Family History 1.738

(Completing the diary of Charles Gaze, my great-grandfather, aged 27, on the ship  Lord Burleigh)

 

22nd March 1860

Very fine. Rocky views on either side of us.

7 a.m. Passed the Hen and Chickens rock.

Heavy and sudden squalls today.

11 a.m. Green hills seen and a fire in the distance.

1 p.m. A steamer seen astern of us and small sailing vessel passed us near shore and 2 p.m. several others seen.

4 p.m. Signal hoisted on Foremast for the pilot; who did not come on board till we had entered the Harbour and run aground, but soon off and made towards The town, the steamer having passed us by this time being the mail. 

 

Half past 5 Heavy rain, Lightning and thunder.

CAST ANCHOR

The Frenchman in quarantine, reported small-pox on board but had no case for the last 5 weeks. Came into harbour 23rd

 

Route taken by Lord Burleigh, which already held the speed record for the journey from London to Sytdney.

My Taranaki Anniversary Day 6

Streets in new Plymouth that run away from the coast, and named by Carrington on his original map, are much less systematic.

 

Captain Liardet (Puke Ariki photo)

One of the main ones is Liardet Street, named after the first Company representative, Captain Liardet, who was hurt in an accident soon after his arrival and had to be sent back to the UK.

 

Cutfield was another settler leader commemorated in this way.

 

Another north-south street remembers William Hobson, first Governor of New Zealand, while Eliot Street is named after one of the prominent Cornish mine-owning families.

 

Carrington Street was Fred's only self-advertisement, and its parallel road was named for Queen Victoria.

 

Mount Edgcumbe is the name of a hill on the Cornwall side of Plymouth Sound, but it is also the title of a prominent landowning family in the district.

 

Along the right bank of the Te Henui River is Baring Terrace, named for Baring Brothers, the famous London bankers, who were part of the group of young men interested in the whole project of emigration from the UK.

 

And the shortest north-south street is Brown Street, after Charles "Armitage" Brown, who also died soon after arrival, but who had bought land in that locality. His son, also Charles, was later Superintendent of Taranaki towards the end of the century. Charles senior "the friend of Keats" is buried in a lonely grave on the hillside above the Taranaki Cathedral.

 

Possibly the most significant historically of these streets is on the line known as the Fitzroy Line at the eastern end of the suburb of that name.

 

The Fitzroy line was the line on the map set by Governor Robert Fitzroy as the eastern boundary of the land claimed to have been purchased by the Company from the Maori owners. West of the line could be surveyed for settlers, east of it was to remain in Maori hands. The northern end, as far as the Waiwhakaiho River, is called Fitzroy Road. The southern part has been renamed Smart Road, after one of the early settlers in the area. It is still interesting that the eastern side has little urban development, whereas there is more subdivision and housing to the west of Smart Road.



Captain Robert Fitzroy

 

At the corner of Smart Road and State Highway 3 stands the Fitzroy Pole, erected by the Maori to mark the boundary of their land.

 

Fitzroy was an interesting man: as a young naval officer, he captained the Beagle on its round-the-world journey with Darwin. He was a staunch supporter of indigenous people and that was why a left-leaning government in the UK appointed him governor. After his return to England in disgrace, because he made himself unpopular with the settlers, he was appointed to the UK weather service at Greenwich, and developed the very beginnings of meteorology, using his observations at sea as the basis. He invented the idea of drawing weather maps by linking places with the same pressure. He arranged for lighthousekeepers to telegraph reports at the same time so he could do this, and then sent cables to the fishing ports when storms were coming.

 

Very popular with fishing people, but thought mad and unscientific by politicians and scientists, he became so depressed he committed suicide.

Family History 1.737

(Continuing the shipboard diary of my great-grandfather, Charles Gaze, aged 27, in the Tasman Sea.)

18th March 1860 Sunday

Fine, and Fair wind but rough sea.

10 a.m. Church prayers.

Baked pork over suet pudding for dinner. A tea pot from off a shelf fell on my wife's head and cut it but not serious.

3 p.m. Bible Class.        

Half past 7 p.m. Dissenters service and address from 107 Psalm 8v.          

About S. Lat. 33. About E. Long 166.

19th

S. Lat. 34.12 E. Long. 168.15

Fine, fair wind and calmer sea. Foretop gallant halyard broke this afternoon.

Several persons begin to pack up (ourselves also).

20th

Fine and calm sea. S. Lat. 33.36. E. Long. 171.1.

 

Carpenter repairs the parts, broken away in the storm.

 

 

 

 

 

21st

Fine and fair winds.

6 a.m. sighted the 3 Kings, rocks which stand off the north point of New Zealand.

8 a.m. sighted Cape Maria Van Dieman and the North Shores of N.Z. A beautiful view of land all day. Quantities of birds seen. Supposed Lighthouse on N. Point of Bay of Islands, revolving light.

Concert tonight on deck. Concertina and vocal and dancing also.

 

 

A nearly new school 1

Rangitoto College 

Rangitoto College is now the largest secondary school in the country: a massive corporation of 3000 students. One of my great-nephews is a pupil there from 2014. 

But in the days when I was a teacher there, it was small and comfortable, in a rapidly growing suburb of the North Shore. 

I started in February of 1966 and was introduced to my close colleagues: the Principal, Frank Tucker, the Deputy Principal, Frank Mathieson, and my immediate boss, the HOD English, Frank Gee.  I was the fourth Frank in the line! The senior lady teacher was Hazel Pettit. 

The staff room at Rangitoto was a very friendly place; Frank Tucker made sure of that. All the tea-tables were set out in one long line down the middle and everyone sat together for tea breaks and lunch, as well as at staff meetings. Frank was in the chair, at the head of the table. 

Rangitoto College Staff before my time; Frank Tucker is centre front row.

Frank Gee also carried on a friendly leadership policy in the English Department. There were four main English teachers: Frank Gee, Hazel Pettit, a Welsh immigrant, “Taffy” Jones, and me. Hazel is in the photo, sitting to the left of Frank Tucker.

 

Also visible are Eddie Meijers, my closest friend in the following years, fifth from left at the back, and Glynis Sweeney, to his right.

I made several advances in my teaching skills at Rangitoto College. 

In the first place the English Department ran an experiment over the winter term to try to teach in smaller groups than the usual 35 pupil class. We put all the Sixth Form in the Hall for four periods a week, where they were lectured on a specific topic by one of the four teachers.  Meantime the fourth class was divided into three small groups for tutorial-style classes on student exercises.

My second new experience was learning to direct stage plays. Frank Gee was an old hand, and together we produced “Arsenic and Old Lace” in the middle of the first year. This is one of the classics of stage comedy; it is one of the few plays I know that cannot be cut at all without ruining the story. Later, I produced it again myself at Mt Roskill, but I think we probably did it better at Rangitoto. 

We had a fright the weekend before the week of the performances: the hero, who was also in the First Fifteen, had his nose broken in a rugby match on the Saturday, and we were worried he would not be able to go on stage on the Tuesday night, but the Rugby Union had good insurance arrangements and his nose was fixed and he was fine on the Tuesday night! I learned from that experience always to have understudies for school performances, and also even for voluntary workers in key positions. 

The second year we tried an experimental programme. Frank Gee, who had links with all sorts of useful people, obtained a sheaf of radio plays from Radio New Zealand – plays written by Aucklanders. We chose three, two short ones and a longer one. I produced the longer one, and he took on the two short ones.

 

My Taranaki Anniversary Day 5

The next street to the south of Gill Street is the main street of the city (and the longest for a long way of any city), Devon Street, named after the Earl of Devon, who was the Chairman of the Plymouth Company Board.

 

The next street, or half of it, was also named after him. Courtenay Street remembers his family. Henry Courtenay was the liveliest of his family, being interested in all sorts of projects for the improvement of his land and his tenants and their part of the country.

 

The other end of Courtenay Street is called Powderham Street, after the family castle south of Exeter.

 

Powderham today with the present Earl (from the website)

After that we have a street again divided in two halves, and again, like Courtney and Powderham streets, a part of the one-way system. The western half is called Vivian Street.

 

Hussey Vivian was a Waterloo veteran. As a junior general he was credited by some with having led a charge by his dragoons, against strict instructions from the Duke of Wellington, and in this way saved the day for the allied armies.

 

A scene from the diorama at Waterloo today

By 1841 Vivian was an MP and a minister, in charge of the "big guns" department of the army, and of the surveyors department, which was originally set up to map the ground where guns were expected to be used.

 

The other half of the street is called Leach Street, but Edmund Leach is a bit of a mystery.

 

Then comes Lemon Street, named after Sir Charles Lemon, a Cornish mine-owner, who was also a company board member, and MP.

 

Lemon was a well-educated man, and interested in science.  He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a friend of Hooker, the great naturalist. He was worried about the diseases which afflicted his miners, and helped to found the Royal Statistical Society, which was able to virtually begin the science of epidemiology.

 

Lemon's nephew was Fox-Talbot, the photographic pioneer, one of whose early shots was of a tree on Lemon's estate which Hooker had brought back from his travels.

 

I am very proud to have such a man as the namesake of the street I live in. Lemon also had a rhododendron named after him, and I believe it is high time our council encouraged residents to plant Sir Charles Lemon trees in their properties and on their berms.

 

After Lemon Street we come to Pendarves Street. Jack Pendarves was also an MP and a member of the Company Board. From records of the electioneering of those days it is clear that these men were colleagues and friends who could work together well, and who co-operated on progressive projects of a variety of kinds, not just on founding New Plymouth.

 

The fact that their names come up in street names in Wellington too shows they were busy in the New Zealand Company at the same time.

A new start

In August 1965, when I reached Auckland with the children, I had to look for employment quickly to keep the family. I had already secured a job at Rangitoto College for the next year, but there was a term to go. Fortunately, my old French teacher, Henry Cooper, by that time Head of Auckland Grammar, was living near my parents’ home. 

Auckland Grammar School 1916 Building

He contacted me with a problem: one of his senior teachers had left on a temporary Overseas Volunteer Service appointment and could I pick up his timetable? This would involve Fifth Form English, History and two classes of Geography. I demurred, never having studied Geography, nor taught Geo or History. Henry persuaded me to accept, and I started straight after the holidays in mid-September. 

I soon discovered that all the four classes on my timetable were second-year fifth formers, ie, they had failed at the first attempt at the exam in the previous year. Second-year fifths were notoriously hard work, and so it proved to be, not because the boys were difficult, but because I had to swat up four classes of new material each night, ready to teach it the following day! 

The payoff came in mid-November when the boys left to sit their exams, and I was left with no-one to teach. In the event, the students I found worthy of a pass in the exams did in fact pass. So I can’t have been completely at sea! 

The education system was very short of teachers at that stage, and the PPTA was fighting a campaign to have pay rates lifted so that after 10 years or so teachers would be paid an annual salary of 2000 pounds. Henry Cooper told me one day that he had a third excellent teachers, a third average and a third useless. Consequently he was advertising jobs to replace the useless third. 

My next unexpected problem was that my holiday pay stopped in early January, because I had only worked one term of the previous year. So I had to look for a holiday job, and found one, thanks to a family friend, at the Winstones Building Supplies yard in the Wairau Valley. This job, which involved heaving cement bags and concrete blocks around the busy yard, soon improved my fitness ready for the new year at Rangitoto. 

I also met Bill Anderson, the Drivers Union leader, who visited us regularly, and with whom I later worked on the Vietnam Council.

My Taranaki Anniversary Day 4

The first Europeans to settle in New Plymouth were two whalers, Love and Barrett. They set up their whaling station at Ngamotu ("The Islands") where the port is now, and married local Maori women.

They were able to help with the negotiations over the New Plymouth settlement once the advance party led by Carrington arrived.

Fred Carrington

In the early nineteenth century surveying, like whaling and many other occupations, was done in teams usually called "crews". With Fred Carrington, when he arrived in 1841, or soon after, were two of his brothers, Wellington and Octavius Carrington, plus assistants Harcourt Aubrey, and Logan, and others as well.

Carrington's family had been Cathedral officials in Exeter for several generations. So he, and many of the other leaders of the settlement, were Devon men. Carrington's name is attached to roads and other features in Taranaki, and his descendants still live here. He became a respected political and administrative leader later in the century.

The deal that Carrington was expected to build into his land survey was that each settler who had purchased a land area was entitled to three "sections"; a town section, a suburban section, and a country section. The town section was for the house, the suburban section was for growing vegetables, and the country section was for farming.

Carriongton and his crew planned for the town sections to be in what is now central New Plymouth, the suburban sections to be in what is now the suburbs and immediately rural areas, and most of the country sections in North Taranaki and up the Waitara Valley.  This was the genesis of the fierce feelings that arose among the settlers over Maori reluctance to sell land.

The plan that Carrington and his team drew up for the centre of New Plymouth is virtually unchanged in the 175 years since. Most of the names given to the streets running east and west (parallel to the coast) were of leaders of the Plymouth Company in the UK. Many of the names given to the streets running north and south were of people who were leaders here in New Zealand.

Street names starting at the coast begin with Woolcombe and Octavius. Tom Woolcombe was Secretary of the Company, and secretary of the Plymouth Institution, an educational, library and philosophical organisation in Plymouth.  Woolcombe was a leader of radical thought. Octavius Place was named after Carrington's brother.

William Molesworth

The next street is Buller Street. Charles Buller was the MP who accompanied his friend Lambton to Canada in 1837 as his secretary, and who wrote the "Durham Report". Lambton Quay in Wellington is named after his friend, who was Chair of the New Zealand Company which founded that city.

Then comes Molesworth Street, which is now part of State Highway 44. William Molesworth was another MP who was a company director. Like Woolcombe, he was a radical thinker; so much so no man in his right mind would allow him to court a daughter.

The next street is Gill Street.  Tom Gill is the man who was mayor of Plymouth in 1836, and the owner of the wharf installations at the harbour there. If you wanted to embark on a ship leaving Plymouth you had to use Gill's facilities and pay a fee for them, so he was a key man to have on the Board!