Moving house

A bunch of us spent yesterday helping our friend Helen move house. It wasn’t the greatest of days – it always seems to pour with rain as soon as you’ve got the beds on the back of a trailer. So there we were, somewhere between cloudbursts – Helen and I were stuffing stereo components and soft toys in the boot of her car, Mac was tying down furniture on the back of his trailer, Em was trying to persuade baby Isobel that sleep was a good idea, and Murray, Dennis and Ivor were hefting furniture onto another trailer at the front of the house – when Helen said, “how do people who don’t have friends manage this?” Good question – I guess they pay people, or struggle along by themselves. And, as I’m still working through William and Sarah’s first few days in Wellington, the big question for me was, how did the Norgroves manage their move from the immigration barracks at Kaiwharawhara to their first house on Thorndon Flat?

The Norgroves had friends, yes, although possibly not like 6-foot, six and a half inch Dennis, able to pick up large sofas and “persuade” them through narrow doorways. They didn’t have family on hand – no parents looking after the kids and organising sandwiches and bacon-and-egg pie for the workers’ lunch, no sister and brother-in-law to help out. But then again, they didn’t have beds and sofas, sideboards and fridges either. The assisted immigrants who travelled steerage to New Zealand couldn’t bring any furniture with them, unlike the cabin passengers, who could bring whatever they could squeeze into their cabins. The only furniture William and Sarah had for their home was the table that William made for that first cup of tea when they came ashore from Gertrude. There might have been some very basic items of furniture on the mud whare that became their first home – maybe shelves and hooks on the wall, perhaps a rough chair or bench, but probably not even a bed.

Many settlers slept on the floor to start with. The first primitive bed was often made from stout stakes rammed into the earth floor, with a rope and sacking hammock base slung from them, and a sacking mattress stuffed with plant material on top. The wooden boxes that brought possessions from England served double duty as both storage and seating. One large tin tub would have been used for everything from washing dishes to bathing them and the baby.

If William and Sarah couldn’t bring furniture, what would they have brought in the boxes that travelled in Gertrude’s hold? William’s tools were a priority – not just the tools of his plumbing trade, but general purpose tools as well. Sarah tells us that on that first day, William unpacked “saw, hammer and nails”, and began making a table.

Sarah would have brought her essential kitchen cooking equipment, including a camp oven; their first kitchen would also have had their tin or pewter plates, cutlery and mugs from the voyage, as well as their share of Gertrude’s left-over provisions. The immigrant ships stocked provisions for six months, and each mess could elect to use less and draw the remainder on landing. Sarah would have had their share of a month’s rations – around 15 kgs of preserved meat, 25kg of ship’s biscuits, and lesser amounts of flour, rice, preserved potatoes, peas, raisins, suet, butter, sugar, tea, salt, coffee, pepper, mustard and vinegar. She wouldn’t have had anywhere to store it, and one of William’s early priorities would have been the manufacture of some kind of food safe, to keep rats and mice away from the supplies, and perhaps some storage bins to keep the flour, rice and sugar dry.

We have no idea of what else William and Sarah brought with them. They would have had their own clothes, and Ovid’s, and Sarah would probably have brought quantities of several different fabrics along with her sewing bag. Would they have brought a china dinner set, or like many settlers, assumed it could be readily replaced on arrival? I’m sure William would have brought books as well as his painting and drawing materials. And Sarah would have asked, just as friends and family have asked me every time I move house, “do you really need all these books?” And like me, William’s reply would have been, “of course”. In fact, like me, William would have probably jettisoned shirts and trousers and jerseys to fit in a few more essential books! Did Sarah have quantities of best linen – embroidered pillow-cases and table cloths – in addition to the sheets, blankets and towels brought along for use on the ship? Would she have tucked treasured knick-knacks and ornaments, sugar bowls, and glasses, in amongst the clothes? What difficult choices had to be made by these people who had far fewer possessions than most of us these days; what should go to the new country, and what should be left behind?

At least having little luggage and only one piece of furniture should have made moving from the immigration barracks to the new house relatively easy. The distance was around two to three kilometres – half an hour to an hour’s walk. John Plimmer tells us that he “hailed a man who was driving a team of bullocks, and asked him if he would take my luggage to town”; Plimmer viewed the man’s rates as extortionate, but accepted them, and so the Plimmer family left the immigration barracks. The Norgroves had no friends and family rolling up in cars with trailers, and there were no household removal firms. Did they find someone to carry their belongings in a bullock cart, or did they walk to the new house, William perhaps making several trips to bring their boxes? I don’t know; for the purposes of the story I have to guess, and my guess is that they walked, carrying Ovid and their bags. At least it would have given William time to try and prepare Sarah for the fact that their new home was nothing like what they had left behind, although probably nothing could have really prepared her for the first sight of that mud whare with clay floors. And while Sarah might have wanted to collapse on the floor and cry her heart out in disappointment, I bet she just straightened her shoulders and set about turning that rough dwelling into a home for her little family.

Why I'd want to hug a tree

I get a lot of thinking done in the shower. In fact, I have some of my best ideas when I’m in the shower. Standing with my head under a stream of hot water, the sound of the water a kind of white noise blanking out everything else in the background – this guarantees ideas. Of course, quite a lot of ideas go straight down the drain with the shampoo, because there’s no way I can stop and write things down…

This morning it occurred to me to wonder what I’d want most when
I got ashore if I’d spent five months on a sailing ship like William and Sarah did. It didn’t take me long to decide on my top priorities :

1. fresh water. After months of drinking brackish, tainted, mud-coloured water which probably wasn’t of great quality to start with, I think I probably would have staggered ashore and thrown myself face down into the Kaiwharawhara stream and slurped like a dog. How many of the Gertrude passengers would have done likewise? I bet most of them at least bent to scoop up a handful to taste – how else would William have known how sweet and clear the water was?
2. privacy. Not a concept that the Victorians were particularly familiar with, given the large numbers in their families. But it’s something I cherish, and if I’d spent twenty weeks cheek by jowl with 170 men, women, children and babies, I’d want to go somewhere very quiet, all by myself, for a while. The immigrants might not have the same concept of privacy, and desire for it, as I do, but they were probably looking forward to getting away from their fellow passengers, especially the ones whose voices or manner or very appearance had begun to grate after such a long time together. No wonder the Gertrude passengers were less than thrilled when they discovered they were expected to squash themselves together again in the immigration barracks, and no wonder men like William wasted no time finding new accommodation.
3. cleanliness. I’ve grown up in a society that places a very high value on personal hygiene, unlike those early settlers. I wouldn’t just be face down in the stream, I’d be in there clothes and all with a bar of soap, scrubbing myself raw. Five months on a sailing ship with minimal washing facilities? Assuming the passengers were even moderately clean to start with, by Wellington they would be scurfy, greasy, smelly, lice-infested and disgusting. Apparently, if the wind was blowing onshore, the townspeople could smell the immigrant ships some distance off. Lovely. A good scrub might not have been a top priority for the Gertrude passengers, but it would be for me. This could also help answer point 2 above – my desire for privacy – I suspect I’d have the stream to myself!
4. salad! Five months without fresh vegetables would be almost unbearable. I’m not a fanatic for salads, but I’m pretty sure that by the end of five months eating boiled salt beef, doughy puddings and bad spuds, I’d be dreaming about crispy lettuce, juicy tomatoes and crunchy carrots. Not sure that my fellow passengers would be thinking the same way – the view that the only good vegetable was a well-cooked one dominated English and New Zealand cuisine well into the twentieth century. However they might feel about salads, the Gertrude passengers would have been looking forward to a change of diet, and fresh food.

And after all that, how about a nice walk, enjoying the sights we’ve been deprived of for so long? Trees, grass, simple stuff like that – contemporary accounts indicate that the immigrants were craving perfectly ordinary land-based scenery by the time their ships reached New Zealand. I think I’d probably feel like hugging a tree or two…

Friends and neighbours

I’ve been pursuing my quest to find Norgrove friends from their earliest days in Wellington, living on Thorndon Flat. First up, I had to figure out where Thorndon Flat was, because it’s not a locality name that is used today. In a general sense, Thorndon Flat was the area north of Clay Point (now Stewart Dawson’s corner, at the intersection of Lambton Quay and Willis St) – the government end of town in the 1840s. In a more particular sense, Thorndon Flat referred to the area to the east of Molesworth Street. It would have encompassed the flattish land now roughly bounded by Molesworth Street to the west, Katherine Mansfield Place to the south, Hobson St to the east and not quite to Tinakori Rd in the north (there being a bit of a gully between the “flat” and Tinakori Rd where the motorway is now). It’s quite a large area, and presumably a stranger looking for the Norgrove house in 1842 could have wandered around quite a bit of Thorndon before finding it. At least I can be confident that wherever the house was, it wasn’t on any of the streets that actually existed at the time (Mulgrave, Murphy, Molesworth, Pipitea) because those street names would have been given as the address rather than “Thorndon Flat”.

The area had some of the prime Wellington sections, but the wealthy owners were all absentee, and the land was mostly idle, or rented to settlers who couldn’t afford to buy their own land. Only one of the wealthy owners actually lived on Thorndon Flat – Charles Clifford Esq, gentleman, grazier and later JP, arrived as a cabin passenger on the George Fyfe in November 1842 and took up residence on his town acre. Chances are, he didn’t have much contact with his steerage class neighbours, and it’s unlikely that he invited the Norgroves round for tea and cucumber sandwiches.


To identify William and Sarah’s neighbours 1841 and 1842, I looked at the earliest available electoral records, the burgess rolls of 1842 and 1843, to see which other passengers from Gertrude lived nearby.

After a couple of false starts at obtaining some form of local government, Wellington was proclaimed the first borough in New Zealand on 21 May 1842. An electoral roll was immediately drawn up, although elections were not held until October. All adult males were eligible to be on the roll – they just had to enrol and pay a fee of £1. The fee may have disenfranchised many – William Norgrove does not appear on the 1842 roll, but does appear in 1843, when the fee had been reduced to 2/6. Despite the 1842 fee, a surprising number of would-be electors made their home on Thorndon Flat – 21 men, most of whom can be tracked back into passenger lists as being married men with families.

I had already identified John and Amelia Gill as steerage passengers from Gertrude and Thorndon Flat residents. Other possible Gertrude friends were Adrian Lowe, a 27 year old printer and engraver and his 28 year old wife Frances, and their six month old daughter.

A fellow Gertrude passenger, but possibly not bosom buddy, was William Pike. He was accompanied by his wife Elizabeth and their two sons and three daughters, who ranged in age from five months to eight years. William gave his occupation as “agricultural labourer” but on arrival in Wellington he became a storekeeper. Amongst his wares, Pike sold wines and spirits, although without a license. During the 1840s, Pike made numerous court appearances for illegal liquor sales, and was sentenced to jail at least twice. It seems he was well-known to the locals as a supplier of liquor, as there was no shortage of people willing to testify to their purchases – presumably the only illegality was selling without a license, and purchasers weren’t prosecuted. This must have made the neighbourhood interesting, with people dropping by under cover of darkness to purchase untaxed and illegal alcohol. Did the Norgroves know what was going on, or not? Did they even buy liquor from the Pikes? Did Mrs Pike carry on running the store, liquor and all, while her husband was in jail? Would William and Sarah have been supportive of her in her time of need, or would they have quietly avoided her?

William and Eliza Fisher were a young couple with an infant daughter who arrived on the Catherine Stewart Forbes in June 1841. William Fisher was a painter and plasterer, so it’s even possible he might have worked with our William in the early days, although later in the 1840s he would have become a business rival.

Eliza Fisher may have been one who, by virtue of having lived in Wellington for fourth months, was able to help Sarah settle in, show her where to go and how to get things done. Other women who were already settled nearby included Mary Ann Buxton, who arrived on Adelaide in 1840 with her husband and children; Jessie Evans, a young nursemaid who also arrived on the Adelaide, accompanied by her brother John; Mrs John McBeth, who arrived on Bengal Merchant in February 1840; and Sarah Pratt, who was 29 and childless when she and her husband arrived on Martha Ridgeway in November 1840. Another Martha Ridgeway passenger would have been one of the few middle-aged women in the neighbourhood – Elizabeth Hunt was 47 when she set off for New Zealand with her husband, nine children, one daughter-in-law and a grandson. The younger women of Thorndon Flat may have turned to her for the kind of advice and support they were used to getting from their own mothers.

In all, in May 1842, there were 21 families in Thorndon Flat whose men enrolled to vote, as well as 2 single men. There must have been others who, like William, couldn’t spare £1 to exercise their vote, or who perhaps were not interested in participating in democracy. By May 1843, when the next burgess roll was drawn up, only seven of the original families can be confirmed as remaining in Thorndon Flat, although there may have been others whose menfolk weren’t on the burgess roll. It would be an interesting exercise to figure out where they all went, but that’s not why I’m here………………

The point of this exercise was to figure out who was living near William and Sarah in 1841/1842. Thorndon Flat turns out to have been a larger neighbourhood than I was expecting – physically, it’s a space which has a huge number of buildings crammed into these days, including the building I work in. In the early 1840s, the houses must have been reasonably widely separated, with lots of empty space – it’s where the gentlemen of the Wellington Cricket Club first played their cricket matches, and it was also used as a military parade ground. Even so, it’s clear that William and Sarah would have found plenty of congenial company among people of similar backgrounds.

Women friends

There are always emails circulating on the internet about the importance of a woman’s friends. I was reading one yesterday that had been sent to Mum, which she wanted to share with her friends. It reminded me that the last bit of research I was working on was to try and identify some of Sarah’s friends – and that the main reason I hadn’t been researching and blogging for the last couple of weeks (apart from exhaustion – I’m sure humans are meant to hibernate in winter) is that I’ve been spending time with and helping my friends.

The reason it’s important to me to identify some of Sarah’s friends is because, like all those emails say, it’s your women friends who get you through the tough times, who share life’s joys and pains and humdrum moments with you. Your friends are the ones who tell you where to find the super-duper on-sale bargains. They go shopping with you, and know how to answer the question, “does my bum look big in this?” They hold your screaming baby so you can have five minutes peace and quiet in the loo. They put the kettle on and make cups of tea while you go and wash the tears off your face. They put your 10 year old daughter in make-up and high heels and smuggle her past the no-children-under-16 sign to visit you in hospital. They turn up in the afternoon and cram you and the kids in the car for an impromptu trip to the beach. They come to the fence to hand you cake still warm from the oven because they just had to tell you how happy they were that they’ve finally cracked the perfect marble cake recipe. They help you shift house. They lend you a table when you don’t have one. They sew with you. They send you cheery texts when you’re sick. Your women friends are there to hold you up when you can’t cope, when your marriage falls apart, when the kids are driving you crazy, when you don’t know how you’re going to pay the electricity bill, when you want to kill your boss. Your women friends celebrate with you when you’ve found a new love or had a baby or passed a test or just because it’s Friday.

When Sarah came to New Zealand, she left behind her mother, her sisters and her friends. Many of those relationships survived through letter-writing – we know about the family ones because some of the letters have survived, but we know nothing of the friends she left behind. And letters would have been small comfort in a new and unfamiliar country. New women friends would have been Sarah’s support, sharing with her the experiences of the rawness of early Wellington, the longing for the familiar things and people of home, the struggle to make do and get on in their new life. They would have watched out for each other’s children, helped deliver each other’s babies, shared news of home and worries about money. They would have laughed together at the small things women manage to find funny, and they would have cried together at heartbreaks and fears, tragedies and pains.

For the early days in Wellington, I can only speculate about who Sarah’s friends may have been. Eliza Plimmer is likely to have been a shipboard friend – the Plimmer and Norgrove bunks were adjacent, and like Sarah, Eliza was a young mum following her husband to a new country. How much time they might have spent together after arriving in Wellington is debatable – the Plimmers lived initially in Vivian St, while the Norgroves lived on Thorndon Flat. With busy lives and no access to transport, opportunities to meet must have been very limited. They would rapidly have grown apart socially, as well – John Plimmer’s quicly found success in business, as well as increased social and political influence, while William’s business ventures met with only patchy success.

Also on board Gertrude with the Norgroves were John and Amelia Gill, and their one-year old son, Frederick. The Gills settled in Thorndon Flat, so for the first year or so would have been close neighbours. With sons of the same age, and the shared experience of the voyage, it seems likely that Sarah and Amelia could have been friends. There are one or two other Gertrude families who also lived in the area who I’m targeting for some further research. Some time soon, a surprised descendant of a Gertrude passenger is going to get a email from me asking if they mind their great-great grandma being written into my great-great grandma’s story!

One friend we do know about is Emma Lumsden, who arrived in Wellington with her husband William on the Oriental just a few days before the Norgroves arrived on Gertrude. William Lumsden was a gardener and nurseryman. The Lumsdens don’t seem to have ever lived particularly close to the Norgroves – newspapers, almanacs and electoral rolls show them in Wadestown in the mid-1840s, Hawkestone St in 1849 and Tinakori Rd in the 1850s and 1860s. Somehow, though, a connection was made, and a friendship formed that lasted even after the Norgroves left Wellington – evidenced by one surviving letter. In 1863, by then widowed, Emma sends bulbs and seeds to Sarah, along with a very affectionate note to Emma Norgrove, then about 14 – could the young Emma have been named for Emma Lumsden even?

Then there’s Mrs Earll. We have a couple of letters written by Sarah later in life, one to daughter Gertrude and her husband Joe, who had moved to Wellington, and one to the family in Blenheim while Sarah was herself in Wellington visiting family and friends. The Earlls are mentioned in both letters – in fact Mrs Earll accompanied Sarah on the Wellington trip – Sarah says in her letter that “I should have been very dull but for Mrs Earll”, although her letter outlines a very busy and sociable time. William Earll seems to have been a joiner who had a sash and door factory in Blenheim, so it’s possible that the women may have met through their husbands who would have been connected by their jobs.

I’ve pondered long enough on Sarah’s friends. I’m going to and eat some of my friend Anne’s marble cake before it goes cold!