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Here are some more letters from the alphabet exercise I've been working on over the last week or two. Wellington is almost a character in itself in some of these. Sometimes I'm so immersed in Wellington as it was in 1841 and 1842 that I get a nasty shock when I find myself in the present. Then there was the morning on the train, coming round the harbour, when past and present blurred together and Sarah's view and my view were suddenly the same.
B is for bowl. The harbour was like an enormous bowl with water in the bottom of it. The sides of the bowl rose away bush-clad and steep, and the town grasped at whatever land it could at the edge of the water. Sometimes in a roaring southerly, with the sea rising and pushing at the town, it seemed that the bowl would fill with water and cover them all. She knew it couldn’t really happen, but sometimes she imagined them living under water in the bottom of the bowl, the great kahikatea trees as slippery and supple as seaweed, fish swimming down Lambton Quay amongst the carts and horses and women with shopping baskets.
A lot of the letters of the alphabet picked up on Sarah's thoughts and feelings about her second pregnancy - Oscar - in 1842.
C is for confinement. Needlework freed her mind to wander, and it always seemed to wander to her greatest worry, her impending confinement. She was dreading it, not looking forward at all to the inevitable pain, when the baby took over and seemingly began to tear and batter its way out while she fought it for her own life. At the same time she was anxious for it to be over and both of them safe, God willing. Her mother had been the same every time, but at least she had Sarah, had the comfort of knowing that if God took her, Sarah would be there to look after the other children. When Ovid came, having Mother there had been a big comfort, knowing that if it all went wrong, she would take care of the baby. Here in New Zealand, with no family, her fears worried at her. She wanted to be practical, tell William that if she did not survive he should marry again as soon as possible, to provide a mother for Ovid, and the child if it survived her. But she couldn’t bear the thought that she might have to leave her dear William and Ovid, and when the tiny stitches blurred and tears fell into the fine cotton she wasn’t sure whether she was grieving for herself or for them.
D is for daughter. She hoped this baby would be a girl. William wanted another son, but she wanted a daughter this time. Men didn’t seem to value daughters in the same way as women did. Daughters were useful, of course, to help with cooking and housework and the smaller children; but really, a daughter was another chance, someone who could be a better version of herself, prettier, more accomplished perhaps.
Earthquakes were always going to make an appearance - can't live around here without them.
E is for earthquake. That last one had been a real rattler – it seemed to go on for an eternity while the china clattered on the shelves and the table rocked and swayed as she crouched under it, clutching Ovid for dear life. Her heart was still pounding as hard as if she had been running. Would she ever get used to these earthquakes? Did anyone? The Maori children from Pipitea Pa would run out calling “ru, ru”, giggling and laughing like it was something they enjoyed. But how could you enjoy it when the solid and dependable earth beneath your feet suddenly started to ripple and shake so that you couldn’t stand up, and you had no idea how long it would last, or what would come tumbling down?
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!
Last week was Disaster Awareness Week, and the “featured disaster” was an earthquake – a big deal for most New Zealanders, and especially those of us who live or work in Wellington. And while disaster awareness and preparation is of professional interest to me, there’s also the fact that earthquakes seem to have been quite significant in early Norgrove history.
Prior to the arrival of settlers, Maori were well-used to earthquakes. They had a word for them (ru) and an explanation – the god Ruamoko, son of Ranginui, the sky, and Papatuanuku, the earth, buried at his mother’s breast. Ruamoko is the god of volcanoes and earthquakes, and the earth’s tremors are caused by his subterranean movements.
Early settlers from 1840 onwards had already experienced many minor earthquakes, and one or two real doozies. On the 4th of December 1846, Wellington was jolted by a severe earthquake lasting several seconds, which caused people to run outside in panic. Perhaps not Sarah, though, as only the day before she had given birth to son Horace, and was probably still in bed recovering. There were at least 10 aftershocks over the next few days; then began a series of smaller earthquakes which went on for the next two years, about one a month.
Then on 16 October 1848 came the first major quake to affect Wellington. At about 1.40am on Monday morning, during a horrible night of severe gales and heavy rain, residents were woken, and in some cases thrown from their beds, by a major earthquake now estimated to have been of magnitude 7.5 on the Richter scale. The earthquake was actually centred in Awatere Valley in Marlborough, but was felt from Hawke’s Bay to Canterbury. The bulk of the damage was in Wellington, which was the most densely populated area at the time, with around 4500 settlers in addition to the Maori population. Three people in Wellington died as a result of the earthquake – a sergeant from the Mt Cook barracks, and two of his small children, who were buried by the collapse of a brick wall.
Sarah’s daughter Emma claimed to have been born during the earthquake, but in fact she was born during the tail-end of the big aftershocks, on 23 October. I have to wonder whether the shock and stress of the big earthquake and the ongoing aftershocks caused Sarah to go into labour prematurely; if that was the case, it doesn’t seem to have done Emma any harm, as she outlived the rest of her siblings and died at a ripe old age, two days after her 97th birthday.
In an attempt to “avert the recurrence of any similar visitation”, Lieutenant-Governor Eyre proclaimed Friday 20th October as a day of “public and solemn fast, prayer, and humiliation”. He also took the somewhat bizarre precaution of shifting most of the coinage from his treasury aboard a naval ship anchored in the harbour, although why he thought it would be safer there suggests how little he understood about earthquakes.
The 1848 earthquake badly damaged brick and stone buildings. Wooden buildings fared better, although many lost their brick chimneys. A major aftershock on the Tuesday afternoon finished off many of the buildings which had been badly damaged – fortunately by then the weather had improved, and people weren’t trying to keep the rain out of the holes where their chimneys had once been. On Wednesday morning the tide came in rather higher than it should have, and a number of Lambton Quay and Te Aro properties were inundated. William and Sarah and their family were living on Lambton Quay at this time – the houses here generally fared better in the earthquake than those at Te Aro and Thorndon, but didn’t escape completely because of the disastrous high tide.
We know that some time in 1849 the family moved from Lambton Quay to Thorndon Quay – could the 1848 earthquake have been a contributing factor in the decision to move? Was their house so badly damaged that they had to move? Did they think that Thorndon Quay might be safer in an earthquake? Or had William managed to put together enough money to buy a property rather than continue renting? Did they simply need more room, now that they had five children?
The next major earthquake was The Big One – a massive shock of 8.2 on the Richter scale, on 23 January 1855. This earthquake was on the Wairarapa faultline, and it visibly changed the landscape in ways that can still be seen over 150 years later.
Wellingtonians were in the middle of a two-day celebration of the 15th anniversary of the founding of the settlement. On the day before, there had been whale-boat races in the harbour; on the day of the earthquake, crowds of people had travelled to Miramar for horse-racing. Whether Sarah attended any of the events is unknown, but William and Ovid were still in the Victorian goldfields, leaving Sarah alone in the Thorndon Quay house with six children ranging in age from 12 (Oscar) to 2 (Kate).
At 17 minutes past nine on the Tuesday evening, the great earthquake struck. The first shock last 50 seconds, but must have seemed much longer as houses shook, windows broke, ornaments and furniture were thrown to the ground, and chimneys collapsed. Many people had trouble getting out of their houses because doors and windows jammed. The tide was high at the time, and the water level suddenly rose over two metres, flooding many of the shops and houses in Lambton Quay. The water then receded to a level several metres below the previous low tide mark, and for the next 8 hours it rose and fell every 20 to 25 minutes. A tsunami about ten minutes after the earthquake caused flooding in the sea-side suburbs, but didn’t have any appreciable effect in the inner harbour.
Most people spent the rest of the night outside, in makeshift tents or huddled in sheets and blankets, as the aftershocks continued. When daylight came, the extent of the damage was visible, from fallen and damaged to buildings to the unexpected change in Lambton Quay where the beach-front had experienced an uplift of about 1 metre. Many of the roads contained deep fissures which oozed mud. Aftershocks continued throughout the day, causing no little danger to the 65th regiment, who from daybreak had started pulling down the worst-damaged buildings. Amazingly, only one person was killed in Wellington, local identity Baron von Alzdorf, flattened by a falling chimney in his hotel.
Repairing the damage took months. How Sarah and the children coped is not known; however, it would seem that the earthquake brought William and Ovid home from Australia as fast as they could get there. In 1855, this wasn’t all that fast. It would have taken weeks for a letter from Sarah to reach William; in fact, it’s likely that he saw newspaper reports of devastation and catastrophe in Wellington, and immediately set off from the diggings, taking the first ship that would get him and Ovid back to New Zealand. This was the Wild Irish Girl, which landed them at Nelson on 10 May 1855. I haven’t yet found any record of how he and Ovid travelled back to Wellington, but perhaps a day or two spent looking around Nelson while waiting for a ship gave William a favourable opinion of the town, which had suffered much less earthquake damage. By October 1855, fourteen years after arriving in New Zealand, the whole family had removed to Nelson – driven away by Wellington’s shaky situation?
