Mrs New Zealand

A large crowd of well-wishers gathered at the Gisborne Aiport when Joan Coates flew out with her husband Dr Jim Coates (left) on a two-week trip to America after winning the 1962 Mrs New Zealand contest.

Joan Coates was born Joan Davenport in Calcutta, India, in the mid-1920s.  (With reverence to a lady’s prerogative not to reveal her actual age, we can only say her 80th birthday was celebrated a year or so ago.)

Her parents, Guy and Doris Davenport, were wealthy English tea planters from Darjeeling. The tea gardens they owned in the Darjeeling hills had been in the family for several generations and they very much epitomised the era of the British Raj – the British colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947.

Joan, and her younger brother John, lived in luxury attended by servants for the first decade of her life.

She tells the story how one day when she was still a baby, a wild monkey stole her out of her pram. A servant saw the monkey scaling the wall separating the garden from the jungle, who alerted her father who fired his gun.

If the monkey hadn’t dropped her immediately she believes she may have ended up like Jane “swinging through the tree-tops looking for Tarzan”.

Joan received home education from a nanny until she was 8 years old. Then family tradition was that the children were shipped back to England for further schooling. Her father couldn’t stand the thought of separation from his wife and children so he abdicated from his role as the family manager of the tea gardens and found a job as a tea taster with a firm in Auckland, New Zealand.

In the mid 1930s the family booked a first class passage to New Zealand on the SS Rangitata, a voyage that took six weeks.

Clockwise from top left: Portrait of Joan just before the Mrs New Zealand contest, publicity photo with Dr Jim Coates while on tour of the USA as Mrs New Zealand, an early taste for beach life at Bognor Regis in the 1930s, dressed up with Dr Jim in top-hat and tails on the way to the Queen’s garden party in 1950.

In New Zealand they lived in Remuera Road, Auckland, next door to the parents of the future Sir Edmund Hillary. Joan was enrolled at Meadowbank School where, at nine years old – and because she had never been to an actual school before in her life – she held the dubious record of being the oldest ever primer one student.  At least for the first term.

When she was 11 years old she became friends with a young man who was five years her senior. Young Jim Coates was a son of friends who attended tennis parties with her parents.

As a teenager she attended the prestigious private Anglican Auckland Diocesan School for Girls and on leaving school worked as a nurse at Auckland Hospital during the years of World War 2. Here the pretty young nurse met up with Jim Coates again, by this time a handsome junior house surgeon, and they married in 1945.

They lived in Auckland where sons Michael and Richard were born then travelled to England where Jim would further his medical studies at London Hospital and later Edinburgh.

Third son Graham was born in Hampton Court just days after the abolition of war time petrol rationing which caused huge traffic jams around London and a panic as the baby began to announce itself.

The house had a river frontage so the midwife was dispatched by boat while the doctor came on the back of a policeman’s bicycle – riding along the footpath blowing his whistle.

Around 1953 after they had returned to New Zealand Jim Coates was offered the job of senior physician at Gisborne’s Cook Hospital and so began the Coates family’s attachment to Gisborne that remains to this day.

They lived in Stout Street, just around from Wi Pere Street, and the boys went off to Mangapapa School. As the wife of the town’s leading doctor Joan was socially in demand and even then became immersed in volunteer work for various organisations. In 1960 she gave birth to a daughter, Tessa.

Well before social media Joan Coates was possibly Gisborne's first "influencer'. Throughout the 1960s she was in demand and on call as the celebrity guest at fashion parades and fund raising functions.

But life was not as perfect as it appeared and when her marriage ended a few years later Joan left Stout Street to live in a rented house in Wairere Road with daughter Tessa.

Around 1974 Joan bought a small cottage in Douglas Street. Over the year's the old beach bach was renovated and improved and Joan established a lovely cottage garden in the backyard which has often been included in local garden tours. Here she has lived as a popular personality of the Okitu community until the present day.

In the early years as an independent woman – with Tessa at boarding school and later away working and travelling overseas – Joan first worked for Hammon Jewellers and later as a salesperson for Guy and Dunsmore Sports.

With an active interest in tennis, golf, badminton and trout fishing she became sought after for advise and information on sporting equipment and sport in general.

Her community work also continued. She was a committee member and then chairperson of the Heni Materoa Children’s Home through the ‘60s and ‘70s, a founding committee member of the Gisborne Business and Professional Women’s Club, also a committee member of the Royal Overseas League.

She was on the original organising committee to raise funds to build the Gisborne squash courts, a long-serving committee member and is still currently the patron of the Poverty Bay Golf Club.

She has been a volunteer at the Wainui Surf Club for decades, a helper at the Gisborne Public Relations office in its day, a volunteer with Palliative Care, Keep Gisborne Beautiful and Eastwoodhill Arboretum.

She has worked as a volunteer gardener at Eastwoodhill for 20 years, she gardens and maintains an adopted spot on the State Highway at Okitu – also at retirement homes, the Poverty Bay Golf Club and for years has opened her own garden for public viewing to assist fund raising ventures.

A bite from a white-tail spider a few years ago has left one of her hands slightly deformed which caused her to give up golf and restricts her gardening activities.

Through the years of the ‘70s and ‘80s she socialised with a great group of lady friends – who were all characters of the Okitu neighbourhood – Joy Low, Jean Schroder, Gloria Harrison, Nelly Lloyd, Kate Hitchings – spending hours at the beach in the summer and long evenings dining and playing cards together.

Joan is now the last woman standing of this group of local identities. Today she continues to garden as much as she can, keeps in touch with her children and her grand-children – and is lucky to have son Richard and daughter Tess still living at Wainui.

Until just recently she would jump in her car at short notice and drive to Blenheim to visit son Graham, an expert consultant on the farming and marketing of salmon, who is now partnered with winemaker Jane Hunter. Son Michael occasionally visits from England.

Yes – Joan Coates is an icon of Gisborne and certainly a loved elder of the Okitu and Wainui communities. A true celebrity in our midst.