The Street
at 10:47 am

Roachs' Department Store, 244 HSW — the morning seventeen people died

Roachs' had been on the King Street corner since at least 1883, when C.H. Roach is first visible in photographic records at this address. By 1915 a new Mission-style ferro-concrete department store had been built on the site. On 3 February 1931 it had 50 people inside at 10:47 am — customers and staff on a Tuesday morning in summer. Seventeen of them did not walk out.

The HDC Heritage Inventory records what happened: "The front of the building rose in the air before the structure collapsed in a heap... One was a boy who had gone in to buy a school cap." The removal of internal support pillars in the early 1920s — to create more display space — is thought to have contributed to the collapse. The boy buying the school cap was Rex Fredsberg, aged thirteen. The oldest victim was 58. A two-week-old infant was also carried in that morning and did not survive.

Two years earlier, in 1929, Roachs' had published a Christmas catalogue — millinery, menswear, gramophones, radios, groceries, electric goods — now held at MTG Hawke's Bay, marked Public Domain. It is a window into an ordinary Tuesday morning on this corner, two years before everything changed.

Hector Jones Electrical Co, King Street — the man who was overseas when it happened

On the King Street corner of this block, the Hector Jones Electrical Company traded as "Electrical Engineers & Radiotricians, Importers of High Grade Electrical and Radio Equipment." A staff photograph from 1931 shows one boy, four men, and two women at the front of the shop. By the end of 3 February, two of those staff were dead: Olive Cambridge (18, clerk, from Karamu Road) and Constance Horsley (33, widow, Southampton Street).

Founder Hector Jones was aged 37 and overseas in 1930. He did not see his building destroyed. He came back, rebuilt, and the business continued — the Hector Jones building features by name on the 1934 Central Hastings Photo Map, and a newspaper account from 2006 recalls a man who chose Hector Jones over a rival electrical firm in his post-war job search specifically because "they had a nicer looking building with big glass walls."

In 1984, Hector Jones sold the business to Leith and Sherrill Jennings. Their son is the current business owner at The Line gallery, 318 Heretaunga Street West — a thread that connects the electrical shop destroyed in the earthquake to a gallery on the same strip, four decades on.

The Cosy De Luxe Theatre — and those who died inside it

The Douglas Buildings were constructed around 1914 at the King Street corner of Heretaunga Street West — first as "Everybody's Picture Theatre" (confirmed as the venue for a land auction in December 1917), then as the Cosy De Luxe Theatre under W.R. Kemball Theatres Ltd. A 1922 photograph shows it with a large neon sign and Paramount Pictures billing: "The Best Show in Town."

Inside the theatre building on the morning of 3 February 1931 were at least three separate business tenants. Doris Haxton (28) and Sabina Haxton (26) — sisters — were at their pastrycook shop, Haxton's Home Cookery. Mary Kirkpatrick (45) was at her confectionery shop. All three died when the building collapsed. Margaret O'Neill (36), a dressmaker, also died in the Cosy Theatre building.

Outside on the footpath, a mother and her two small boys were passing: Ethel Cole (33), Peter Cole (3), and Billy Cole (4), all living at the Hastings Hotel. All three died outside the Cosy Theatre. Emma Cockerill (78) and Alice Wells (17) also died outside the building. William Bartle (61), a painter, was injured at the Cosy Theatre and died the next day at the Racecourse Hospital.

Eight deaths — inside and outside this single building — in less than a minute.

Miss Emma Wade — the woman who rebuilt the corner

Miss Emma Wade lost her building at the Nelson Street corner in the earthquake. With the compensation money she received, she commissioned architect Edmund Anscombe to design replacement premises at the same address. The result — completed 1932 — is the Wade Building that still stands at 353–359 HSW today: horizontal Art Deco banding, a distinctive corner pilaster treatment, and a shopfront rhythm that Anscombe used across several Hastings commissions in this period. It is the finest Art Deco facade on the strip.

She also had Anscombe plan the property next door — documented in his original 1932 drawings as a "battery bay" and two garages. That building, 103–103A Nelson Street North, is now Bistro 103. Both were Miss Wade's investment. Both were built at the same time, to the same architect's drawings, with the same earthquake compensation money. The concrete drive-through kerbing from the original garage is still visible inside today.

We do not know where Miss Wade went after the earthquake, or when she first acquired the properties, or whether she ever lived above her shops. What the record shows is that when the dust settled, she built — and what she built has outlasted her by at least ninety years.

Mick Thomson — a life that connected two eras of the street

In 1928, fifteen-year-old Harry Knight Thomson — known as Mick — left school to work at Blackmore's Clothing Shop in Heretaunga Street. He was still there on the morning of 3 February 1931 when the earthquake struck. Blackmore's survived. He kept working — through the war, through his return, until the founder's son took over as manager and Mick began looking quietly for his own place.

A real estate agent friend told him about an empty ladies' shop at 355 HSW — too far west, Mick thought. The reply has become the most quoted line in the Thomson family history: "If you want to succeed, go west young man."

In 1957, Thomson's Suits opened in the Wade Building — the building Miss Emma Wade had built with her earthquake compensation money twenty-five years earlier. Son Michael joined in 1966. Grandson Angus in 1998. Three generations. Same address. Still open.