Family History 2.15

Bigelow History: Pre-1630

Count Ramon Berenguer IV of Provence

 

 

Ramon was the son of Alfonso II of Provence. His father died in 1209, and he was imprisoned in Aragon until he was old enough to escape and claim his inheritance as Count of Provence.

 

Contemporary reports make him one of the best rulers of that part of the world: peaceful, energetic and a patron of the arts.

 

One of the most remarkable things about him was that he had four daughters, all of whom married kings.

 

Our interest is in his daughter Eleanor, who married Henry Plantagenet, who became King of England as Henry III.

 

But it is worth reading Nancy Goldstone's book,. Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe, published in 2007.

 

 

The first few weeks

Honeymoon Mode

From Hawera we set off east to explore Hawke's Bay and the East Coast. After about ten days we returned to New Plymouth, picked up our spare clothes and wedding gifts, and headed north through Auckland for a last few free days at Ruakaka before going back to work.

 

The honeymoon euphoria lasted a few more days. But it came crashing down about three weeks into the winter term. Quite literally: Margaret and I were teaching our fourth form English classes together one afternoon. Creative Drama it was supposed to be. Adding creativity to euphoria was too much. At one stage I gave a leap into the air and landed awkwardly on my left foot, heard a cracking noise and ended up later in  the afternoon with my foot in plaster and my walking-stick, purchased a few days beforehand in Kerikeri, helping me to stumble around.

 

Then there was the sombre period a few weeks later when Mary had another heart attack.  We rushed to Auckland, where Olwyn was home from Bangladesh looking after her. We visited the hospital, and Mum was siting up, looking and seeming weak, but able to talk with us. After staying as long as we could on the Sunday, we headed home, only to be met by a phone call telling us Mary had died while we were on the road.

 

So Monday morning we headed back to Auckland and the large funeral at the Epsom Church. Rightly, Mary was eulogised by a succession of speakers for her church and community work, and her leadership of the family at various times.

 

Eventually life began to settle down and we were able to get on with our learning to live together. Olwyn was planning to marry early the next year, in Bangladesh, and asked me to give her away. We could not , of course, stay away from such an important event. So we decided Shamal would have to be sold. We got her ready and found a buyer in Auckland, who came just before Christmas and we watched sadly as she sailed out of the Bay.

 

The scarf was intended to include the autumn colours

in the park at our wedding.

Also before Christmas, the local body elections were held. I was re-elected to the Community Council with the largest vote, and unanimously re-elected Chair of the group.

 

Also during this period, Margaret became interested in learning to spin, bought a spinning wheel and found an older friend in Paihia who was able to teach her. It is very relaxing to sit by the fire on a winter's evening, with the spinning wheel humming nearby.

 

I found an interest in weaving, and eventually purchased a small table loom on which I wove cushions and wall-hangings and so on. Especially later when we grew our own sheep, shore and spun the wool and wove some, this was a fascinating hobby.

 

We also planned some renovations for the house: aluminium joinery, and some new wall-paper, which over the succeeding months we had much fun choosing and putting up.

Back to school

 

Grandparents' Day

Tikorangi School; the Principal is in the check shirt.

 

 

This morning we went to Grandparents' Day at Carys's school.



Carys (left front) in her classroom

Over a hundred of us crowded into the play area enclosed by the two classroom blocks and watched the half-hour Jump Jam session. The children sang and exercised wildly to several very rhythmic tracks, to get the blood flowing through their brains.

We had been welcomed with morning tea served by the Home and School Association members.

Dewey

Next we spent half an hour in Carys's classroom helping her with a spelling exercise, and looking at the dozens of interesting examples of language and art work the kids had done.

Then we bought lunch from the Home and School women, and finally visited the library, where they had a display of books for purchase for the library shelves.

What a great school environment! The principles behind the education being provided are similar to what my education was based on in the thirties, thanks to the contributions of great early 20th century educators like Dewey, Montessori and Tagore.

Montessori

Principles like:

          Kids' job is to play.

          Kids learn by doing, acting, trying, imitating, imagining, having a go, practising, repeating, and exploring.

          The teacher's job is to encourage, support, demonstrate, point, find the way, set the example.

We could not imagine a better environment for our granddaughter.



Tagore

This school is at Tikorangi, a farming village a few kms south of Carys's home. All around it are prosperous dairy farms.

The district also bustles with traffic for the oil and gas industry: a short distance north is the Motunui factory (methanol) and the same distance south is the similar, smaller Waitara Valley factory. All around are operating wells, or wells being drilled.

Tikorangi is a small sample of modern Taranaki.

 

(Tikorangi School was started in 1867, the year my grandfather, Fred, was born. Carys's Mum, Evelyn, spent some time there, as did her great-grandfather, Rex Barriball)

 

Books

 

This month's reading

If you were watching the early morning TV programs on Maori TV on Anzac Day, you will have learned something about the Italian Campaign fought by the New Zealanders alongside the other allied nations as they drove the Germans North out of the country.

And you will have had an insight into the feelings of the soldiers who survived and revisited Cassino for the anniversary celebrations.

When I was a schoolboy during the war, we knew all the war songs. One of the most popular was "Maori Batallion". We could belt it out, knew the words by heart and felt it a symbol of NZ national pride.

As a result of the Italian Campaign, dozens of New Zealanders found Italian girlfriends. Many wanted to marry them and bring them home. The army tried to block their plans, but the flood of testosterone and war-fuelled young men was too strong, and many Italian girls left home either married or engaged to young kiwis.

Some knew no English, few knew much about NZ, some had difficulty recognising their men in civvy clothes when they walked off the ship.

Their story is told in a fascinating book by Susan Jacobs called In Love And War.

 

 

The question of just who steers the ship of state is an interesting one which has exercised better minds than mine for centuries.

Does any one person, by their choices, or by their personality, actually change the country's direction?

Do even prime ministers have that much influence?

Winston Churchill is often credited with such power in the case of the UK, and FD Rosevelt in the US. Have we had any such people in NZ?

Some people would instance Robert Muldoon, but his direction was changed again soon after he left office, so that is a doubtful proposition.

Who actually steered us out of the Anzus Alliance and into the independent foreign policy of the 80s and 90s? Was it Lange who actually moved the tiller, or had it been shifted a few years before by Kirk?

David Grant has written a life of Norman Kirk that is well worth a read. It is a no-nonsense account of the man's life and thought, and the effect of his work on our history.

The book is called "The Mighty Totara"' published just this year.

 

 

 

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Gaze History: NSG Memoir

Out of the Depression

 

One celebration which the whole community enjoyed at this time was the Coronation of King George VI on 12 May 1937. Noel and Mary and the children spent the day with Fred and Julia and Doris driving around looking at the decorations of flags which had been hung everywhere. This was in the new car which Fred had recently bought, a black, square De Soto, straight out of a gangster movie! 

After the school holidays in September of 1938, Franklin went to school.  Mary heaved a sigh of relief; in those days there was no Kindergarten in the area and few families sent their children anyway.  There was plenty of space at the local Owairaka School, in fact they were crying out for more pupils. So two months before his fifth birthday Franklin was enrolled.  Owairaka School was a modern building with recently trained teachers and modern attitudes.  From the first days at school Franklin enjoyed his schooldays. 

Noel’s office in Queen Street was handy to the shops.  In his lunch-hours Noel would browse the sales, especially Whitcombe and Tombs’ annual sale next door.  This year he brought home from the sale Francis and Day’s Popular and Community Song Book, original price 3/6d (35c), which is still used regularly, although battered and dog-eared. Another year, he came home with a huge Atlas of the world, which was a favourite with the family on wet days. 

Noel (35), Franklin (4), Fred (70)

On his shelves from this period were three books of jokes, one about lawyers, one about doctors and one more general book.  Whenever he had to speak in public these books would come out and a well-worn joke would be added to the speech. Punch was always a favourite with him: especially the jokes which depended on a play on words.  This was an interest he learned from his father; Fred had several witty recitations he had learned by heart as a boy and which he loved to trot out for family and friends.  One of Noel’s favourite jokes concerned a diner who asked the waiter for “Steak and Kidley Pie”.  “Don’t you mean ‘Steak and Kidney Pie’?” asked the waiter. Back came the reply: “I said ‘Kidley’ diddle I?”

Meanwhile Noel’s business was beginning to make progress, with the improving economic situation. And the church in which they were so involved was also making strides in providing for the religious education of a slice of the population of a suburb which was beginning to grow again. 

The Labour Government introduced the forty-hour week, so instead of getting up and going to work every Saturday morning, Noel was able to stay in bed and play with the children, or read the Supplements to the Saturday Herald with all the coloured cartoon strips like “Katzenjammer Kids” or “Bringing up Father”.

 

This month's poem

LIGHT

 

There is that clear light again!

            Obliquely from the right.

See how the pearl glows!

            Brighter every year,

Now twenty-two times brighter

            Than the first time I saw it. 

Then the glow dazzled out shadows;

            Now the brightness raises a starker contrast. 

Then shadows of failure were dimmed by love’s hope;

Now the shadows are a different shade

            But the love-light is stronger. 

The mortgage is nearly paid off

            Against the soaring value of the equity. 

And now my eyes can no longer focus

            Without the glowing pearl

                        At the centre of their landscape.

 (Written for our wedding anniversary in 1999)

Note: The name, Margaret, comes from the Greek word for "pearl".

 

A Short Engagement

The Knot is Tied

You will not want to hear about weeks of torment while Margaret made up her mind.

On March 10 1977, we went for a walk along Te Tii Beach and Margaret gave me the answer I had been waiting for. We immediately started planning for our wedding on 10 May. This only gave us two months but we decided we did not want to waste time, and the school holidays would give us time for a honeymoon trip.

Margaret got busy sewing her wedding dress, and we quickly lined up the key people for our wedding party, the venue and who to invite.

 

Nearly forty years later it seems amazing that we got it all done in time, but our family all co-operated, and on 10 May, six months after the episode with the cow, we tied the knot in Brooklands Park, New Plymouth, with the help of Margaret's brother-in-law, Rod, who performed the ceremony, and her sister Denise and my brother Stuart standing beside us as Matron of Honour and Best Man.

It was a glorious fine autumn day, with heavy dew on the grass. I remember Rod cleaning up my shoes before the ceremony.

The autumn colours in the park were staggeringly beautiful, as can be seen from the wedding photos.

After the ceremony we all went to La Scala restaurant for the breakfast. The MC was Jack Smith, with whom I had worked in Boys Brigade at Epsom Baptist Church many years before, and whose second wife, Hazel, had been a valued colleague in India. We borrowed a car from old friends and Terry did the driving. Margaret's Mum, Ruby, made and iced the cake.

Several senior members of our families were able to come; my mother, Mary, and her sister Wyn, along with Margaret's grandmother, Elsie, and aunt, Betty. Stuart and Catherine's two eldest sons, Andrew and Phillip, also came.

After the formalities we changed our clothes at Margaret's parents' flat and Stuart drove us down to the bus which we were catching to Hawera. The younger members of our families managed to give us a few handfuls of confetti, but we had hidden our car in Hawera, where we had booked a motel for a couple of nights, so we managed to evade their efforts.

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Family Life in the Thirties

However March 1934 saw the death of Mary’s mother, Fanny, at the young age of 56 from a heart attack.  As a result her father, William, became a much more regular visitor to the home at Ruarangi Road and later at Papatoetoe.  He continued working for several years after Fanny’s death, employing a housekeeper, Miss Rutherford, and continuing with his gardening, his bowls and his work for the Baptist Association as its Treasurer.

Mary regularly travelled across town to visit him, or to visit Noel’s parents at Bellevue Road. She would travel by tram from Owairaka to Sandringham and then, pushing a push-chair or with Franklin walking beside her, would walk from Sandringham Road to Dominion Road and another tram to Balmoral or Valley Road as the case may be. Later they would go home the same way.

 A few years later William had problems with his knee – the sort that would nowadays earn him a replacement – and had the knee stiffened, which was the best the medical world could provide then.  At the time of recovery from the operation he stayed with Noel and Mary and their family.  His visits were notable for his baby-sitting on Sunday evenings while Noel and Mary went to Church, his readings of Winnie-the-Pooh, and his vigorous political discussions with Noel, bemoaning the excesses (to his mind) of the First Labour Government under Savage and Fraser.

 

In June of 1936 Noel took Franklin to stay with his parents at Bellevue Road, where Auntie Doris was always ready to entertain her brother’s children, so that Mary could go back to the Nursing Home for the delivery of Olwyn.  She was not as healthy as her brother and was a worry on this score to her parents for the first few years of her life until she outgrew this stage. Her name was one Mary and Noel had heard about in a story about Wales, and was the name of a girl in Noel’s Sunday School.  She was called Anne after Mary’s grandmother, Anne Bigelow, nee Brown, who came to visit the baby a few weeks after the birth. A few months later great-grandmother Anne died.

 

 

As the family was growing, Noel and Mary decided that the house needed enlarging and had the extra rooms at the back built on.  In practice the front sitting-room became almost redundant as the living room at the back became the centre, being larger than the front room and closer to the back yard, where much of the activity took place.

The kitchen, with its dining alcove, was also a room where much of the family life took place.

 

It was a pleasant spot, with its great view over what is now a thickly populated suburban area

towards Mt Roskill and Three Kings.  Noel and Mary would wash the dishes together in the evening with the two toddlers playing around their feet. But major celebrations, like birthday parties, took place in the living room at the back.

Family History 2.14

Bigelow History, pre-1630

Alfonso II of Provence

Sancho and Alfonso II, Counts of Provence

 

 

Sancho was a younger brother of King Alfonso II of Aragon, who named him Count of Provence in 1181, when his elder brother, Ramon Berenger III of Provence died.

 

In 1185, under pressure from the Toulouse authorities, King Alfonso deposed Sancho and replaced him with his older brother, Alfonso II of Provence.

 

He died in 1209, and was succeeded by his son, Ramon Berenguer IV of Provence.

 

 

 

 

Encounter with a cow

The Drive Home

I have always been keen on sharing driving on long trips if at all possible, so once we had driven an hour or so out of Auckland I suggested that Margaret take over the driving. I moved into the back seat and let the young ladies chat in the front. I even dropped off to sleep.

 

Between Warkworth and Wellsford there was a dark, winding section of highway, where Margaret was travelling fairly carefully. Suddenly she turned a bend and there in  the headlights was a black shape. Before she had recognised it as a young cow, the car had hit it and we stopped quickly. I woke and we all hopped out of the car.

 

As Margaret and I were moving close to the cow to see if it was dead or alive, it suddenly jumped up and ran away into the grass at the side of the road, giving us a great fright. We clutched each other for support, and have stayed that way almost ever since.

 

We found a nearby farm with lights still on (it was after midnight) and the farmer grabbed his rifle and drove us in his landrover to find the cow. It was nowhere to be seen. He explained that there was a farmer who did not keep his fences in repair and it was a not uncommon event for cows to be on the road at night.

 

He agreed to have the car towed in the morning to the nearest garage, and to take us all to the bus stop in Wellsford to enable us to catch the bus for Kawakawa. This was the Herald bus that brought newspapers to the far north leaving Auckland about 1 30am.

 

We reached Kawakawa in daylight about 7, and Margaret kindly gave us all breakfast at her flat in the township. Then we went to school to teach for the day!

 

(We travelled down to Wellsford to tow the car back to a repairer in Kawakawa the next Saturday morning. Margaret had agreed I could use her car to travel from Paihia and back.)

 

My head was in a whirl! On the Thursday I had an optician's appointment in Whangarei, and before going back to school I visited a jeweller and bought a diamond ring.

 

The Friday was my birthday, so I invited Margaret to a birthday meal at the local restaurant, and after the meal I asked her to marry me. I was not about to waste time!

 

Margaret naturally enough asked for time to think. However, we did become an "item" as they say more recently.

 

Highlight of the rest of the school year was the College prizegiving, where we danced all the evening to ABBA singing "Dancing Queen" which was at that time the No 1 track. 

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Gaze History: NSG Memoir

Early Holidays

One of the most memorable shared experiences of this early period of the marriage was a holiday Noel and Mary took around lower Northland by bicycle.  The roads in those days were almost universally unsealed.  They took the train to Helensville and then cycled through the Kaipara, Albertland and Wellsford areas as far as Maungatoroto, where they caught another train home.  Sleeping in a small tent and carrying their clothes and food, they explored byways in that part of the world. 

Other holidays were enjoyed in company with Fred, Julia and Doris at Milford, or, as in 1935, on a trip around the East Coast in Fred’s car.

 

 

Business and a Baby

 

By then Noel and Mary had been joined by their first child, Christopher.  His second name was given in memory of Frank Crocombe: Franklin, or little Frank.  After a year of enduring comments from acquaintances connected with the use of the name Christopher as an expletive, they decided to use Franklin as the preferred name.  The name Christopher was carefully chosen because of its meaning: Christ-bearer, and in the light of the poem of that name written by Studdart Kennedy, one of Noel’s heroes. The parents did not want to impose the burden of their grief over Frank on the baby, so did not call him directly after the lost cousin. And they always insisted on Franklin being used in full. 

The baby was born in November 1933 at the Edenholme Nursing Home in Mt Eden Road, as were his younger siblings later.  Noel was relieved that there was no sign of the congenital defect he had endured. There is some uncertainty as to the extent of the genetic contribution to this condition anyway; expert opinion gives around 50% as the genetic component in the statistical occurrence of it.[1]

---

[1] Fifteen years after Noel’s death, his youngest grandchild, Julia Margaret, was born with cleft lip and palate, but by then the advances in surgery and other interventions had made a more complete repair possible.

 

Mary and the baby were visited weekly by the Plunket nurse, who weighed the baby and gave the usual advice.  At seven weeks he had thrush, and at three months Mary was advised to rub his abdomen gently to assist ”sluggish”  bowel motions.  Two weeks later a concoction of prune juice was prescribed, as the abdominal massage had clearly not produced the desired result. Within a month everyone heaved a sigh of relief as things were declared normal, but the prune juice, and orange juice, were continued just in case.

Family History 2.13

Bigelow History: pre-1630

Alfonso II of Aragon and Barcelona

Alfonso was King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona from 1164 to 1196. He was the son of Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona, and the first to rule both the Kingdom of Aragon and the county of Barcelona.

 

From 1166 to 1173 he was also count of Provence. Catalan historians regard him as the leader of a move to unite the regions on both sides of the Pyrenees.

 

During Alfonso's reign, Aragon was closely allied with the Kingdom of Castille, both in extending the Christian Kingdoms' control at the expense of the Moorish regions to the south., and in moving people from the French dominions to repopulate these newly acquired regions to the south.

 

Aragon also helped family members extend control in Sardinia.

 

Alfonso was a noted poet of that time, and a close friend of Richard the Lionheart of England.

 

Alfonso encouraged the Cistercian order of monks to found monasteries in the Barcelona district.

 

 

 

Sketching Week 18

Urban Sketch

 

 

 

Our U3ASketching group met at Puke Ariki, our Museum-cum-library in the centre of town, on a beautiful, still, sunny afternoon.

 

Here is my sketch looking up Brougham Street. I was sitting on a seat by the Puke Ariki Landing, an open community space so called because it was where the surf boats landed passengers and cargo from the ships anchored off shore in the nineteenth century before the port was built.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the village of Llangollen in Wales, where the eisteddfod is held, where choirs from all over the world compete. Several of our friends have attended with the New Zealand National Male Choir.

 

The railway is only a tourist attraction; it doesn't actually go very far.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today I was sitting waiting at the Post Shop and people were coming and going quite quickly.

 

Here are a few of them, sketched in a few seconds each.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Margaret

 

A new interest

I first became aware of Margaret Barriball during 1975. She had joined the staff of Bay of Islands College to teach the secretarial course at senior level, as well as shorthand and typing for the junior classes. In those days these were strictly for girls.

During that year, this beautiful young lady would waft in to the staff room, cool and poised, often dressed in pure white, and chat quietly to her friends on the staff. I thought of her, if I thought of her at all, as a junior colleague only just out of teenage years. In fact sometimes I mistook her for a pupil in mufti.

However in 1976 I had reason to heighten my interest. Margaret undertook a couple of papers from Massey university in English, which would enable her to widen her teaching subjects, and she approached me, as Head of English, to advise her on books to read. I also offered to help her with assignments if necessary.

During these conversations I was surprised to find Margaret was several years older than she looked, 26 in fact. This changed my attitude quite considerably, and I became much more interested in her as a possible companion. So, as I have already said, I wondered how she would fit in as a crew member on the yacht.

Towards the end of the year, in the first weeks of November in fact, the Mercury Theatre in Auckland were producing Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which Margaret had been introduced to through her course at Massey. Staff and students of the College would from time to time make up parties to travel to cultural events like theatre, and I tried to encourage that activity.

So I suggested to my colleagues that we take a carload to Canterbury Tales. Only Margaret and my junior colleague in the English Department, Patsy Moi, were able to go with me.

So we left school straight after classes finished, and drove directly to the theatre in Karangahape Road and saw a great performance, with actors like George Henare, Rawiri Paratene, and Ian Mune in the lead roles.

After the play was over, we piled into the car and headed back up State Highway 1 towards Kawakawa, and the next day's work.

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Gaze History: NSG Memoir 

 

 

 

Gladys Massam, widow of Henry,  Noel’s best man, remembers this period:

 

The Massams and the Gazes were in the Tabernacle and I guess the boys would be in Bible Class together.  I gather that the Shackleton Road Church began with a split from Grange Road, and Russell Grave, who was an old Tabernacle boy, was minister, and I gather that Doris and Noel went there.  I know that the Senior Gazes gave the land for the Shackleton Road Church

 

The Bigelows were members there and Noel fell in love with Mary and married in the church there.  Henry and Reg Barker were in the party.  Bible Class camps and BYMOA Club were very much part of this era.

 

When Noel and Mary built in Mt Albert they went to Sandringham Church and there we caught up with them again.  My Dad was the minister there and we left the Tabernacle and joined Sandringham when our first babe was born in 1935.

 

Noel, Reg and Henry met again and were all immersed in the work there, all of them being church officers.

 

Reg led the choir and Noel and Henry sang in it, and they were always the star turn at Church socials, for they had a real gift with skits, etc.

 

Henry shared Noel’s office while he began business on his own, and Doris was helping in Noel’s office. We moved to New Plymouth in 1938 and we lost close touch…

 

 

During the depression Noel and Mary did their best to help others even more needy than themselves.  Mary had had first-hand experience at the stock and station company of farmers who had had to walk off their farms because of the very low commodity prices and high mortgages. And both of them had relatives who were out of work. So the windows were regularly washed by itinerant window-washers, and the household tasks were assisted by a woman who came in for a few hours weekly. 

In those days the milk used to be delivered by a milkman with horse and cart, who would come round to the back of the house and pour a pint or two of fresh milk into a billy left in a special small cupboard by the back door. And the grocer at the Owairaka shops would send the groceries up with a boy on a bicycle which had a large wicker basket on the handlebars. All the loose items like flour and sugar were weighed out and put into brown paper bags.

Family History 2.12

Bigelow History: pre-1630

Ramon Berenger II, Count of Provence

The ruined fortress of les Baux today

Ramon Berenguer II was count of Provence from 1144 to his death in 1166. His uncle, Ramon Berenguer IV, count of Barcelona, was the regent until 1157, as we saw in the previous posts.

 

In fact, his uncle had helped to defeat the Baux family, who had opposed the succession from the beginning.

 

 

Provence was legally part of the Holy Roman Empire, so he had to travel to Turin to obtain the Emperor Frederick's confirmation in 1161.

 

He died fighting the Genoans.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Gaze History: NSG Memoir

Marriage

By this stage, of course, Noel was married.  In the years following the trip to Australia he had become specially friendly with Mary Bigelow, another of the young ladies at the Grange Road Church.  Mary’s brother Jack was a friend of Noel’s and both had been studying for university qualifications at the same time.  Jack trained as a teacher and finished his career as Principal of Whangarei Primary School. 

In May of 1932 Mary and Noel were married. The service was conducted in the new Shackleton Road Baptist Church by Rev R L Fursdon, and the reception at the Mt Eden Tea Kiosk as it was then called, on the slopes of Mt Eden. The Best Man was Henry Massam, and the bridesmaid was Mary’s sister Win. The other attendants were Rona Whitton and Reg Barker. The newly-weds travelled to Rotorua for their honeymoon, borrowing Fred and Julia’s Buick for the trip.  They set up home in Mt Albert, and threw their lot in with the Sandringham Baptist Church, another newly founded congregation in a newly developing suburb.

 

 

Mary had been a “ledger-keeper” (so says her marriage certificate) for the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Company, a stock and station agency long since amalgamated out of existence.  She had been one of the first to be trained on the newly-introduced Burroughs machines which calculated and printed accounts, taking the course at Brain’s Commercial College.

 

Her family was an old Auckland clan, originally from Nova Scotia, and engaging in ship-building and shipchandlery in St Mary’s Bay in Ponsonby from the time of their arrival in 1850. Her father and uncles had been stalwarts of the West End Rowing Club, and both her father’s family and her mother’s family (the Robinsons) members of the Ponsonby Baptist Church.

 

Her father was chief accountant for Sargood, Son and Ewen, an importing company, and Treasurer of the Auckland Baptist Association and of the Mt Eden Bowling Club, both voluntary positions which he held for twenty-five years.

Noel struggled on with his law practice. Both Mary and Noel threw themselves into the work of the Sandringham Church, and into such activities as tennis in the summer and basketball in the winter. Noel was soon taking up the leadership of the Sunday School, and Mary led the primary department.  Sunday Schools in new suburbs were large in those days. The Sunday School teachers used to meet in the Gaze home one night a week, for preparation and friendship.

 

Noel and Mary on holiday

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sketching Week 17

From the U3A Group meeting

 

It was a dripping, misty wet day when we were scheduled to sketch in the park; only two of us met at the kiosk and spent a pleasant time sketching in the tearoom over coffee and scones. I found a dresser with several items of china on display:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And I spent another half-hour on the view through a misty pane of one of the glass doors looking out on the park and the lake:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have also continued some sketches from old travel photos, this one of the hotel at the Welsh village of Portmerion:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And on mother's day, I grabbed a photo of granddaughter Sophie and used it as the basis of this sketch. My portraits are improving, but they're still not perfect. Sophie is much prettier than I have drawn her here!