Family History 1.117

 

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