Going fishing

I’m not much into fishing for actual fish. I like my fish to arrive steaming hot, wrapped in crispy batter and surrounded by chips. However, growing up with a brother who was, and still is, seriously into fishing, means that I spent hours of my youth dangling lines from assorted wharves and sea-walls. Generally, by the time I noticed the nibbling on my line, the bait and the fish were gone. Either that, or I fell in the water. Iain’s a different matter – when he goes fishing, he catches fish, and he comes home dry. He once tried to teach me the art of fly-casting in the back-yard. I might have been quite successful standing with my back to the fish – I caught a number of things behind me, including the clothes-line and the garage. The only time I actually managed to get the fly to land in front of me, it was half-way up a plum tree – a useful technique for catching that little-known species, the flying trout. I think that’s when Iain gave up on me and the damage I was doing to his fishing gear. He packed up and headed off to the river, and I returned to my regular bookish pursuits.

These days, when I go fishing, I’m casting my lines in the deep ponds of online databases and websites. A family name like Norgrove is an excellent bait – in the first few decades of New Zealand settlement, our Norgroves were the only ones in the country, so any references I fish up are going to be family. Every now and then I pull up something odd, like one of those ugly prehistoric-looking monsters that people find in Wellington harbour – the sort of fish you’ve half a mind to throw back. One such fishy surprise was in an 1877 issue of The Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, an article entitled “On the Habits of the New Zealand Grayling”. The grayling was a small native fish that is now extinct; even in 1877 it was becoming rare, hence the author’s investigation into its habits. Among the sources cited was our William, who said :

I have taken the grayling in the Maitai, just where the tide breaks into the fresh water, in large quantities, and as much as four miles higher up always in shoals. About the month of March they go up to spawn. I have fished at the mouth of the same river at all seasons in the salt water and caught lots of so-called herrings, which are, I believe, a kind of mullet, but never caught a single grayling at any time. They remain about a month, and then not one to be seen higher or lower.

Well, knock me over with a Parson’s Glory, but I never thought of William going fishing. There are probably any number of other blokey activities that I haven’t considered William doing either, but I guess I imagined William spending what little leisure time he had drawing and painting. Now I have to get my head around the idea of him dropping a line over one of Wellington’s many wooden jetties, or wading into Nelson’s Maitai river with his boys and netting a huge haul of graylings.

Then there’s the thought of Sarah – how often was she presented with a flax basket or soggy newspaper parcel of fish to cook for dinner? At least grayling didn’t have to be gutted and filleted – another article from the Royal Society’s learned journal advises that they were boiled whole, and “in eating, the flesh is drawn off the bone by a sucking action of the mouth, the head and bone being thrown behind over the shoulder.” Fun for the whole family, cat included.

The great fire of Wellington

I’ve been doing some more research into the fire on Lambton Quay on 9 November 1842, if only because it struck me as odd that William took his family up onto the Terrace to get away from it.

The wind was blowing from the north-west (“half a gale” according to one local newspaper). The Norgroves lived at almost the northern-most end of Lambton Quay, near the intersection with Mulgrave St. The fire started the best part of half a mile south-east of that and was heading away from them. Of course anyone who has spent more than five minutes in Wellington knows that the wind there can change direction in the blink of an eye, but any wind shift would have been more likely to push the fire up onto the Terrace than not.

The map below is of modern Wellington - the green line marks the Beach as it was in 1842 (everything to the right of the line is on reclaimed land).

The most likely reason for going up onto the Terrace was either that William wanted to seek shelter for his wife and children in the home of a friend, or in one of the wealthier settler’s homes. An exposed beach-front in a howling gale in the middle of the night is no place for a nine-day old baby. William’s priority was probably to get Sarah and the children safely under cover before going back to help fight the fire. Oscar wasn’t the youngest baby affected by the fire though – a Mrs Samuel had given birth to a daughter that day, and was given shelter at Barrett’s hotel during the fire.

The north-western end of Lambton Quay curves away from the Terrace, out to a point at its intersection with Thorndon Quay. This is the end the Norgroves were at, and to get to the Terrace, the family most likely went round the corner onto Sydney Street (now Kate Shepherd Place). They would have crossed the old Government reserve somewhere in the area of Museum Street to reach the Terrace. There were few houses on the Terrace at this early stage – the largest and best of them was Colonel Wakefield’s, which sat high on a town acre which stretched from Lambton Quay to the Terrace. Wakefield himself was out of town the night of the fire.

The fire started at Lloyd the baker’s premises, and from there proceeded to consume a solicitor’s office, a fishmonger’s, two pubs, a shoemaker’s, three butcher shops, Mrs Millar’s boarding house, two carpenters’ premises, two tailors’ shops, a stay-maker, another baker’s, a greengrocer, a hairdresser, a coffee-house and a bootmaker’s. Several stores and warehouses, the entire Kumutoto pa and sundry other private residences also went up in smoke. Jabez Dean, the plumber and painter who I’ve speculated William may have worked for, also lost his premises in the blaze. In all, contemporary accounts suggest 57 or 59 buildings were destroyed, of which around half were “Maori houses” made largely of raupo. Several more raupo buildings were pulled down to prevent the fire spreading even further.

It was quite a night. One account has the residents, aided by local Maori, rushing out of their houses with armloads of possessions and dumping them on the beach. Another account suggests that townspeople took refuge from the heat of the fire in water itself, although given how a north-westerly whips up the harbour, that seems unlikely. Sailors from the Bolina which was moored in the harbour helped with the fire-fighting, as did soldiers based in the town.

The fire was finally extinguished early in the morning – that afternoon, a public meeting, chaired by the mayor, gathered at the Exchange building and it was immediately agreed to launch a fund-raising appeal to help provide for the immediate needs of those affected by the fire. Almost £158 was immediately donated by those at meeting, and the total sum eventually raised was more than £360. The total losses of those affected were estimated to be in the order of £16,000. The economic effects of the fire were widely felt in the community because of the loss of large quantities of goods in the destroyed warehouses, as well as the temporary loss of services from a large number of small businesses. Some businesses recovered quicker than others – within six weeks, Lloyd the baker, in whose premises the fire started, was advertising he was back in business on the site of his former premises.

The morning after the fire, local Maori offered to build, free of charge, several raupo houses as temporary shelter for those who had lost their homes. The offer was declined on the grounds that it was the raupo houses which had made the effects of the fire so disastrous. Many of the dispossessed were accommodated in the New Zealand Company’s immigration barracks. The Maori took up a collection at their Sunday church service, and contributed to the relief fund instead.

The fire resulted in New Zealand’s first building legislation, the Raupo House Ordinance, which prevented the further construction of raupo houses within towns, and severely and punitively taxed the owners of the remaining existing raupo buildings. Later, the 1857 Town Protection Act required householders to keep two buckets full of water for fire-fighting purposes. In 1858, the Council bought itself a fire engine, which was operated by the police. The first volunteer fire brigade formed in 1865, with the help of funding from insurance companies.

Happy birthday!

On 1 November 1842, in a house on Lambton Quay somewhere in the vicinity of the present bus station, Sarah gave birth to her second child, Oscar Alfred Norgrove. Oscar was the first of the Norgrove children born in New Zealand. Today is also the birthday of his great-great-grandson, my nephew Cody, who is 6 – happy birthday Oscar and Cody!

We don’t know very much about Oscar when he was 6, or at any other time during his childhood. He was nine days old when a fire broke out soon after midnight at the Lloyd’s bakery on Lambton Quay. The fire spread quickly among the wooden buildings, and although it headed south and east, towards Te Aro pa, William took his young family up onto Wellington Terrace to be safe. Sarah makes mention of this story in a poem she wrote for her children – I suppose it was an unforgettable night for her, waiting on the hill in the small hours of the morning with a sleepy toddler and a new-born baby. She doesn’t say so, but William had probably gone to join the other settlers, local Maori, and the crew of several ships in harbour in fighting the fire. She would have been mightily relieved to go home in the morning, with William safe. Although many houses were destroyed, no-one was hurt in the fire.

The family moved to Blenheim in 1861, and Oscar seems to have taken up painting and wall-papering as his trade. By then, he was the eldest son, his older brother Ovid having died of tuberculosis three years earlier. In 1878 Oscar married Edith Brook, and their first child (my grandfather) was born later that year. Two girls and two more boys followed at tidy two year intervals.

Apparently Oscar was bright, very bright, scary-genius bright, and was given to tinkering around and coming up with new inventions. There was some concern in the family that he was insane, because some of his inventions seemed pretty wacky and way out for the time. The concern reached a whole new level in March 1888 when Oscar was committed to the Wellington Lunatic Asylum. The Marlborough Express reported :

LUNACY – Oscar Norgrove was committed to the Wellington Lunatic Asylum on Saturday by Mr Allen RM, Drs Cleghorn and Nairn having certified to his being insane. The poor fellow brought to our office a few days ago some models, very cleverly designed, with which he had been working out the theory of perpetual motion. Great sympathy is felt for his family.

I’m sure it was just wonderful for his family to have this announced to the whole town. His father had died two years previously, so was spared the sight of his son being carted off to the loony bin, but mother Sarah was still alive. Poor Edith was probably eyeing the kids and wondering if the insanity was hereditary (it doesn’t seem to have been – we’re all just fine, thanks!)

Although the modern view of nineteenth century definitions of insanity seems to be that the men in white coats carted off anyone who was a bit different, the reality of mental health care in New Zealand at this time wasn’t like that at all. Lunatic asylums didn’t differentiate between those who were mentally ill – treatable and with hope of recovery – and those who were mentally impaired from birth defect, accident or alcoholism. All were lumped in together. An ideal existed of providing a quiet haven with steady routines and therapeutic manual work, but by late in the century the asylums were becoming overcrowded. The country had a large population of early settlers who had never married. These men were aging, and many had mental health problems brought on by alcoholism, as well as age-related disorders. With nowhere else for them to go, the asylums had to take them in and care for them till they died. Wellington Lunatic Asylum (on the site now occupied by Government House) was probably less overcrowded than some in 1888, as the Porirua Asylum had opened the previous year.

Whatever Oscar’s problem was, it had to have been pretty serious if his large extended family couldn’t manage to look after him. It had to have been more than a matter of being misunderstood for his way-out ideas. Whether as a result of treatment or on his own, he seems to have recovered. I’m not sure when he was released (haven’t yet found the newspaper article trumpeting the return of his sanity), but by 1891 he was back in Blenheim, painting the parsonage.

In 1892, the Marlborough Express reprinted a letter titled “A New Zealand Inventor” from an Australian newspaper which makes it pretty clear that Oscar was indeed a clever chap. The writer of the letter (“FM” of Levin) had seen a newspaper article about someone in England who had patented a design for a boat with three keels, and that the admiralty intended to have some vessels constructed on the design. The inventor had apparently derived his idea from the albatross. “FM” went on to say :

I wish to call the attention of the public, through your paper, to the fact that the original inventor is Mr Oscar Norgrove, of Blenheim, Marlborough, New Zealand; that he constructed a model, which I saw, with plans, which he forwarded to the Admiralty, and that he stated at the time that he had derived the idea from the movements of the albatross. He has been a most enterprising man, and I think should have the credit of his invention, if not the profit. He forwarded the model, &c, about two years ago, while th[is] patent is quite
recent. Models and plans will be found in his possession on inquiry.

Now here’s the only photograph I have of Oscar, posing in front of the house in
Manse Road with Edith, Edgar and Bertha. Judging by the size of the children, the photo would have been taken in the late 1880s. When Mum gave me the photo, she told me Oscar was holding one of his inventions. The photo has faded badly, and between the cricket cap and a beard of old testament proportions, it’s pretty hard to see what Oscar looks like. But it sure looks to me that what he’s holding is a pair of model-size trimaran hulls!

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!

Pregnancy, then and now

I got back to work after my summer holidays to discover an absolute epidemic of pregnancy in our building, including three young women on the same floor as me. All three are at different stages – one with only a few weeks to go before Baby Day, one at around 20 weeks, and one around 9 weeks. They all sit together in a “pod” of 4 desks – the fourth woman is a grandmother who has stopped drinking the local water just as a precaution!

Discussions in the tea room centre around baby preparations and pregnancy comparisons, all three being first-time mums-to-be. This is endlessly fascinating to me as the biographer of a woman who had 10 children; the three pregnant women know about great-great grandma and are interested in comparing 1840s/1850s pregnancies with their own. They were hardly surprised when I looked at someone’s 9-week scan and commented that Sarah wouldn’t have had one of those, but they were surprised by some of the things I found in my latest research reading on the historical management of pregnancy and childbirth.

In the late eighteenth-century, pregnancy and childbirth were just beginning to be medicalised by doctors. It was greed, pure and simple. Upper class and aristocratic women were making it trendy to have an accoucheur, a male obstetrician, rather than a woman midwife. And doctors were keen to get into the baby business because it was easy money, all these rich women needing their help to pop out babies. Debate was intense as to whether the developing foetus was a separate entity from the mother before birth, and a view of the foetus as having separate rights from the mother was beginning to form – although most practitioners came down pragmatically on the side of the mother if pregnancy complications necessitated a choice between mother or baby.

The stethoscope was invented in 1819. In 1822, a young doctor had the inspiration of applying it to a pregnant belly, expecting to hear the “splashing” of the foetus in the amniotic fluid. To his great surprise, he heard a heartbeat instead, and is now credited with the discovery of the foetal heartbeat. I expect that midwives had probably discovered it long before this, but they were women, and thus didn’t count in the new world of scientific discovery. The foetal heartbeat soon became a significant tool in monitoring a pregnancy, within the bounds of modesty demanded by Victorian decorum.

Early medical intervention didn’t mean much beyond foetal monitoring and forceps deliveries. There was nothing like the wealth of information women have today, from books and medical pamphlets and websites, to scans, measurements and weigh-ins. What seems to have been traded for today’s information, and perhaps the security it provides, is modesty. Modern women usually say that after the first baby, they’ve got no modesty left. Notwithstanding today’s bikinis, low-cut tops, TV nudity and casual sex, today’s pregnant women have to deal with a variety of professionals peering at their nether parts under high illumination on numerous occasions. Great-great grandma, on the other hand, dressed modestly, especially when pregnant, and was unlikely to have experienced any stranger’s hand on her bits, and possibly not even her husband’s. Accepted procedure for the rare physical examination was for the pregnant woman to lie fully dressed on her side with her knees drawn up to her chest, while the doctor, carefully avoiding eye contact, rummaged under layers of garments, and literally groped his way through the examination working by touch alone.

Historically, women couldn’t be sure they were pregnant until around 4 months – the quickening, literally coming to life, as the baby’s first movements were felt. For first-time mums, even then they couldn’t be sure, having not experienced the sensations before. The cessation of periods wasn’t a reliable indicator. Unlike today’s hormone-regulated menstrual cycles, these women may not have even had a period at the time of first pregnancy. And later pregnancies might not be detected by women who spent the majority of their lives pregnant and breast-feeding – the menstrual cycle simply didn’t settle down into a regular pattern.

Technical and medical issues aside, possibly the most striking difference between Sarah’s child-bearing, and that of the young women I work with, is in the matter of choice. It’s not just that today’s young mums can chose whether or not to have children; they can (to a point) choose when, and how many. For Sarah, children were the inevitable outcome of marriage, and while breast-feeding might help to space them out a bit, the average nineteenth-century fertile woman would bear eight children. Sarah had ten live births; we don’t know whether she had any failed pregnancies. Most women today choose fewer children, at wider-spaced intervals. Choosing when to start “trying for a family” (not a phrase that Sarah would ever have heard) now means a myriad of decisions – the ability to support a child, impact on careers, future child-care options, even just feeling ready to have a child. Once the decision to go forth and procreate has been made, and assuming fertility isn’t a problem, that’s just the start of the choices : to know the gender or not; when to stop working; disposables or cloth nappies; home birth or hospital; epidural, or not, or even an elective Caesarian; birth plans and positions and which family and friends will attend; video or just photos; when to go back to work, and if early, bottle-feeding or expressing or having the baby brought into work for feeds; crèche or in-home child-care? Clothes, bedding, nursery decorations, toys, cot, baby capsule, car seats, wipes – the expense mounts up as well.

The choices may be bewildering to modern women navigating their way through first pregnancies; to great-great grandma they would be incomprehensible. She got pregnant when she got pregnant, had the baby when the baby was ready to come, survived or not depending largely on luck and her own strength, breast-fed and used cloth nappies, took care of the rest of the family, had the next baby when the time came, and with good fortune raised most of her children to adulthood. She dressed to hide her pregnancy as much as possible, keeping her corset on until she couldn’t do it up any more; she didn’t flaunt her belly and discuss the details with everyone she met – even her parents back in England might not know of the pregnancy until the birth was announced. She wouldn’t have gone out much in public in the latter stages of pregnancy, and she certainly wouldn’t have had a photo of herself taken while pregnant (let alone a video of the actual delivery!)

The one choice that Sarah had which today’s women don’t, was whether or not to involve the medical profession in her pregnancy. That choice was personal (and possibly economic), barring emergencies – she could have chosen to keep her pregnancy to herself until delivery, and then given birth with the help of a midwife, or friend or neighbour. She didn’t have to have a doctor and a raft of pre-natal checks. Nowadays, it’s nigh on impossible to have a baby without the involvement of the medical profession – and although most women wouldn’t have it any other way, there are always some who want to keep delivery as natural as possible and with the least amount of intervention – and they usually have to fight to achieve this.

Given the choice, would Sarah have traded her modesty and dignity and privacy for information about her own health and the baby’s progress? Would she have wanted the security provided by today’s very low maternal and infant mortality? I think it’s very likely that she would. Would she have wanted the choice of how many children she would bear, and when, and all the other choices and decisions that follow? That’s harder to know because it’s harder to separate from the culture and conventions of her time, her upbringing, her view of the world and her place in it. But if you could show her a scan of her growing baby, I think she’d react just the same as the young mums at work – with wonder and awe and amazement at seeing into the secret world of the tiny clench-fisted creature curled safe inside her.

Birthdays

If you’d been thinking there was something wrong with my blog’s web-page because it was permanently stuck in October 2008, you’d be wrong. I just haven’t updated it for a few months. It’s hard to start back again – do I explain my absence (pressure of the paying job, mostly) or do I jump straight back in? Or a bit of both?

It was Helen who put the hard word on me – “update your damn blog” – a couple of weeks back, on the occasion of my god-daughter Izzy’s first birthday party. A good time was had by all, especially the birthday girl, although she really doesn’t have the hang of presents yet. She’s much more interested in crawling off at high speed. She enjoyed her birthday cake, a sponge decorated with her name written in marshmallows. I know she enjoyed the cake because I got given the job of feeding it to her, and at one point she chomped down quite enthusiastically on my finger. Those little baby teeth are sharp! Who would want to be breast-feeding when the teeth started to arrive – instead of a mother-baby bonding moment, it would be a desperate race to refuel the little piranha before it drew blood. Poor Sarah, still breast-feeding Ovid when he was sixteen months.

Anyway, Izzy’s birthday party made me wonder about the celebration of birthdays back in Victorian times. I wasn’t sure that they celebrated at all, although you would think, given the infant mortality rate, that Victorian parents might want to mark the first and second birthdays just to acknowledge the child’s survival. Or maybe they didn’t want to make too big a deal of it, in case they somehow jinxed the baby?

Further research revealed that social class and income seem to have played a part. By late in the Victorian period, lavish children’s parties with entertainment like a conjuror, were all the rage in upper-class and aristocratic families. Even the middle-class were doing their best to keep up with the Joneses when it came to birthday bashes. It all seems very much like the McDonald’s / magician / clown parties young children seem to expect today.

On the other hand, most children of the poor struggled to be able to say how old they were, let alone the date of their birthday. It seems unlikely that their birthdays were marked in any special way, or even remembered at all.

Working class families seem to have celebrated birthdays according to their means. The day would be remembered, but whether there was any more to it than recognition that it was Fred or Jane’s birthday depended on the state of the family finances. A special family meal could probably be managed. If there were presents, they were more likely to be things the birthday boy or girl needed – hankies and underwear, those traditional stand-bys – or things lovingly crafted by siblings – embroidered hankies, knitted scarves or pen-wipers, a rag doll or carved animal. Sometimes cards would be sent by relatives, maybe with a little money.

I imagine this is pretty much how birthdays went in the Norgrove household, but whether there were birthday parties is hard to know. If William and Sarah adopted the philosophy that what one got, they all got, then you’re looking at six or seven children’s birthday parties a year in the 1850s. It seems unlikely, although it’s possible that during their school years, the girls at least might have had small gatherings of friends at home. Gertrude and Emma had birthdays a week apart, and although there was a four-year age difference between them, this would be a likely occasion for all of the girls to prepare special treats and invite a friend or two each.

Whether the adults gave each other gifts is uncertain, but it seems likely. William at least, could always give Sarah the gift of a sketch – one of the children, or a favourite place. He seems to have been the sort of person who would spend money if he had it – so might have given quite generous presents when in funds, and more likely to resort to giving a drawing when broke. He doesn’t seem to have come from a family which made a huge deal out of birthday gift-giving, going from a comment in a letter to him from his sister Hannah in 1869 :

Dear Mother’s birthday is on the 7th September and yours she tells me is on the 28th of the same month. We did not allow the day to pass without drinking your health as it is call’d, and most sincerely wishing yourself, dear Sarah and your dear children prosperity and every real happiness.

Later, when the children were older and the family more prosperous, both bought and hand-made gifts were the order of the day. In 1889, Sarah wrote to Gertrude for her birthday – by this time, Gertrude is married and has a family of her own :

Your sisters & Brothers write with me in wishing you many happy returns of the day. Kate has just gone to Mrs Compton’s to leave a small parcel for George Groves to take you - the photos for dear Ovid [Gertrude’s son], the wash stand set for you. I made every stitch since my birthday, so you must please excuse any faults as I insisted on doing it all myself. I intended to line the crochet with Turkey red twill, but Mrs Earll persuaded me that as they would wash easier as they are. Your sisters bought the photo with Joe’s shop [Joe Dempsey, Gertrude’s husband, had a saddler’s shop in Blenheim before the Dempseys moved to Wellington], they thought you would like to see it.