Devon Hern

Devon Hern (1928-1990) was a prominent businessman in Auckland and a leader in the liquor trade there.

Early life
Hern spent his childhood in Auckland and was a foundation pupil of St Peter's College, Grafton.

Business
Hern ran the wine and spirits side of Campbell & Ehrenfried in the 1960s. Campbell & Ehrenfried (the Myers family company) had sold its brewing interests to New Zealand Breweries Ltd and otherwise operated a small chain of hotels. Douglas Myers returned to New Zealand in 1965 after his studies at Cambridge University and was appointed CEO. Myers considered the wine and spirits trade was going to be more profitable than brewing and hotels. New Zealand Wine and Spirits Ltd (NZWS) was set up with a capital of $4,000,000 (contributed half and half by Cambell & Ehrenfried and New Zealand Breweries). With the right to supply New Zealand Breweries' 200 hotels nationwide and a steadily expanding chain of wholesale outlets, NZWS became very profitable. However high import duties and the great difficulties experienced in winning more import licences prompted Myers to look for opportunities to maunfacture locally. In 1972 NZWS purchased most of Seager, Evans and Co., a Te Atatu-based company which rectified, compounded and bottled white spirits purchased from the New Zealand Distillary Company Ltd. By the mid-1970s NZWS sales were increasing 20 per cent per year and tax paid profit at a similar rate. "Myers delegated day-to-day management of the company to his general manager Devon Hern, who had long tended the wines and spirits business for Campbell & Ehrenfried. He was an experienced liquor trader, skilled at dealing with the principals of companies in New Zealand and around the world, and a good personal friend of Myers."

St Peter's College
Hern, who was a devout Catholic, was an active old boy of St Peter's College of which he was a foundation pupil in 1939. He was taught by the first Headmaster of the school, Brother Francis Pius O'Driscoll who Hern said "combined a wonderful teaching ability with a benevolent yet severe discipline and won our respect and loyalty. Indeed, he won the respect of all those he came in contact with, and obtained for the college a prestige that was out of all proportion to its years of existence." Devon Hern was chair of the St Peter's College 25 years jubilee committee in 1964 and he assisted with the purchase from New Zealand Breweries Ltd of the The Cage sports field and pavilion site on favourable terms in 1959.

John Tamihere
Hern provided some inspiration for the future New Zealand politician, John Tamihere who, as a pupil at St Peter's College, was a friend of fellow pupil and Devon Hern's son, Nick Hern. Taimhere has written that Nick's "dad was a senior executive at Lion Breweries ([sic]). I remember watching his mother welcome his father home with a kiss, and offer him a drink. She opened a bottle from the drinks cabinet and poured him a little shot. I thought she must have been very stingy - at our place when someone opened a bottle it stayed open till it was empty, but these people had a whole different attitude to drinking." Tamihere observed that Devon Hern was driven by a strong work ethic: "a huge sense of going forward, and a sense of duty to ...family, and wonderful standards and ethics that drove it all." Tamihere said that he was privileged to observe all this and to "take away a lot of knowledge of these things that existed at a totally different level in [the Hern family] than I experienced in my own."