Book extract: Determined to Win – Radio Avon's beginnings

Christchurch businessman Sir Robert Stewart is best known as the founder of Skope Industries, set up when he was 25 with a loan from his father, Sir Robertson Stewart. But Sir Robert has had many other interests, including his involvement in the organising of the 1974 Commonwealth Games, medical research and racing cars, yachts and power boats. In this extract from Determined to Win, he describes the launch of Canterbury’s first private radio venture

Radio Avon  The beginings

The early seventies offered me two great opportunities to reach beyond what I was doing at SKOPE. Peter Greenslade, a newspaperman and car reporting guru from way back, asked me to join a small team to establish a new radio station in Canterbury called Radio Avon. Noel Wesney, the original promoter of the concept, was a close friend of Peter Greenslade who wanted me on board. Noel owned a business called Instant Music Ltd, which did in-flight programming for Air New Zealand and provided in-store and in-factory background music programming for subscribers throughout New Zealand. The music service was piped along telephone lines from 13 different studios around New Zealand. Another critical player was Ian Kirkpatrick, who supplied Noel Wesney’s electrical engineering hardware to make Instant Music work.

I thought Radio Avon would be an interesting counter-balance to a manufacturing business. It also fulfilled my personal desire to change Christchurch. I became convinced I would never be able to leave it because I now owned a factory, which effectively bolted me to the city. Having lived in London for a year and travelled to South-East Asia many times, the difference between New Zealand and my experience of the sophistication of other countries was pronounced. For example, you could not by law sit outside a restaurant and eat or have a drink. Hotel bars closed at 6 p.m., shops were closed on the weekends or certainly on Sundays. Everything was regulated here and going to Sydney with its nightclubs, piano bars and various other attractions was a world away from Christchurch.

Barbara [Sir Robert's wife] also found it difficult to settle in Christchurch initially because she had travelled widely throughout Europe and lived in London at a much higher social level than I before we were married. But she was equally determined to play a role in the city’s life, first contributing an ‘art in town’ slot on Radio Avon, and also writing occasional articles for The Press, and then as a city councillor for many years. Today, Barbara volunteers much of her time to improving the lot of people less fortunate than her through involvement in social welfare and women’s issues. She also runs the Robert and Barbara Stewart Charitable Trust.

It takes year tomanufacture a product with design prototyping, sample manufacturing and market testing to be done before you can make a sale. In comparison, a radio station seems to have instant outcomes. It can only sell a minute of broadcasting time before that minute occurs and is similar to an airline company. In the case of an airline, you cannot sell the occupancy of a plane seat after the plane is in the air.

I agreed to join Peter and Noel with Ian Kirkpatrick as our technical wizard and asked my lawyer, Paul Mortlock, to be the legal mind and coordinator. To get a licence to broadcast we first had to prove to the Broadcasting Tribunal that there was a requirement for the Radio Avon programme. By definition, this meant proving no other Canterbury radio stations offered the same service. In those days, there were no private radio stations in Canterbury but there was one in Auckland, Radio Hauraki, which the New Zealand Broadcasting Authority had finally approved. Radio Hauraki was similar to the famous Radio Luxembourg I had listened to during the lonely nights I spent in the UK in the early sixties. Radio Hauraki had spent 1111 days at sea, broadcasting illegally to break the monopoly held by the government, and was the first private commercial radio station to be approved in New Zealand.

It was not easy to prove there was a requirement for another radio station in Canterbury when there were already five state-owned radio stations in the city but, because they were state owned, they didn’t try very hard to please their audience. If they had, there would have been no requirement or market for an additional radio station. To help prove our case, we asked Lincoln University to survey Christchurch and its outer areas and, to our surprise, we found our potential audience liked country and western music. Back then, if you wanted to listen to country and western music it would perhaps be on one of the state-owned stations for an hour on a Wednesday night only. We were able to demonstrate to the Tribunal that parts of the Christchurch listening audience were not being looked after properly from a radio entertainment point of view. Some people had to wait until Wednesday evenings to hear country and western music.

To secure a licence, we also had to prove to the Tribunal that we could broadcast our proposed programme. We wanted to broadcast our signal from the government-owned, purpose-built broadcasting station on top of
Geddes Pass in Canterbury. They rented part of the broadcasting station frequency spectrum to taxi companies and others, so there should have been no legal reason why they couldn’t rent space on the frequency spectrum to Radio Avon. When they denied Radio Avon the opportunity to rent their facilities, it only made us more determined to succeed. I would like to think that today, the government would be more open to getting a return on taxpayers’ capital expenditure; however, in the early seventies, the state was all-pervasive.

Their refusal meant we had to find an alternative to prove to the Tribunal that we could broadcast a signal. Fortunately, when Ian Kirkpatrick surveyed parts of Canterbury he discovered we could use the Styx River floodplain, near Spencerville, as an earth for a signal to make the very tall broadcasting mast function correctly, because it relied on the water to complete the signal’s return path. This would allow us to broadcast the maximum 2-kilowatt source of radio power available to us under a proposed licence agreement — which turned out, by good luck, to allow us to broadcast our programme much further than would have been the case had we been allowed to use the state-owned Geddes Pass broadcasting facilities. Now we could prove technically to the court that we could broadcast a signal if we got the licence. This also meant Paul Mortlock had to secure a lease and other rights to the land to erect the broadcasting mast needed.

In the application we provided to the court, we tendered evidence from the Christchurch stockbrokers, Hamilton Hindin Greene, who agreed we needed $200,000 to fund the station and get it on air. If we were successful in getting a broadcasting licence, they stated they would have no trouble raising that amount of money if a public company were floated and supported this by an affidavit, stating they would underwrite the funding.

The five of us had mortgaged our houses and pooled our funds to pay for the significant legal costs, the costs of preparing the court action and, of course, the general cost of trying to secure different places to make the station function. It was a drain on everyone’s finances and our losses would have been sufficiently great if we didn’t get a licence to broadcast. However, if we did get the licence, it would allow us eventually to float a public company to pay for everything. Eventually, we gained a licence but then lost it on a technicality put up by the Opposition in October 1971 and had to reapply at a later hearing to gain it back.

Initially, I was the proposed chairman of the company but, just before the second hearing, the state-owned television channel broadcast the outrageous piece of television involving SKOPE and the storage heater we manufactured. As a cornerstone component of the application was that each director had to be a fit person to control a radio station, many people believed it was run to publicly demonstrate that I was irresponsible and therefore an unfit person to be chair of a radio station, let alone a director. Looking at the issue as pragmatically as possible, I asked Paul Mortlockhis views on the matter and, when I stepped aside as the proposed chairman, Paul took over the role. The five of us then set about putting everything together that we needed. It was tremendously expensive because we needed a building to broadcast from and we needed it as close to the town centre as we could get. A piece of land was available in Kilmore Street and, between us, we thought we could raise a mortgage of $180,000 to buy the land and build our studio.

Paul Mortlock and I went to see Miles Warren, a partner of Warren and Mahoney, which is today one of New Zealand’s leading architectural firms. We told Miles we needed a four-storey building but that it had to be a certain floor size to fit the newsroom and everyone else on one floor. Ian Kirkpatrick and Noel Wesney had designed a layout that would squeeze everyone into the minimum space. We told Miles that the rent from the three storeys we didn’t need would pay for our costs if everything didn’t work out as well as we’d hoped. In other words, if we didn’t get a licence we would still have a four-storey building we could sell and, with a bit of luck, might get back most of our expenses, providing we could find tenants for the building.

Miles, now Sir Miles, was a very clever architect with a business-like view. Many architects fall out with their clients because they run with the client’s hopes and dreams, which often outstrip the client’s ability to pay. The end result is one very unhappy client, even though they’ve got what they asked for. With Miles, if the client only had x amount of money, then the challenge for him was to produce a building for that figure. He said if he got Reg Muirson, a well-known house builder, to build it, then we could use concrete blocks and the spine of the lift would hold the four-storey-high building together from the ground to the top floor.
We started building before we had the money, with the hope and expectation that when the company was floated we would be able to pay for it and own the building outright, with the rent from the other three floors providing an additional source of income. I found the whole process exciting, because owning the property that supports the business is an integral part of my personal philosophy. When the building was almost finished, I returned from an overseas trip to find to my surprise and annoyance that Paul had sold the building to a client of his. That client then put together a package and Bob Charles, the golfer, took the building into
his estate. This was done without my knowledge but, from Paul’s point of view, it took the financial pressure off. Nobody wanted to lose their house and Paul pointed out that in the event we didn’t get a licence, I would also be severely financially dented which, in his opinion, I knew but didn’t want to face up to.

When the company was finally floated onto the market, it was the most successful public company float in the history of New Zealand at the time. The shares sold out within hours and, of course, we all wished we had committed to more shares at the time. As promoters, we had taken small shareholdings based on Paul’s advice that if we, as promoters, owned too many shares, it could put off potential investors. One can never look back other than to say the shares were very valuable and we all made our money back and the risk to our home ownership disappeared.
 

© Copyright. Reprinted with permission from Determined to Win, published by Random House New Zealand