Hamilton's Jet The Biography of an Icon

Hamilton's Jet The Biography of an Icon By John Walsh.

Publisher: CWF Hamilton and Co Ltd, Christchurch , 2014. First Edition.

Very good softback; no inscriptions; light shelf-wear; small scuff to top of spine, light creasing to a few back pages. 360 pages, illustrated.

This is the story of an iconic New Zealand company. The first stirrings of the embryonic engineering enterprise that became CWF Hamilton & Co Ltd began 75 years ago on a high country sheep station at the foot of Mt Cook. At Irishman Creek Station the inventive Kiwi farmer, Bill Hamilton, and his idealistic English wife, Peggy, fashioned an extraordinary community turning rabbiters and farmhands into skilled trades-people. When Bill Hamilton won the contract to construct an aerodrome at Mt Cook in 1935, the sheep farmer-turned-engineer was on his way to establishing an engineering business eventually to employ 500 people in Christchurch that would leave its mark on the post-War infrastructural development of New Zealand. Yet it was Sir William Hamilton's jet boat hobby that made him internationally renowned. He and his team discovered for themselves the secret to a successful jet boat, one that could tackle the swift-flowing rivers of the South Island. Soon Hamilton's jet was making headlines conquering the Colorado River upstream through the Grand Canyon, river racing in Mexico, re-tracing Stanley's footsteps in Zaire and jetting Sir Edmund Hillary in the sacred Ganges in India. In the economically turbulent 1980's, CWF Hamilton & Co nearly succumbed like so many companies. To secure its future, the Company morphed from a multi-product heavy engineering business, aimed at the domestic market, to a single product-line manufacturer with a global perspective.

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