Family History 1.123

Gaze History: NSG Memoir

BACKGROUND CIRCUMSTANCES

 

There are three features of Noel’s family life that stand out: its close involvement with the church, his congenital condition, and the family business.

 

 

Both Fred and Julia had been brought up with a close connection with the Auckland Baptist Church, founded in 1855, and in 1885 shifted to its present site at the top of Queen Street as the Baptist Tabernacle. 

During and after Noel’s youth, his father was Church Secretary and Superintendent of the Morning Sunday School (there was also an afternoon one) for 25 years.  His mother was a leading member of the Baptist Women’s Missionary Union both locally and nationally, and his sister, Doris, was for many years its Treasurer.  Julia was also a long-time member of the Manurewa Children’s Home Board. 

By the time of Noel’s young adulthood, the Tabernacle leadership was in the hands of the Rev Joseph W Kemp, one of the outstanding ministers of the Baptist Denomination in the Twentieth Century.

 

 

 

 

 

Noel was born with a cleft lip and palate.  In those days the surgery to repair this defect was by modern standards primitive, but Noel was sent to the best surgeon in that specialty, at Wellington Hospital. 

Children with “hare lip” were often treated cruelly by both their classmates and by adults in those days.  Many people regarded hare lip as a sign of intellectual handicap, probably because of the speech difficulty experienced by those born with this defect, in days when surgery could not correct speech and speech therapy could do no better. In fact when Noel was a young lawyer he was not above being ridiculed even from the bench. 

The fact that he overcame this disadvantage to become a successful public speaker and chairman speaks volumes for the love and support of his family. Public speaking was always an ordeal to him; he practised at length whenever he was called upon to give any address, either in the court, in Church or in other public arenas.

 

 

 

For the whole of Noel’s youth, from the time he was a five-year-old, his parents were involved in their own business, that of manufacturing and selling woollen garments.  They made stockings, underwear, swimsuits, socks, scarves and other garments, and employed a team of machinists in their workshop above the shop at the Grafton end of Karangahape Road. Karangahape Road was then the second main street of Auckland, cobbled with wooden blocks from Queen Street to Ponsonby Road. 

All the family, at times, helped in the shop.  During the Great War, 1914-1918, the public flocked to the wool shop to buy wool to knit into garments of all kinds to send to the troops in Europe.  The business was so successful that Fred was able to sell it and retire at sixty, fortunately just before the Wall Street crash and the beginning of the Great Depression.