O is for Ovid

You can’t help but think that Ovid held a special place in his parents’ hearts, not just because he was the first-born, but because he was the only child to go on the Great Adventure with them. He alone among the children was born in England, shared their shipboard life and the privations of the early days, even if he probably didn’t remember most of it. It makes it all the more sad for us to know that he would also be the first of their children to die in New Zealand; to judge by the appearance of the name Ovid as the middle name of many of his nephews suggests that he was not only a dear son, but a much-loved brother as well.

O is for Ovid, whose small freckled nose was soon to be put out of joint by the arrival of a brother or sister. Maybe it wouldn’t bother him, no longer being the centre of her attention. He was becoming quite fiercely independent, eager to do things for himself and inclined to become irritated by parental assistance. She didn’t want him running quite as wild as the Maori children from the pa, but if he was happy looking after himself it would be much easier for her when the baby came. She needn’t feel guilty that he was going to be pushed to one side, displaced by the new arrival. Her father had told her many times
how special she was to him, as his first-born child, so she supposed that however many more babies there were, Ovid would always hold a special place in her heart.

The residents of Pipitea Pa were Te Matehou, a hapu (sub-tribe) of Te Ātiawa. They had been part of a group of around 2000 who had migrated south from Taranaki to escape from Waikato raids into their area. They went at first to relatives at Waikanae, encouraged by Te Rauparaha, but by 1836 they had taken over Ngati Mutunga’s pa and cultivation sites when that hapu migrated to the Chatham Islands. By 1840, there were about 150 Te Matehou living at and around Pipitea pa. Although their land was part of the sale of the Wellington area to the New Zealand company, which they later disputed, they were fortunate that the pa site itself was on land which the New Zealand Company held as a reserve for Maori. They were less fortunate with much of their garden and cultivation sites, which were quickly surveyed by the Company as blocks for sale. After a period of resistance, which included the removal of the surveyors’ pegs under cover of darkness, Te Matehou adjusted to the new arrangements and by 1850 were flourishing with the profits of doing business with the settlers. Eventually however, they became disillusioned with the pakeha incomers, and by 1881 most of them had decamped to relatives at Waiwhetu in the Hutt Valley, leaving only nine residents of the pa itself.

One of the biggest challenges for me in writing about the settlers’ relationships with the Maori is to strike a balance – to convey the many and often negative feelings that the pakeha settlers had about their new neighbours without offending modern sensibilities. I lean heavily on writings of the time, including one of William’s own letters, to understand the settlers’ viewpoints; I’m equally indebted to the work of the Maori land claimants and the Waitangi Tribunal for their extensive and detailed research into the history of the Wellington area as part of the current Maori land claims process. My attempt at balance informs Sarah’s thoughts in this next section of her alphabet.

P is for Pa. There were several of them within the town, but the nearest, their neighbour almost, was Pipitea pa. The first time she saw it, on their first day in New Zealand, she had been horrified by its meanness. The low scrubby huts clustered miserably within its tall pickets. The carvings at the gate were ugly and not a little bit frightening with the great poking tongues on the faces. And the people had scared her as well, half-naked, with their painted faces and proud flashing eyes. She had got more used to them now, even knew a few of them, the women who came by selling fish and vegetables, and the young men who passed by on their way to hunt birds in the forest. She couldn’t see herself asking any of them in for tea, and she didn’t want Ovid playing with any of the dirty naked children who swarmed in and out all day long. However, she couldn’t look down on them as some did – how could she when the only real difference between her house and those in the pa was that she could stand upright in hers? She cooked outside in all weathers, just as the Maori women did, although even when it was raining, there were several of them hunkered down talking companionably, while she was usually alone in her misery. The Maori women might be scandalously under-dressed to English eyes, but at least that meant they didn’t have her worries about trying to keep skirts out of both the mud and the fire. She could hardly think herself much better than them, given her situation.

Many of Wellington’s streets are called quays, but all of them except Lambton Quay were originally wharves which were later absorbed by land reclamation into part of the town. Lambton Quay alone was called a quay from the very beginning, although most of the early residents just called it The Beach.

Q is for Quay. They called this rutted track above the beach Lambton Quay. Lambton for the Earl of Durham – it was his family name. But Quay? For all the world as though it was some great dock for shipping. The big ships had to anchor further out in the harbour. There were a couple of little jetties where their boats could pull up, but most passengers and goods were landed directly on the beach. In a spring tide, the water covered the track in places, and even if the sea left it alone, the rain left it muddy and perilous. Quagmire would be a better name than Quay, but presumably Lambton Quagmire would be far less flattering to the Earl. But then, if he ever saw it in all its muddy glory, he would hardly be flattered at all.

Sarah doesn’t tell us exactly when, or why, the family moved to Lambton Quay, although she does indicate that it was before Oscar’s birth on the first of November 1842. Writing for her children around forty years later, she is pretty upfront about the deficiencies of the Thorndon Flat house, and it’s not hard to understand why she would have been pleased to leave it. An improvement in the family’s circumstances, coupled with a desire to be better housed before the arrival of the second child seem logical drivers; however the timing of the Raupo House Ordinance in the same period means it may also have been a factor.

R is for Raupo. She would never have imagined that she would be grateful to be evicted, but the Raupo House Ordinance turned out to be a blessing in disguise. After so many disastrous house fires, fortunately with no loss of life, the Ordinance was a means to rid the town of the Maori-built thatched cottages. Faced with the prospect of a twenty pound tax, their landlord had given them notice to quit so he could pull the house down. She wouldn’t miss it – it was bitterly cold, the southerly wind driving through the gaps in the thatched walls, and the roof leaked constantly, regardless of William’s attempts to patch it. By some miraculous chance, the house on Lambton Quay became available on the same day that the landlord advised them of his plans, and William took the lease before anyone else could get a look in. It was a real house, wooden instead of raupo thatch, and it had proper windows with glass in them, and the cooking fire was in the kitchen with a real chimney and fireplace to keep the whole house warm.

She was so relieved to be there, and to know that she wasn’t going to deliver this baby on a mud floor, that she almost missed William’s musings about using the attached shop-front as an actual shop. She was bracing herself to become the town’s most heavily-pregnant shopkeeper when William came to the conclusion, almost all by himself, that he should stick with plumbing and painting, so he used the shelves in the shop to store his white-lead and turpentine out of Ovid’s reach. She and Ovid used the shop-front’s bay window to take their morning tea (or milk, in Ovid’s case), fascinated by the street and harbour activities in front of them.

Most days, the glass was coated in a sticky layer of sea-salt, removing a lot of detail from their view. This was not always such a bad thing, given some of the goings-on out there. However, it meant that sometimes passersby came and peered in the window to see what the shop might be selling. Ovid would tap on the window and squeal and giggle with delight to see them jump back, surprised to see him there. She should stop him, tell him it was rude to startle people like that, but it amused her and the little boy’s laughter was an addictive pleasure.

Weaning the baby

My god-daughter Izzy is 7 months old and she just got her first tooth, not that she was very keen to show it to me yesterday. She’s getting started on solid food. Her Mum Helen says she likes sweetcorn and potato, peas and broccoli, kumara and carrot, but she’s not that impressed with the sharper tastes of apple and plum. Banana is OK though. Izzy gets mushy veggies into spooned into her and she smears them back all over her Mum, who wants to know what great-great grandma weaned the babies onto.

My assumption was that Ovid would be weaned onto mushy veggies, just like Izzy, except that his wouldn’t come in convenient little jars and tins from the supermarket. Then I consulted Dr Thomas Bull’s 1840 manual, The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease, and discovered that nineteenth-century babies were weaned onto things like boiled cereals, which were sieved and mixed with milk. Sometimes they were started on flour boiled with milk and water. Dr Bull also suggested “tops and bottoms, steeped in hot water, with the addition of fresh milk and loaf sugar to sweeten”. Tops and bottoms of what? Carrots? Swedes? No, there’s not a vegetable to be seen in the weaning plan of C19th infants. “Tops and bottoms” are apparently small rolls of dough, baked, cut in halves and then baked in the oven, used as food for infants. Mmmmm, not much nutritional value. Dr Bull said beef tea and chicken broth could be added occasionally, along with a little cooked egg. “Animal food” was strongly discouraged as being bad for the digestion, however sugar was regarded as a necessary condiment, as was salt, which stimulated the digestion and prevented worms! Fruit was OK, and water the preferred beverage, although apparently toast-and-water might be more palatable. [Really? This seems to be a drink for infants and invalids found in a number of old recipe books. Toasted (but not burnt) bread is soaked in water and then strained. It’s supposedly a refreshing drink. Can I bring myself to try it?] Finally, Dr Bull spoke out strongly against the maternal practice of giving wine, beer or any stimulant to any child, except medicinally!

From around twelve to 24 months, Dr Bull suggested the following meal plan :

Its breakfast between seven and eight o’clock, to consist of tops and bottoms, steeped in hot water, a little milk added, and the whole sweetened with sugar; or bread may be softened in hot water, the latter drained off, and fresh milk and sugar added to the bread. Its dinner about twelve o’clock, to consist, every other day, of a small quantity of animal food (chicken, fresh mutton, or beef, being the only meats allowed) with a little bread and water; on the alternate days, well boiled rice and milk, a plain bread, sago, tapioca, or arrow-root pudding, containing one egg; or farinaceous food, with beef-tea. Its afternoon meal, about four o’clock, the same diet as formed the breakfast. At seven, a little arrow-root, made with a very small proportion of milk, or a biscuit, or a crust of bread, after which the child should be put to bed.

Still not a vegetable in sight!

The weaning of Ovid Norgrove is something of a puzzle for me. These days, solids start appearing in baby’s diets after 6 months. Back then, Dr Bull was suggesting between 9 and 12 months as the optimum time to start introducing solids. His view was that with mother and baby in good health, weaning shouldn’t be delayed after 12 months of age. His colleague Dr Jacobi agreed, noting that while many mothers continue breast-feeding to prevent conception, sometimes until the child is four years old, breast-feeding is not a guaranteed way of avoiding pregnancy. However, Sarah tells us that on the voyage to New Zealand, Ovid was breast-fed; she didn’t start weaning him until they reached New Zealand 4½ months later. The Gertrude sailed from England on Ovid’s first birthday, so he would have 16 months old before she started weaning him off the breast. His brother Oscar was conceived about 3 months later, so either the breast-feeding or the close proximity of the neighbours on Gertrude had been acting as contraception!

Rations weren’t provided for children under one year of age on the immigrant ships – they were expected to be breastfed. However, a number of “comforts” were provided for the breast-feeding mums and their babies – stout for the mums, and good old sago, tapioca and arrow-root for the babies. Chances are Ovid actually started on solids while on Gertrude – the cereals, a little bread soaked in preserved milk, and maybe a ship’s biscuit to gnaw on when his teeth started to come through. Once in New Zealand, fresh cow’s milk was available – he had his first taste within hours of coming ashore – but if Sarah followed the traditional approach, he probably didn’t see a mashed vegetable until he was much older. Sarah had eight siblings; twins Alfred and Anne were born when she was five, and by the time she turned eight, she had five brothers and sisters. No doubt she had been helping her mother raise babies since she was a small child; sister Caroline was born six months after Sarah had Ovid, so she went straight from caring for her siblings to raising her own babies. She probably did the same things with her children as her mother did, and fed them the same sorts of foods as her mother, and her mother’s mother, had traditionally prepared.

So there we are. Nineteenth century baby food was cereals and breads, seasoned with salt and sugar – not quite as nutritious as what modern babies receive, but less likely to stain than when baby lovingly wipes a face-full of mushy pumpkin all over mum’s blouse.

Baby wrangling

Last week my friend Helen asked an interesting question – how did Sarah carry Ovid? Okay, so initially it didn’t seem much of a question. At the time, we were sitting together on the train, and Helen had her 15-week-old Isabel slung across her lap, and I had teeny little Izzy-feet pummelling my thigh, and it seemed kind of obvious how any mother would carry a baby. But what she meant was, how did Sarah carry Ovid when she needed her hands free? Helen pointed out how women in most cultures had some kind of sling arrangement for carrying small babies. Maori women carried them in a kind of kete, or sometimes a sling made out of beaten lacebark. Izzy herself had arrived on board the train in a nifty stretchy sling, tied and knotted around Helen’s body so that the baby was pressed firmly face-first into her mum’s chest.

I have no kind of mental picture of women of Sarah’s time and class carrying or wearing babies in this way. You don’t see it in art; you don’t see it in photographs – although with the long exposure times of early photography, there aren’t many candid snaps – everything is carefully posed, adults and older children frozen straight-faced. Very young children are often blurs in these early photographs because they simply couldn’t keep still. It seemed to me that western women had moved away from baby-wearing before the nineteenth century, and didn’t rediscover it until the 1960s and 70s. Some quick internet research confirms this – baby-wearing seems to have remained normal practice for women from all over the world except western women.

Helen speculated that perhaps Sarah and other young settler mums might have taken up the baby-wearing idea from Maori women. Would they have done this, or would they have been more likely to follow the more western pattern of simply leaving babies lying in their cradles while doing household chores? I imagine that Sarah’s later babies might have spend time in a perambulator, popularised by Queen Victoria later in the century; but that Ovid and the older children would either have been carried in arms, or not carried at all. American pioneer experience shows that young children were left to their own devices far more often than in earlier or later times, simply because their parents were working too hard to spare much time for them. It seems likely that early New Zealand settlers were in much the same position, and this raises a more interesting question about how Sarah coped in the first few years.

Back in England, although William and Sarah lived in their own little house, both of their families were reasonably close at hand. In her early days of motherhood, Sarah would have had ample help and support from the extended families. It would have even been likely that one of her sisters or sisters-in-law might have lived with them for a time to help out, although on the night of the 1841 census, two weeks before they left for New Zealand, the household consisted only of William, Sarah and Ovid. Leaving the extended family behind was a huge step, but to some extent the loss of support would have been buffered by the five months spent on Gertrude with other young families. The women would have helped each other out with child-care and other domestic tasks; older children and other adults would have been around to watch the babies and toddlers. It wasn’t until they went ashore in Wellington that William, Sarah and Ovid were truly on their own – although perhaps not even then, as they shared their first house with a shipmate. [Sarah herself uses the word “shipmate”, which suggests a single man rather than a woman or family.]

Would the friendships and support systems developed on Gertrude have held up once the steerage passengers came ashore? Or would they have been so scattered, and so busy trying to survive, that they were isolated into their individual families? How did Sarah cope with an active toddler while doing everything she had to do to care for her family? I suppose Ovid wasn’t the first toddler to have ever been tied to the kitchen table by leading strings to prevent him falling in the fire while his mother cooked the dinner!

More children, paradoxically, might have made things slightly easier for Sarah. Older children (often even toddlers) were pressed into service to care for their siblings. Chances were that Ovid carried and held Oscar at least as much as either of their parents did, and that Gertrude was watched over and petted by both of them. Modern mums would probably have fifty fits if they saw their two year old lugging the newborn around the house, but the reality of large families in lower socio-economic households has meant that this has always happened, and probably still does.

The facts of how Sarah managed are lost in the past. In terms of my story, the bits that hold the known facts together, I now have Helen’s thoughts tucked into my sub-conscious to percolate. I can see, perhaps, that in desperation, Sarah might have fashioned a make-shift sling to cradle a fractious infant while leaving her hands free to peel the potatoes. I can see that William would have needed to whip up a rocking cradle for Oscar, that Sarah could have rocked with her foot while sewing or writing letters. I can’t see her wearing any of the babies in a sling while going out of the house. On the other hand, a carry-cot, Moses-basket style, would have been a distinct possibility… Anybody have any more ideas?

Leaving the ship

A little bit more of the story - pure fiction, this part.

Finally it was their turn to disembark. Mr Ellis, the Third Mate, called them forward to the steps leading to the accommodation ladder. Sarah balanced Ovid on her hip, her workbag stuffed between his body and hers to leave one hand free for holding on. The winds were still quite strong after last night’s spectacular storm, and she had earlier tied her hat down with a scarf to prevent it from being ripped from her head.

Mr Ellis bared uneven and discoloured teeth in what he must have intended as a reassuring smile.

“You first, missus, and I’ll carry the lad for you”.

She gripped Ovid more tightly. She had travelled the last months in constant vigilance, full of worry that Baby might fall overboard, but she was never more afraid than when asked to entrust him to arms other than her own. Her fears must have been written clearly on her face, because as Mr Ellis reached for the boy, he winked and said, “Don’t worry, missus. I’ve not dropped anyone in the briny yet.”

That made her feel slightly foolish; after all the Mate was an experienced seaman, and she had never once seen him stumble even in the roughest of seas. Her face warmed with a blush, and she hid it in ensuring that Ovid’s sun-hat was set firmly on his head. The wind was worrying at it, although she had tied the strings tightly under his chin. She gave it another tug to be sure, before moving closer to the steps.

Mr Ellis grasped Ovid firmly around the middle and lifted. To her surprise, he hoisted the boy over his head and onto his shoulders. As Ovid crowed with delight and waved wildly to his father, the Mate secured both little ankles around his neck by grasping them together in one big, sea-roughened hand. Sarah hesitated, wanting to be sure Ovid was safe; wanting more than anything not to have to go through the frightening climb off the ship.

“Hold tight, lad”, Mr Ellis said, and she relaxed a little as Ovid wrapped his arms around the man’s head. He seemed perfectly happy taking in the view from his lofty perch, and she could see that the Mate held him quite securely.

She had no excuse left; she could delay no longer – there were still many behind her waiting for their turn. She looped the drawstrings of her workbag over her right wrist and took a tight grip on the wooden railing with her left hand; her hat was going to have to take care of itself. She stepped carefully up onto the platform beside Mr Ellis and Ovid. From behind her, she heard William’s low tones.

“Try not to look down, dearest.”

It was too late. She had already looked over the side, and the sight of the sea so far below made her stomach lurch; suddenly light-headed and fearing she might faint and topple headlong overboard, she grabbed for the railing with both hands and hung on. The swelling pewter sea was a very long way down, and the longboat waiting for them at the base of the ladder looked impossibly small. How was she going to do this?

Familiar warm hands gripped her shoulders.

“We’re almost there, dearest,” William said softly, his mouth close to her ear. “Take a few deep breaths. I’ll be right behind you.”

She inhaled obediently. William’s touch and the salty air were calming; after a moment she felt able to let go with one hand to reach for the whitened rope of the ladder railing. William’s hands slid away as she turned to face the side of the ship and began her cautious descent. She kept both hands firmly on the inner railing and tried desperately to keep from looking down. The ship and the ladder rose and fell dizzyingly together in the sea’s slight swell, and her stomach suddenly rose too. She was not going to lose her breakfast in front of all these people. She took another great breath, and concentrated her attention on the side of the ship, mere inches from her nose.

How strange it was to see Gertrude from the outside after all these months; the wooden hull which had been so new and perfect when they left Gravesend was marked and scraped, and damply encrusted with crystals of salt. William’s closeness was reassuring as she shuffled slowly down the ladder, feeling her way one foot at a time, the workbag swaying with every step. The sea made slopping sounds against the side of the ship, and the longboat bumped against the bottom of the ladder with a regular thud as they descended. Finally, she could hear the murmurs of encouragement from the men in the boat and she knew the ordeal by ladder was almost over.

At the bottom of the ladder a seaman reached out to guide her down the last few steps. His hands were big and roughened red by years at sea; he was missing at least two fingers, but his touch was gentle as he lifted her into the boat where other hands waited to guide her to a seat. The boards in the bottom of the boat were wet and suspiciously fishy, and she slipped twice in struggling over seats and sea-bags, between the pairs of sweating oarsmen to the stern. A sailor helped her turn to face forward, and held her arm as she lowered herself carefully onto the damp seat.

Awkward with embarrassment at being handled by all these strange men, she took a moment to fuss with her skirts, pulling them up a little to keep them dry, and shifting the workbag to her lap. Then, with order and composure restored, she looked up to find what had become of the rest of her family.

William had worked his way across the longboat to stand across the seat in front of her. The Mate bounded confidently down the accommodation ladder, one hand lightly on the railing and the other still clasping Ovid’s ankles. Ovid was finding his hat a great trial; he had fidgeted with it until it was twisted down over one eye. He pushed at it with his little hands, and before she could call out a warning, a sudden gust of wind caught it and whisked it off his head. She almost laughed out loud at the Mate’s surprised look as the hat flapped past him and dropped into the sea. It wasn’t funny though – she had made the hat herself, during the endless hot days of the doldrums, because Ovid’s own caps and bonnets had no brims to protect his delicate face from the sun. She had sacrificed one of William’s neckerchiefs and part of her own petticoat for it, and although it wasn’t high fashion, it would have done for a year or two yet. Now, though, naughty Baby giggled and pointed to where the errant hat drifted near the longboat.

At the base of the ladder, Mr Ellis lifted Ovid off his shoulders, and lowered him into the boat. The oarsmen passed him back, weathered hands securely wrapped around her precious boy as if he was the Crown Jewels. As she reached to take him from his father, the little boy announced “Hat, Mama,” in quite triumphant tones, and twisted in her arms to look for it in the water. “Your hat is lost and gone, Baby,” she told him, but as William sat down, the sodden hat was presented it to him on the blade of an oar, its dripping strings trailing like seaweed.

Causes of death

One of the research-rabbits that I’ve had running for a couple of weeks was a request to Births, Deaths and Marriages at the Department of Internal Affairs for copies of the entries in the Nelson Register of Deaths for Ovid, Zoë and Alice. The papers arrived in the mail this morning – just over a week for turn-around time, so that’s pretty impressive of the folk at BDM.

Zoë, the second-to-last daughter, died in 1856 at the age of three weeks. Family oral tradition left us with no information about Zoë or how she died. My speculation was the all-purpose “failure to thrive”; Mum wondered if it was an early cot death (I wonder what they called it back then, and how they explained it away?). Anyhow, according to William, who registered the death himself, poor wee Zoë died of “hooping cough”. That would be a horrible way to see your baby go.

Zoë died at the end of April 1856. Sarah fell pregnant again in September that year, and Alice was born on 11 June 1857. She died just over a year later, at the age of 14 months. We had been told she died of croup, and the death register entry confirms that as the cause of death.

Then, a month later, in a terrible double-blow for the family, Ovid died. Family tradition tells us he died of TB. Aunt Emma (there are a few “great”s in there – she was Ovid’s sister) told Mum that “one lung was completely gone”. We’d always taken from that statement that they knew this from an autopsy and/or coroner’s inquest – but thinking about it, they would not have been likely to have done one for TB, it being a relatively common death at the time. Autopsies and inquests were for sudden and unexplained deaths, and TB hardly seems to be something that sneaks up and kills a person before they realise they are sick. I guess it’s possible for a doctor to know that someone only has one functioning lung from all that chest-tapping they do when listening through a stethoscope – so maybe that’s where Aunt Emma’s information came from. Interestingly, the death register entry for Ovid reads, “water on the chest” – I guess fluid on the lungs (or lung), so really a death from complications of TB. Mum commented the other day that having TB was a shameful or embarrassing thing - no-one would want to admit having TB in the family – so maybe the use of “water on the chest” was an acceptable euphemism to spare a family’s feelings? I’m still looking for background material on TB to give me more of a clue about this.

At some stage, I will check the indexes for coroner’s inquests at Archives NZ, just in case there was one – but usually the wording on the death certificate would say something like “verdict of jury” or “verdict of coroner” if there had been an inquest. An inquest would also have been reported in the local paper – I’ve found William as a witness to an inquest of a small boy who drowned near the Norgrove home – so if there had been an inquest into Ovid’s death, chances are I would have found it already.

It only dawned on me today that Sidney, the youngest child, would never have known Ovid, let alone Alice and Zoë. Sidney was born in March 1860, almost 20 years after Ovid’s birth, and a year and a half after his death. His eldest surviving sibling was Oscar, who was 17. The sibling next in age to him was Kate, at 7. Although a late addition to the family, I guess Sidney must have been treasured and probably rather spoilt after everything that had gone before.

How I know that William suffered from sea-sickness!

I have a copy of a letter from William to Sarah, sent not long after he and Ovid arrived in Australia - however the letter is dated only "Saturday 12th", so I don't know exactly when this was. The original letter wasn't in good shape (there were holes in the paper), and even after all the years I've spent reading bad manuscripts, there were parts I still couldn't get - the gaps are in square brackets. Spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviations are William's own. Where I've assumed a letter or word to get the text to make sense, I show it in blue.

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Dear Best Beloved

I imbrace this opportunity of sending to you By steamer that you may know How we are getting on & what are our Hopes & expectations
We left as you know on Sunday morn with a Delightful Breese from the [S.W.] reached Terawitte (Te Awaiti) at night got a S.E. wind in the night & went rattling away On Monday night got clear of the land encountered [a] SW gale [force] wind was obliged to put back to Port Hardy in Blind B[ay] on Friday Left Port Hardy on Sunday made the land of New [Zea]land on Monday Last Passing a most miserable time 25 Days on Board the th[at] I Believe most wretchedly found [ ] that ever sail But However we are [ ] safe & sound at last We got into Sydney H[arbour] [late] & therefore could see nothing of the H[arbour ] but in the morning I could Describe the Georgeous Beauty of Port Jackson it is truly a most magnificent Place

A noble Ocean Steamer the Argo lay just under our Bows a Large Man [of] War & a tender steamer the Acheron, a Host of merchant vessels of every nation & every conceivable size We Landed in a Beautiful Little Boat Licensed to carry 8. My first impression of Sydney as seen from the Bay was enthusiastic but it Banishes on Landing from all the accounts I had had of Sydney I was Disappointed not but that it contains many fine houses but it is not a nice town it is a fine town Building it is a Bay of fine Promise But at every turn you are reminded that you have long to wait before it will reach maturity [ ] All the Cheapside of Sydney has many Blank spaces many old Low wooden Houses with Moss grown shingles along side good stone H[arling] Stone is here the principle material for Building [ ] every where at Hand in the great[est] abundance & some very fine Houses are Being Built But I will tell you more in my next

I have been to Millers & got work to go to on Monday morning 15/- a Day I should not stay Long so you need not write to me he[re] But you shall have a letter before I Leave to Direct you what to Do I expect to stay 3 weeks not Longer the Passage to Melbourne is [ ] [ ]/6 per steamer 3 Days is the average Passage I shall take that as the most to Be Prepared for I suffer dreadfully Coming up sick nearly all the way My Dear Boy is all that I could wish Cheerful & Happy He cried 2 or 3 times coming up & said he hoped Oscar was a good boy to his Mother he Believed it would Break his Heart if he was not I may add & mine too But I have too much Confidence in him to think that he can Be otherwise & my Dear Gertrude oh how I wish I could get one kiss and my Dear Oscar I hope he is a good Boy But I know he is & the little ones I need not tell you to kiss them for me I shall send a Box of oranges by the next steamer if I possibly can as I shall not be able to get any in Melbourne Everything is very reasonable considering the immense rise in wages & consequent cost of Building Butter is 2/lb Bacon 8 ½ /lb Bread 7d 2 lbs Best English ale 6d pint Colonial 2 ½ [ ] Dear the price of meat I do not know but from the immense quantities consumed I Believe very cheap The weather has been very wet But this Day very delightful but Dull I hope you are all well as are we I have met several old Hands from NZ & now Dearest I hope you will all Be very Happy in anticipation of our joyous meeting with an independence to [pay] [you] for this Painful separation if you know How my Heart yearns to see & embrace you once more you would Pity me But I must conclude with my Best Love to you all & remain Dearest wife yours affectionately W Norgrove

Ps My Best respects to Mr & Mrs Smith & all those who may Do me the Honour to enquire for me

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OK, that's pretty clear. Rotten trip, William suffered badly from sea-sickness, and wasn't looking forward to the next leg of the trip by sea to Melbourne! A little bit of detective work with Sydney shipping lists might help me narrow down the date.

Ovid, Mrs Beeton and a wild Irish girl

Looking back over this blog, I think that from the outside, it must look like I’m taking a rather random approach to my research. I’m all over the place with the things I’m pursuing. The truth is, it’s not totally random. It’s not completely linear either, but there’s a method in my madness.

The organised, linear part of what I’m doing sits well behind the scenes. I have a huge spreadsheet with one workbook for each of the years in the 20-year period I’m concentrating on (1840 – 1860). Each year has a calendar, and everything goes in there – known facts and dates about the family; key dates in New Zealand history; notes on probable/possible dates of events. Most of the items are tagged with their source, so I can go from the date of an event to, for example, a newspaper clipping of it. I’ve got everyone’s birthday in there, every year, so I know how old each person was at the time of a particular event. And I’ve also (blush) charted the approximate duration of each of Sarah’s pregnancies, and colour-coded that block of dates in each year – which gives me an interesting perspective on the efficacy of breast-feeding as a mechanism of birth control – I can just about pick the date on which each baby was weaned!

The more random-seeming part is the research. I have lots of different things on the go at once. I’m chasing very specific bits of information in relation to the section I’m writing at any given time, but I’m also pursuing a whole range of other things as they crop up. As an archivist, I’m drawn to primary source material – there’s not a lot of Norgrove papers around, but there’s still a lot of useful material at National Archives and National Library. Their online systems enable me to identify particular documents or collections to investigate when I have time during the day when I’m in Wellington. There’s also a fair bit of primary and secondary material available via the internet, which is quicker for me to work with. Then there’s published secondary material – I’ve usually got two or three books on the go at once, and by the time I have finished with them, the pages bristle with neon marker flags. Sometimes I’m marking specific things to follow up and find more about; sometimes I just want to be able to go back and consider the relevance of something to Sarah and the family.

So, in no particular order, the last week’s work has meandered through the following :

• Background reading has been the book My Hand Will Write What My Heart Dictates – journal and letter excerpts from New Zealand women in the nineteenth century. I want to look at the complete source material from one or two of these women; also have lots of things to think about from their words
• Tuberculosis – Ovid died of TB at 18. According to Mum, who got it from great-great Aunt Emma, one lung was almost gone when he died. So I’ve been looking for general historical information on TB in nineteenth century New Zealand (not a lot of it out there), as well as more specific information on the treatment and nursing of TB at the time, and the social attitudes towards it. I know someone is going to ask why it matters – the answer is that having a family member with a disability or chronic illness has a profound effect on a family. It changes the family dynamic, and it affects the lives of the healthy family members. So it matters, because as far as I can see, Ovid would have been nursed at home by his mother and sisters. It could have been quite a long illness; he might even have contracted it while gold-mining in Victoria with his father.
• Which led me to see if I could nail down the dates of the Victorian gold-mining trip a bit better, by digging into what the various Australian archives have online. And although I still don’t know when William and Ovid departed for Australia (probably very late 1852), I know now when they came back! They sailed from Victoria on the Wild Irish Girl in April 1855, arriving in Nelson on 12 May.
• Nelson? But the family hadn’t moved to Nelson yet, and anyway, why didn’t my index search of the Nelson Examiner show their names on an inbound passenger list? As it turns out, they were in the Examiner, but somebody must have had lousy handwriting because they appear in the passenger list as “Mr Norysom and son”!
• Logically, William and Ovid should appear shortly thereafter on an outbound passenger list from Nelson to Wellington. Not according to the Nelson Examiner – so either they travelled on something so small that it didn’t make the newspaper (poor William – he did suffer so from sea-sickness) or maybe, having checked out Nelson, they went and had a look at the Wairau and sailed to Wellington from there. I can’t check that online because the relevant newspapers for the period aren’t there, so further pursuit of this line of inquiry is temporarily parked.
• Meanwhile, the search for TB info led to some bizarre recipes from Mrs Beeton (searching for nursing information); the effect of tuberculosis on architecture (ever wondered about all those enclosed sun-porches on old houses?) and Samuel Butler’s voyage to New Zealand (online books)!
  
  And so it goes on…………….

William's views on education

A while back I quoted from a newspaper report of William’s speech at a public meeting held in 1856 to discuss the Education Act. In March 1856, the Nelson Provincial Government passed its own Education Act, providing for education in the province funded by a tax on rate-payers. It seems to have slipped quietly under the radar during its three readings, and the outcry only came after the Act had passed into law. Some people found the idea of a compulsory tax on every household objectionable; others had issues with the carefully-worded religious instruction provisions.

All households were to pay £1 per year towards funding education; in addition, those households with children between the ages of five and 14 were to pay 5 shillings per child, up to a maximum of an additional £1. In return, any schools funded under the Act were to be open to all children, with no additional fees to be paid for their attendance. Some people objected on the grounds that education should be funded by the government; some objected because they had already paid to educate their now-grown children and didn’t see why they should have to pay for the children of others; and some simply objected because the tax was compulsory.

The religious instruction provisions were interesting. Having already seen a completely secular education scheme fail in Wellington, the Nelson Provincial Government provided in their Act that “Any religious instruction given in schools shall be free from all controversial character, and shall be imparted at such hours that any parents objecting thereto may be able to withdraw their children from the school at the time when it is given.” It would be up to the elected school boards to determine whether a school offered any religious instruction, and the nature of it, and it would open to parents to withdraw their children if they so wished. It seems pretty inoffensive, but the local Catholic priest, who had been running a school attended largely by Protestants, got bent out of shape. He foresaw a situation where protestant-dominated school boards would run protestant schools on public funds, and the Catholic schools would struggle to get any share of public money. [As it happens, he was quite right. The original national Education Act made state-funded education free and secular (which is why we all sang hymns at school assembly, right?) and the Catholic schools were essentially privately funded until the 1975 Integrated Schools Act gave them access to state funding.]

Anyway, the meeting at which William spoke was some months later, in June, when concerns about the implementation of the Act were beginning to bite. The meeting started with the proposal of a resolution “that this meeting considers the Education Act unjust and oppressive, violating the civil and religious liberty which every one in this country is entitled to enjoy.” By the conclusion of the meeting, the original resolution had been so amended that it was reversed into saying that the Act was “a just and necessary measure, …calculated to be productive of welfare to this province”. In this form the resolution was carried by a majority of around three to one!

William’s own views were recorded in the Nelson Examiner of 21 June 1856 :

MR. NORGROVE said that, like Marmaduke Magog, it was not often that he spoke in public, but he must beg permission to say a few words on the subject of education. He remembered attending a Chartist meeting about 25 years ago, at which one of the great reasons urged for the passing of the people's charter was that the Government did not make proper provision for the education of the people [hear, hear]. He remembered that one of the speakers on that occasion had alluded to the mill girls of Manchester, who toiled from morning till night at the mills instead of going to school, and had remarked that the wonder was not that they were bad, but that they were so good [hear]. The same speaker went on to show that without education a people could become neither wise nor good, and that it was the duty of the state to care for the education of the people [hear, hear]. He (Mr Norgrove) was sorry to find that the question was so mistaken here, and that people forgot that in paying this tax for the support of a scheme of education, they were investing for posterity [hear, hear]. He had seven children, and he should some day be gathered to his fathers and leave a name behind him - it might be an indifferent one, but at all events it would be a name - and it was his earnest desire to see his boys receive a better education, and earn a better name than himself [cheers]. Should parents toil on day after day and leave their children what they considered a competence, without giving them some education to take care of that which, if they were ignorant and uneducated, some plausible scoundrel might come and chouse them of [hear, hear]? He was sorry to hear no argument on the other side; he wished to see the measure fairly tried, and he had no doubt that some day or other they would all be the better for it [vehement cheering].

Despite saying he wanted his boys to receive a better education than he had, William’s girls were also educated – the younger ones amongst the protestant crowd at the Catholic school mentioned above. The younger children seem to have had the opportunity to attend school regularly and do well – Horace, Emma and Kate appear in the school prize lists. In December 1857, 11-year old Horace received a prize in the First Division for "general good conduct". The following year, 10-year old Emma received her prize for general good conduct and attendance. In 1859, she came first in the Second Class. In 1860 she was 2nd in the First Class, and took a prize for Writing. That same year, eight-year old Kate came second in the Fourth Class.

I still don’t know how much of an education the older children received. There were schools in Wellington when Ovid, Oscar and Gertrude were small, but they were private schools, and attendance wasn’t compulsory. There may not have been money to spare for regular schooling – and Gertrude may have been needed at home to help with the babies. Certainly Ovid’s formal education was patchy – he was 12 when William took him to the Victoria goldfields, so if he had been in school until then, that would have been the end of it.

I don’t know that William got his wish, that his boys received a better education than he had. William was essentially a scholarship boy – he had received the secondary education that would usually have been out of reach for boys of his class, at an English Foundation School. Certainly, however, the investment for posterity in education was ultimately made in free and universal education. Succeeding generations of Norgrove descendants have done well – I think he would be proud of us.