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!
No comments:
Post a Comment