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Martin Montague - Partner
It was with great sadness that Gibson Sheat farwelled Martin Montague late in 2009. His sudden death on Sunday 29 November was an enormous shock to all of us.
Martin was a very special person and greatly loved and respected by everyone at Gibson Sheat, his family, the legal community of Wellington and his loyal clients.
Martin's funeral was held on Thursday 3 December at Ss Peter & Paul in Lower Hutt. The packed church was a testament to the lives that Martin touched and the high regard in which he was held by all who knew him.
Eulogy - Read by Dave Robinson
I have the privilege of talking about Marty from the perspective of those who spent their working lives with him.
Nothing we do, even as lawyers, really equips us for these situations, and it's really difficult to know where to start and what to leave out. There's so much to say. I'm glad I've got all my friends here to share in the collective responsibility for what I have to say to you.
My first experience of Martin was in the District Court at Lower Hutt. I think it was about 35 years ago. Marty had come later to the law having reached a mutually acceptable separation from the seminary at the Mission in Hawkes Bay. I think that it was because he may not have been best suited to a life of celibacy.
On this day, he was to appear before JK Patterson, the local magistrate who was a very tall gruff man, who hailed from the West Coast.
Marty's client was called to the dock and Marty rose majestically with the standard greeting "If it please your worship, I appear".
Quite audibly from the gallery behind us came an instant remark from one of the audience... "only just".
JK was a man for whom the dignity of the court was quite important. He didn't see the funny side of it and threatened to clear the court.
On another occasion Martin was cross-examining a witness when he was pulled up and told off by JK for excessively wandering around the courtroom. All of you will remember Marty the fidgit. It was not often he stood still.
Marty was an intensely loyal man. Loyal to his family. Loyal to his clients and friends, and always loyal to us.
With Marty, if you were his client, you were his friend, you always got the whole nine yards.
He was a man who truly cared about his clients. A man who always considered the monetary reward last and as a mere consequence of doing what he did as well as he could.
He was an old fashioned general practitioner who got immense pleasure from the service he gave and the relationships he built. As a consequence he regarded with pride that he acted for 3 generations of the same families.
Few of the women for whom he acted, escaped without being called darling, being hugged, or occasionally kissed.
We always asserted that women had the essential urge to mother him on account of his stature, but we really knew that it had more to do with the depth of his character which people genuinely warmed to.
Martin was a really nice man with tremendous energy, a considerate and caring approach, a ready wit and a man for whom contention was complete anathema.
Out of all the people I have ever known, Marty was the man with whom it was least possible to have an argument. He was not prepared to waste energy on such things. He would always calmly deflect a barb or quietly express a view. This made him uniquely suited to be our first chairman of partners.
He was a compassionate man with a ready ear for any of us, and always direct and practical in his advice.
He was a traditionalist who believed in playing his part in every way; communing with his fellow practitioners at bar gatherings and as our Lawlink representative at many Lawlink conferences. He built great relationships with all whom he met including the BNI network.
When the Lawlink conference was held in Hawkes Bay, a dinner was held at the Mission Vineyard at what was the Old Seminary and so Martin talked of his memories of his time there. He recounted that the novitiates would often be expected to line up in single file in alphabetical order by surname. This presented some issues because the person ahead of him in line was 6 foot 8 inches tall, and Martin believes that it was quite some time before anyone ever noticed that he was there.
Behind this nice man was a person of enormous resolve and determination incapable of being pushed around. Those of us proddies who used to go past St Pats Town at the Basin Reserve watching the boys train on the single field onto Cambridge Terrace, claimed that this had been partly formed through a phenomenon we attributed to the Catholic School system and which we called "strength through exhaustion". It's hard to imagine Marty as hooker in the front row of the first 15 isn't it, but he was. I'm not sure if they went looking for props of equal stature.
An example of this determination and commitment was when he just decided in 1993 that he wanted to run a marathon. Just one. He trained for several months and ran the Fletcher Marathon at Rotorua in 1994 under the time he set for himself. He was extremely proud of having tested himself to such an extent and succeeded. And so were we.
Marty always pushed himself but was fortunate that the things he chose to do with his life were truly things which he enjoyed. His family, his grandchildren especially, his clients, work, running and travelling were all in this category.
I guess that growing up as one of nine children with a strong set of values, left him with his marvellous ability of accommodating and treating all people in the same fashion. He was as comfortable with a person who swept a yard as he was with a Minister of the Crown. The same easy style and genuine interest was always evident.
He counted his blessings and never forgot where he came from.
He was a man who was humble about his abilities but was in fact, well beyond his formal education, a self-educated man in very many other ways. He loved classical music and opera, loved the arts, read extensively, and was a mine of information; a great deal of it useful.
He was modest , in fact self effacing, about his intellectual capacity, but certainly had no need to be. He had plenty of it. He was first choice for any quiz team. Nothing gave him more pleasure than that.
He wandered off around the world with an inquisitive mind and in recent times with Martin Junior as his companion.
He had the sharpest of wits and was fantastic at the immediate and reactive one liners. Once he got on a roll he couldn't stop. He regularly had us splitting our sides.
He also had the ability to say things which were utterly untrue, with the straightest face and in the most plausible fashion, which would fool the most suspicious and canny of us. The only give away was sometimes the scratching of an elbow. We learned to look for it.
With new people joining us, he loved, with a bit of aiding and abetting, to let us introduce him as a man who could speak several languages.
He had a fantastic ear which was matched by the beauty of his tenor voice, but this also allowed him to launch into a demonstration of his prowess in Mandarin, Japanese, Maori, Samoan, Russian, German and a number of other languages. All of them were absolutely perfect in sound and intonation, but complete jibberish.
One of the funniest of Marty's repetoire was to hold a conversation with himself playing two parts, one as a Chinese and the other as a Japanese. We would laugh until we had tears in our eyes.
He always played a full part in all that we did at Gibson Sheat, whether it was work, the 5k challenge runs we went in every year, or just having fun.
He loved parties and socialising. He always entered into the spirit of things dressing up for our many themed mid-year do's and singing beautifully to win the prizes on offer. He won the Gibson Sheat Idol Talent Quest. He did so with an amazing performance of Harry Neilson's "can't live, if living is without you", ironically a song title that reflects how we all feel today.
We have since learned that his love of music started with the drama club at St Pat's Town which progressed to him playing the part of the Major General in Gilbert and Sullivan's trial by Jury, with the St Mary's girls choir accompanying him. He never looked back from this.
Marty was sometimes the butt of practical jokes on account of his stature.
When I joined him in partnership in 1987 at the first Christmas party we had, one of our ladies decided to play such a joke. She constructed a dissertation regarding the partners and set presents for us in the bottom of a big box which was slightly taller than a wheelie-bin and which included a bottle of wine for each partner gloried in the name "purple death". She recited what was written, and with a perverse grin then asserted that it was Martin's job to retrieve the presents. Gosh, he could barely see over the rim of the box, so some of us partners assisted him (-right-o Marty-) by upending him by his legs into the bin so that he could perform the task.
It was around about then that we were privileged to experience something I saw him perform only three times in 22 years.
It was his own particular version of Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe Through the Tulips". This progressed from tiptoeing through the tulips by a succession of stages with actions, to the act of stomping through and obliterating them.
He was strangely reticent about performing this but he was the consummate artist when he did and brought howls of laughter from those watching.
He was also free with his advice to all of us on work matters. At one point he gained a largely unearned reputation for time recorded on other peoples files. It was just a bit of fun which gained credence. He had opened his own file to manage the building of his pride and joy - his dream home in Woburn Road, on which he was head contractor. We hatched a plan and one day he came in to find we had all recorded time on this file and he discovered about $30,000.00 of billable work in progress on it.
Martin did not have the tidiest of offices. I think that on one occasion one of his partners expressed some concern about this and indicated to Martin that it might cause problems with his clients. Quick as a flash Martin retorted.. "you don't understand, you see my clients love me so much that they won't ever mention it for fear of offending me".
Occasionally I would call him to tell him that his office had been burgled
Martin was a quietly religious man. It was never overt. It was just a simple part of who he was and from where he gained his great strength.
Marty, we celebrate your life today and the indelible part you have played in ours. We honour you as you honoured us. We pray for your soul and most certainly for a little divine intervention on account of the paucity or brevity of notes on your many files.
Marty you must know that we respected and loved you. If we didn't say so out of awkwardness, we do so now.
You might have been diminutive Marty, but the hole you leave in our lives feels at present almost as big as the sky itself.
Haere Ra old friend, Haere Ra.
