Mysteries I’ll probably never solve - #2

How was William employed between November 1841, when the family arrived in Wellington, and January 1844, when the first evidence of him running his own business appears?

William was the family breadwinner. Sarah doesn’t appear to have ever worked outside the home – she stayed home and raised her siblings as her mother produced one baby after another. She would have been totally reliant on William’s earnings to support her and the children. It’s unlikely that they had sufficient savings to live on for more than a few weeks after arrival; most of their money probably came from selling furniture and household items in England, with a view to spending it on replacing these items once they got to New Zealand. As soon as the house had been made livable, William’s priority would have been to find work.

For the first two years in New Zealand, there’s little evidence of William’s employment. I suspect 1842 was a pretty lean year financially, and he might not have had full-time work. In 1842, Wellington was proclaimed a borough, and arrangements were made for the first election of a mayor and aldermen. I can’t imagine anything stopping William from participating in the democratic process except lack of money - yet his name is not on the 1842 burgess roll. Every male inhabitant of the town over the age of 21 could register to vote – however, they had to pay 20 shillings for the privilege, which would later be credited against any rates levied by the new Council. If William couldn’t put aside 20 shillings by the time registration closed on 30 August 1842, then money must have been very tight.

The following year, when voters had to register by 31 May, and pay 2/6 for the privilege, William’s name appears on the roll of voters. He could also afford to subscribe 5/- in July to the fund for the repair of the Lambton Quay footpath, so his financial situation had obviously improved. This would have been a big relief to Sarah, with an increasing family to feed and clothe.

While there seemed to be plenty of labouring work around, including building roads for the New Zealand Company, it’s reasonable to assume that William would have initially looked for work as a plumber. He was a qualified journeyman plumber, and the only thing preventing him from setting up shop as a plumber in his own right would have been lack of money. I’m sure that he didn’t plan to launch his own business straight away – he would probably have assumed he would be able to get employment with another plumber until such time as he could afford to start his own business.

When the Norgroves arrived in Wellington, seven plumbers had arrived before them, but the 1842 burgess roll suggests that only five were practising their trade with some degree of success - John Minifie and his younger brother Thomas, Jabez Dean, Joseph Miller, and Edward Fox. Miller and Dean were the only two advertising in the local papers, and the first of these advertisements that William would have seen was Jabez Dean’s. The style of advertising was very different from today :

Jabez Dean,
Plumber, Glazier, and Painter,
Lambton Quay, near the Royal George Inn,

Returns his sincere thanks for the liberal support he has received, and begs to assure those gentlemen who may favour him with their orders, that they may depend on materials of the best description and good workmanship, combined with reasonable charges and punctuality.

William would have got a bit of a surprise when he went to knock on the door of the punctual and reasonable Mr Deans, as he was not the middle-aged master plumber he might have expected, but a young man of 22 or 23. The Minifie brothers were also young, in their mid-twenties. However, Thomas Fox was 35, and Joseph Miller was in his mid-forties. Miller advertised his plumbing business for a while in 1842, but by 1845 appears to have left for Sydney. Any or all of these men may have provided employment for William in 1842 or 1843.

Plumbers were generally also glaziers, and often painters as well. It’s possible William may have found employment with one of the many painters in Wellington, and learned his additional trade there. By the time of his first newspaper advertisement in January 1844, he is advertising himself as a painter first :

Cheap Paints
W. Norgrove, Plain and Ornamental House and Sign Painter,

Plumber and Glazer, Lambton Quay, has for sale :-

Red Anti corrosion for shingles, weather boards, Agricultural implements &c., white and red lead, oil and colours, varnish, glue, whiting &c. Wholesale and retail at the lowest prices.
Colours of every description for Artists &c.

There’s no way of knowing how long William had been in business for himself before he started advertising in the local paper, however we do know that this particular business only lasted until 15 November 1845. That’s when the bailiff was planning to sell everything, including the lease on the house/shop the Norgroves were occupying, as the result of a writ taken against him by one Harry Hughlings. Hughlings was most likely William’s landlord, and the court action was an attempt to recover unpaid rent. William and Sarah’s address remains Lambton Quay for a few years after this (they moved to Thorndon Quay in 1849) so whether he was able to come up with enough money to salvage the lease, or whether they moved to another property, is unknown.

Jury lists in the following years continue to list William’s occupation as painter. It doesn’t seem that he had a business of his own again until 1852, when he advertises himself as having taken over a local private hotel and boarding house – a complete career change that’s yet another unsolved mystery!

Mysteries I'll probably never solve - #1

Who was the shipmate the Norgroves shared their house with when they first arrived in Wellington?

Sarah says :

Your Father walked to the town early the very next day.
He hired an old mud whare the floor was only clay.
Three rooms a thatched roof the rent sixteen shillings per week.
A shipmate shared it with us, when it rained how the roof did leak.
No glass where the windows should be some calico nailed up tight.
Through the crevices came the wind, and some of the bright sunlight.
The whare was on Thorndon flat…

That’s not very helpful, Sarah. “A shipmate” implies one person rather than a family. Of the single men and women travelling on Gertrude, there were 14 men and three women who weren’t travelling with other family members.

One of the men and one of the women can be discounted straight off. Rice Owen Clarke, a 25 year old clerk and former Lloyds insurance underwriter, travelled as a single man. Ann Inglesby, 25, travelled as a single woman, as a servant to cabin passenger Ellen Garrett, the very young and pregnant wife of the ship’s doctor. During the voyage, rumours circulated that Clarke and Inglesby were actually married, but they evidently went their separate ways on arrival in Wellington. Clarke later married Louisa Felgate, and in September 1849 was charged with bigamy, on the grounds that his first wife, Ann Inglesby, was still alive. The first witness called at the trial was our William, who said that the two had lived as a married couple for about a year, before Ann left the colony – however, he didn’t think Ann was dead because he has seen and spoken to her a couple of months ago.

The two remaining women are Ann Duling and Amy Brown. Duling was a 22 year old seamstress who just disappears from history after arriving in Wellington. I can’t find any further mention of her in available records – not even a marriage. She seems pretty unlikely as a potential housemate. Amy Brown, on the other hand, is a distinct possibility. She was a 40 year old laundress who travelled on Gertrude as the ship’s matron, with her 13 year old son, who was unnamed on the passenger list.

The other single men were :
• George Ade, a 22 year miller
• Joseph Angell, 25, a gardener who worked as a labourer before becoming a small farmer. Angell later became the postmaster at Tawa Flat. In 1868, concerns about his laid-back approach to mail delivery reached the local newspaper, which printed a hilarious exposé of his deficiencies
• Charles Barrow, a 21 year old agricultural labourer who had been a surgeon’s assistant on Gertrude
• George Bartlett, a 14 year old labourer – was he emigrating alone, or was he travelling with family members with different surnames?
• William Benson, 18, a labourer
• Edmund Chatfield, a 16 year old agricultural labourer
• Robert Conway, 20, agricultural labourer
• William Durrant, a 25 year old labourer – he may have gone off to Nelson shortly after arriving
• James Rumsey Forster, a 22 year old former bookseller who found clerical work on arrival in Wellington
• Edward Lowe, the other assistant to the surgeon on Gertrude. Lowe was a 19 year old clerk
• James Russell, 21, a gardener
• Stephen Sherring, 17, agricultural labourer
• William Wilson, a 32 year old baker

So does is matter who the housemate was? The existence of the housemate certainly matters, because it affects the Norgrove family dynamic. In England, William, Sarah and Ovid had lived as a single family unit, rather than with extended family. They had spent six months living cheek by jowl with dozens of other families on Gertrude. They were probably looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet as a family, even if their first house in New Zealand was a leaky shack with a mud floor and no glass in the windows. On the other hand, 16 shillings a week in rent was a lot of money. Labourers were earning about £1/10 a week; “mechanics” or skilled tradesmen could earn as much as £2/14. Even if William was earning over £2, Sarah would have been grateful to have someone else contributing to the rent, even if it meant cooking and doing laundry for an extra person.

But who was the housemate? Well, this is where I find the lines between biography and novel get blurry. I’m writing a biography in the form of a novel – there are no rules here. I know I have to make things up so that the story hangs together without any nasty gaping holes where I’m lacking in facts. I try to make sure that what I invent makes sense, both historically and for the people as I know them.

So I need to include the housemate in the story – who’s it going to be? I think it’s likely that the Norgroves only shared the Thorndon flat whare, and when they moved to Lambton Quay on 1842, they left their housemate behind – probably in possession of the whare. The 1842 and 1843 burgess rolls for Wellington don’t show any of the single men living on Thorndon flat – so whoever it was either didn’t meet the financial qualification for voting, or was too young, or was a woman.

It’s tempting to pick one of the very young single men as being the least likely to find accommodation on their own and needing to lodge with a family. George Bartlett, at 14, is the youngest, but I find it hard to believe he was travelling on his own. One of the families or young couples on Gertrude must have been related to him – an aunt, or a sister perhaps, to account for there being no-one else with the same name. Next youngest are 16 year old Edmund Chatfield and 17 year old Stephen Sherring, but as agricultural labourers, chances are that they would have been snapped up by employers almost as soon as they came ashore. One of the others, perhaps? As the eldest of a large family, Sarah probably wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at taking a young lad under her wing; William, with only a much younger sister, might have enjoyed having a temporary younger “brother”.

I think the most likely candidate for housemate was actually Amy Brown and her son. I know Sarah said “a shipmate”, singular, but she was trying to make the words fit her verse – and it’s likely enough that she would count the adult and discount the child in her thinking. Amy Brown would have been able to get laundry work quite easily in one or more of the wealthier households, but this would have been most unlikely to be a live-in position. It would make sense for her to have taken over the lease of the Thorndon flat house when the Norgroves moved to Lambton Quay – then she herself could have taken in a lodger to help with the rent.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to find out for sure who the housemate was. I could just invent some entirely fictitious character, I suppose, but picking one of these gives me somewhere to start from. Everything else about them will be fiction anyway.

Keeping the Sabbath

The first earthquake William and Sarah experienced in New Zealand was on 22 May 1842 – a moderate quake, calculated to be less than 4.5 on the Richter scale, but undoubtedly a nasty shock all the same. You can be sure that the NZ Company hadn’t mentioned the general shakiness of the New Zealand landscape in its advertising for settlers. The New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator reported :

On Sunday last, at half-past 9 o’clock AM, we experienced a distinct shock of an earthquake. It continued for about four seconds, and felt like an upheaving of the earth.

So I wondered, what were William and Sarah and Ovid doing at 9.30 that Sunday morning? The obvious thought is that they were in church or getting ready to go there. There’s an assumption somehow that respectable Victorians of all classes went to church once or even twice on a Sunday, that they kept the Sabbath holy by not doing any work, and that they probably spent their non-Church time quietly reading the Bible to each other. How realistic is such an assumption for settler society in early New Zealand?

Not very, as it turns out. For a start, there weren’t any churches in Wellington in 1842. There was a “Native Chapel” at Te Aro pa, where the Presbyterian Minister held an 11am service, although I suspect that most of the settlers would have opted for his 1.15pm service at the Court House rather than go to the pa. There was an Anglican minister, Rev. R Davy, who appears to have preached occasionally, and sold Bibles and prayer books – he was based at Kumutoto, so was likely a missionary rather than a minister to the settler society.

I’m assuming the Norgroves attended Anglican services. William was baptised in an Anglican church, and he and Sarah were married in one. Sarah’s family appear to have been Baptists – her younger, blind brother became a deacon and preached in the market-place of their English home town using a Bible with an early form of raised type. And on the day of William and Sarah’s marriage, Sarah tells us the rest of her family went to chapel, and only her brother accompanied her to the church for the wedding. Presumably Sarah dutifully converted to her husband’s brand upon marriage.

The New Zealand Company had imported, at great expense, a Rev. Churton of the Anglican Church, but early in 1842 he was poached by Governor Hobson for Auckland. This was regarded as just another sign of the Governor’s antipathy towards the Wellington colony, but as no-one much liked Churton, he wasn’t regarded as a great loss by the Port Nicholson residents. Fortunately the Anglicans weren’t forced into ecumenism by the lack of a minister. According to the New Zealand Gazette “several gentlemen have arranged alternately to read prayers at the Court-house, every Sunday, at 11 o’clock, in the absence of a clergyman of the Church of England”.

Bishop Selwyn arrived in August 1842, bringing with him the Rev. R Cole to be the Anglican minister for Wellington. From then on, Anglicans had regular Sunday services, although the first Anglican church in Wellington was not built until 1844. This was the first St Paul’s, a small timber building in the area where the Beehive now stands.

So, at 9.30 in the morning on Sunday 22 May 1842, the Norgroves were probably planning to go to the Court-house for the 11am Anglican service conducted by a lay-reader. William had probably worked on Saturday, maybe a half day, maybe his full eight hours if work was available [the 8-hour day was well-established in Wellington by 1841, thanks to Samuel Parnell]. Saturday night would have been bath night, with much chopping of firewood and boiling of hot water. Sarah would have made sure that everyone’s Sunday best clothes were clean and pressed and ready to go.

Sunday morning maybe meant a bit of a lie-in, however much of one might be possible with an active two-year old in the house. The big challenge would probably have been to keep Ovid clean and tidy until it was time to go to church – maybe this was a bit of father-son time for William and his boy. As for Sarah, how strictly could she obey the no-work stricture of keeping the Sabbath, with a family and possibly also a boarder to feed? At the very least she probably spent part of the morning preparing vegetables for the Sunday roast, to be eaten in the early afternoon when they returned from church.

On this particular day, the service would have been relatively short because of being taken by a lay-reader rather than a clergyman. It was most likely the Matins service from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, something most Anglican households would have had at least one copy of. There was probably at least one extra prayer on the subject of the earthquake! As nowadays, a short time before and after church was probably spent socialising, a weekly catch-up with people who didn’t live close enough to talk to every day. Then it would be home to the big meal, and maybe short naps all round afterwards. On a fine afternoon, the family might have gone out for a walk; rainy Sunday afternoons were probably a good opportunity for letter-writing and maybe an opportunity to read – something improving, of course! This particular Sunday, there would probably have been plenty of discussion about the earthquake. Other church-goers who had been in New Zealand longer would have been sharing what they knew about earlier earthquakes – Wellington had a couple early in 1841, and New Plymouth had quite a big one in September 1841, followed by smaller ones in November and December. It would have been just one more thing to make Sarah and William wonder if they had done the right thing in coming to New Zealand!