadside stall – Pinewood Gardens, at Frankton.

Born in 1951, Brian grew up roaming the Frankton Flats, his paternal grandfather also buying the Shotover Hotel. “I remember as a kid sitting in the bar.”

His maternal grandparents – the Hansens, farmed the north side of the airport runway. “The government bought the land off them in the 1960s for a DC3 airstrip that went right through their farm,” Brian says.

Grandfather Hansen also had a market garden where Frankton Camping Ground is now during the 1920s and worked on the construction crew for the Kawarau Falls Bridge. “He put a line of subdivided lakefront sections up for sale and they all said he was mad, no one would want them, so he gave them away with the place when it sold in the late 1920s.”

Brian recalls the big flood of 1957: “The old Shotover Bridge shook when we walked across it, water to the top of the big rock island.”

Bikes were left against a tree where BP Garage is now when they caught the school bus into Queenstown School, Brian First XV Rugby captain, U16 Wakatipu captain and a Vincent rep.

After working for a shearing contractor, he joined a Fletcher’s crew building the new Lower Shotover Bridge, then earthmoving for John Bishop.

Brian married Nelda in 1977, and they took over Pinewood Gardens, Brian then working for legendary pilot Tex Smith at the airport from 1979, loading poisoned carrots which they dropped all over Central Otago to fight the rabbit plague.

“Tex said he and Trevor Cheetham were flying back from Te Anau in an Auster in the 1950s when the new metal propellor flew off. Tex said, ‘What the heck was that?!’ Trevor was sitting in the back reading a comic and said, casually, ‘Your propellor’s fallen off’. It was a long hike to Mount Nicholas Station after Tex performed an emergency landing.”

Geoff Ramshaw at Mount Cook Airlines needed a hand one day, Brian rising to the call, quickly employed as a loader with Max Campbell. Brian became a tarmac multitasker, operating the pushback tug, refuelling and loading, and for eight years, also working as Queenstown Airport Crash Fire Rescue Crew. They were long days, sometimes up to 16 hours. In that time there were eight crashes – a Cessna down beneath The Remarkables with multiple fatalities during the 1990s the worst he attended.

“A tourist collected her car via the Avis airport desk once, the guy instructing her to head out to the main road and turn right to get into Queenstown,” Brian says. “But she turned right at the end of the terminal building past the air control tower and out onto the taxiway. She got to the main runway then turned left. When the fire rescue guys caught up with her she said she was heading to Queenstown,” he grins.

Brian trained many newcomers before retiring in 2014, when he and Nelda travelled widely, before his stint with Corporate Jets.

While he’s a bit ‘mum’ on it, Brian’s met Tom Cruise, had a yarn with Queen Elizabeth II through the airport fence and chatted to Nelson Mandela in town for CHOGM.

He was a Frankton volunteer firefighter for 17 years, recalling the night a car brought a power pole down with a person trapped at Frankton around 2am. Brian had hurriedly donned his spare fireman’s overalls in his home garage, only undies on underneath. “I thought I’d change at the station,” he says. “But I met flashing lights and cops flagging me down on the way with power lines across the road. It started to snow and I was mighty cold,” he grins.

A health set back in 2020 has clipped his wings a little but with doctors telling him only 1% survive what he had Brian’s pretty happy just to be here.