Gaze History: NSG Memoir
Noel's tour diary 1956 continued
After
exploring Doone country (Mary loved Lorna Doone) they went on to
Glastonbury. Noel never knew, so far as
we can tell, that his Gaze ancestors came from Gloucestershire[1]. However
after returning to London and the Flower Show and a meeting with his old friend
Reg Barker who was there on business for the Grocers Federation, they headed
north for Kettering and the old Goodwin stamping grounds.
They
were met by Noel’s distant cousin Lesley and his wife Joan, who took them home
for a sumptuous tea and later supper, and where they met Lesley’s daughter and
her husband. Lesley took Noel to inspect
his legal office, where the firm employed 18 staff, and worked in funny old
premises. Noel was envious of Lesley’s Bentley.
They attended Fuller Baptist Church on the Sunday morning: “It was
rather moving to sit in the pew and think that one’s mother actually worshipped
there and had probably walked down that very aisle.” Distant relatives they
were introduced to at the service showed them the church hall built when Julia
lived there and where some of the work had been done by Goodwin family members.
“They showed me with pride the tombstone of my great great grandmother but as I
have never met the lady I was not much moved… I marvel more at the courage of
my mother’s people in leaving all that for they knew not what in distant NZ…
Lesley took me round in his car to see where mother lived in Duke Street.”
The
rest of the trip involved another tour around the north of England, and then
through several countries in Europe.
Highlight of this part of their travels was their visit to St Moritz in
Switzerland, which they fell in love with and vowed to return, which they did a
few years later.
They
sailed on the Queen Mary to New York, trained to Montreal and the
Niagara Falls, through Minneapolis and Winnepeg to Banff, and then over the
Canadian Rockies to Vancouver. They flew
home by British Canadian Pacific Airways to Auckland, with stopovers in those
days at Hawaii and Fiji.
[1] The earlier history of the
family came to light about 30 years after Noel’s death when a relative had time
in retirement to study some old papers he had found in the home of a mutual
cousin (Alice Pearce, nee Gaze) after her death. Alice was a daughter of Fred’s older brother
Charles.
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