Whales

I’m getting to the end of Sarah’s alphabet. When I started thinking about the letter W, the idea of whales kept surfacing. I knew that New Zealand’s whaling industry was vigorous in the 1840s, but with no whaling stations in Wellington harbour, would Sarah have known anything of it? The nearest whaling stations were on the Kapiti coast, and across Cook Strait at Te Awaiti and Port Underwood. The Cook Strait whalers came to Wellington frequently – the ships, and the men would have been common sites around town. But would Sarah have ever seen a whale, except perhaps in the distance while on the voyage to New Zealand? I started digging around, and got quite a surprise. While the people who live and work around Wellington today know that dolphins and pods of orca frequently come into the harbour – that’s a real traffic and work-stopper when it happens – I didn’t know that the southern right whale had been a frequent visitor in the 1840s, choosing the harbour as a breeding ground. I was enchanted to discover that they had made so much noise that people even complained about them.

W is for whale. If she was going to lie waiting for sleep like this every night until the baby came, she would be soon be exhausted. The baby was wide awake and cavorting around inside her like the playing dolphins they often saw in the harbour. The idea made her smile. If this baby was a dolphin, then she must be a whale, the great size of her. There were whales in Lambton Harbour at the moment – they often came right in during the winter, to the consternation of the ferry-men. She and Ovid had watched them from the hill yesterday, waiting for the sudden explosions of air and water as each giant creature surfaced, then slid slowly back under the grey water, broad tail rising in a farewell wave. She could hear them now through the thin walls of the house, blowing and whooshing, seeming as close as the garden in the still night air. Some people complained that the whales kept them awake at night, but she was uncomfortably awake anyway, and they kept her company, all whales together, wallowing through the dark night.

The following “memory” Sarah has of learning to sew is actually mine. It might have been a small table-cloth, I think, but I remember the large red-and-white checks, and the challenge of positioning the needle so it would go through the corners exactly, drawing the white embroidery cotton in a neat line behind it. To envisage Sarah’s tiny, neat stitches, I only have to turn my head to see my mother’s needlework, artistry that is exquisitely detailed and perfect. Sarah would have been proud to see her great-grand-daughter’s skill and talent.

X is for cross-stitch, the tiny little stitches she was working across the hem of her new table-cloth. The first stitch her mother had taught her, sewing on fabric with large red and white checks to help her get the stitches even, going from corner to corner one way along the row, and back again on the opposite corners. Now she made the tiniest stitches, evenly spaced, without even thinking about it. In a few years, she would be looking for checked fabric to teach a daughter the same way her mother had taught her. Would it be this baby, or would she have to wait a little longer for a girl?

The model for this “snapshot” of Catullus is my own Avro, a savage and enthusiastic hunter who can be quite charming and affectionate when the mood takes him. I don’t know what the Norgrove family cats were named – later generations had prosaic names, like my grandmother’s Ginger and Nugget – no prizes for guessing the colours of those two! But when it came to the Norgrove’s first cat in New Zealand, I was stumped – until it dawned on me, looking at the children’s names, that Sarah and William had obviously made an agreement early on – he would choose the names for the boys, she would choose the names of the girls. This would explain the Latin poets (Ovid and Horace), the admired writer Walter (for Walter Scott), and just barely, the obscure Oscar, from the even more obscure Poems of Ossian – William chose to show off his education in the naming of his sons. Sarah, on the other hand, opted for the more traditional girls’ names of the time – Kate and Emma. Gertrude, of course, was for the good ship which brought them to New Zealand. So if William named the boys, and the first cat was male, then he would have chosen its name as well. Naturally, he would have chosen another poet from his Latin education – Catullus, of course.

Y is for yawn. What was it about cats that they could yawn so unabashedly and look so pleased with themselves? Catullus was yawning, a great gaping stretch of the mouth that displayed his pink gums and his sharp little white teeth, his pink tongue curling with pleasure. He ended his yawn with a little squeak, and shut his mouth, his eyes closed to little slits while he decided whether to sleep or take another look for the mouse that had been trying to get into the food-safe. He stretched and yawned again – it was catching. She felt it building up in the back of her throat, forcing her mouth open and her eyes closed, a great sucking in of air. When she looked up again, eyes watering, Catullus was watching with an air of satisfaction, as if he had made her yawn on purpose.

The last letter of the alphabet was obvious – at least to any New Zealander (and anyone whose name starts with Z).

Z is for New Zealand. Funny how Z was a letter that she hadn’t needed to use much before, hadn’t noticed in words before, and now it seemed to be the most important letter in the alphabet. Reading the news from home reprinted in the Spectator, she found herself constantly seeking out the Z’s, thinking every Z would mean New Zealand, and being surprised and oddly disappointed to encounter it in Zoological Society and Zambia.

Te Rauparaha and Queen Victoria

Still sharing Sarah’s alphabet – S through to V today.

S is for ship. She had never seen a ship before they arrived at the Gravesend docks, and now, after five months spent in one reaching New Zealand, ships were such a big part of her life, as they were to all of the immigrants. What ships had arrived was the big news of any day; which ships were leaving, and where they were bound was the subject of many a conversation, not to mention letters hastily scrawled in hopes of catching the mail. Which ships were long expected and still not heard of, what fate might have befallen them and their hopeful passengers were frequently discussed, and all the useful and important things in their holds, like letters from home, and marmalade and linen were the cause of much speculation. Where once she had looked out the window of her house onto the bricks of an Ilford street, she now looked out on a vast harbour forested with masts. The flags and sailors’ washing fluttering from the rigging gave the town a festive look, as if every day was market day. The comings and goings of the ships’ boats and the native canoes provided endless entertainment for her and for Ovid, who liked to call himself a sailor-man and pretend to be rowing in his bath.

I’m sure that if Sarah really did have a close encounter of the Te Rauparaha kind, we’d know all about it. But it’s certainly likely that in the early 1840s, prior to the Wairau incident, the Norgroves did seem him in street, especially since they lived just below the pub which was reputedly the old chief’s favourite watering hole. He would have been in his 70s by this time, and although his reputation makes him seem 8 foot tall, it was a great surprise to me to find out that he was actually less than 5 feet in height. So this little piece is pure fiction from Sarah’s point of view.

T is for Te Rauparaha. The old chief was a fearsome sight with his heavily tattooed face and body. Everyone knew when he had come to Wellington because his canoe would be drawn up on the beach just below the corner of Lambton Quay and Mulgrave St – Te Rauparaha liked to do his drinking at the Thistle Inn, the pub just behind and above their house. She had managed to avoid encountering him until this afternoon, when she and Ovid were walking back up the beach from visiting Eliza Plimmer. Ovid took one look at the terrifying old man and his entourage, shrieked and buried himself in her skirts. Te Rauparaha had laughed, and walked over to her. She pushed Ovid behind her, and raised her parasol defensively, wishing with all her hammering heart that she had someone’s skirts to hide in herself. Te Rauparaha pushed her parasol gently aside with his carved wooden staff. “I don’t eat little English boys,” he said, baring surprisingly white teeth at her. “Or their mothers.” He didn’t wait for an answer, just stomped on down the beach to his canoe. She stood still with complete shock, not just because he had spoken to her, or even because of what he had said, but because he had stood eye to eye with her. From all the stories about the mighty warrior, she had assumed he would be a giant of a man, but the truth was, he was no taller than her.

Everywhere in Wellington seems to be uphill from where you are, and when you occasionally go downhill, it’s often just as hard as going up, especially in the wind. The extreme hilliness of the town came as a bit of a shock to the early settlers, but they adapted, figured out construction techniques to make houses cling to the hillsides, and got around as nimbly as mountain goats.

U is for uphill. The whole town was surrounded by hills, and everywhere she walked, she always seemed to be going uphill. At first she had to keep stopping to catch her breath; now she must be more used to it, because she could get all the way up Wellington Terrace without stopping to lean and gasp on someone’s fence. If only their fortunes would strengthen in the same way, so that they didn’t always seem to be struggling uphill, and gasping, when it came to money.

I was quite struck to find that Sarah and Victoria were fairly close in age. Funny thing, because it runs in the family – Mum and her sister are of similar ages to the present Queen; Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose were a kind of gold standard for them when they were young. And the late Diana, Princess of Wales was only a month or two older than me – and our lives couldn’t have been more different. So I wondered if Sarah followed the news about Victoria in the same way as we did about our respective royals…

V is for Victoria. Queen Victoria was born just one day short of a year after her own birth. The closeness in age meant that Sarah had always felt a connection to her, a sisterly concern, despite the vast difference in their social circumstances. The parallels were heightened when Victoria married Prince Albert not long after Sarah married William. Ovid was born, and then a few months later, Princess Victoria. Fond mother though she was, Sarah had no great hopes of a match between the two. And there was little point wondering if the Queen ever thought of her like she often thought about the Queen – Victoria had no idea of her existence. But did the Queen ever think about New Zealand, and her subjects trying to make their fortunes, or at least a competence, in this far away country?

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.

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.

Far, garden, Henry, Ilford, jam and kick

More of the alphabet exercise – thoughts from Sarah’s point of view.

F is for far. Far, far away, that’s how the old life seemed to her now, not just the thousands of miles and months of sailing far away, but far in the distant past, blurry and fragmented like memories of her childhood. Wellington was all about the here and now, young and brash and fresh, everyone broken out of the moulds of the past and bent on making something new.

I know there was some fairly keen gardening going on later in William and Sarah’s lives – the image of the Blenheim house that heads this page is evidence of that. But I’m not so sure about the early days. It’s unlikely that Sarah grew up in a house with a garden; William might have spent some time around gardens, but having their own vegetable and fruit gardens would probably have been a new experience for them, as for many of the other settlers from urban backgrounds. The New Zealand Company was quick to organise the formation of the Wellington Horticultural Society to encourage settlers to take up gardening, and the first horticultural exhibition was held in January 1842. Sarah’s view of gardening below probably owes more to my brown-thumbed approach than anything else, but you can be sure that William would have taken a highly scientific route! With none of the environmental protection controls that we have nowadays, all sorts of seeds were sent out from England, with mixed results. Some quite innocuous English hedge-row plants adapted rather enthusiastically to the New Zealand climate and are now treated as noxious pests.

G is for garden. The garden was William’s latest project. Neither of them knew the first thing about gardening, but it was the expected thing here, to start your own garden as soon as you had a bit of land you could call your own. People were getting seeds sent out from home, and she was always being offered them, or cuttings or bulbs. William took a very scientific approach, with labels, and notes in a small book, but she just did what she was told and followed whatever instructions she was given. She doubted the survival of the funny little things and waited without much hope, but with a willingness to be surprised when something green pushed its way through the soil towards the light.

Sarah’s younger brother Henry was born when she was 14, so she would have played a major role in caring for him when he was young. He was always referred to as her little blind brother. The 1851 census has a column for listing whether each individual is “blind, or deaf and dumb” – Henry is not marked as such. However in the 1871 census, where the choices are “deaf-and-dumb; blind; imbecile or idiot; or lunatic” a note against Henry’s name says “blind from small boy”. In an 1844 letter, Sarah’s mother says “Poor Henry is trying to improve that he may be capable of writing to you himself before long and then he has a deal to say”, which suggests that while his sight may be poor, he is not completely blind. Henry then adds a few sloping lines of his own to the bottom of the letter. Many years later, Sarah’s father tells of how Henry preaches in the market-place in Barking from his book of “Moon’s raised type”. He goes on to say, “Oh Sarah, if you could see him standing up declaring the Gospel to falling men – only to think a few years back you watched over him in bed diseased with a loathsome disease”. The most likely of the loathsome diseases that could have caused blindness in a child at that time was measles.

H is for Henry. She missed him dreadfully, her little brother Henry. He was the dearest of all her brothers and sisters. When she and William married, they hadn’t wanted a big fuss, and so Henry had been her only family at the church. He had been five then, and afterwards, he had cried because he didn’t want his big sister to go away. They had both cried a lot more when the passage to New Zealand had been confirmed. She had wanted to take Henry with them, but her parents and William had persuaded her that New Zealand would be no place for a blind boy. If anything happened to them, he wouldn’t be able to manage on his
own, and who would there be to take him in? She knew they were right, but his absence was always with her, like the gap between two of her back teeth. Her tongue would always seek out the hole, looking for the tooth that had once been there. Her mind was like that with Henry, always prodding at the gap where he had been in her life. And every time she asked herself, was it something that she did, or didn’t do, when she was nursing him through the illness, that caused the damage to his eyes?

I remembered Sarah’s father mentioning in a letter that she had been born in London, so I went back to the letter and checked. In fact, it was Dorset Street in Spitalfields, so I Googled it and discovered it was pretty much the worst street in London. I’m waiting on an interloan from the library of a book about the street, which is actually called The Worst Street in London. Among other things, long after Sarah’s time, Jack the Ripper murdered one of his victims in an alley off Dorset Street! Anyway, this piece of information asks more questions than it answers – like why were Sarah’s parents living there? Why did they move to Ilford?

I is for Ilford. She had thought that she would spend her whole life in Ilford, or at least nearby. She hadn’t been born there; she was born in one of the worst streets in London, not that she remembered life amongst the immigrants and doss-houses. She had imagined marriage and a family of her own, but always there, with her own family close at hand, not on the other side of the world. Would she ever see Ilford and her family again?

"Jam" is about all the things the early settlers didn’t have…

J is for jam. She missed jam. And honey. And marmalade. There wasn’t enough fruit yet for any but the earliest of the settlers to be making jam, and there were no bees for honey. All those lovely jars and jars of jam that had filled her larder at home – plum, raspberry, strawberry – she had given them all to her mother when they packed for New Zealand, not wanting to risk the extra weight and possible breakage. Now jam was an imported luxury, an occasional purchase when she had spare house-keeping money, kept for special occasions. She craved
the taste of something sweet.

Another imagined episode from Sarah’s pregnancy with Oscar.

K is for kick. Dear heaven, how this baby could kick. It seemed to be doing it for its own amusement. Rubbing her stomach just made it worse, as if it was trying to reach through to her hand. The other night, she had rested her saucer on the bulge while she drank her tea, thinking it safe, the baby dormant. It was just lurking in wait though, and with one almighty kick, sent the saucer flying. Fortunately it didn’t break – she didn’t have china to spare, and when William asked for a repeat performance because he didn’t quite believe it, she had told him rather tartly to fetch one of the tin plates they had used on the ship. He had placed it quite gingerly on the bump, and was rewarded a minute or so later with a satisfying clatter as the plate sprang up and slid to the floor.

More of Sarah's alphabet

Here are some more letters from the alphabet exercise I've been working on over the last week or two. Wellington is almost a character in itself in some of these. Sometimes I'm so immersed in Wellington as it was in 1841 and 1842 that I get a nasty shock when I find myself in the present. Then there was the morning on the train, coming round the harbour, when past and present blurred together and Sarah's view and my view were suddenly the same.

B is for bowl. The harbour was like an enormous bowl with water in the bottom of it. The sides of the bowl rose away bush-clad and steep, and the town grasped at whatever land it could at the edge of the water. Sometimes in a roaring southerly, with the sea rising and pushing at the town, it seemed that the bowl would fill with water and cover them all. She knew it couldn’t really happen, but sometimes she imagined them living under water in the bottom of the bowl, the great kahikatea trees as slippery and supple as seaweed, fish swimming down Lambton Quay amongst the carts and horses and women with shopping baskets.

A lot of the letters of the alphabet picked up on Sarah's thoughts and feelings about her second pregnancy - Oscar - in 1842.

C is for confinement. Needlework freed her mind to wander, and it always seemed to wander to her greatest worry, her impending confinement. She was dreading it, not looking forward at all to the inevitable pain, when the baby took over and seemingly began to tear and batter its way out while she fought it for her own life. At the same time she was anxious for it to be over and both of them safe, God willing. Her mother had been the same every time, but at least she had Sarah, had the comfort of knowing that if God took her, Sarah would be there to look after the other children. When Ovid came, having Mother there had been a big comfort, knowing that if it all went wrong, she would take care of the baby. Here in New Zealand, with no family, her fears worried at her. She wanted to be practical, tell William that if she did not survive he should marry again as soon as possible, to provide a mother for Ovid, and the child if it survived her. But she couldn’t bear the thought that she might have to leave her dear William and Ovid, and when the tiny stitches blurred and tears fell into the fine cotton she wasn’t sure whether she was grieving for herself or for them.

D is for daughter. She hoped this baby would be a girl. William wanted another son, but she wanted a daughter this time. Men didn’t seem to value daughters in the same way as women did. Daughters were useful, of course, to help with cooking and housework and the smaller children; but really, a daughter was another chance, someone who could be a better version of herself, prettier, more accomplished perhaps.

Earthquakes were always going to make an appearance - can't live around here without them.

E is for earthquake. That last one had been a real rattler – it seemed to go on for an eternity while the china clattered on the shelves and the table rocked and swayed as she crouched under it, clutching Ovid for dear life. Her heart was still pounding as hard as if she had been running. Would she ever get used to these earthquakes? Did anyone? The Maori children from Pipitea Pa would run out calling “ru, ru”, giggling and laughing like it was something they enjoyed. But how could you enjoy it when the solid and dependable earth beneath your feet suddenly started to ripple and shake so that you couldn’t stand up, and you had no idea how long it would last, or what would come tumbling down?

Apples

I’ve been working on a writing exercise called the Character Alphabet, where you take a letter of the alphabet, let your character pick a word that starts with it, and write a short scene from their point-of-view. I knew straight away that for Sarah, A is for “apple” – which does have a certain clichéd children’s alphabet feel about it, I know. But I’d been thinking about apples. The last of the peaches and nectarines have disappeared from the supermarkets, so this week’s lunchtime fruit for me will be juicy, crunchy, Pacific Rose apples. And I’d been writing about William, Sarah and Ovid visiting the Horticultural Exhibition on Wellington Anniversary Day 1842, where the first apples grown in the region were exhibited.

The apples were grown by the Baron Alzdorf in the Hutt Valley. He put four of them into the exhibition and they received a special prize and a mention in the newspaper reports. They must have been a bit small and confused, those apples, it being January at the time. For new arrivals like the Norgroves, they were probably the first apples they had seen in almost a year, having left England at the height of summer, and arrived in New Zealand at the end of spring. New Zealand’s only indigenous fruits were berries, and there wouldn’t have been many about since William and Sarah arrived – and anyway, how would they have known which ones were safe to eat?

So, knowing I was going to write about Alzdorf’s four apples and Sarah’s reaction to them, I needed to do a little apple research. After all, I don’t want any accidental anachronisms – I don’t mean having her bite into a Pacific Rose, which is a late twentieth-century apple – but if I needed to describe an apple’s colour, texture and taste, it had better be an apple that she might be familiar with. This led to a fantastic voyage around the internet to discover that there are a heck of a lot of varieties of apples out there, with some weird and wonderful names. Ashmead’s Kernel, anyone? Or how about a Flower of Kent or a hefty Peasgood’s Nonsuch? By the time I got to the Cornish Gilliflower, I was drooling into the keyboard, and had to stop for a Pacific Rose of my own.

I wanted to know what sort of apples William and Sarah had been familiar with back in England, which is how I ended up reading Mrs Beeton (loads of apple recipes, but she’s not particular about the varieties to be used) and The Whole Art of Husbandry, written in 1716 by J. Mortimer, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who was rather more helpful, if colourfully descriptive : “The Aromatick or golden-russetting hath no compare, it being of a Gold-colour’d Coat under a Russett Hair, hath some Warts on it, its Flesh of a yellow colour, its form of a flattish round…” Mmmm?

I decided William and Sarah were probably familiar with the Blenheim Orange; the Decio, which dates back to Roman times and looks like the great-grandmother of all apples; the Golden Reinette (or Golden Rennet, according to the spelling of J. Mortimer above); Ashmead’s Kernel; Fearns Pippin; and the White Pearmain, which had been grown in England since about 1200AD. And it was the Pearmain that seemed the most likely candidate for Baron Alzdorf’s first apple trees, being a self-fertilising type, not reliant on other fruits for pollination. At this point, I had to stop myself from diverting down the research path of finding out how the early settlers got their first fruits, vegetables and flowers going without bees for pollination, a topic for future enquiry. Back to the story at hand – here is how “A is for apple” played out.

At the Horticultural Exhibition, Wellington, January 1842

A is for apple.
The next table had only one display, a white china plate holding a pyramid of small green-and-red apples. When had she last seen apples? Certainly not since they had been in New Zealand. In fact, the last time she could remember eating apples was early in her pregnancy with Ovid.

She hadn’t even been sure that she was pregnant; they had only been married a few months, after all. William and Mr Allardice had gone to work on the roof of a house on the outskirts of Ilford. The men were told they could take windfalls from the orchard, and William came home with his lunch-cloth bulging with russety golden rennets. He held them out to show her, and she snatched one up and crunched into it as if it was the only food in the world. Which it was, for her, for the few minutes it took her to gobble it, pips and all. She was licking the juice from her fingers when she saw William’s expression, surprised, but oddly pleased.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted, suddenly conscious of her greed. “I don’t know why…….I just wanted it so badly.”

“Maybe it wasn’t you who wanted it,” he had said, with a meaningful look at her waist that had made her blush deeply, still a little shy with him about the unexpected pleasures of marriage.

He had been right, though. She looked at them both now, as Ovid reached out for the shiny fruit, and William caught him up and held him so that the apples were out of his reach. He looked at her over the top of Ovid’s head, and smiled.

“He still wants apples, then”, William said, winking at her.

Letters from home

On the rare occasions that I write letters, they’re pretty good letters, even if I say so myself. But as my mother, an indefatigable letter-writer herself, will tell you, I’m absolutely no good at sustaining a relationship by letter alone. Years can go by between letters from me, and even the most devoted of friends eventually give up the one-sided effort and fade away. Not even the immediacy of email helps. I might forward the occasional joke, but don’t hang around waiting for a newsy juicy bit of personal correspondence, because it will be a long wait.

I’m lucky to have some of the family letters, although only two written by Sarah, to her adult children. The majority of the letters are from members of the Hall and Norgrove families in England to Sarah and William in New Zealand. I started out thinking that for Sarah, letters would have been a lifeline between her and the family left behind in England. She didn’t have the instant give and take of email; she didn’t even have the dubiously reliable New Zealand postal system which might get a letter from one end of the country to the other in under a week. She had to rely on the dodginess of sailing ships which might not even survive the voyage between England and New Zealand, and if they did, took months on the voyage.

In the early days of Sarah’s life in New Zealand, it would have taken up to a year to receive a reply to a letter she had written – four, five, six months for her letter to reach England, and the same again for the reply to reach her. Letters would have been less a conversation than a series of news bulletins travelling in two directions. This might have served to reinforce Sarah’s sense of isolation and separation from her family – while letters might have kept her connected to family and neighbourhood news, they would also be a reminder of how far away England was.

Paper was not the cheap commodity it is to us these days. Paper for letters was often scarce and always expensive; a newsy letter would be written on both sides of a sheet, and then “crossed” – the paper turned 90 degrees to write across it again. Then the sheet used as the envelope – for there was no such thing as a ready-made envelope – it would be written on as much as possible before being carefully folded around the first sheet and addressed. Postage would have been another expense, although possibly more for the families in England than in New Zealand – the New Zealand Company encouraged immigrants to write positive accounts of their new lives to those at “home”, presumably by giving free postage on their own ships. For the Company, it was free advertising, and many of the letters were collected up and published in their fortnightly English newspaper, The New Zealand Journal.

I was reading an article the other day that seemed almost surprised at the degree of literacy of people of Sarah’s class. I’ve got no way of knowing how and when she learned her letters, but it’s clear that Sarah, her parents and her siblings could all read and write, and that Sarah herself enjoyed reading. “You were very fond of a newspaper when you were at Ilford”, her sister-in-law Hannah wrote, enclosing a selection for Sarah’s amusement. Even though she could read and write, it seems unlikely that Sarah had written many letters before leaving for New Zealand. In England, her family lived nearby and she would have seen them often – no need then for letters to them. People of her class rarely travelled, so she was unlikely to have any friends living at a distance with whom she corresponded. Moving to New Zealand brought many changes, and among them would have been the necessity to maintain relationships with the people left behind through letter-writing.

Sarah’s early letters back to the family in England can only be guessed at. The first letters would probably have been written from the emigration barracks before boarding the ship at Gravesend, and from Gertrude between her departure from Gravesend and her final departure from the Downs eighteen days later. These would have been hasty letters, written when the opportunity of mailing arose, notes about shipboard life and how the family was settling in on board. There may have been one or two opportunities for similar letters during the five months Gertrude was at sea. When another ship was sighted heading in the opposite direction, wherever possible the two ships would drop sail within hailing distance, and news would be exchanged. A boat would be sent between them with mailbags and any other urgently needed provisions. From the first sighting of another ship’s sail, there would have been a few hours, or sometimes only minutes, to compose a quick letter to let the family know that all was well so far.

The first letter Sarah wrote home after landing in New Zealand must have been a difficult one. She wouldn’t have wanted to tell of their disappointment in finding Wellington so primitive, much less than the promised land they had been led to expect. She might not have wanted to confess the poverty of her first home, with its mud floors and leaky roof. She would have wanted to keep her fears about William’s employment prospects to herself, along with her homesickness, and her alienation in a land where not even the birds and trees were familiar. That first letter would have been short, telling how they were safely landed after twenty weeks at sea. It might have told how the town was laid out around the curving bays of the harbour, and of the steep bush-clad hills behind. She might have said it was warm, that the climate seemed promising, and that the nearby bush teemed with bird life which had no natural predators. She might have mentioned the friendships made on the ship, perhaps mentioned other people who had travelled from the same town as the Norgroves. Any mention of their prospects would of necessity have been vague and positive.

What is possibly the reply to that very first letter comes from Sarah’s father, William King Hall. It’s very short, written in the awkward hand of a carpenter for whom expressing himself in a letter is an unfamiliar experience.

Send us word how far you live from the waterline or where you landed and how far Mr Kebble lives from you Mr Allard would be very pleased to have a letter from you He is delighted to hear you are doing well he says William is a clever tradesman and will become a great man he tells every body what he can do

Tell William his mother and sister was well when we heard from them

What a brief and tantalising glimpse of her father this must have been for Sarah. We have to hope that she had received an earlier letter, sent while she was still at sea, which contained some news of her mother, and brothers and sisters, especially her blind younger brother Henry, and Caroline, the sister who was born only months after Ovid. At least there was news of William’s family, and a hint of what was to become another letter-writing relationship, between William’s family in Colchester and Sarah’s family in Ilford.

There’s evidence of correspondence between the two families, forwarding the precious letters and news received from New Zealand. William wrote to his mother, probably in 1846, asking him to find and send a glazier’s vice. His mother forwarded the letter to Sarah’s father, who made enquiries, and on receiving a letter with the price, wrote back to William’s mother Hannah on the bottom of it, asking whether she could find out from someone in the much larger town of Colchester how the vice could be shipped to New Zealand. Hannah in turn must have forwarded the letter to William and Sarah, although any letter of her own that accompanied it has not survived. Even so, the letter would have given Sarah quite a jolt, as William mentions that his wife, Sarah’s mother, is ill and not expected to survive.

A month or two later, the expected black-edged letter arrives from Hall, informing Sarah of her mother’s death, and enclosing a lock of her hair for a keepsake. For the four or five months it took for the letter to reach her, Sarah must have imagined her mother alive; the last month or so, perhaps, after receiving the earlier letter, wondering and worrying. Her father is in turn prosaic - “She was confined to her room for 6 months with a liver complaint. Mr Allison opened her and examined her liver which was her particular wish. He said her liver weighed near 12 pounds”, and anguished – “O Sarrah if you was here I could tell you my trouble but then I think again. Ah Poor Sarrah she has got plenty of trouble for I cannot tell what you go through”. The letter is marked at this point with the stain of one large tear-drop, Sarah’s grief still evident more than 150 years later.

Letters were a mixed blessing then, when the news was bad, and the recipient too far away to be of any help. And a long gap between letters was just as bad, worrying about the reasons for lack of news. In the same letter that tells of her mother’s death, Sarah’s father goes on to say :

My Dear I received your letter in March. Your Poor Mother and I were glad to hear you and William was well likewise the Dear Children. I hope they will never leave you to cause you to think and fret as we have done about you but you seem to think we had forgotten you all together and say you will not rite but I hope you know better than to think so light of a lone Father and Motherless Sisters and Brothers but you are quite just in Finding Fault for I feel guilty and ashamed of neglect in not riteing to you oftener but I hope you will forgive me and as soon as my mind is moore at rest I will rite a long letter. I hope your love to me nor my love to you will never be altered w[h]ile we are in this world.

Poor Sarah. If there was one letter from home she would have wished not to have survived the long voyage to New Zealand, it would have to be this one.

Christmas and New Year

The first Christmas in New Zealand must have seemed very strange for William and Sarah, and all the other English emigrants to New Zealand. Christmas in the northern hemisphere was a mid-winter festival, celebrated cosily indoors in front of a roaring fire, with hearty eating and drinking, and the gathering together of families. Decorations included whatever greenery was available; holly and mistletoe were traditionally used, and the Christmas tree, a German custom first introduced by Queen Charlotte, and later popularised by Prince Albert, was becoming a feature of most homes by the 1840s.

In contrast, Christmas in New Zealand falls around the summer solstice. It’s warm, if not hot, by late December, and the traditional imagery of snow and winter activities has always sat oddly with the reality of the weather. So too have the food traditions – at first, the English roast beef, and more recently the American tradition of roast turkey are generally less than a pleasure for the cook who has spent a sweaty morning in the kitchen with them.

Christmas 1841 fell on a Saturday. The weather was mild – despite a strong north-westerly, the temperature touched on 19°C at the hottest part of the day, and it was still 17° in the late afternoon. The pleasant day was spoiled only by strong squally winds and a little rain in the evening. Christmas day was a common-law holiday – it was expected that if it fell on a working day, employers would give their staff the day off. Most did, and we can only hope that if William was in employment at this time, he was given the day, or at least the afternoon, as an unpaid holiday – Saturday more often than not being a working day for the labouring class.

The traditional holly and mistletoe decorations would have been absent, as would any of the familiar trees used as Christmas trees in England. While the hillsides around Wellington were ablaze with the spiky red blooms of the northern rata, it wasn’t until the 1860s that this and the pohutukawa tree began to be referred to as the New Zealand Christmas tree. However, the red and green of the native trees and shrubs were noticed and used for decoration from early days, if the following verse from the 1842 Christmas editorial in the NZ Gazette and Wellington Spectator is any guide :

Ye gentlefolks of England, who live at home at ease,
When you think of us New Zealanders, remember if you please;
Altho’ we’ve not the mistletoe or the bright holly berry,
Under which to kiss the fair sex, and thus be gay and merry,
We still have the rata, with its bright and beauteous flower,
Mingling with its myrtle leaves to form our Christmas bowers…

The editorialist goes on to note that the Christmas revelry, the singing, drinking and feasting on roast beef still continued; that the English in New Zealand clung to their traditional associations despite the different climate of their new location.

As if it wasn’t strange enough to be celebrating Christmas in the middle of summer, the worst of it for William and Sarah was probably the lack of family to celebrate the holiday with. If they weren’t already feeling a bit homesick, then Christmas with its tradition of family gatherings would have made them painfully aware that they were a very long way from home. Sarah, in particular, coming from such a large and close-knit family, must have desperately missed seeing her parents and siblings. Perhaps they joined together with friends to have a shared Christmas dinner as a way of making up for the absence of extended family.

William and Sarah probably exchanged small gifts, and found something special for Ovid too. Gift-giving at Christmas was a long-standing tradition, although without the overwhelming commercialisation of more recent times. Christmas 1841 was completely un-commercial – in the weeks leading up to Christmas day, there was absolutely no mention of the holiday in the NZ Gazette and Wellington Spectator – no Christmas advertising by any of the local storekeepers and tradespeople, no mention of any special Christmas church services at all. The paper was published on Christmas day itself (at this stage, it was a twice-weekly publication, Wednesdays and Saturdays), and even on the 25th there was no mention of the word Christmas. The following editions made no mention of any activities that had occurred on Christmas day, and the next Saturday there were no reports of any New Year’s Eve activities either. It might have seemed as if Christmas and New Year were completely overlooked in 1841 by a settlement that was wholly focussed on preparing for the settlement’s second anniversary celebrations later in January.

Fortunately, Edward Wakefield’s Adventure in New Zealand tells us about the celebrations in 1840 and 1842, so it seems reasonable to assume that 1841 was much the same. In 1840, he tells us :

“A merry Christmas and a happy New Year” had been celebrated in old English style. Fat bullocks had been slaughtered and dressed with evergreens, and the New Year saluted with ringing of bells, firing of cannon, and hoisting of flags.

In 1842, Wakefield was at Otaki, feasting on “a haunch of goat venison instead of a sirloin of beef”. However, he had heard that :

the festival had been celebrated with “right merrie” sports in Wellington. A cricket-match between two clubs which had practised for some months, quoits, swings, and other diversions, were numerously attended on Te Aro flat, and, to the credit of the community be it spoken, not a single case of drunkenness or disorderly conduct disfigured the pleasant associations of the day.

New Year’s Day 1841 had started noisily, as bells and cannon-fire echoed around the great bowl of Wellington harbour. New Year’s morning 1842 would have been much the same, with ships firing their cannons and ringing their bells, and the few Scots settlers in Wellington (former Gertrude shipmates the Lawsons among them) encouraging a vigorous celebration of the traditional Scottish holiday. New Year’s eve was showery, but a light northerly wind kept the temperatures mild for those who went first-footing; New Year’s day brought southerly winds and more showers, the temperature around 15°C most of the day, which would have put a dampener on any planned sports and outdoor activities.

However 1841 ended and 1842 began for William and Sarah, they probably felt much the same as most of us – whatever regrets they had about the passing year, they would have been hopeful that the year to come would bring better things.

Going fishing

I’m not much into fishing for actual fish. I like my fish to arrive steaming hot, wrapped in crispy batter and surrounded by chips. However, growing up with a brother who was, and still is, seriously into fishing, means that I spent hours of my youth dangling lines from assorted wharves and sea-walls. Generally, by the time I noticed the nibbling on my line, the bait and the fish were gone. Either that, or I fell in the water. Iain’s a different matter – when he goes fishing, he catches fish, and he comes home dry. He once tried to teach me the art of fly-casting in the back-yard. I might have been quite successful standing with my back to the fish – I caught a number of things behind me, including the clothes-line and the garage. The only time I actually managed to get the fly to land in front of me, it was half-way up a plum tree – a useful technique for catching that little-known species, the flying trout. I think that’s when Iain gave up on me and the damage I was doing to his fishing gear. He packed up and headed off to the river, and I returned to my regular bookish pursuits.

These days, when I go fishing, I’m casting my lines in the deep ponds of online databases and websites. A family name like Norgrove is an excellent bait – in the first few decades of New Zealand settlement, our Norgroves were the only ones in the country, so any references I fish up are going to be family. Every now and then I pull up something odd, like one of those ugly prehistoric-looking monsters that people find in Wellington harbour – the sort of fish you’ve half a mind to throw back. One such fishy surprise was in an 1877 issue of The Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, an article entitled “On the Habits of the New Zealand Grayling”. The grayling was a small native fish that is now extinct; even in 1877 it was becoming rare, hence the author’s investigation into its habits. Among the sources cited was our William, who said :

I have taken the grayling in the Maitai, just where the tide breaks into the fresh water, in large quantities, and as much as four miles higher up always in shoals. About the month of March they go up to spawn. I have fished at the mouth of the same river at all seasons in the salt water and caught lots of so-called herrings, which are, I believe, a kind of mullet, but never caught a single grayling at any time. They remain about a month, and then not one to be seen higher or lower.

Well, knock me over with a Parson’s Glory, but I never thought of William going fishing. There are probably any number of other blokey activities that I haven’t considered William doing either, but I guess I imagined William spending what little leisure time he had drawing and painting. Now I have to get my head around the idea of him dropping a line over one of Wellington’s many wooden jetties, or wading into Nelson’s Maitai river with his boys and netting a huge haul of graylings.

Then there’s the thought of Sarah – how often was she presented with a flax basket or soggy newspaper parcel of fish to cook for dinner? At least grayling didn’t have to be gutted and filleted – another article from the Royal Society’s learned journal advises that they were boiled whole, and “in eating, the flesh is drawn off the bone by a sucking action of the mouth, the head and bone being thrown behind over the shoulder.” Fun for the whole family, cat included.

The great fire of Wellington

I’ve been doing some more research into the fire on Lambton Quay on 9 November 1842, if only because it struck me as odd that William took his family up onto the Terrace to get away from it.

The wind was blowing from the north-west (“half a gale” according to one local newspaper). The Norgroves lived at almost the northern-most end of Lambton Quay, near the intersection with Mulgrave St. The fire started the best part of half a mile south-east of that and was heading away from them. Of course anyone who has spent more than five minutes in Wellington knows that the wind there can change direction in the blink of an eye, but any wind shift would have been more likely to push the fire up onto the Terrace than not.

The map below is of modern Wellington - the green line marks the Beach as it was in 1842 (everything to the right of the line is on reclaimed land).

The most likely reason for going up onto the Terrace was either that William wanted to seek shelter for his wife and children in the home of a friend, or in one of the wealthier settler’s homes. An exposed beach-front in a howling gale in the middle of the night is no place for a nine-day old baby. William’s priority was probably to get Sarah and the children safely under cover before going back to help fight the fire. Oscar wasn’t the youngest baby affected by the fire though – a Mrs Samuel had given birth to a daughter that day, and was given shelter at Barrett’s hotel during the fire.

The north-western end of Lambton Quay curves away from the Terrace, out to a point at its intersection with Thorndon Quay. This is the end the Norgroves were at, and to get to the Terrace, the family most likely went round the corner onto Sydney Street (now Kate Shepherd Place). They would have crossed the old Government reserve somewhere in the area of Museum Street to reach the Terrace. There were few houses on the Terrace at this early stage – the largest and best of them was Colonel Wakefield’s, which sat high on a town acre which stretched from Lambton Quay to the Terrace. Wakefield himself was out of town the night of the fire.

The fire started at Lloyd the baker’s premises, and from there proceeded to consume a solicitor’s office, a fishmonger’s, two pubs, a shoemaker’s, three butcher shops, Mrs Millar’s boarding house, two carpenters’ premises, two tailors’ shops, a stay-maker, another baker’s, a greengrocer, a hairdresser, a coffee-house and a bootmaker’s. Several stores and warehouses, the entire Kumutoto pa and sundry other private residences also went up in smoke. Jabez Dean, the plumber and painter who I’ve speculated William may have worked for, also lost his premises in the blaze. In all, contemporary accounts suggest 57 or 59 buildings were destroyed, of which around half were “Maori houses” made largely of raupo. Several more raupo buildings were pulled down to prevent the fire spreading even further.

It was quite a night. One account has the residents, aided by local Maori, rushing out of their houses with armloads of possessions and dumping them on the beach. Another account suggests that townspeople took refuge from the heat of the fire in water itself, although given how a north-westerly whips up the harbour, that seems unlikely. Sailors from the Bolina which was moored in the harbour helped with the fire-fighting, as did soldiers based in the town.

The fire was finally extinguished early in the morning – that afternoon, a public meeting, chaired by the mayor, gathered at the Exchange building and it was immediately agreed to launch a fund-raising appeal to help provide for the immediate needs of those affected by the fire. Almost £158 was immediately donated by those at meeting, and the total sum eventually raised was more than £360. The total losses of those affected were estimated to be in the order of £16,000. The economic effects of the fire were widely felt in the community because of the loss of large quantities of goods in the destroyed warehouses, as well as the temporary loss of services from a large number of small businesses. Some businesses recovered quicker than others – within six weeks, Lloyd the baker, in whose premises the fire started, was advertising he was back in business on the site of his former premises.

The morning after the fire, local Maori offered to build, free of charge, several raupo houses as temporary shelter for those who had lost their homes. The offer was declined on the grounds that it was the raupo houses which had made the effects of the fire so disastrous. Many of the dispossessed were accommodated in the New Zealand Company’s immigration barracks. The Maori took up a collection at their Sunday church service, and contributed to the relief fund instead.

The fire resulted in New Zealand’s first building legislation, the Raupo House Ordinance, which prevented the further construction of raupo houses within towns, and severely and punitively taxed the owners of the remaining existing raupo buildings. Later, the 1857 Town Protection Act required householders to keep two buckets full of water for fire-fighting purposes. In 1858, the Council bought itself a fire engine, which was operated by the police. The first volunteer fire brigade formed in 1865, with the help of funding from insurance companies.

Happy birthday!

On 1 November 1842, in a house on Lambton Quay somewhere in the vicinity of the present bus station, Sarah gave birth to her second child, Oscar Alfred Norgrove. Oscar was the first of the Norgrove children born in New Zealand. Today is also the birthday of his great-great-grandson, my nephew Cody, who is 6 – happy birthday Oscar and Cody!

We don’t know very much about Oscar when he was 6, or at any other time during his childhood. He was nine days old when a fire broke out soon after midnight at the Lloyd’s bakery on Lambton Quay. The fire spread quickly among the wooden buildings, and although it headed south and east, towards Te Aro pa, William took his young family up onto Wellington Terrace to be safe. Sarah makes mention of this story in a poem she wrote for her children – I suppose it was an unforgettable night for her, waiting on the hill in the small hours of the morning with a sleepy toddler and a new-born baby. She doesn’t say so, but William had probably gone to join the other settlers, local Maori, and the crew of several ships in harbour in fighting the fire. She would have been mightily relieved to go home in the morning, with William safe. Although many houses were destroyed, no-one was hurt in the fire.

The family moved to Blenheim in 1861, and Oscar seems to have taken up painting and wall-papering as his trade. By then, he was the eldest son, his older brother Ovid having died of tuberculosis three years earlier. In 1878 Oscar married Edith Brook, and their first child (my grandfather) was born later that year. Two girls and two more boys followed at tidy two year intervals.

Apparently Oscar was bright, very bright, scary-genius bright, and was given to tinkering around and coming up with new inventions. There was some concern in the family that he was insane, because some of his inventions seemed pretty wacky and way out for the time. The concern reached a whole new level in March 1888 when Oscar was committed to the Wellington Lunatic Asylum. The Marlborough Express reported :

LUNACY – Oscar Norgrove was committed to the Wellington Lunatic Asylum on Saturday by Mr Allen RM, Drs Cleghorn and Nairn having certified to his being insane. The poor fellow brought to our office a few days ago some models, very cleverly designed, with which he had been working out the theory of perpetual motion. Great sympathy is felt for his family.

I’m sure it was just wonderful for his family to have this announced to the whole town. His father had died two years previously, so was spared the sight of his son being carted off to the loony bin, but mother Sarah was still alive. Poor Edith was probably eyeing the kids and wondering if the insanity was hereditary (it doesn’t seem to have been – we’re all just fine, thanks!)

Although the modern view of nineteenth century definitions of insanity seems to be that the men in white coats carted off anyone who was a bit different, the reality of mental health care in New Zealand at this time wasn’t like that at all. Lunatic asylums didn’t differentiate between those who were mentally ill – treatable and with hope of recovery – and those who were mentally impaired from birth defect, accident or alcoholism. All were lumped in together. An ideal existed of providing a quiet haven with steady routines and therapeutic manual work, but by late in the century the asylums were becoming overcrowded. The country had a large population of early settlers who had never married. These men were aging, and many had mental health problems brought on by alcoholism, as well as age-related disorders. With nowhere else for them to go, the asylums had to take them in and care for them till they died. Wellington Lunatic Asylum (on the site now occupied by Government House) was probably less overcrowded than some in 1888, as the Porirua Asylum had opened the previous year.

Whatever Oscar’s problem was, it had to have been pretty serious if his large extended family couldn’t manage to look after him. It had to have been more than a matter of being misunderstood for his way-out ideas. Whether as a result of treatment or on his own, he seems to have recovered. I’m not sure when he was released (haven’t yet found the newspaper article trumpeting the return of his sanity), but by 1891 he was back in Blenheim, painting the parsonage.

In 1892, the Marlborough Express reprinted a letter titled “A New Zealand Inventor” from an Australian newspaper which makes it pretty clear that Oscar was indeed a clever chap. The writer of the letter (“FM” of Levin) had seen a newspaper article about someone in England who had patented a design for a boat with three keels, and that the admiralty intended to have some vessels constructed on the design. The inventor had apparently derived his idea from the albatross. “FM” went on to say :

I wish to call the attention of the public, through your paper, to the fact that the original inventor is Mr Oscar Norgrove, of Blenheim, Marlborough, New Zealand; that he constructed a model, which I saw, with plans, which he forwarded to the Admiralty, and that he stated at the time that he had derived the idea from the movements of the albatross. He has been a most enterprising man, and I think should have the credit of his invention, if not the profit. He forwarded the model, &c, about two years ago, while th[is] patent is quite
recent. Models and plans will be found in his possession on inquiry.

Now here’s the only photograph I have of Oscar, posing in front of the house in
Manse Road with Edith, Edgar and Bertha. Judging by the size of the children, the photo would have been taken in the late 1880s. When Mum gave me the photo, she told me Oscar was holding one of his inventions. The photo has faded badly, and between the cricket cap and a beard of old testament proportions, it’s pretty hard to see what Oscar looks like. But it sure looks to me that what he’s holding is a pair of model-size trimaran hulls!