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.