L to N

In William and Sarah’s social class, there wasn’t much need for letter-writing, especially within the family. People weren’t particularly mobile – they generally were born, lived and died within the same small area. Emigration meant getting the hang of writing letters, of figuring out what to say and what not to say, all compressed into a small piece of expensive paper.

L is for letters. This business of writing letters was very strange. There was never any need for letters before, with all the family close at hand. Father and Mother must be finding it strange as well – their letters begin formally, as if a school exercise they expect to be judged by a schoolmaster. But sometimes they would write just as they spoke, and it was almost like they were standing in the same room talking. They must find her letters much the same. It was hard to find the words to describe all the new and strange things. And how did you put in a
letter something that you barely mentioned to your own family even when you were face to face? She had puzzled over the words for weeks, finally deciding she would write, “By the time you receive this, our family will number four. The happy event is expected in November.” When she told William, he said that by the time they read it, the event would have taken place, happy or not, but they would still worry until they received confirmation that all was well. So in the end, she hadn’t mentioned it at all.

William wasn’t registered to vote for the 1842 borough elections, and the only thing I can see that would have stopped him was lack of money. The same problem seemed to have affected most of the Gertrude passengers – only 6 of them registered to vote. In fact, from a potential electorate of around 2000, only 352 registered. William was one of only 150 who did register the following year – at a cost of a mere 2/6 – but the election didn’t happen. A clash between national politics and local body politics saw the fledgling municipality founder, and it wasn’t until 1863 that there was an election for a Town Board.

M is for Municipal Corporations Ordinance. The big excitement in the town was the passage of the Municipal Corporations Ordinance and the proclamation of Wellington as a borough. The franchise was 20 shillings, a large sum on William’s income. He was bitterly disappointed that he hadn’t been able to put together this sum in the bare month between the proclamation and the closing of registrations to vote. After all, part of the reason for coming to New Zealand was the hope of a fairer society, although they hadn’t expected that he would get an opportunity to vote quite so quickly. He had buried his disappointment in furious activity, attending all of the town meetings and speaking at many of them. It was an important opportunity, he said, to ensure that the best candidates were chosen to represent the working men. And anyway, getting his name out there and getting to meet almost everyone in the town would undoubtedly lead to opportunities for work. No doubt this was true, but William’s enthusiasms could be exhausting – he would come home from meetings all fired up, words spilling out of him as soon as he came in the door. He positively encouraged her to have opinions of her own, and to debate them with him. Sometimes she thought it was almost a pity that she couldn’t vote herself, but in the end, that was something best left to the men.

I’ve don’t know whether Sarah thought women should have the vote; in the 1840s, perhaps not – for William to be able to vote was new and exciting enough. Maybe later in life she thought, like her daughters did, that women should also have the vote. She died in 1891, before the successful women’s suffrage petition of 1893.

Naturally, N is for Norgrove. I’m not sure where the rest of this came from; it just came out of my fingertips onto the keyboard without any conscious thought. It hadn’t occurred to me until someone pointed it out, but this encapsulates the huge changes Sarah experienced in the space of about two years – new wife, new mother, new country.

N is for Norgrove. She was still getting used to being Mrs Norgrove. It seemed that no-one called her Sarah any more. William called her “dear” and “dearest”. Ovid called her Mama. Sophia, when she was still in Wellington, had called her Sarah, or just as often, she would call her “my dear Mrs Norgrove”, gently mocking the refined tones of the ladies who formed the town’s better society. Only her family still called her Sarah, and now that was just in letters which were few and far between. Sometimes, she just has to say her own name out loud, to hear it, to keep herself from disappearing altogether. Sarah my girl, she says to herself, Sarah, you had better buck up and get on with those potatoes, for they won’t peel themselves.

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.