The old engineer’s vice sat heavy on Barry Gunson’s workbench; its jaws worn smooth from thirteen years of gripping the same two nuts. Barry had made it not long after the Pauanui Menzshed opened its doors in 2013 – a trophy, of sorts, though nobody who’d seen it would call it handsome. Whoever won Sheddie of the Year each year carried it home, propped it somewhere visible, and then, in the spirit Barry intended, made it a little more ridiculous before passing it on.
Bill Witts was the one who wired it for light. A small switch, a tidy little bulb, so the nuts could be properly illuminated. “in case anyone doubted their significance,” he liked to say. Others had added their own touches since. Nobody took it too seriously. That, everyone agreed, was rather the point.
Down at the shed on Tuesday mornings, twenty-odd members – retired tradesmen mostly, sharp with wood and steel even now – gathered as they had since Tony Whitehead first called them together in Rex Johnstone’s hangar back in 2012. They fixed door locks and welded machinery for the Sports and Recreation Club, kept the Mini Putt green tidy, painted what needed painting, and broke, always, for tea and biscuits.
Fifty members now, seventeen years in, and still no honours board. No wall where the names could be set down properly – the founders, the Tuesday regulars, the quiet ones who’d given a decade of mornings without ever asking for the vice and its nuts.
The trophy could stay silly. That was Barry’s gift to them, and it worked. But somewhere on that workshop wall, a plain board with proper names was overdue – a place to say, simply, these people built this.
