9 August 2023
Margaret Broad was one of Harbour Hospice’s first, and most influential, volunteers. The tragedy of losing her husband and daughter in the Mt Erebus disaster drove her to work tirelessly for the Hospice cause. She was instrumental in setting up a hospice in Waikato then moved to the North Shore, where she did the same.
I first became involved with Hospice in 1979 after my husband and daughter were killed in the Mt Erebus crash. My daughter was only 21; the sightseeing flight to Antarctica had been her 21st birthday present. I had wanted her and my husband to have a father - daughter day as they liked doing things together.
At the time I was volunteering for a hospital in Hamilton and I was so shattered one of the doctors said to me, “Now, come on Margaret, you need a challenge!” I said, “I don’t know what I can do.”
He said, “You’ve talked for many years about hospices (because I had heard about them in America). Start up a hospice.”
I went home that night and thought about it. Then I talked to the district nurses and GPs and hospital staff to see what people thought. We had a meeting in a hall and got over 100 people. They’d never heard of Hospice so I had a lot of talking to do.
We managed to get a steering committee from that group of people and one of the accountants let us use his office for meetings. That’s how the Waikato Hospice started. While I was with Waikato Hospice I received the Winston Churchill Fellowship.
In 1981 my son and I moved to Auckland, and it was soon after that that I got a phone call about helping develop North Shore Hospice.
North Shore Hospice was originally part of the Auckland Hospice Association. I became one of the representatives for North Shore alongside Dick Stephenson. Eventually hospices pulled away from the association to operate independently and North Shore left too.
My first big project was setting up the Daycare. We rented some rooms at the Orongo Rest Home at Campbells Bay and we started from scratch, scrubbing it out and going around friends to get pictures and cushions and coffee tables and things like that. There were four of us plus two other ladies who came in. We made sandwiches and soup to give the patients for lunch and we picked them up. We did everything.
Daycare was an early success. One lady told me she’d bring her husband in a wheelbarrow if she had to because he liked it so much. Another told us on her second visit, ‘You’ve no idea how I’ve been counting the days till I come back here because I can be myself and I can use the word cancer and I can cry if I want to. With my friends, cancer is the big C and I could never really say anything but coming here I can talk and I get a hug.’
I did Daycare for two years and I was on the Management Committee for many years. After a while we started talking about starting an op shop.
We didn’t really know what an op shop was but I said I’d start it, so I rang the South Auckland Hospice which had one and they told us to come and have a chat. We left with a station wagon full of clothes they’d given us and as people started to hear about the op shop, clothes just kept pouring in.
In 1991 we found out we could get a shop on Huron St in Takapuna. Our biggest worry was how we were going to get enough money to pay the first rent, but from the beginning it was very popular. We got a lot of customers, especially women looking for children’s clothes. Volunteers from the Cancer Society helped us out and we sold things very cheaply. It just went from there. Next, we opened a hospice shop in Birkenhead, then one in Browns Bay.
By that time I was looking for something else to do so I got a team involved with the gardens at our new site at Shea Tce. We had little verandahs for the patients and we had borders and trees along the fence. We planted roses and agapanthus and there was a lovely spot that we got all cleaned up - couch grass and things like that. It almost killed us doing it.
I did lots of things like cleaning and I helped choose the new building’s colour schemes. I used to come in at night if there was a big cheque to be handed in and serve wine and cheese and biscuits. Just little things as we got organised. I had umpteen different roles, and I loved every minute. It really helped me at a time when I could easily have driven into the river.
Hospice helped me a tremendous amount and all the love you get is amazing. We had lots of laughs and lots of hugs. It didn’t matter who you were, you got a hug. We called it the Hospice Hug.
