Office of the Waikato District Hospital and Charitable Aid Board (Former)

For thirty-five years this two-room brick building on Hood Street was where the Waikato District Hospital and Charitable Aid Board decided who in the region got relief. At its first meeting here, on 6 August 1903, it raised one Huntly man's allowance by a shilling to five shillings a week and arranged a cook for the Old Men's Refuge. It is a Category 2 historic place, List No. 9279, and today it is Biddy Mulligan's Irish Pub — Digger's Bar, which is what most accounts still call it, closed in 2018. The haunting attached to it is one rumour and one nickname: that a doctor hanged himself in his office here, and that bar staff called the presence Richard. The Hamilton group that investigated the building says plainly it has found no evidence for the suicide. Neither has anyone else — and the building never had a doctor's office to hang oneself in. What it did have, recorded in October 1903, was a board room that echoed badly enough for the Board to write to its architect about it.

The two-room brick building at 17 Hood Street is small enough to walk past without noticing, and for thirty-five years it was where somebody decided whether you ate that week. The Waikato Hospital and Charitable Aid Board was born in 1886 out of a rates revolt. Waikato money was going to the Auckland Hospital Board and being spent, as far as Waikato ratepayers could see, in Auckland. The leader of the revolt was the Mayor of Hamilton, W. A. Graham, who believed the district could run its own affairs; when the separate board was created he became its first chairman. The Waikato Hospital opened the following year, in 1887, with seven patients, half a kilometre from the centre of town at the top of a gentle hill. For its first sixteen years the Board had no premises of its own and held its monthly meetings in the Borough Council chambers. In 1902 it began looking for an office. Four sites were considered. Hood Street won because it sat on the direct road to the hospital, about eighty yards from the Bank of New Zealand and a hundred from the Post Office — and because it was the cheapest of the four, which the Heritage New Zealand registration report notes was something of a habit with this Board. The land was bought in 1903 from a Mr Young for £100. At its February 1903 meeting the Board resolved to build in brick. The following month it accepted John P. Murray's tender of £437, the lower of the two received. The design came from the Auckland architect Thomas Mahoney (ca. 1854–1923), eldest son of Edward Mahoney: a false-fronted single-storey office in Stripped Classical dress, with a curved pediment, an internal wall about a third of the way back dividing the secretary's office at the front from the board room behind it, and a pressed metal ceiling in the board room. The Board met in its new offices for the first time on 6 August 1903. The local press called them spacious and, the registration report drily observes, rather optimistically judged them likely to meet the requirements of the Board for all time. According to the historian Hamish Steven, quoted in the same report, the board office was the first Social Welfare Centre in Hamilton. What that meant in practice is on the record for that very first meeting. The surgeon reported nineteen male and thirteen female patients, with the women's wards so crowded that three cases had to be postponed. Relief to a man in Huntly was increased by one shilling, bringing him to a grand total of five shillings a week. The Clerk reported that he had arranged a cook for the Old Men's Refuge, which the Board also ran. That is the register of the room: a shilling here, a cook there, a woman told to wait. In October 1903 the Board instructed its secretary to write to Mahoney with a view of improving the acoustic properties of the board room. Echo was a problem. 1903 was also the year Miss Cogswell of Waikato Hospital came top of New Zealand in the national nursing examination, introduced with registration in 1901. Considering the list of applicants for probationer nurse positions was one of the Board's routine duties in this room; the hospital was the first place in Hamilton to offer advanced training continuously, and became one of the region's largest employers of women — at pay rates that Heritage New Zealand's assessment singles out for the gulf between male doctors and female nurses. Late in 1903 the secretary, C. J. W. Barton, resigned on being elected Mayor of Hamilton and was replaced by W. I. Conradi, formerly Raglan County Clerk and Engineer. In March 1911 a fire destroyed many of the Board's records dating from before 1901 and damaged the building badly enough that meetings went back to the Borough Council chambers for several months. At a special meeting on 16 March the Hamilton architect John Willing Warren (1859–1936) reported on the cost of repairs and was authorised to proceed; the builder H. M. Hollow of Otahuhu won the work with a tender of £199 10s, and in July Warren was authorised to finish the offices in Keen's Cement. Warren later became the Waikato Hospital Board's architect, and this is among the earliest of his jobs for that client still standing. In 1921 the Health Department instructed the Board to drop the words Charitable Aid from its name. It became the Waikato Hospital Board. The registration report is careful about what that did and did not mean: relief work continued, but the department preferred it be called social welfare. The lettering on the parapet — Office of the Waikato Hospital & CA Board — apparently stayed up until around 1938. By 1 August 1935 the Board had outgrown the two rooms: more staff, more files, and office technology including typewriters and a Gestetner duplicator. The new offices in Marlborough Place were not ready until 1938, and the Board met there for the first time on 21 April that year. In May the Hood Street property was leased to Treloar Brothers Limited. James Treloar (d. 1945), inventor of the Treloar milking machine and later a Hamilton borough councillor, ran his office, shop and factory from the full section, 17a and 17b. The lease stayed with the Treloars until the 1980s. Hamilton Lighthouse opened here in April 1963 under manager Rolly Coombes and left for Victoria Street in 1966; around 1985 Vern Wilson's Wilsons Sports Centre moved in, selling fishing licences, diving gear and guns kept in locked cabinets in the rear lean-to, and stayed until at least 1989. Somewhere in this stretch the sash windows were torn out for a single plate-glass pane and the ceiling was dropped. Ownership then took an unusual turn. The land passed to the Waikato Area Health Board in 1992 and to Health Waikato Limited in 1994; in 1996 it went to the Crown and immediately to the Tainui Maori Trust Board, apparently as part of the 1995 Waitangi settlement, then to Tainui Corporation Limited in 1997, and in 1999 to the current owners, George and Cheryl Williamson, their son Craig Williamson and Nigel Smith. The restoration that made the building what visitors see now was approved in 1994: the kauri floors polished, the board room ceiling reinstated as fibreglass casts of an original pressed metal panel, and twin sash windows recycled from another building and matched to the originals still in the side wall. Digger's Coffee House and Bar was open by late 1995, run under lease by Phil Pavich and Richard Dyer. A rear upper floor followed in 2000 to a design by Vaughn Priddy, and in 2007 a consent covered the courtyard and added a first-floor balcony designed by Murray Price. Heritage New Zealand's registration report on the building, written by Kathryn Mercer, was completed on 4 November 2008; the place was entered on the New Zealand Heritage List as a Category 2 historic place, List No. 9279, on 26 June 2009. Digger's own website stopped serving pages between June and August 2018, and the bar closed. Biddy Mulligan's Irish Pub, until then at 742 Victoria Street, took the premises over; its website announced the move with the line that Digger's bar is no longer and has now become Biddy's. That is the business trading there today.

The building is at 17a–17b Hood Street, Hamilton 3204, in the older southern end of the central business district. Heritage New Zealand classifies access as able to visit, which here means the obvious thing: it is a working pub and you can walk in and buy a drink. Since 2018 the tenant has been Biddy Mulligan's Irish Pub. Do not look for Digger's Bar; that business ended and its website went dead in mid-2018. Biddy Mulligan's advertises live music every night of the week, pub food and two private function rooms, and its published general hours are from 3pm daily, with a midday opening on Saturdays. Hours at a live-music pub change, so check before you travel. There is no admission charge, no tour, and no ghost tour — the Quantum Foundation's visits were arranged privately with the operators, not public events, and nothing about the building's paranormal reputation is on sale here. The front is easiest to appreciate from the footpath, at any hour. What you are looking at is a small false-fronted single-storey shop face in Stripped Classical style with a curved pediment, the low corrugated-iron roof hidden behind it. The twin sash windows are not original to the building but are the right thing in the right place: they were recycled from another building during the 1994 restoration and matched to the original sashes surviving in the side wall. Do not go looking for the lettering that once read Office of the Waikato Hospital & CA Board across the parapet — it was removed around 1938, along with the finials and the chimney. Inside, two things are worth a moment. The floorboards are largely original kauri, roughly 14cm wide. And the ceiling in the rear room — the old board room, where the relief decisions were made — carries decorative panels cast in fibreglass from a pressed metal panel original to the building. The front room, with its board-and-batten ceiling, was the secretary's office. Heritage New Zealand's 2008 report noted that two historic photographs of the building then hung on the wall across from the bar; whether they survived the change of tenant, I have not been able to confirm. The street is worth the walk on its own. The Loaded Hog, in the former Grand Central Private Hotel of 1914 (Category 2, List No. 5310), is immediately to the right as you face the building from Hood Street, which is almost opposite the Alexander Street intersection. The former Bank of New Zealand building (Category 1, List No. 768) and the former Post Office (Category 2, List No. 5299) — the two buildings whose presence the Board cited in 1903 when choosing this site — are both still standing and both visible from the door. The building is included on the Hamilton's Historic Southend heritage trail. One courtesy: the staff here are pouring pints, not running an interpretation centre. Interviews about the building's reputation are something the Quantum Foundation obtained by arrangement over several years. Turning up and asking bar staff about Richard mid-shift is not the same thing.