Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  He was struck down, at thirty, not as heroes ought to be, by sword or gunfire, but by a virulent typhoid bacillus: water contaminated by faecal particles is the most common source. He had been working as a carpenter at the Natal Government Asylum in Matisberg, and on completion of the job in December 1901 he travelled to Salisbury and there he fell ill and died.

  The terrible news was sent back by telegraph, and appeared in newspapers from Otago to Auckland and Hawke’s Bay. It had not been long since Captain Russell had said that Sidney and his compatriots would be heroes all their lives. The short paragraph in the Otago Witness was headed ‘DEATH FROM ENTERIC’ and dated 9 April 1902 (the Auckland Star headed its article ‘DEATH OF A NEW ZEALANDER’). ‘Napier Wednesday. The Mayor received a telegram this evening stating that his nephew — Sydney [sic] Northe — had died in South Africa on February 16, of enteric fever. Deceased was a member of the First New Zealand Contingent, and returned to the colony but went again to South Africa.’22

  For Mayor McVay it was a sad moment: Sidney had become a favoured son. William and Elizabeth Northe, Sidney’s bereft parents, sent out an elaborate photographic montage, thanking the many people who had contacted them to console them in their loss. A pinhole shows where the card has been pinned to a wall — and kept there — during many a summer as a reminder of one who had no grave or other marker in New Zealand. It is covered in fly dirt.

  Sid Northe was accompanied in his final moments by mates. Two of the montages’ poignant photographs show a funeral cortege leaving the Salisbury Hospital — a large group of serious-looking men in summer straw boaters is halted by the funeral cart — and the same people, now hatless in respect for their friend, gathered around the grave. One has a hand on his brow in what looks like a moment of private distress. It may have been the heat, but it gives the final scene an added layering of emotion.

  The poem accompanying a dandyish photograph of Sidney with a waxed moustache reads:

  An oft told tale! O, Death, thou gloomy phantom,

  Another triumph thou hast borne away;

  A voice to which these walls so lately listened,

  Thy power has stilled, its tones are hushed today.

  (composed by P. Given)

  In keeping with the nascent nationalism of the period, the card was decorated with New Zealand ferns.

  ZIMBABWE, AS RHODESIA WAS RENAMED after independence, is today a failed state. Its inflation is ruinous. I have no idea where the cemetery in Harare (one-time Salisbury) is, what its state is, or whether there was, in fact, ever a headstone erected for Sidney Theodore Northe.

  It is probably fitting that the best memorial to him — and to all the other Hawke’s Bay troopers from the South African campaign — is situated in the most prominent position on the Parade in Napier. It’s an outstanding piece of military memorabilia, showing, atop a marble plinth, a rough rider with the characteristic slouch hat with one side pinned back. Here he stands, his head lowered in mourning, holding his rifle, always on guard.

  This memorial was created in 1906 when memory was still fresh — and it is here that Sidney Northe is finally commemorated. It is perhaps a slight adjustment of the truth that the word ‘died’ after his name infers he died, gloriously, in battle. But there he — or at least his name — lies, on marble, theoretically forever.

  ‘Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy’, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald.23

  Notes

  1 Alice St Clair Inglis, Souvenir Album of the First New Zealand Contingent for South Africa 1899–1901 (Waipawa: 1902), 31.

  2 Pai Mārire was a millennial sect with beliefs which have been reframed today as a liberationist theology. They rejected the European version of Christianity and invented a religion that was partly Old Testament and partly a composite of ancient Māori beliefs. Pai Mārire started out as peaceful but quickly became associated, in Pākehā minds, with violence. Its followers were seen as reverting to pre-colonial cannibalism, provoking intense anxiety among Pākehā migrants. In a larger sense, it was a form of resistance to colonisation.

  3 Thomas Wayth Gudgeon, ‘An Alphabetic List of Volunteers and Militia men who received the New Zealand Medal having been either under fire, or attached to Her Majesty’s Imperial Forces, during the War of 1860–1870’, in The Defenders of New Zealand — Being a Short Biography of Colonists Who Distinguished Themselves in Upholding Her Majesty’s Supremacy in These Islands (Auckland: Henry Brett, 1886), xxiii.

  4 Michael King, Being Pakeha Now: Reflections and Recollections of a White Native (Auckland: Penguin, 1999), 69, 70.

  5 Ian McGibbon and John Crawford, One Flag, One Queen, One Tongue: New Zealand and the South African War (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), 124.

  6 The poem by G. P. W. was anonymous and one of many penned in New Zealand at this time. It appears in St Clair Inglis, Souvenir Album, 5.

  7 Ibid.

  8 The other two Hawke’s Bay men called up were Sergeant G. Holroyd and Private J. Catherall, also Hastings Rifle Volunteers. They were photographed together with Sidney Northe as ‘Volunteers for the Transvaal War’.

  9 Hawke’s Bay Herald, 21 January 1895.

  10 Daily Telegraph, 13 September 1895.

  11 St Clair Inglis, Souvenir Album, 3.

  12 Evening Post, 7 February 1900.

  13 Thomas Craig Wallace, typescript memoir ‘Military Career’, Alexander Turnbull Library.

  14 David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 168.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Evening Post, 13 December 1900.

  17 Sergeant G. Holroyd, one of the original three volunteers, had remained in Sydney and came back later in a different boat. In the end he went to live in England. Catherall had had a much more troubled war than Sid Northe: he had been taken prisoner by the Boers, at Sanna’s Post, taken to Pretoria, and released only when General Roberts entered the city.

  18 General Sir Andrew Russell was born in Napier, educated at Sandhurst and was a member of the Hawke’s Bay gentry. He led New Zealand forces in the First World War, managing a textbook evacuation of Gallipoli by night without a single loss of life. His war ended with a brilliant attack on Le Quesnoy, France, in which he managed to take the German-occupied town by surprise. After the war he was instrumental in setting up the RSA. His favourite son, John, died in Libya in 1942, and Russell continued writing fortnightly letters to him. Letter writing was how he expressed his grief, a form of long goodbye. This expresses the strange power implicit in letter writing.

  19 Maddison had nothing to do with the Anglo–Boer War and his name cannot be found among the ten contingents Hawke’s Bay provided. Possibly he was a member of the Hastings Rifle Volunteers and a friend.

  20 Daily Telegraph, 29 December 1900.

  21 Evening Post, 13 December 1900.

  22 Otago Witness, 9 April 1902.

  23 Edmund Wilson (ed.), Notebooks of Scott Fitzgerald, Notebook L, 1945, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald (accessed 10 August 2017).

  Dear Heroix

  We last glimpsed Sergeant John Northe as he wrote about his first-born son, John James, swimming ashore from the Star of the South shipwreck. Since he and his Australian wife, Nancy, are the core of this story, it seems almost ill-mannered to have left them standing at the door, awaiting a proper introduction.

  WHAT MAKES IT WORSE IS that I am going to make them wait a little longer — after all, they have been dead almost a century and a half — while I introduce Elizabeth Ereaux, Sergeant John Northe’s live-wire younger sister. It is she who contextualises Sergeant John’s predicament.

  And it was this: how to survive in the maelstrom of a free-market economy when you have no capital, when all you have is your labour, your street smarts, your ability to negotiate your way through want in nineteenth-century Britain. You could say this was — and is — the predicament of every immigrant.


  Elizabeth Ereaux was a migrant in her own way, though she never left Britain. Her migration was to the city — in fact, to the ur-city of the nineteenth century: London. How did a ‘five feet nothing’ (as she described herself), unskilled woman navigate her way from a small mining town in a depleted part of Britain to the most cosmopolitan city in the world? How did she survive, let alone flourish? Her gossipy, bustling little frigates of letters offer insights into how an individual, and a woman what’s more, could master the trick of survival in the world’s largest metropolis.

  This is the opening of an undated letter that Elizabeth Ereaux sent to Sergeant John Northe in answer to his November 1847 letter telling his sister he was leaving Australia and setting off to New Zealand: ‘My dear Brother and Sister … I had begun to think that something had happened to you or you had forgotten me … I was rather surprised to find you were going to remove to New Zealand but hope it is to your advantage for it does not matter much where we are as long as we can live and do well, and that is all we must expect these very bad times.’

  Her reference to ‘very bad’ times takes us to the heart of the situation. It was ‘the hungry forties’, the years of the Irish famine and escalating poverty and hunger in Britain. Many people survived by doing the most drastic thing you could, short of death. This was to leave the country you were born in. You went into permanent exile. ‘Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience,’ the historian of Orientalism, Edward Said, has written. ‘It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.’1

  Between 1815 and 1930, twelve million people left Britain, never to return. Seven million Irish did the same. This led to what historian James Belich has called ‘the Anglophone settler explosion’ that changed the history of the world.2 My ancestor Sergeant John Northe was just one tiny atom within this population flood, as are the ancestors of practically every Pākehā family in Aotearoa New Zealand. They were driven by want, and they were prepared to accept the catharsis of exile — ‘the crippling sorrow of estrangement’ — in the hope of a better life.3

  What was the life that Elizabeth Ereaux and her brother Sergeant John Northe were in such a hurry to leave? ‘The original Faustian pact of the industrial age,’ Naomi Klein has written, ‘[was] that the heaviest risks would be outsourced, offloaded, onto the other — the periphery abroad and inside our own nations.’4

  Elizabeth and John Northey, their brother Samuel and sister Maria were born in Chacewater, in Cornwall, on the cusp of the nineteenth century and as the industrial revolution roared into action. Chacewater was a tin and copper mining town in this most isolated of British counties, best described as ‘a bony ridge … probing out into the Atlantic Ocean … swept by ocean winds’. It was an unforgiving part of Cornwall, characterised by ‘a series of wind-swept rolling plateau surfaces cut in granites and slates’.5 The thing about extractive industries like tin and copper mining, Naomi Klein writes, ‘is that they are so inherently dirty and toxic that they require sacrificial people and places: people whose lungs and bodies can be sacrificed in … mines, people whose lands and water can be sacrificed to open-pit mining’.6 Chacewater was one such place.

  ‘A rather ramshackle collection of squatters’ cottages, small holdings and industrial buildings around the tin-stream workings … Chacewater had something of a rough frontier character.’7

  The town was largely created in the early nineteenth century, a miniature boom town of the kind that springs up everywhere an extractive industry is situated. It had the lawlessness of such transient places, too. It was not beautiful; in fact, it was ugly. And when the bottom fell out of the Cornish tin and copper market in the 1820s, it suffered in the way all boom towns do when their key commodities sink in value: the community around it went into crisis.

  Sergeant John Northe and his brother, Samuel, had begun life as miners — they were among the people whose lungs and bodies were ‘sacrificed’ doing ‘dirty, toxic’ work. Both men made a decision which changed the course of their lives. (As did their sisters. None of them stayed in Chacewater.) Yet if the word ‘miner’ conjures up labour of the most unskilled sort, this is to misinterpret the nature of traditional tin mining in Cornwall. There was a degree of agency involved, with the work being essentially let out on a contract basis. Some miners were part-owners of the mine, auctioneering off work and proceeds to other miners who had to assess what value the tin or copper seam had and make a bid. In its most basic form, it provided a small business model, with an emphasis on individual enterprise — something we have seen played out in the life of Sergeant John Northe’s son, Robert Northe. I believe this level of individualism had a long-term influence on the way Sergeant Northe and his family explored their options.

  Born into what seemed the very bottom of the industrial slag heap, Sergeant Northe and his family weren’t inert and crushed. The work was dirty, the work was hard, and when the price of tin and copper in Cornwall collapsed, work itself vanished. But these people were active agents in transforming their lives. Mining was a skill that was highly mobile, anyway. The tin miners of Cornwall fanned out around the world.

  John Northe was baptised in 11 January 1799. Elizabeth Northey was baptised on 13 June 1802. (Again we see a random difference in the surname.) This meant John Northe was sixteen and Elizabeth was thirteen when the Napoleonic Wars ended. This produced another problem: the labour market in Britain became flooded with soldiers looking for work. There was none. Unemployment rose and rose, and so did desperation and poverty. And crime. John’s younger brother, Samuel, baptised in 1800, was found guilty of housebreaking in 1824.

  Such was the terror of revolution that relatively minor crimes were regarded as unofficial declarations of anarchy. Samuel was tried at the Devon Lent Assizes and sentenced to death. Yet if there was an abject fear of oncoming revolution among the wealthy classes, this was also the time of humanitarianism. (The abolition of slavery was enacted in Britain in 1833.) A version of this was that a man found guilty of housebreaking was not hanged from the neck until dead but sentenced to the existential hell of transportation.

  If exile can be regarded as a fundamental estrangement, enforced exile ‘for the term of your natural life’ deepens the sense of loss to the point of vindictiveness. Twenty-four-year-old Samuel Northey boarded the convict ship Mangles on 13 July 1824, bound for the Antipodes. He was five foot five, with hazel-grey eyes, black hair and freckles. His body had already been written on — he had two broad slashes on his body, scars from powder of a gun by his right eye, and S and N (Sam Northey?) tattooed inside his left arm. Already he has been deprived of language, and from here on out we have only his brother and sister to speak of him (and for his name to echo down the family tree and find a home in John James Northey’s darkly handsome son, who will die at Chunuk Bair on Gallipoli).

  IF THIS WERE A NOVEL, the difference between the two brothers, Samuel Northey and John Northe, would seem a perfect counterpoint: one a defiant law breaker who never escapes the system but becomes more deeply entrenched in criminality; the other working within the system capably and steadily, never doing anything wrong, marrying and founding a family of which I am a distant part. But this is not a novel, it is a tracery of what happened, of the way people in the same family can react in completely different ways to the same pressures.

  Whether being a young boy at the time of the stirring victories of the Duke of Wellington predisposed John Northe towards the army I do not know. Because if being a miner was hard work, so too was being a private in the British Army. It was the traditional refuge of the working class in times of stress. Wellington, a great general but also a reactionary, famously called the lower ranks of the British Army ‘the scum of the earth’. Yet the army also provided limited mobility, a roof over your head and food to eat in times of need. The pay was poor, but a soldier could still save so long as he did not drink.

&
nbsp; A letter from John Northe, who did not drink, shows another view of British Army life. (I found this letter floating on the internet; its possessor had no idea who John Northe was.) Letters were important binding agents for people like the Northes, compressing a loosely knit family into a tight focus. The letters also functioned as financial bulletins, offering information on where might be a good place for others to try to make a living.

  John had just returned from Nova Scotia in Canada, and he hints in this letter that he was creaming it, albeit on a very small scale.

  ‘Gyth 29 January 1834

  ‘My dear Cousins,

  ‘… We arrived in England on the 4th December and discharged all our company a few days afterwards except myself who they would not part with, which answers my purpose well for as I have now 14 years service and if I live to stay 7 years more I shall then be entitled to 1/10d day pension … it appears to me everything is very dull about England at this present time and no likelihood of it getting better. My duty at present is very easy and dear cousins I am happy to inform you that I am very comfortable. I don’t know of any thing else that I have to say at present, but remain your ever affectionate and loving cousin, John Northe, Serjeant, Royal Staff Corps.’8

  We can contrast Sergeant John’s gladsome letter with some other letters (also found on the internet) from his Northey cousins. The Northeys were an extended family, thick on the ground in Chacewater, running the gamut from wealthy and ‘independent’, meaning landed with sufficient income not to work, through to those who had fallen by the wayside and were listed as ‘paupers’. One such person was Elizabeth Walsey, née Northey. In 1854 she wrote to her brothers William and Francis Northey, who were in South Carolina working as miners. Another brother was mining in Cuba. It was effectively a begging letter. She begins it with a customary curtsey to ‘the blessing of the Almighty’ and the hope they were in ‘the enjoyment of good health’. She was living in a family house with her single youngest child: ‘my other two dear children left England for Australia a few weeks since’. There is no mention of a husband. ‘I was glad you had not forgotten you had an only sister left,’ she wrote.