![]() ![]() Richard Pearse, self-taught inventor, trailblazing aviator and eccentric visionary, was about to be rediscovered. There, among the tools and farm implements and an odd homebuilt powercycle, were a set of wings and the assorted fabric-covered parts of what the Public Trust man construed to be an “improvised autogyro.” Out in the locked garage, however, he came upon something unexpected. The inspector entered, but found nothing untoward, and little of worth: a gas cooker, a cycle lamp, a cased cello. On the other side of the door to that room something, perhaps leftover food, was decidedly off. Talk of patents was news to the superintendent, as was the discovery by the Public Trust Office that the apparently impecunious Mr Pearse owned three houses in Christchurch, all of which he had built himself, and that he was collecting rent from each of them.Ī property inspector was sent to investigate complaints by tenants at the Woolston house where Pearse had for years slept, cooked and lived in a small front bedroom. He fretted over his Australian patent rights and told the medical superintendent that he wanted them extended. The Wright brothers had illegally used his ideas, as had American helicopter designers. ![]() Schemers plotted even now to snatch them away. The 73-year-old soon grew accustomed to Sunnyside life, liking the food-or at least eating without complaint-and taking part in basketmaking and other occupational therapy classes Yet the paranoia persisted, and at times drove him to distraction. Pearse wasn’t insane, just confused, hard of hearing and no longer able to care for himself. The diagnosis was arteriosclerotic psychosis, a common ailment among the elderly. In his spoof documentary Forgotten Silver, director Peter Jackson presented a few seconds of fabricated cine film as “proof” that Pearse flew first-the true “Lord of the Wings.” Pearse the popular hero is now part of the national mythology. Had a handful of individuals not rescued the relics he left behind from rubbish tip and furnace, his aeronautical achievements would have been lost to history. He ended his days in a psychiatric hospital, worried and alone. He jumps from speculations about planetary collisions and vague ramblings about astronomy to fragmentary accounts of his everyday affairs.” Today Pearse is hailed as a visionary and a pioneer, yet his legacy is tinged with sadness. ![]() “His spontaneous conversation is jumbled and largely incomprehensible. “He knows his age and year of birth but does not know what year or month it is at the present time,” recorded the examining doctor. On the afternoon of June 30, the day of his admittance to Sunnyside, the muddled, disoriented old man, who gave his name as Richard William Pearse, was subjected to a clinical examination. About all that could be deduced was that he was a retired farmer, of Irish extraction, unmarried and with no known relatives in New Zealand. People were out to steal his inventions, he said. Weak and distraught, he muttered about attempts being made on his life. ![]() In the depths of the winter of 1951, a frail, elderly man with long white hair and an unkempt moustache was helped from his home in Woolston, Christchurch, and taken to Sunnyside Hospital, a psychiatric institution in the city’s south-west. Written by Vaughan Yarwood Photographed by Vaughan Yarwood ![]()
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