Kev Wilson started working in the wool industry in Napier in 1962. At 16 his first job was as a junior wool classer for broker De Pelichet Mcleod.

A few years after the Korean War had driven huge impetus into the wool sector, demand for the fibre remained strong.

“There were plenty of wool stores here: Dalgety, Hawke’s Bay Farmers, Williams & Kettle, Wrightson and National Mortgage, with over a dozen stores all around the Napier port. You can see them now with their iconic roof lines.  At the height of each season over 1000 people worked in the local industry in Hawke’s Bay. New Zealand was farming about 80 million sheep back then. It was a boom time,” he says.

Kev had grown up on his parent’s Puketapu dairy farm, finishing school early to study agriculture at Lindisfarne College.

“Most of my classmates there were sheep cockies’ sons, which prompted me to take more of an interest in sheep. I thought I’d become a stock agent. You had to have a job before you left school in those days, and when seasonal work came up, I fell into wool. Shortly after that I was asked if I’d like to learn classing. All the wool classers at the company were old fellas, around a dozen of them, and they all wanted to teach you their skills, so I thought ‘Yeah, that’ll do for me,’ and that’s how I got cracking.”

In 1973, by now with a few years’ experience as a classer, Kev moved to scouring company Louis Woods & Sons, in Awatoto.

“Working in the store was much more physical then than it is now. It was much more labour intensive. That was before forklifts and cats’ claws, so all the wool had to be shifted with hooks and barrows, and bales were stacked seven high in the old days. We didn’t think much about health and safety back then. If the stack opened up, it could be hazardous, and though I saw that happen a few times, I never saw anybody injured: you had to ride the bales down as they fell.”

During his time at the scour Kev was caught out once himself when an accident collapsed a stack of bales. Fortunately, he was trapped in a pocket, coming out unscathed when a mate carefully pulled the fallen bales away, not thinking too much about the danger he would have been in if the bales had fallen slightly differently.

“Health and safety is a much bigger deal now. Back then you had to flip every bale; the classers had bin boys to bring the bales out for them to start on. Often the cocky would come in to watch his wool being classed. These days in the store you stay on the walkway, and there is virtually no risk,” he says.

When Louis Woods & Sons sold the plant in 1986, he decided to move on.

“In those days you didn’t need a CV. I was fairly well known in the industry. I went down the road to Wrightson Dalgety, walked in the door, Allan Jones offered me a job just like that, and away I went.”

Kev was promoted to managing the bin room, with 30 people under him at the height of the season. He’s been at PGG Wrightson ever since, running the show floor for the past eight or nine years.

“When I started in 1987 there were 120 people working in Napier. Now there are 12 of us in the wool store, plus office staff. When more people worked here, I definitely enjoyed it more, though maybe it is more efficient since modern systems and processes, and computerisation has come in. It’s quicker and more thorough, though you miss the human element,” says Kev.

To be a good wool classer you have to enjoy it, he reckons. Kev has trained plenty of classers, including several who now hold prominent management roles in the wool sector.

After notching up 60 years in the industry, Kev decided to call it a day late last year, finishing up on 25 November. He retired with one ambition:

“I’m going to do nothing. Just take it easy. All my life I’ve been up every morning to come to work at 6am, so I’m going to take my chance to do nothing for awhile, though I suppose eventually I’ll work out what I’m going to do,” says Kev.