Civil Contractors New Zealand members have lost one of their most energetic and high-achieving life members with the death of Morris McFall, writes former Contractor editor Gavin Riley.
Morris, who was Contractors’ Federation president from 1988–1990, died in Tauranga Hospital on 8 June at the age of 91.
He worked relentlessly hard during a packed lifetime but also achieved widespread accomplishments that benefited countless others as well as himself.
He took on the presidency amid challenging circumstances: the federation’s 60-year-old chief executive Bob McKnight had just retired – to be succeeded by 33-year-old Peter Tritt – and the president-elect Trevor Tattersfield had stepped aside to chair the about-to-be-formed Bitumen Contractors’ Association.
This meant 53-year-old Morris, after only four years on the federation’s national executive, was catapulted into the top job at a time when the Ministry of Works (with 6000 staff) was being privatised; imminent local government reform was to see many councils forming civil construction units known as LATES (local government trading enterprises); and New Zealand was still reeling, and would be for some years, from the effects of the severe late 1987 share market crash.
(The Ministry of Works became Works Civil before eventually being absorbed by Downer, while over time many of the LATES were either bought by contracting companies or simply disappeared.)
That the 190-centimetre-tall Morris (with barrister Tritt’s shrewd help) was up to the challenges facing civil contractors at this crucial time was a tribute to his tenacity and capacity for hard work – traits developed and honed in his boyhood.
The son of an Irish immigrant farmer who arrived in New Zealand in the mid-1920s at the age of 19 with just £5 in his pocket, he had hard physical work thrust upon him very early in life. Morris was born in New Plymouth in 1935 but the family soon moved to the Te Awamutu area where his father Samuel bought his own land and began dairy farming.
When Morris, who was the second of five siblings, was eight he was helping milk the cows before and after school. By age 10, he was awake at 5.30am to milk the cows and lift 12-gallon cans of cream nearly a metre onto a platform. After breakfast he walked three kilometres to catch the bus to school, frequently fell asleep in class, and returned home at 4pm to do more milking. The heavy lifting eventually gave him a lifelong back problem that was to end his hopes of making the Waikato rugby team as a number eight and in the 1970s forced him to give up being an active dairy farmer.
Despite constant tiredness, Morris always topped his class at college, yet inexplicably failed school certificate and had to leave school at 15. For the next few years, he worked on his father’s farm for a few pounds each month before he was given a block of land at 20 to start dairy farming on his own.
In 1957, Morris left sister Lois to look after his farm and elected to do his compulsory military training in the Air Force where he played a lot of rugby and met his future wife, schoolteacher Hilary. The couple wed in 1959 and went on to enjoy a 65-year marriage before Hilary’s death two years ago.
After military service, Morris won young farmer awards, excelling in match ploughing competitions; served as a director of the Te Awamutu Dairy Company, and in 1970 won a Nuffield scholarship to study intensive farming methods in Britain for six months. He was then 34 years of age, had 320 cows on his 235-acre farm near Te Awamutu, and had three young sons. Life was good – but it was about to change direction.
Morris had a tidy engineering workshop where he built his machinery and owned a truck and a loader. H Allen Mills Construction from Rotorua noticed this when they were building a road from Te Awamutu to Mangakino – a four-year project. With the nearest welder 50 kilometres away, Morris became Mills’ main machinery repairer. He later acquired another truck and loader and that was the start of McFall Enterprises Ltd, civil contractors.
Land development work for local farmers and roading contracts quickly followed, leading to the $250,000 reconstruction of a 2.4-kilometre section of SH3.
“My philosophy right through my whole contracting life was that I only bought machinery if I could afford to reach for the cash in my cheque book,” Morris later said. “I held it together and kept growing and growing. I learned to appreciate the difference between risk and opportunity.”
He was encouraged by senior members of some of the country’s biggest contracting firms to join the Waikato–Bay of Plenty branch of the Contractors’ Federation, which he did in the early 1970s. He went on to serve on the branch committee and before long was elected chairman. In 1984, the branch put his name forward for the national executive and, aged 49, he was elected at the federation’s 40th birthday annual conference in Rotorua, becoming president in 1988.
While steering the ship, he served the federation in other valuable capacities. He helped overhaul NZS3910, the set of industry contract standards; was on the annual construction award judging panel well into the 1990s, serving as chairman for much of that time; and was a director of the Contrafed Publishing Co. He also chaired the Northern Drivers’ Union negotiations committee which argued annual wage awards with such union firebrands as Ken Douglas and Bill Andersen, who threatened to close down McFall Enterprises’ Te Kawa quarry, alleging its workers were in the wrong union.
His federation presidency over, Morris was elected to the Waikato Regional Council in 1991, serving until 2000. He stood because of his fears and those of others he respected that if the construction industry didn’t fight back, it would be overwhelmed by recent local government reforms and by the new Resource Management Act. His most significant achievement was chairing the Council’s land transport committee and broadening its membership base to include every local mayor, police, roading authority Transit New Zealand, the Automobile Association and Federated Farmers. The aim – largely successful – was to ensure better liaison and co-operation over roading projects.
In the late 1990s, McFall Enterprises paid about $1 million to buy Waipa District Council’s road construction unit. Then, in a surprise move in 2000, Morris sold the company to trans-Tasman infrastructure solutions company Excell Corporation for a rumoured $6.5 million, with all 55 staff choosing to stay with the new owner.
Two years later, Morris and Hilary moved from Te Awamutu to Mt Maunganui to be near their second son Bryce, who was a tetraplegic due to a quad bike accident. They took the rest of the McFall business group with them – McFall Fuel Ltd, Fuel Storage Ltd and McFall Lubricants Ltd, which was under the managing directorship of their second son, Allan.
Morris kept himself busy, continuing with the Justice of the Peace work he had begun in 1997 and Rotary Club involvement stretching back to 1978. He and Hilary also contributed to the work of the Westpac Helicopter Trust, Waipuna Hospice and the United Seafarers’ Mission.
In 2014, Morris was one of nine shareholders who revived a stalled town-sized residential development project in Tauranga. Others included former Contractors’ Federation presidents and life members John Feast and Tony Mills and leading industry figures Paul Adams, Bernard Higgins, Peter Fehl and Brent Glover.
Morris also set up a “bloke’s shed” which, when Contractor visited him in 2014, had grown over seven years into the open-to-the-public McFall Museum housing half a dozen classic cars, 21 vintage tractors, at least 10 restored and stationary engines and 10 vintage petrol bowsers, with Morris spending up to five hours a day supervising and maintaining the collection in working order, despite having overcome two bouts of prostate cancer.
He also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars erecting a building next to the museum and leasing it to a Whakatane charitable trust for use as a rehab centre and gym by wheelchair users like his son, staffed by specially qualified trainers.
“Morris McFall may be nearing 80 but he’s still doing what he’s always done – keeping busy and in the process helping people,” Contractor noted in its article. It was a simple lifelong philosophy which saw him receive the Queen’s Service Medal in the 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Morris is survived by his sons David, Bryce and Allan, five grandchildren and five great grandchildren.
Leadership and vision
In 1984, Morris McFall became a member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, a voluntary organisation of movers and shakers in the logistics and supply industries. He was made a fellow in 1995, a chartered fellow in 2002 and a life member in 2012.
Two years later he received the prestigious Sir Bob Owens Award for his outstanding contribution to the logistics, transport and supply chain sectors over many years.
Transporting New Zealand Chief Executive Dom Kalasih touched upon this aspect of Morris’s work in this email to Contractor just before the magazine went to press: “The fuel industry has undergone massive changes, particularly over the last couple of decades, and I have no doubt that Morris’s leadership and vision contributed significantly to these positive changes.
“Morris also had a genuine love and passion for the industry and machinery, which I think was well demonstrated by the fabulous vehicle collection at the McFall headquarters in Mt Maunganui.”
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