Franchise and felony

In a public debate about the Education Act in 1856, William mentioned that he attended a Chartist meeting “about 25 years ago”, so around 1831. In fact, the actual Chartist meetings didn’t begin until 1837 with the publication of the People’s Charter which called for electoral reform and universal male suffrage. Either William misremembered his dates, or he was thinking of the meetings of 1831 and 1832 prior to the passage of the British Reform Act of 1832. This Act, formally the Representation of the People Act, made significant changes in the British electoral system, but did not, as had been hoped, result in granting the franchise to all adult men.

Either way, we know that as a young man, William had an interest in universal male suffrage. He left England to make a better life for himself and his family, and while he may not have envisaged that in New Zealand the British class system would break down, by the end of his life he knew that it had. He left England as a poor working class tradesman, but by the time he died, he was a successful businessman, well-known early settler, and had been an elected representative on the Blenheim Borough Council.

His first opportunity to cast a vote in a democratic election was been Wellington’s first municipal election in 1842. He would have known from soon after he arrived that a Municipal Corporation Bill had been presented to the Governor, and that the intention was for a universal male franchise. William doesn’t actually appear on the register of electors for 1842, and I’ve always assumed that the registration fee of 20 shillings was the reason why. Twenty shillings was the best part of a week’s wages for a labouring man, and it’s very likely that the Norgroves just didn’t have the money to spare. I’ve imagined William being excited by the sudden opportunity for democratic participation, and then frustrated by the lack of funds to achieve it. I’ve even imagined William and Sarah arguing, him wanting to spend the money and her arguing for paying the rent and buying food and furniture.

What I didn’t imagine was that when William had his first opportunity to read the details of the bill, his dreams of voting would have run into a brick wall. In late January 1842 a summary and extracts of the bill were published in the local newspaper. A few paragraphs in, the details of the franchise were described :

Every male inhabitant of full age, not convicted of felony, bribery or perjury, may claim to be enrolled a burgess on payment of 20s, although he may possess no rateable property within the Borough. 

The brick wall? William was a convicted felon.

Roll back to December 1832. The Reform Act had been passed, and while most of the so-called “rotten boroughs” had been disposed of, and the number of eligible voters had increased, the requirement for property worth £10 still ruled out the bulk of the working class from voting. The protests which had led to the Reform Act continued throughout Britain into December 1832 when the general election took place.

There was evidently a custom in Colchester at the end of elections for members of the public to pull down the hustings and polling booths to take away the materials they were made of, presumably to use or to sell for cash. The local authorities had attempted to prevent this from happening by putting around notices advising that the buildings were the property of the builders, and not to be taken.

On the evening of 12 December, nineteen-year-old William Norgrove was amongst a mob of around 100 people who had assembled around the hustings. Police constables waited nearby in anticipation of trouble. A man by the name of John Grove got the ball rolling, encouraging the mob to take their customary perquisite by pulling down the hustings. The mob respond with some enthusiasm and violence. Rocks were thrown. William apparently hurled a rock which hit two constables. Then, according to an eyewitness, he started pulling down the hustings, while calling out, “Now then, we’ll have a go!”

Nine men, including William, were arrested and appeared before the local justices on 17 December charged with inciting the populace to riot and tumult, and with having demolished one of the polling booths. Three of the men were discharged without conviction; the remaining six, William included, were remanded to stand trial at the next session of the Assizes. They were given leave to apply for bail; all but two were able to afford this, but two remained in jail until the Lent Assizes session in March 1833. These two aren’t named so I have no idea if William was one of them.

At the Lent Assizes, William and the other five men were indicted for riotous assembly and the assault of three constables in the execution of their duty. The prosecutor was determined to prove that John Grove was the ring-leader, but noted that there were differing degrees of “criminality” among the other defendants. A number of witnesses were called, including constable George Gusterson, who said :

I was employed to protect the hustings on the above occasion; large stones were thrown by the mob at the hustings and the constables, one of which, thrown by Norgrove, first struck Hills and then Finch; Norgrove was particularly active in inciting the mob to break down the hustings; the inhabitants were much alarmed by the riot and closed down their shops. 

Grove’s lawyer argued that Grove hadn’t even been there, and produced a number of witnesses who said he had been in the pub at the time. He then tried to muddy the waters by claiming it was all the city corporation’s fault for putting around the notices telling people they couldn’t take the materials from the hustings. The judge took a remarkably lenient view, found the lot of them guilty, fined Grove £30 and the rest of them one shilling each.

They were lucky they got off lightly – if the Riot Act had been read at the time of the riot, they could have all been hanged or transported to Australia.

So back to William in Wellington in 1842, reading about the proposed municipal corporation bill and realising with something of a sinking feeling that he had rendered himself ineligible to vote by his youthful behaviour. It raises some questions, not least of which is whether he had ever told Sarah about this less than stellar moment in his past? If he had, was that before, or after they were married? And if he hadn’t, had the moment for confession arrived? I’ll never know for sure, although I rather suspect that he might have told her at some point after they were married, possibly characterising it as part of a political protest.

In the end, it did not matter. William paid his 20s and appeared on the burgess roll of 1843 – when the Municipal Corporation Act was eventually passed in 1842, it did not explicitly disenfranchise the felons, bribery artists and perjurers of the borough. And, as it turned out, the 1843 election didn’t take place. The first election in which William actually voted would have been the first general parliamentary election in 1853. (Felons were disqualified from registering to vote only if their felony had been committed “within any part of her Majesty’s dominions”. Felons who had committed their crimes anywhere else in the world, including Britain, were presumably free to vote…)

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.

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.

*******************************************************************

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.

Was William a Chartist?

Was William a Chartist? He went to one Chartist meeting that we know of. This doesn’t necessarily make him one, doesn’t mean he signed any of the petitions or agreed with all of the Charter. He left England before the 3 million signature petition was presented to Parliament, as did many of the Chartists and their supporters. A quick search of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography shows that quite a few former Chartists ended up in Nelson. Former Chartist leader George Binns, in replying to an attack on him in the Nelson Examiner, said “I have nothing to do with Chartism in New Zealand, and my past enthusiasm might have been forgotten where there is no grievance to redress and no enemy to our weal”. It’s possible that many of the former Chartists in New Zealand felt this way – in the new country, where the English class system had not taken root, and where opportunity was available for all who were willing to put in the work, there were not the same grievances as in England. The former Chartists didn’t need to be activists – they could just get on with their lives. It’s possible that this was the situation William was in.

What adds spice to the mystery is that a few months later, in October 1856, at the public meeting for the election of the Superintendent of Nelson Province, William rushed in to propose Dr David Munro as a candidate. William showed a rather strange haste and lack of propriety – the Nelson Examiner noted that the two main candidates were quietly conferring as to which of them should be proposed first; and Munro already had an intended proposer, who was reduced to seconding the nomination. A third candidate, opposing Munro and his main opponent on a number of issues, was a former Chartist, JP Robinson. So why didn’t William support Robinson? Was it that he didn’t agree with Chartist policies? It seems unlikely, given that life in New Zealand had already provided him with a key aim of the people’s charter, the vote. Was he trying to make a bit of a name for himself in Nelson political circles – he had been there for less than a year, so was he trying to get noticed? Did he have political ambitions of his own? He would have known Munro in Wellington, although they moved in different social circles – did he want to win personal favour with the man?

So does it matter whether he was a Chartist or not? I think, for the purposes of telling this story, that it does. I had been wondering how much of “politics” was going to find its way into the story – the more politics, the more work for me. The context is inevitably political – the New Zealand Company and land issues; Maori and land issues; the Maori wars; and local body politics, which we already know William was involved in. And where does Sarah fit into it all, given that it’s her story? It’s even harder to find out what she would have thought about it all – after all, reported history is so much his-story, and very little her-story. There are a couple of clues which suggest to me that Sarah would have taken an interest in politics, and that she and William may have discussed these issues at home. First, William’s sister comments in a letter to her that she remembers “you were very fond of a newspaper when you were at Ilford” – she encloses some of the local ones for her. Well, apart from advertisements, newspapers of the time were almost entirely political – so we know Sarah took an interest in the world around her. Second, two of her daughters signed the huge electoral petition that ultimately resulted in the 1893 Electoral Act giving New Zealand women the right to vote. Sarah died a couple of years before this; I don’t think the earlier petitions survived, and I don’t know if she signed any of them. But Emma and Kate, the two daughters who never married, did sign – and they had to have been influenced by the views of their parents, with whom they lived far longer than their siblings did. Slender clues perhaps, but I’m coming to the view that political issues were probably regular dinner conversation in the Norgrove household, and that therefore there’s a natural place for it in Sarah’s story.

Going with the flow

People sometimes experience moments where something appears in their creative work that seems to come from beyond them – for writers, a character appears fully-formed from nowhere, or a character says something that you know you didn’t think up yourself. Some people think it’s the hand of God at work. William Blake said, “I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me.” As far as Puccini was concerned, Madame Butterfly was dictated to him by God : “I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public”. Sometimes it does feel like that – those are my fingers on the computer keyboard, but it’s just flowing through me from somewhere else altogether. I think flow is an explanation which removes the spiritual element which some people find off-putting –flow is just the state where we’re so in the groove with what we’re doing, everything just comes together. You lose track of time and the world around you and it’s like magic!

Last week I had one of those experiences, resulting in a research side-track and some interesting questions. I’ve been working on writing William and Sarah’s last night on the Gertrude – the immigrants are a bit stunned and disappointed by what they have seen of Wellington. They’re feeling a bit misled by the New Zealand Company’s claims about the place, and there is a lot of talk going on in the steerage compartment instead of the usual quiet getting ready for bed. Here it is, still very much messy First Draft :

Below deck, it was noisy chaos instead of the usual quiet bed-time preparations. The curtains were still open in most of the bunks, and somewhere she could hear a woman weeping. The men were clustered around the tables between the berths, several vigorous discussions taking place at once. A small child’s wail rose above the din, and the sudden tightening of her nipples made her realise that she had been so caught up in her own worries that she had forgotten Ovid. Where was he? They had left him sleeping in their bunk, watched over by the neighbouring Plimmers. She was too small to see the far end of the compartment over her thronging ship-mates. She began to work her way past the benches, struggling past backs and elbows and sea-bags, stubbing her toes as she pushed and excused herself. She glanced up to get her bearings in the shadowy sea of dark coats, and found she could see the pale moon of Ovid’s face peering from their bunk. She reached for him, hands quickly checking over his small body as he wrapped his legs around her waist and pushed his face into her neck. “Mama’s here now,” she murmured to him, “Mama’s here”. Over the hubbub, she heard a gruff voice call out their name from the other side of the table.

“Norgrove! You’ve looked longer on this so-called town of Wellington than the rest of us tonight. What say you about the New Zealand Company’s promises now?”

The muttering voices quieted as benches creaked, men turning to see William as he followed Sarah through the crowd. She heard him sigh, and felt his hand on her shoulder, a brief squeeze that sent warmth and tingling quite unexpectedly through her. She leaned into his solid warmth as he turned to look at the expectant faces.

“Well, certainly it’s not a town or city as we know them back in England,” he began.

“Far from it,” came a voice from near the hatch, as other voices called out, and fists thumped the table.

“Friends,” William shouted. “Friends, that is not why we took this journey! If you wanted the familiar, the towns and cities of England, why then are you here? Why did you bring your wives and children on this dangerous voyage if you wanted a world like the one we left behind?”

“Hear, hear!” came a voice from below and to the right of her. Bodies shifted around Sarah as John Plimmer extracted himself from his family’s bunk and stood up. “Norgrove has the right attitude. This place is full of opportunity for us all!”

Immediately, the uproar broke out again, and William broke away from her to move closer to the table. Men shifted to allow him through and she lost her balance, pushed back against the bunks and almost falling into someone’s bed. A tug at her skirt made her look down, and she saw Eliza Plimmer beckoning her down to join her family in the lower bunk. She squirmed between a ship-mate and her own hanging sea-bag and gratefully sat down on the edge of the bunk as Eliza pulled six-year old Isaac onto her lap to make room. “You stayed on deck a long time.” Eliza leaned over and spoke directly into Sarah’s ear to make herself heard. “Does it look any better for looking at it longer?”

“No,” Sarah said, “not in the slightest.” She tried unsuccessfully to hitch her skirt into a cushion without jolting Ovid, or disturbing Eliza’s two younger children, who were nested in blankets at the back of the bunk. The raised edges of the bunks stopped bedding from sliding out, but made for uncomfortable seats, especially since five months of use had reduced the straw stuffing in the mattresses almost to dust. In the end, she did what Eliza had done, and swung her feet up onto the bunk and leaned her back against the rough boards dividing it from the next bunk. They sat toe to toe, unable to talk without raising their voices, and unable to see anything of what was going on through a solid wall of men’s coats. Sarah let Ovid slide down onto the mattress with his head pillowed on her stomach, and twitched the end of a blanket over him. She thought she saw Eliza rolling her eyes in the gloom as outside, their husbands argued the opportunities and benefits of their wild new Eden against those who despaired.

She stroked Ovid’s fine blond hair – it had lightened in the sun since they had crossed the equator. It really needed cutting, but she wasn’t going near him with a pair of scissors in a ship rolling around at sea. It would have to wait till they got ashore, and then she would barber William as well if she got a chance. Who knew? This time tomorrow night, they would probably be sleeping on the shallow beach she had seen from the deck, or somewhere in a forest under one of those towering trees. She didn’t want to think about it – she wanted to be doing something. No wonder the men were ranting and storming, but none of the women seemed inclined to join in, and she wasn’t going to be the first to speak. Eliza seemed to have come to the same conclusion; she had reached around Isaac for work-basket and was digging through it for something to do. Sarah leaned towards her. “You won’t be able to see to sew in this light.” Eliza pulled out a thick skein of grey wool. “No,” she said, “but we may as well finish rolling the wool while we’re stuck in here.” She picked out the end of the yarn, and held the rest for Sarah to take. Sarah tucked her hands inside the skein and then pulled them apart to hold the loops taut. Eliza started to roll the wool around her fingers, forming a squarish lump that slowly took on the shape of a ball as she wound the wool around it. Sarah’s hands moved automatically, easing the wool off the skein. She focused on it in the dim light as they settled into a rhythm, concentrating on the wool and her hands so that individual words from the men’s discussion blurred into a loud hum.

They were just starting on the second skein when Eliza abruptly stopped winding and leaned out of the bunk to look at something. Although the men nearest them were still talking hard, the noise seemed to be dying down, and Sarah thought it was probably the ship’s surgeon, come on his nightly rounds. She was proved right when Dr Garrett’s voice called out above the noise. “What’s this then, a Chartist meeting?” The silence that followed was so sudden and tense that she realised a good number of her fellow passengers must have been more involved in the Chartist actions than merely signing a petition.

© Helen McNaught

I stopped writing in complete surprise when Dr Garrett spoke, because where in the world did “a Chartist meeting” come from?? It’s not something I ever studied in a formal history class, but I knew I had run across it somewhere. Eventually, I tracked it back to the Nelson Examiner’s report on a public meeting held in 1856 to discuss the Education Act. In speaking in favour of the Act, our William “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”.

The rest of his speech is quite fascinating, but I’ll come back to it at another time. I took off into an exploration of Chartism, starting with Wikipedia, and ending up in some fairly scholarly articles. I haven’t quite finished yet – am still wondering if anyone has written a thesis on the links between Chartism and emigration to New Zealand – because obviously there has to be a link.

Just as interesting, though, is whether great-great grandpa was a Chartist, and does it matter anyway? I’ll come back to this in my next blog entry, because this one is already enormous!

Discoveries!

Apparently it takes the first 10-14 days of a holiday to relax properly, which for most people taking a two-week vacation probably means they are only just getting into the swing of it when it's time to go home. I realised yesterday, which was roughly two weeks into my annual leave, that I had finally stopped vegging on the sofa in front of the TV and felt like doing something. Good thing I have another couple of weeks before I have to go back to work! I've ripped back into research for Sarah's story, and I've already made some exciting discoveries!

It surely can't be a year since I last visited Papers Past at the National Library website - it can only have been a few months? Since my last visit they have machine-read a whole lot of the old newspapers archived there, including a couple of the papers which up until now, I have had to read page by page looking for any mention of family. Now I can just plug "Norgrove" into the search engine and boom, a surprising number of hits in the Nelson Examiner and the New Zealand Spectator and Cook Strait Guardian!

I'm only about one-third of the way through processing all the goodies I found, and fitting them into the timeline, but there were a couple of jaw-dropping moments - like William's advertisement in the NZS&CSG that he had taken over a private hotel and was fitting it out with a view to opening it as a boarding house! Huh? That definitely wasn't amongst the known facts of the family's early life in Wellington! So Sarah not only had 6 children and was pregnant with the 7th, but she was running a boarding house???? And then there were the advertisements in both the Wellington and Nelson papers advising creditors that William had assigned his property to third parties - was this some kind of receivership or were these agents? Was great-great grandpa some kind of dodgy dealer or just crap at business? Or were they simply handling his affairs while he was out of town, and if so, why third parties and not Sarah?

How I love research! Way more questions than answers! I'm itching to get back to it....