Chapter
One, the immigrants
1.-
John Birnie was born on 12 November 1830 in Cavan, an Irish border county. His
family were Roman Catholics but he fell in love with Jane Gibson – born on 20 January ten
years later – the daughter of a Scottish Presbyterian minister. Their
wish to marry was strongly opposed by both families and besides, a mixed
marriage was no simple matter in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. It required a
dispensation from the parish priest, and even then the ceremony could not take
place in a church. The bride and groom were required to state, not only in
writing but also verbally before witnesses, that all children would be brought
up as Roman Catholics. Added to that, the spouses would almost certainly be
disowned by their families. Jane, as a Presbyterian clergyman’s daughter, had
been educated to a level unusual for women at the time and, even though she was
bound by the strict Victorian morality that placed respectability above all
else, she was able to think for herself. They had to take their walks in
out-of-the-way places to escape the censuring gaze of their sanctimonious
neighbours, sitting down on a secluded park bench to make plans for a different
future…
–
That would be unbearable, I simply could not stand to live in such a way.”
–
But Jane dearest, it is the law of my church and I cannot do otherwise. Unless…
unless we go far away, emigrate to a place where religious denominations don’t
matter, where we can be free to live as we desire. Would you be willing to
forsake friends and family and set out for the unknown?
–
If I am to be without you, I no longer wish to live at all. I will go anywhere,
provided we go together; Australia, America… anywhere we can be away from this relentless
bigotry.
–
Then I shall make inquiries. I have heard good things about the colony of New
Zealand, in the South Seas.
2.-
Andrew Williamson was born on 15 January 1836 in Crawfordjohn, Scotland, the seventh
of eight children (Thomas, James, George, John, David, Mary, Andrew and Robert).
His father John Williamson (b. 1781, Crawfordjohn),
a shepherd by trade, died in 1857 when Andrew was twenty-one. The family broke
up over the next couple of years: James and George were already married and had
their own households. Thomas, the eldest, had passed away thirteen months after
his father and the other three single brothers, David, John and perhaps Robert,
moved south and settled in Swindon, England.
After
Tom’s funeral we can imagine the four brothers returning to John’s cottage and sitting
around the smouldering coal fire. David, Andrew and young Robbie waited for
John, who had finished his apprenticeship as a draper, to speak first now that
he was the eldest unmarried brother.
–
I've been corresponding with a firm in Swindon, in Wiltshire. It's a good place
they've offered me and I am going to take it. There's more and better work in
England than here, a man can make a living. Robbie, you can come with me when
you’re ready. You others can decide for yourselves.
– I'm not going to England – said Andrew – I'd rather emigrate and live with
savages than with the English.
–
Oh, Andy, take me with you! – burst out Robert – Why don't we go to California
or Australia and find a fortune in gold?
– How can you emigrate if you haven't got a penny to your name? – David spat
out. – Besides, you’re indentured. You've got to stay here until Michaelmas. As
for me, I'm going with John. There's work with horses in England. I'm not going
to risk drowning or getting eaten by cannibals. It’s England for me. He turned
to Andrew –– Who cares if you hate them? Don't you hate the gentry here?
- Aye, but at least I know them. I'll be going over to Greenock next week.
There's assisted emigration, I've seen the notices. You can go to Australia for
four pounds. He was silent a moment. “Lots of men are emigrating… and women too.”
He stopped, suddenly aware of the bare silence that greeted his words. He
looked around: three pairs of eyes stared mutely back. There had been
Williamsons in the village since their great-grandfather George, the first
Williamson to arrive in Crawfordjohn from Lanark more than a hundred
years ago in the days when it was a busy and prosperous junction
with stables, inns, schools and its own market. Now, a decade after the potato
famine, it had become a stagnant backwater. New roads had left it stranded far
from the main thoroughfares. But for all that it was still their home. If they
didn't live there they would no longer be the Williamsons of Crawfordjohn. Each
brother stared into this new chasm, and the sepulchral silence was broken only
by the moan of the wind in the eaves. Andrew stood up.
– I'll never get on here – he said. – I need to know tomorrow.
3.- William Hunter was born at Crosshouse in
Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1855 and married Allison Inglis in her home town of
Sanquhar, Dumfriesshire. The couple had emigrated to New Zealand where their
fourth child, William John, was born. They were residents in Brunnerton, at
Wallsend, from where William senior went to work as a hewer. For the twelve
children of William and Allison Hunter, the mid-1890’s was a disastrous time.
Their thirty-six-year-old mother died in October 1894 from a uterine
haemorrhage when the eldest child, Jean, was just fifteen years old and baby
Charlotte [“Aunty Lottie”] only one.
When their forty-one-year-old father was killed in the mine disaster two years
later, the children were orphaned. The two eldest girls were employed in
Christchurch as domestic servants, but they joined the younger children and
went with them to an aunt, Elizabeth Thomson of Oamaru, who brought them up.
The Hunters were the largest family to be affected by the Brunner Mine disaster.
(West Coast New Zealand History Website
https://westcoast.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/15020#idx101163).
Sanquhar, Allison’s
home town, is only eleven miles south-west of Crawfordjohn, the ancestral home
of the Williamson family, and Crosshouse is located forty-five miles further
west. Thus the Hunter-Inglis family was from the same Scottish Lowland district
as the Williamsons and probably emigrated for much the same reasons. Allison
was born in 1857 (the year Andrew’s father died). The couple emigrated to New
Zealand with their three Scotland-born children – Susanna
Watson Hunter (1880 - 1951), Jean (Jane) Hunter and Elizabeth
Hunter (born
1882) – in 1883. Allison would bear nine more children in New Zealand, making a
total of twelve in less than fourteen years: William John Hunter (1883 – 1959),
James Hunter (1885 - 1906), Mary Inglis (d. 1962) and Allison Inglis Hunter (twins
born 1887), Frederick Collinson Hunter (1888 - 1959), Harris Hunter (1889 -
1962) Archibald Hunter (1890 -1924), Margaret Hunter (1892 – 1974) and
Charlotte Hunter (1893 -1961). Her married life was nothing but one pregnancy
after another. With no time to recover properly, her body finally broke down,
and she was by no means an exception.
William Sr. was a hewer, the worker responsible for loosening the coal
from the seam with a pickaxe. The seam could be so narrow that he would hardly be
able to creep into it on hands and knees or thick enough to stand upright. He was
a specialist who dug the coal out of the seam and made it available for loading
into the tubs for its journey to the surface. He must have been an experienced
miner to get such a relatively well-paid job on arrival. Lanarkshire, after
all, was not known as the Black Country of Scotland for nothing, so he must
have worked in Scottish mines from childhood, a hard and dangerous occupation.
The North Otago Times, Oumaru’s newspaper, wrote:
At least two families in Oamaru have lost
relatives by the sad catastrophe at
the Brunner mine. William Hunter, who was one of the victims of the
explosion, and whose body has been found, was the brother-in-law of Mr.
Thomson, of the Railway department here. Mr Hunter leaves a family of twelve,
the oldest 15 years of age. These children are now fatherless and motherless,
the mother having died about a year ago. Deprived of both their natural
protectors at an age when they are totally unprepared to battle with the world,
their case is an exceptional and sad one, and one that will evoke widespread
sympathy. Mrs Thomson has, we believe, left for the West Coast to care for the
immediate wants of the orphan children. Of all the sad instances of
bereavement, none could be sadder than this.
4.- No more is known of Andrew Williamson or
his siblings until on 1 October 1866, now thirty years old, he turns up at the
Registry Office in Alexandra in Central Otago, New Zealand, to marry Ellen
Balling of Jersey, England. He is first registered on the Electoral Roll in the
Manuherikia District in 1867 and subsequently at Halfway House (Dunstan) and
finally at Nevis in 1876. But how long he had been in New Zealand and whether
he came straight from Scotland or by way of the gold rushes in California or
Australia is still a mystery. All we know is that that a stillborn child was delivered in March 1867, five
months after his marriage. Another child would be born in July 1868, but three
days later both the mother and the second child were also dead.
Andrew then married Ellen
Whelan (born in Limerick, Ireland in
1841) at the Dunstan Registry Office on 13 February 1869, just seven months
after losing his first family. The first of eight children, John, was born in
Outram on 14 October the same year and a daughter, Ellen, in 1871 when,
according to this clipping from the
Otago Daily Times, he was still prospecting around the Dunstan area:
Messrs. Williamson and Co. have abandoned
their claim on the West bank of the Molyneux (the Clutha, between
Clyde and Alexandra), and are now
prospecting at the foot of the Dunstan Range. They have struck payable gold
nearly everywhere, and if water were obtainable, they state they have found
ground that would afford remunerative employment for a large number of miners
for many years to come.
But water with a good head to drive a
sluicing nozzle is rare in those parts. Apparently the Dunstan prospect didn’t
work out and they either had to turn back towards Clyde or carry on over the
Carrick Range to the Nevis.
The third child, Robert,
was born in Clyde in 1873, but
after that Mary (1876), Jane (1878), Ada (1881), Andrew (1883) and Alice (1887)
were all born in the Nevis Valley. By 1876, when Mary was born, Andrew must
have been working a claim in the Nevis Valley and had brought his family to join
him. He spent the rest of his life there and was appointed Justice of the Peace
for the district in 1891.
Ellen Williamson nee Whelan died in 1901 as reflected
in this account from the Otago Witness dated 21 August:
The third death, came as a shock to almost
everyone. It was that of Mrs Andrew Williamson, who, with her husband and small
family, came to the Nevis in the early seventies from Clyde, where they had
been residing for some years. Mrs Williamson had been ailing for some time
past, suffering from chronic bronchitis, but no one imagined that her end was
so near. She passed peacefully away from her sorrowing friends at 8 o'clock on
Saturday evening, 3rd inst.
Andrew died in the Nevis in
1912 at the age of 76 and, like his wife, is buried in the Nevis cemetery in a
currently unmarked grave.
5.-
John Birnie and Jane Gibson did manage to elope to New Zealand and made
landfall at the Scottish settlement of Dunedin where they married in St Paul’s
Cathedral on 12 September 1863. There are no parents’ names on his side of the
marriage certificate, probably because he disowned his family for opposing his
marriage. John was thirty-six years old and Jane a decade younger. The gold
rush was in full swing so, along with many others, the newlyweds travelled to Dunstan (Clyde) where Annie, their
first daughter, was born on 14 July 1864. They later moved to Carricktown,
a quiet mining township on the Bannockburn side of the Carrick Range where John
became a storeman and carrier, carting goods on the long haul from Dunstan and
coal from Bannockburn.
Between
1864 and 1882 Jane Birnie, the demure clergyman’s daughter, bore seven
daughters and a son. Fourth daughter Mary died, probably of berry poisoning, at the age of four. Living
conditions were uncomfortable at best, and more often atrocious. Dwellings in the tiny settlement of
Carricktown were built of local stone and most had only two rooms. Floors were made
of beaten clay and the only lighting they could afford was rush lamps. Winters
were harsh and summers scorching. There were no trees for shade or shelter.
Life on that shoulder of tussock and rock was extremely austere, almost
primitive. Far from her homeland, parents and extended family, loneliness and
yearning for society must have come to dominate Jane’s existence, especially at
times when her husband was away and
support and comfort were desperately needed. Not surprisingly, she suffered what
used to be called a nervous breakdown: a period of mental and emotional stress
so intense that she was unable to perform normal day-to-day activities. As a
result, her fifth daughter, Isabella (Bella), was taken into care by a
childless couple, Thomas and Mrs Shaw, Presbyterians who lived in Potter’s
Gully at the bottom of the Carrick Range on the Nevis side. The Shaws became so
fond of Isabella that she remained with them until she grew up and later cared
for them in her Nevis home in their old age. The rest of the family moved down
to Bannockburn when Bella’s eldest sister Annie was 12 years old. Jane Birnie would
bear two more daughters and a son who lived only 7 days. But even the anguish
of the children’s deaths, the arduous living conditions and her own problems did
not deter her from educating her daughters. John Birnie, died on 20 March
1902 and is buried in the Old Cromwell cemetery. Jane, who spent her last years
in a cottage opposite the home her eldest daughter – Annie McNulty in Blythe
Street, Cromwell – died on 14 March 1912 and is also buried in the town
cemetery. Bella would grow up to marry a well-established gold miner known as
Jack Williamson.
Chapter Two
Born and bred
in New Zealand
1.- It is now
necessary to introduce one of the great protagonists in this story: not another
immigrant facing terrible hardships with resilience and determination, but
certainly a character, one that has been sculpted from the Palaeozoic-Mesozoic rocks known as Otago Schist over a period
of more than five hundred million years: the Nevis Valley.
J.C. Parcell,
in his book The Heart of the Desert,
being the history of the Cromwell and Bannockburn districts of Central Otago
(Otago Centennial Historical Publications, 1951) gives a good description of
its physical layout and some enlightening comments on its climate:
Nevis District
in the main consists of a deep but flat-bottomed valley, walled in on one side
by the Hector Mountains and the Remarkables and on the other by the Garvie and
Carrick Ranges. It is traversed by the Nevis River, and the Carrick Range cuts
the district off from Bannockburn. The lowest end of the valley is just under
2,000 feet [around 600 metres] above sea level. The upper end is much higher. (p. 270)
Life at the
Nevis has never been an easy one, though the winters vary a great deal in
severity. Sometimes Nevis has been cut off for weeks in snow feet deep. The
winter of 1893 was particularly bad, the
worst since 1878, and stock losses were very high. Again, snow and blizzards
were bad in August, 1902, while the following year they had eighteen inches of
snow and forty-five degrees of frost. In 1907 the river and all the creeks were
frozen solid; 1918 brought extensive snow and severe frosts. In 1925 there was
a foot of snow and there have been other winters equally severe since. But the
hot, dry summers and golden autumn weather are more than compensation for any
disadvantages winter may bring. (p. 276)
A more contemporary
view is provided by Louise Joyce in Take
me to the Nevis (Dunstan Publications, 2019):
It is a place
many New Zealander know little, if anything, about and its exact location would
probably present a challenge. The Nevis Valley is one of the most isolated,
inhospitable and remote places that people have occupied in New Zealand. It is
a long, deep-bottomed alpine valley ringed by mountains that have to be climbed
and descended before the valley is reached. It has an entrance at either end
but, rather than visit the Nevis – you go into the Nevis like an old-time explorer making
a journey into the unknown. […]
The Nevis River
(Te Papapuni) rises in the southern end of the Hector and Garvie Ranges,
draining the Upper Nevis basin and flowing north along the valley floor for
about 50 km to join the Kawarau River […] The valley has two sections, upper
and lower, separated by a gorge about 8 km long. Lower Nevis is about 600 m
above sea level and Upper Nevis is about 240 m higher.
Heritage New
Zealand - Pouhere Taonga – Lower Nevis Historic Area states:
The stark
barren landscape of the Nevis Valley is a dramatic setting which provides
essential context for the history of human occupation in the valley. The Maori,
pastoralists, miners and others who lived here lived in a climate of extremes
which is reflected in the landscape. This is an isolated undeveloped place,
with the feeling much as it was in earlier times. This visual context makes it
possible to step back in time and imagine life for the earlier occupants of
this beautiful, harsh, but isolated place. The relatively unmodified landscape
of the Nevis basin is an important context for the historic sites, giving it
special aesthetic significance. According to the first Warden’s Report (1862):
Nevis is so isolated and remote from every centre of population that it is just
beginning to be discovered. This cold, sequestered, and ice bound region,
hemmed in on all sides except where it opens to the Kawarau, will probably
never attract a very large population. It will be a storehouse of wealth to the
hardy adventurers who are prepared to brave its inclement climate.
The story of
four generations of Williamsons and their extended families cannot be
understood without keeping this geographic and climatological information in
mind. Andrew’s eldest son, John (Jack) Williamson (1869 to 1936) lived all his
life on the goldfields in the Nevis except for a brief and fatal expedition to
the West Coast. He had a hydraulic sluicing claim and was also a dredgemaster
during the height of the dredging era in Central Otago. The site of his sluicing
claim is now marked by a Geocache:
Geocache Description: John
Williamson's Claim. The cache is located at the site of John Williamson's
claim. The Williamson family has a long history in the Nevis Valley. John
Williamson was the son of Andrew Williamson who moved into the Nevis Valley to
mine in the early 1870s. Both of John's parents are buried in the Nevis Valley
cemetery (in unmarked graves) and two of his sons are also buried in the
cemetery (James and John Williamson). [https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC26Z9R_john-williamsons-claim-central-otago?guid=f4813282-efea-4ef7-89f3-b7f521ec637e]
2.-
Isabella Birnie, meanwhile, had grown up and opened
her own dressmaking shop in Alexandra. There she met Jack, the well-established
dredgemaster in his forties from the Nevis Valley. They were married on
30 Sept 1908 and would have three children: James (Jim) 1911 to 1939, John
(Beau) 1914 to 1976 and Evelyn 1917 to 2010.
Evelyn remembered in 1998 –
John and Isabella
were married in the home of Thomas and Mrs Shaw of Potter’s Gully at the base
of the Carrick Range on the Nevis side. The Shaws were a childless couple who
cared for Isabella from a very young age when her mother Jane Birnie suffered a
breakdown brought on by the death of daughter Mary who was just under four
years of age. Isabella was the next child. The Shaws and Isabella became so
devoted [to each other] that she grew up in their care and trained as a
dressmaker. Even so, she always remained in contact with her sisters, three
older and two younger than herself.
John (Jack) Williamson grew up in a Nevis
mining family , the eldest of eight children. Like his father, he became a gold
miner and dredgeman. He and Isabella made their home in the Nevis township but
John’s work was mainly at Upper Nevis – nine miles off through the river gorge.
That meant his only getting home at weekends and in the depths of winter when
mining had to cease. As children we were happy in our valley, nature providing
the stage for sports and games. There were rocks, tussocks, creeks, pools, snow
and ice in winter, a beautiful river for swimming and fishing in summer. As our
years of growing up went by we missed so much of value because of our father’s
long absences, for he was a father to cherish, a gentle, warm-hearted man. It
was not until I became an adult that I realised and felt the hurt of knowing
just how deprived he and we had all been. For our father living in miners’ huts
with only basic needs provided and little comfort must have often seemed drear,
and for mother, lonely times –
She told me that when they had been married
twenty-eight years she calculated that their time together would only have
amounted to eight years.
When James had finished primary school our
mother moved us to Dunedin for secondary education. We lived in a four-roomed
hillside cottage on a half-acre section in Mornington.
In 1936 our dear father was lost to us
forever. Dredging had ceased at the Nevis some years earlier and he had
transferred to Gillespie’s Beach, Westland, once again living in a site camp.
He died in Hokitika Hospital. An extended family group travelled there in time
to be with him in his last few days. Sadly then, we brought him back home for
burial in Anderson’s Bay cemetery, Dunedin.
Only two years later the tragic death of
James in a mining accident at Nevis brought about the beginning of Isabella’s
decline in health and finally her death in 1947. She was laid to rest alongside
her beloved husband, John.
Although our family life had been much
disjointed, our ties to each other were strong.
Evelyn also wrote about a serious illness
that Isabella survived in 1939:
Our mother had come
through a serious illness but her hold on life was tenuous. As I sat by her
hospital bed anxiously attending her occasional needs and searching for ways to
comfort her, I knew that her will to come back was fading. Finally I was
advised to send for my brother (John). His trip entailed many hours of boat and
overland travel.
Amazed, I watched as his presence rekindled
her life force: her eyes brightened, a warm colour tinged her cheeks, she spoke
in quiet happiness and began the road to recovery.
I thought I had seen a miracle happen and of course
it had – wrapped in the power of love.
3.- While Jim,
John and Evelyn Williamson were still at primary school at Nevis, a certain
Arthur George McLeod was pursuing an unpromising career as a petty thief and
con-man in Christchurch. Born (apparently) in 1889, he gave his age as 31 when he
wed Mary Inglis Hunter on 30 August 1920 in the Christchurch Registry Office. According
to the marriage certificate he was working as a fishmonger at the time. The
couple already had three children: Edna, Arthur Harris (Mac) and Beatrice
Allison (Betty). A month later, on 28 October, he was fined three pounds in the
Christchurch Magistrates Court for making false statements about his birth,
possibly in relation to the information on the marriage certificate where he states
that he was born in Milton, Southland, to Neil McLeod and Beatrice McLeod (no
maiden name given), but there is no record of any such persons on the electoral
rolls or any of the other usual documents that bear witness to people’s
existence – at least, that of people whose progeny have no reason to conceal
it. There is a record of an Arthur McLeod born in Invercargill on the right
date, but the marriage certificate says Milton, where no such record exists.
While the elusive Arthur was busy covering his tracks, Jack
and Bella moved into a house at 6 Kevin Street, Mornington, Dunedin when their
eldest son started high school (around 1924). From then on Jack would work the
goldfields alone, only living with his family during the winter when work in
the Nevis ceased. Bella and the children also spent the school holidays at the
Nevis, she housekeeping for her husband and the children exporing their valley
and, as they grew older, helping their father on the claim. More than seven
decades later, Evelyn would write about her elder brother:
James was a quiet-natured, studious boy whose
academic results were excellent, so that his high schooling ended in Matriculation
(which
qualified him to enrol at a university).
However, he chose not to pursue an academic ºcareer and instead answered the
call of his childhood environment in the goldfields of the Nevis Valley in the
heart of Central Otago. This choice was partly prompted by his wish to earn
rather than cause his family ongoing expense for further education.
His roughly ten years of mining encompass a
period of prospecting at Drummond’s Creek, Upper Nevis, some years in a
sluicing partnership with Danny Deegan, then hydraulic mining on his own
account with employed help. He lived in two well-built stone huts, more
spacious than most.
During these years his love of learning was
kept alive by reading the English classics, studying astronomy through
publications from the Carter Observatory in Wellington and experimenting with
amateur radio and photography. Love of his environment took him on mountain
tramps where he enjoyed photographing the mountain flora and snow peaks.
Jim was devoted to family, but was thought by
some to be reserved – somewhat of a loner. To Evelyn he was an admired big
brother, friend, champion.
To
us kids he was a legend: the lost uncle, a sensitive hermit who read great
books, took, developed and printed his own photographs and was said to be the
strongest man in the Valley.
The
few photographs we have of Jim show a tall, handsome and – to judge by the
robust arms – very strong man with a gentle smiling face and relaxed stance.
The
contrast with his younger brother could hardly be starker. Evelyn wrote that John
had
Another
type of personality, gregarious and musically talented. As a primary schoolboy John
played in the Mornington School piccolo band and always had a harmonica handy.
In his teens he played in the Stokes Banjo Band and later, he and some friends
formed the four-piece Gaiety Dance Band in which he played the saxophone. His
nickname was Beau, probably because of his handsome and dapper appearance.
She
recalls that the family moved to Dunedin when Jim had to start high school,
which would mean that the three children lived in the Nevis until James was
thirteen and in the city after that. John would be about ten years old when
they moved, after which he would only spend the six weeks of the summer
holidays in the Nevis.
Unlike
Jim, Beau preferred to work in town after leaving school (around 1930,
presumably) rather than in the family gold mining concern in the harsh,
isolated valley. Evelyn recalls that his first job was as an office junior with
a Dunedin solicitor. During the next decade or so he seems to have enjoyed the
life of a young single man about town, working at a series of more or less
dead-end jobs and playing banjo, guitar, accordion or saxophone in dance bands.
We know that he won some money in the lottery in 1936 and bought a new car: a
Ford 10 model C. Laurie Rands wrote that Evelyn appears in the 1938 electoral
rolls living at 6 Kevin Street, Dunedin and her brother John Williamson – recorded
as a Salesman – and mother Isabella were living at the same address. We also
know from family tradition that he spent time in Australia working as a miner
in the Ovens district, from whence he had to return suddenly in May 1939.
1939
was a traumatic, life-changing year for the Williamson family. On 20 May they received the
devastating news that Jim had been
killed. Evelyn writes: his death in 1939 in
a mining accident (fall of earth from the top of the elevator while he was
clearing the intake) was a drastic shock and deep grief to his mother, brother
and sister. Their father had died in Hokitika Hospital in July 1936. His mother
was keeping house for Jim that season while Evelyn and John were working away
from home, she in Auckland, he in Australia.
Evelyn
recalls that Bella’s health was affected by these griefs. Then New
Zealand declared war on Germany on 1 September and Beau, a registered miner
despite his preference for city life, was recruited under the manpower scheme
to mine tungsten ore (scheelite) in Pukerangi, about eighty kilometres north of
Dunedin by road.
He met the lovely Beatrice McLeod (Betty) when she was waitressing at
the Beau Monde restaurant in Princess Street, and they married in Oct 1942 in
Christchurch. Their first home was at Pukerangi (on the Dunedin to Ranfurly
section of Central Otago railway) to where John had been manpowered by War Office to mine scheelite, a substance
used to harden steel and therefore needed to manufacture weapons. He had previously had some gold mining experience.
From Pukerangi they were moved to the Glenorchy scheelite mines for the
duration.
A
rough chronology would probably look like this:
- 1914
born and raised in the Nevis
- 1924
moved to Dunedin, 10 yrs old
- 1930
(?) office job, Dunedin
- 1938
Living at Kevin Street. Occupation: salesman.
- 1936
Won some money. Bought a new Ford 10 (so he was still Otago)
- 1939
Returns from Australia
- 1942
Married Beatrice Alison McLeod / manpowered to Glenorchy
- 1943
Linley born in Invercargill Hospital
- 1945
Released from manpower scheme. Return to Nevis (with Doug?)
- 1948
Linley 5: sold or abandoned his sluicing claim. Drove taxi in Dunedin
- 1950-51
(?) Roxborough Dam
- 1952-56
Garston
- 1956-1976
Christchurch (with interlude in Nelson)
This
is also Betty’s story until 1966, the story I have to fill out, so any comments
will be helpful at this stage.
Evelyn:
Prior to her marriage to Garnet, we can see Evelyn Margaret Williamson in the
electoral rolls in 1938, living at 6 Levin Street, Dunedin. She was recorded as
a 'Spinster'. At the same address was her brother John Williamson, and he was
recorded as a Salesman.
In
the 1941 and the 1943 rolls, we can see Evelyn living at 9 Swinton Street,
Invercargill, again listed as a Spinster. She was at this address, along with
her mother Isabella, recorded as a Widow.
Evelyn
married in December of 1945, so we see her and her husband Garnet in the next
roll.
Evelyn
and Garnet did not move very far, as we can see in the electoral rolls for
1946, 1949, 1954, 1957, 1963, 1969, 1972, and 1978 that Garnet Hunter Evans was
living at Hedgehope and was working as a Farmer, along with his wife Evelyn
Margaret who was listed as married.
The
only change in the records came when in the 1981 rolls, Garnet was again listed
as a Farmer, and Evelyn as Married, however their address was recorded as State
Highway 96, Hedgehope.
The
cemetery records for Winton Cemetery state that Garnet Hunter Evans was a
Flight Lieut of the 97 Sq. RAF, Pathfinder Force Bomber, 426136.
The
Pathfinders were target marking squadrons in RAF Bomber Command during World
War II. They located and marked targets with flares, which a main bomber force
could aim at, increasing the accuracy of their bombing. The Pathfinders were
normally the first to receive new blind bombing aids like Gee, Oboe and the H2S
radar.
Linley
wrote on her Face Book timeline: Evelyn:
a wonderful, sensitive person with unrealised dreams. She and Betty had so much
more potential than their upbringing and environment let them develop. Their
yearning for wider horizons survived in spite of hard lives contained within
narrow spiritual and emotional boundaries. They wanted to fly, but were tied to
the ground. Their heritage lives on in some of their children although probably
the best of us, Lloyd, has gone.
