Moving house

A bunch of us spent yesterday helping our friend Helen move house. It wasn’t the greatest of days – it always seems to pour with rain as soon as you’ve got the beds on the back of a trailer. So there we were, somewhere between cloudbursts – Helen and I were stuffing stereo components and soft toys in the boot of her car, Mac was tying down furniture on the back of his trailer, Em was trying to persuade baby Isobel that sleep was a good idea, and Murray, Dennis and Ivor were hefting furniture onto another trailer at the front of the house – when Helen said, “how do people who don’t have friends manage this?” Good question – I guess they pay people, or struggle along by themselves. And, as I’m still working through William and Sarah’s first few days in Wellington, the big question for me was, how did the Norgroves manage their move from the immigration barracks at Kaiwharawhara to their first house on Thorndon Flat?

The Norgroves had friends, yes, although possibly not like 6-foot, six and a half inch Dennis, able to pick up large sofas and “persuade” them through narrow doorways. They didn’t have family on hand – no parents looking after the kids and organising sandwiches and bacon-and-egg pie for the workers’ lunch, no sister and brother-in-law to help out. But then again, they didn’t have beds and sofas, sideboards and fridges either. The assisted immigrants who travelled steerage to New Zealand couldn’t bring any furniture with them, unlike the cabin passengers, who could bring whatever they could squeeze into their cabins. The only furniture William and Sarah had for their home was the table that William made for that first cup of tea when they came ashore from Gertrude. There might have been some very basic items of furniture on the mud whare that became their first home – maybe shelves and hooks on the wall, perhaps a rough chair or bench, but probably not even a bed.

Many settlers slept on the floor to start with. The first primitive bed was often made from stout stakes rammed into the earth floor, with a rope and sacking hammock base slung from them, and a sacking mattress stuffed with plant material on top. The wooden boxes that brought possessions from England served double duty as both storage and seating. One large tin tub would have been used for everything from washing dishes to bathing them and the baby.

If William and Sarah couldn’t bring furniture, what would they have brought in the boxes that travelled in Gertrude’s hold? William’s tools were a priority – not just the tools of his plumbing trade, but general purpose tools as well. Sarah tells us that on that first day, William unpacked “saw, hammer and nails”, and began making a table.

Sarah would have brought her essential kitchen cooking equipment, including a camp oven; their first kitchen would also have had their tin or pewter plates, cutlery and mugs from the voyage, as well as their share of Gertrude’s left-over provisions. The immigrant ships stocked provisions for six months, and each mess could elect to use less and draw the remainder on landing. Sarah would have had their share of a month’s rations – around 15 kgs of preserved meat, 25kg of ship’s biscuits, and lesser amounts of flour, rice, preserved potatoes, peas, raisins, suet, butter, sugar, tea, salt, coffee, pepper, mustard and vinegar. She wouldn’t have had anywhere to store it, and one of William’s early priorities would have been the manufacture of some kind of food safe, to keep rats and mice away from the supplies, and perhaps some storage bins to keep the flour, rice and sugar dry.

We have no idea of what else William and Sarah brought with them. They would have had their own clothes, and Ovid’s, and Sarah would probably have brought quantities of several different fabrics along with her sewing bag. Would they have brought a china dinner set, or like many settlers, assumed it could be readily replaced on arrival? I’m sure William would have brought books as well as his painting and drawing materials. And Sarah would have asked, just as friends and family have asked me every time I move house, “do you really need all these books?” And like me, William’s reply would have been, “of course”. In fact, like me, William would have probably jettisoned shirts and trousers and jerseys to fit in a few more essential books! Did Sarah have quantities of best linen – embroidered pillow-cases and table cloths – in addition to the sheets, blankets and towels brought along for use on the ship? Would she have tucked treasured knick-knacks and ornaments, sugar bowls, and glasses, in amongst the clothes? What difficult choices had to be made by these people who had far fewer possessions than most of us these days; what should go to the new country, and what should be left behind?

At least having little luggage and only one piece of furniture should have made moving from the immigration barracks to the new house relatively easy. The distance was around two to three kilometres – half an hour to an hour’s walk. John Plimmer tells us that he “hailed a man who was driving a team of bullocks, and asked him if he would take my luggage to town”; Plimmer viewed the man’s rates as extortionate, but accepted them, and so the Plimmer family left the immigration barracks. The Norgroves had no friends and family rolling up in cars with trailers, and there were no household removal firms. Did they find someone to carry their belongings in a bullock cart, or did they walk to the new house, William perhaps making several trips to bring their boxes? I don’t know; for the purposes of the story I have to guess, and my guess is that they walked, carrying Ovid and their bags. At least it would have given William time to try and prepare Sarah for the fact that their new home was nothing like what they had left behind, although probably nothing could have really prepared her for the first sight of that mud whare with clay floors. And while Sarah might have wanted to collapse on the floor and cry her heart out in disappointment, I bet she just straightened her shoulders and set about turning that rough dwelling into a home for her little family.

Friends and neighbours

I’ve been pursuing my quest to find Norgrove friends from their earliest days in Wellington, living on Thorndon Flat. First up, I had to figure out where Thorndon Flat was, because it’s not a locality name that is used today. In a general sense, Thorndon Flat was the area north of Clay Point (now Stewart Dawson’s corner, at the intersection of Lambton Quay and Willis St) – the government end of town in the 1840s. In a more particular sense, Thorndon Flat referred to the area to the east of Molesworth Street. It would have encompassed the flattish land now roughly bounded by Molesworth Street to the west, Katherine Mansfield Place to the south, Hobson St to the east and not quite to Tinakori Rd in the north (there being a bit of a gully between the “flat” and Tinakori Rd where the motorway is now). It’s quite a large area, and presumably a stranger looking for the Norgrove house in 1842 could have wandered around quite a bit of Thorndon before finding it. At least I can be confident that wherever the house was, it wasn’t on any of the streets that actually existed at the time (Mulgrave, Murphy, Molesworth, Pipitea) because those street names would have been given as the address rather than “Thorndon Flat”.

The area had some of the prime Wellington sections, but the wealthy owners were all absentee, and the land was mostly idle, or rented to settlers who couldn’t afford to buy their own land. Only one of the wealthy owners actually lived on Thorndon Flat – Charles Clifford Esq, gentleman, grazier and later JP, arrived as a cabin passenger on the George Fyfe in November 1842 and took up residence on his town acre. Chances are, he didn’t have much contact with his steerage class neighbours, and it’s unlikely that he invited the Norgroves round for tea and cucumber sandwiches.


To identify William and Sarah’s neighbours 1841 and 1842, I looked at the earliest available electoral records, the burgess rolls of 1842 and 1843, to see which other passengers from Gertrude lived nearby.

After a couple of false starts at obtaining some form of local government, Wellington was proclaimed the first borough in New Zealand on 21 May 1842. An electoral roll was immediately drawn up, although elections were not held until October. All adult males were eligible to be on the roll – they just had to enrol and pay a fee of £1. The fee may have disenfranchised many – William Norgrove does not appear on the 1842 roll, but does appear in 1843, when the fee had been reduced to 2/6. Despite the 1842 fee, a surprising number of would-be electors made their home on Thorndon Flat – 21 men, most of whom can be tracked back into passenger lists as being married men with families.

I had already identified John and Amelia Gill as steerage passengers from Gertrude and Thorndon Flat residents. Other possible Gertrude friends were Adrian Lowe, a 27 year old printer and engraver and his 28 year old wife Frances, and their six month old daughter.

A fellow Gertrude passenger, but possibly not bosom buddy, was William Pike. He was accompanied by his wife Elizabeth and their two sons and three daughters, who ranged in age from five months to eight years. William gave his occupation as “agricultural labourer” but on arrival in Wellington he became a storekeeper. Amongst his wares, Pike sold wines and spirits, although without a license. During the 1840s, Pike made numerous court appearances for illegal liquor sales, and was sentenced to jail at least twice. It seems he was well-known to the locals as a supplier of liquor, as there was no shortage of people willing to testify to their purchases – presumably the only illegality was selling without a license, and purchasers weren’t prosecuted. This must have made the neighbourhood interesting, with people dropping by under cover of darkness to purchase untaxed and illegal alcohol. Did the Norgroves know what was going on, or not? Did they even buy liquor from the Pikes? Did Mrs Pike carry on running the store, liquor and all, while her husband was in jail? Would William and Sarah have been supportive of her in her time of need, or would they have quietly avoided her?

William and Eliza Fisher were a young couple with an infant daughter who arrived on the Catherine Stewart Forbes in June 1841. William Fisher was a painter and plasterer, so it’s even possible he might have worked with our William in the early days, although later in the 1840s he would have become a business rival.

Eliza Fisher may have been one who, by virtue of having lived in Wellington for fourth months, was able to help Sarah settle in, show her where to go and how to get things done. Other women who were already settled nearby included Mary Ann Buxton, who arrived on Adelaide in 1840 with her husband and children; Jessie Evans, a young nursemaid who also arrived on the Adelaide, accompanied by her brother John; Mrs John McBeth, who arrived on Bengal Merchant in February 1840; and Sarah Pratt, who was 29 and childless when she and her husband arrived on Martha Ridgeway in November 1840. Another Martha Ridgeway passenger would have been one of the few middle-aged women in the neighbourhood – Elizabeth Hunt was 47 when she set off for New Zealand with her husband, nine children, one daughter-in-law and a grandson. The younger women of Thorndon Flat may have turned to her for the kind of advice and support they were used to getting from their own mothers.

In all, in May 1842, there were 21 families in Thorndon Flat whose men enrolled to vote, as well as 2 single men. There must have been others who, like William, couldn’t spare £1 to exercise their vote, or who perhaps were not interested in participating in democracy. By May 1843, when the next burgess roll was drawn up, only seven of the original families can be confirmed as remaining in Thorndon Flat, although there may have been others whose menfolk weren’t on the burgess roll. It would be an interesting exercise to figure out where they all went, but that’s not why I’m here………………

The point of this exercise was to figure out who was living near William and Sarah in 1841/1842. Thorndon Flat turns out to have been a larger neighbourhood than I was expecting – physically, it’s a space which has a huge number of buildings crammed into these days, including the building I work in. In the early 1840s, the houses must have been reasonably widely separated, with lots of empty space – it’s where the gentlemen of the Wellington Cricket Club first played their cricket matches, and it was also used as a military parade ground. Even so, it’s clear that William and Sarah would have found plenty of congenial company among people of similar backgrounds.