Family History 2.46

Bigelow History

Post-1630

 John Smith Bigelow

 

This is the painting of the last ship built in the Bigelow shipyard, and christened Welcome. She was wrecked off Whakatane in 1916.

 

John Smith Bigelow was still a boy when his family sailed from Pugwash in the George Henderson, eventually settling in Auckland and establishing the shipyard in St Mary's Bay.

 

After he took over the family business, he used to entertain visiting ships' captains, taking them to his home to meet a "native", who turned out to be his eldest son, William, who was then a baby.

 

Just before Christmas 1874, John had married Mary Ann Brown. Mary's family had come to Auckland from Nottingham in 1865 on the ship Caduceus. Both families were members of the Ponsonby Baptist Church and their social life was closely connected with that community.

 

Auckland was growing rapidly in the late nineteenth century, and so was their circle of friends belonging to the church.  When the Ponsonby Baptist Church was established in 1880 with 19 foundation members, six were from John's family and five were from Mary's.

 

In 1885, when John was Secretary and Sunday School Superintendent, he and the minister, Rev Charles Carter, had a disagreement. The other leaders refused to take sides and begged the minister to withdraw a letter he had written asking John to resign his official positions in the church. The minister resigned when the church members agreed that he should withdraw the letter.

 

The next minister, a younger man, also had trouble with John and other church members and had to resign also. The nineties saw better days, especially with the arrival of Rev A H Collins in 1892. The community was by no means conservative, as this extract from one of Mr Collins's sermons shows:

 

"The time will come when the capitalist will cease out of the land. The skilled manager will remain at the head of the industrial army, but the capitalist who lives only on the fruit of other men's toil, will be as extinct as the dodo....[Now] those who work most have least to eat, and they who work not at all live wantonly on the earth and speak loftily about the improvidence of the working classes."

 

John and Mary had five children. In 1876 William was born, named, not John in the Bigelow tradition, but after Mary's oldest brother who had recently died. (See later posts for a continuation of William's story)

 

John Smith Bigelow and Mary Ann (Brown) Bigelow

In 1879, the second son, John, was born. Uncle Jack became a well-known bookseller. His shop was in Shortland Street just off Queen Street, and specialised in books about nautical subjects: navies, yachting, rowing and so on. The Bigelow family were keen members of the West End Rowing Club. During my high school days I worked at the shop for holiday jobs a couple of times.

 

1881 saw the birth of Frederick. Uncle Fred saw action in World War I and lost a leg.  When we used to go to stay with him and Auntie Katy (Dreadon) on their farm at Pukehuia in Northland, we were fascinated by his wooden leg.

 

Reg was born in 1884 and Daisy in 1889. Reg's wife was from a prominent Northland family; her father was an MP and they owned a grocery business in the Bay of Islands. Daisy married another of the Dreadon family; it was from another Dreadon that my parents bought the house in Papatoetoe.

 

John Smith Bigelow died in 1903 as the result of an accident at work, so he never knew my mother, his granddaughter; by this time William and his wife and young son were living in New Plymouth.

 

Here is a brief obituary from the Observer of 30 May 1903:

Mr John Bigelow, whose life was cut short by an accident at Calliope Dock this week, was a member of a family which has been prominent in shipbuilding matters in the Waitemata almost ever since Auckland was founded. Numbers of the wooden vessels which were at one time so numerous in these waters were built by Messrs Bigelow and Sons, of which firm John Bigelow was the junior member.  

In more recent years, Mr Bigelow has been the superintending shipwright to the Northern Steamship Company, and it was while directing operations on the Wakatere that he met with the fatal accident.  

Mr Bigelow was an active member of the Baptist Church, and also an enthusiastic temperance worker.

Mary Ann, however, lived on for many more years. She came to visit my mother once when I was very small.  I simply remember her as a lady in a black hat (all ladies used to wear black straw hats in the thirties) standing at the front door when Mother and I went to answer the doorbell.

 

 

 This rocking-chair, which is used in our lounge all the time, belonged originally to Mary Ann. The fabric has been recovered twice by us.