Oil and Gas Lawyer practised at peak of exploration and production era

The death at 91 of Francis Joshua Handy brings to end one of the most geographically diverse legal careers in the oil and gas sector

He worked directly with the New Zealand Shell BP Todd consortium on its contracting for leases and then for the exploration and production hardware in the form of rigs, supply boats and platforms notably with such suppliers as Sedco and J Ray McDermott.

Frank Handy was determined to be part of the productive economy.

The excitement and sense of industrious purpose that accompanied the Maui exploration and production implementation more than half a century ago has largely evaporated from public consciousness.

The zest of this now forgotten productivity era of New Zealand having under development the resources to balance agricultural dependence has become instead submerged under a contrived aura of guilt and shame sponsored by a quite recently evolved new patrician class.

But when Frank Handy moved to New Plymouth the city had about it an atmosphere compared at the time to Houston.

His was the patient calming legal mind to smooth over administrative and operational differences and unite in their common purpose the head office and operatives in the field.

His always elegantly attired lanky frame presented an aristocratic aspect and there was indeed a dynastic tilt to his career.

From the South Island of New Zealand Frank Handy was the son of a clergyman and throughout his life constantly displayed the seriousness of his upbringing, which as he grew older became tempered by an infectious laugh and deliberate irreverence.

In the event he exchanged a career in the church for a more worldly one in the New Zealand government Treasury.

In a surprise career curve he suddenly quit the public sector for the private one, starting off as a law clerk for Scott Morrison.

A quick study Frank Handy had graduated in 1957 MA from Victoria University and then in 1968 LLB

His marriage in 1965 to Lyndsey Watts, daughter of Jack Watts, a decisive National Government Minister of Finance, accelerated the young Handy’s progress in his new legal career.

After several years with Scott Morrison he now became a partner in his father-in-law’s firm, Watts & Patterson.

Jack Watts, after leaving Parliament, had begun his own legal partnership with Colin Patterson.

Perhaps to please his new father-in-law Frank Handy stood for the National (i.e. conservative) Party in 1969 to contest the Labour Party working class bastion of the Petone electorate and predictably he lost.

Watts & Patterson as a partnership had organised itself around high-end legal contractual assignments, notably in the auto trade.

When Frank Handy originally joined the partnership its association with the motor trade had led to a global resources orientation which positioned the firm for the Taranaki-based era of oil and gas exploration, symbolised by the Maui offshore drilling.

The conclusion of the Maui era saw him reluctant to return to Wellington and to its inevitably more routine emphasis on commercial work.

Instead he repositioned himself and his family in Aberdeen, then as now the hub of North Sea oil.

Frank Handy eventually ended his tour of duty in Scotland and re-established himself in Auckland with his by now much expanded old partnership.

Rather later he returned to Wellington to fill the gap left by his brother-in- law the late Julian Watts who had departed for London to become the head office company secretary for BP.

An enthusiastic sportsman Frank Handy played the Heretaunga Golf Club. He never lost his taste for ecclesiastical music

As his corporate career drew to a close he insisted on retaining his practising certificate and now established himself as a sole practitioner, a kind of store front attorney, in the distinctive Hibernian Society building on Wellington’s Bond Street.

In contrast to the earlier part of his legal career Frank Handy now deployed his institutional commercial experience for the benefit of hard-pressed individuals, small businesses, and start-ups.

He consistently put himself out for those who found themselves struggling in one capacity or another.

He finally quit practising in 2022.

He is survived by his wife Lyndsey and their three children.