Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  Yet I can add a heartening footnote to this tale of silences, omissions, destruction of a written voice. It reveals something else about Polly, something she could never say out loud. She left behind four words that say everything.

  They can be found on Sheet 428 of the 1893 Women’s Suffrage Petition, the petition that led to New Zealand women being the first in the world to get the vote. In a larger sense it was the beginning of an assertive demand for women’s rights. The four words on Sheet 428 are: Mary North [sic] Havelock Road.9

  But look at the misspelling of the family surname. Her husband’s name was everywhere: on his company’s advertising on the buildings in White Road and Raffles Street, and in newspapers. There is no way Polly did not know the correct spelling of her husband’s surname. Like all women, she was born into a man’s surname and exchanged it for another man’s surname on marriage. Was this misspelling a sleight of hand, a duck under the cover of illiteracy in the hope that her husband might not find out she had signed it?

  These are questions no one can answer. Perhaps she really did accidentally misspell her surname, such a key part of her husband’s identity. Or did she deliberately misspell it as a way of giving him the fingers and asserting her own private identity? She needed it to be recognisable for it to count in the petition as legal. Yet the small variance in the surname, by effectively castrating that dangling ‘e’, made it her own.

  And what happened to Agnes, the hard-working laundress? In old age she lived with Polly and Robert Northe, as was common in those more communal times. This is the good news. After she died, she was buried in the Northe family plot. Possibly a headstone was always going to be placed there. But it never happened. Like so many who came to a new country, worked hard, struggled and hoped for a better life, she lies in an unmarked grave.

  Notes

  1 It was probably a point of pride that Ern Northe, Polly’s son, had enough money for his wife, Jessie, to employ a laundress, an Irish woman, Mrs Audrey. By such small steps do we demarcate social and economic changes. In a similar way, Ern gave Jessie a house as a gift after she had her first child, Jean. This would ensure that Jessie had her own ‘pin money’. In this way Jessie also became a rentier.

  2 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 62.

  3 Daily Telegraph, 12 January 1871.

  4 By 1886 most Pākehā were born in Aotearoa New Zealand, so a tipping point had been reached. It was no longer a country dominated by foreign-born migrants, although Britain was still called ‘Home’, with a capital ‘H’ to signify its emotional importance. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/history-of-new-zealand-1769-1914 (accessed 10 August 2017).

  5 Hawke’s Bay Herald, 29 January 1879.

  6 Daily Telegraph, 2 February 1891. The Union Rowing Club’s Trial Fours took place on the inner harbour, ‘the weather being perfect, and the water beautifully smooth’. R. Northe’s crew kept up ‘a slashing pace’.

  7 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 553.

  8 Daily Telegraph, 25 March 1911. A further obituary in the Hawke’s Bay Tribune on the same date noted ‘Nobody in Napier knew as much about the town.’ The Harbour Board League meeting stood for a minute in silence and a wreath was ‘forwarded on behalf of the League’. Polly remained unnamed and unacknowledged.

  9 http://archives.govt.nz/womens-suffrage-petition (accessed 5 SEptember 2017).

  What’s in a Name?

  I was sitting in the Hocken Library looking at hard copies of newspapers — a rare pleasure. A nineteenth-century newspaper is like a Dickens novel, full of pungent detail evoking the way people laboured, loved, fought one another or tried to scrape a living in whatever devious way they could.

  IT’S LIKE LOOKING THROUGH A tiny keyhole at a tumultuous yet vividly alive world, frozen for a second and then broken down into print. For anyone interested in history, reading newspapers is nectar, opium and entertainment all in one.

  I had looked through the Hawke’s Bay Herald, then the Hawke’s Bay Times for 1871. The latter was an advocate of abstinence from alcohol. It supported the Rechabite movement, whose followers took a pledge to abstain from liquor, drank tea and espoused the virtues of being a teetotaller. (In a way it was a forerunner of Alcoholics Anonymous.) I understood why nineteenth-century Napierites would be so passionate about providing an alternative to the allure of alcohol. Booze threatened the economic viability of working people’s lives. It was often the difference between food on the table or hunger. Napier, like every colonial outpost throughout the Empire, was saturated in alcohol. By the 1870s there was one pub for every 287 people (including children) in New Zealand. Alcoholism was like a colonial disease.

  Whether people drank purely for enjoyment is debatable. I asserted earlier that I felt drinking helped migrants who were profoundly affected by a series of psychological and spiritual losses. Everything around them reminded them they were not at home — would never be at home. Most lacked the ability to return to a homeland that, anyway, had effectively expelled them. Some people had the inner resources to cope. But many did not, and for them alcohol was a drug that eased the nagging sense of estrangement.

  I turned to the Daily Telegraph, the third daily newspaper produced in the provincial capital of Napier. This in itself astonished me — the population of Napier in 1871 was a mere 2179. That it could sustain so many newspapers illuminated the fact that this was the maximum reach of both literacy and the printed word. Newspapers had been revolutionised by the invention of the steam-driven printing press. And while not all people could read, it was not unusual for a literate person to read newspapers, books and letters aloud to those who were unable to do so themselves. The presence of the three newspapers was also a salute to the hyperactivity of this small colonial town, which boasted a gentlemen’s club, artillery dances, a reading club, plays, lectures, penny readings, and an acclimisation society which in 1871 was importing ‘insectiverous birds’ and grapevine cuttings from Auckland and Melbourne.

  In the Daily Telegraph of June 1871 I came across a very small item with the headline ‘Days & Northy’. Since this was not what I was researching I read the report quickly: it was a rather dry account of a court case involving a failed contract to do with building a bridge. I took note of the date and went on with my work. It was only much later, when I was beached at the National Archives in Wellington, awaiting documents, that I came across a further reference to the Days & Northy case. My interest was piqued. A cache of letters relating to the court case was in the archives. On the spot I decided to ask for them.

  A bundle arrived on my desk.1 There is always something potent about handling historic documents. You can’t help but feel the shock of reality in encountering these dispatches from the past. It’s there in the nut-like reek that hovers about the paper. (The ghost of a smell from coal, wood smoke, sweat, dried tears, damp wool, dirty personal linen, whatever rags went into making the paper itself, the tannic acid and gall that was ink.) Paper is almost a blotting paper soaking up the stink of the past. Then there is the language of handwriting itself: each individual shaping of a word is a pen-portrait of the person who wrote it — quick, crabbed, a stab with the sharp end of a nib, or scratchy and nervous, each letter arduously formed, tongue clamped on lower lip.

  As I looked through the letters, some with notes scrawled across the back, I realised they were so complete they provided, as it were, a 3D picture of the case and, simultaneously, of the power structure of Napier. There were handwritten letters from a variety of people, including Charles Days, who was in partnership with John James Northey, a brother of my great-grandfather Robert Northe. There were also letters from major historical Hawke’s Bay figures: J. D. Ormond, the superintendent of the province, and James Rochfort, Napier’s principal engineer and the brother of John Rochfort, surveyor of much of the North Island. What is, on one level, a matter-of-fact judicial case gives a good sense of where Joh
n James Northey — and the Northe family itself — fitted within the surprisingly stratified society that was evolving at this time in Napier.

  JOHN JAMES NORTHEY WAS BORN one year after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, on 7 August 1841 in Bathurst, Australia, the first-born son of Sergeant John Northe and his wife, Nancy. (Sergeant John Northe and Nancy are the start of the Northe family in New Zealand.) Birth order is often key to personality, and to be a first-born son is to carry all the hopes, all the obligations and often some of the harshness that goes with parents’ high expectations of — and unfamiliarity with — the incorrigible nature of a growing child. At the age of eight John James shifted to New Zealand with his family. He became a New Zealander at a time when there was probably very little concept of such a hybrid being.

  John James was both an army brat, a child of an itinerant soldier, and the son of a non-commissioned officer serving in a force whose emphasis was on conformity and hierarchy. The family moved with the army from Auckland to Wahepu, near Russell, a base created following the 1844 attack by Hone Heke on the flagstaff at Kororākeka. By the time the family came with the army to Napier in 1858, he was a young man of seventeen.

  Understandably, he was restless. He had never had a fixed home and he seemed to have a love affair with the sea. But a key part of his identity was that he, of all Sergeant Northe’s children, changed his surname.

  There was an instability about the surname anyway. Partly this related to illiteracy: people who are not confident about writing their names cannot be expected to possess it in terms of its spelling. It may have been that the illiterate members of the family relied on saying their name out loud and other people writing it down, making it up as they went along. (Hence the family name appears at different times in newspapers and documents as North, Northe, Northey and, here, Northy.) Northe may have been a transliteration of Northey, in any case — the single ‘e’ having to express the characteristic Cornish ‘errrrr’ sound at the end of the name. But there is another theory about the name change that has to do with the antagonism that sometimes occurs between fathers and first-born sons.

  A family story goes that John James Northe chose to add a ‘y’ to the name as a way to differentiate himself from his father, Sergeant John Northe. There were no longer two ‘John Northes’ in Napier. There appears to be some credence to this story. When he was a young man, John James left Napier for Auckland. The certificate for his marriage to Jane Scott (the daughter of a shoemaker) on 29 July 1869 in High Street, Auckland, notes his surname as Northey and his occupation as shipwright.

  In 1870 John James was the second mate aboard The Star of the South, a seven-year-old schooner that traded cattle between Auckland and Napier. The ship had left Auckland on 21 June 1870 and was out off Napier — an area notorious for its huge swells and rough coastline — when the captain made a navigation error. John James was on deck in the early hours of the morning while the captain, having set the determinants, was below decks asleep. There was dense mist, and the schooner was headed not towards the port but towards Awatoto, a bleak and stony shore just to the south of Napier. It rammed onto the rocks. John James Northey, a staunch colonial lad, swam through the crashing surf to raise the alarm.

  ‘Immediately on information reaching town,’ reported the Hawke’s Bay Herald Tribune, ‘assistance was promptly sent.’2 The wreck was not a complete disaster: no lives were lost and the cargo was landed safely before the vessel broke up in the surf.

  John James’s father, Sergeant John Northe, wrote to his daughter Eleanor Evinson about the drama three days later, on 24 June 1870: ‘The Star of the South whent on Shore last night on the long Beach, high and drie. She is laying facing the road leading up to the Meaney. It was very dark and the sea running high … John swimmed on shore this morning at 3 o’clock and came up to Town to give the alarm.’

  Interestingly, in the Hawke’s Bay Herald’s account of the inquest into the shipwreck held at a tavern eight days later, John James is described as ‘John Northe, second mate’. This may have been part of his current Napier identity. In the same letter to his daughter, Sergeant John Northe adds a fascinating insight into the next step in his twenty-nine-year-old son’s life: ‘As far as I can learn John is about to settle on the Spits, he is about to go into partnership with a young man named Charles Days — Boat Builders, and I think with care they will do very well.’

  ‘As far as I can learn’ implies that the patriarch was not in close contact with his son. In fact, the two were estranged. But the information Sergeant Northe had on hearsay was correct and leads us into the main stem of our story.

  BY 1871 PāKEHā IN THE North Island were just starting to recover from the nightmare of the land wars. For too long it had looked as if New Zealand was a failed colonial experiment, a place of never-ending war and financial ruin. Migrants had been pouring out of the country for years, and those left behind had the sour feeling they had to stay simply because they had so much invested in it, personally if not financially. But as 1871 progressed, there was a feeling that a corner had been turned. The war in Waikato was over: the warrior prophet Te Kooti Arikirangi was in retreat. The capture and bringing to trial of Kereopa Te Rau for the sensational utu killing of the Protestant minister Carl Völkner underlined the fact that the war on the part of Māori rebels, as they were called, had been a failure. ‘I am constrained — to admit somewhat unwillingly,’ a Napier newspaper commentator wrote, ‘to recognise that a revolution — and indeed a very great revolution — in Maori affairs is at this time being accomplished.’3

  Iwi began to treat for peace. Part of this dawning sense of sea change was that roads could now be put through what was previously hostile enemy territory. ‘No one will be much surprised, we imagine, if by the end of 1872, we have almost forgotten that we ever had a native difficulty in New Zealand,’ the Hawke’s Bay Herald noted airily at the end of the year.4

  Added to this almost surreal premise was a surprise bonus: the American civil war and the Franco–German war in Europe had knocked out powerful competitors for wool. New Zealand wool was in demand. This had a flow-on effect in a small port town like Napier. A building boom commenced: a splendid new neo-classical Australasian bank was built; Large & Townley, a general store, made extensive additions; new buildings went up all over town. ‘So far from employment being scarce in Hawke’s Bay at present, labour is so scarce that we hear, in many parts of the country, it is hardly possible even to get a man to cut firewood,’ the Herald commented on 5 June 1871. The whole colonial economy was expanding, and infrastructure like roads and bridges needed to be built.

  In 1871, Charles Days and John James Northey signed a contract with the provincial government of Napier to repair and enlarge the Ngaruroro bridge, which led into the burgeoning township of Clive to the south, and the Petane bridge to the north. It was a brave, if reckless, undertaking. The job had to be done in six days. One contractor had already turned it down as too risky. Days and Northey, two mates, were relatively inexperienced and had not factored in various contingencies. The whole project soon went awry, and they failed to complete the job within the very tight timeline mandated in the contract.

  The best place to enter this quagmire is via the humble but grizzlingly defiant letter written by Charles Days to ‘His Honor, the Superintendent of Hawke’s Bay’, J. D. Ormond, a Scotsman who was a stickler for detail. Since Hawke’s Bay had broken away from Wellington to form its own separate province in 1858, the Superintendent was the unofficial governor of a tiny micro-state.5 Ormond was exceedingly powerful within Hawke’s Bay, the distributor of contracts and the arbiter of disputes such as this.

  Days’ letter is dated 19 June 1871 and from the first sentence we get the tone. It also suggests the steep incline working men had to walk when they sought to address their ‘betters’: ‘We the undersigned beg to lay the following Statement of work Executed at Ngaruroro Bridge and we are prepared to prove the Same to be correct.’ There is an odd mixture here
of nineteenth-century obsequiousness (‘lessers’ deferred to ‘betters’; we ‘beg’ to lay information) and a plainer, more workmanlike challenge: ‘we are prepared to prove the Same to be correct.’ (The handwriting is sketchy and awkward, as if Days’ hand was not used to holding a steel-nibbed pen. And, in a style that harkened back to the eighteenth century, Days used capitals as a way of adding emphasis to words. Nor did he match subject with verb, as in ‘we done’. It’s more of a spoken language, written down arduously on paper, than a fully fluent script.)

  Days then goes on to say that ‘the pile driving plant not being ready and at the Bridge as specified we were directed by the Overseer and Provincial Engineer [James Rochfort], to get the pile driving machine to the Bridge and Strength it, and charge for our time & the Hands we employed by the day.’ This is the beginning of one long continuous sentence of complaint: ‘I was 11 hours at work on that day on the 28th we worked 10 hours at the same, on the 29th we worked half a day at the same. On the 29th in the afternoon we started driving but finding the pile was too long for the machine we were half a day trying to get the pile under it, we took it down to dark.’ Rochfort then arrived at the bridge and ordered the piles to be taken up. ‘… [W]e done so as directed, on the 31st the weather came over bad. we also lost time in work, April 1st we were half a day Strengthening the pile driving plant as directed on Monday 3rd April weather had unfit for work to be carried on the 4th we worked Extra at night Trying to make up Time, on the 5th weather very bad, but done all we could on the 6th weather very bad …’ The river then rose, causing one of the stray piles to float away: ‘… it took us considerable time to secure the piles and rebuild the stages on the following day’.