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.
