Never to Return Home: John and Mary White’s Otago Story

Never to Return Home

John and Mary White’s Otago Story

Fraser Boyd

Copyright © 2015 Fraser Boyd

All rights reserved.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ePub edition

ISBN 978-1-927260-32-6

Philip Garside Publishing Ltd

PO Box 17160

Wellington 6147

New Zealand

books@pgpl.co.nz www.pgpl.co.nz

Table of Contents

Title and Copyright

Where this book came from

What we know

Outline map - Otago Harbour

Prologue

Part One — Mary Neylon

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Part Two — John White

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part Three — John and Mary

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part Four — Baby Hannah

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

About this book and the Author

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Where this book came from

Over the last few years, my wife, Margaret, has been researching her family’s history. She was able to glean many facts from shipping records, school records, a few newspaper cuttings, wills where the probate record existed in the national archive and so on. What we don’t know, and have been unable to find, is many life stories of these people and their descendants. After all, except as a kind of fluke, what records exist that contain details of the life of ordinary people?

So I set out to use my imagination to fill that gap.

This book is dedicated to Margaret, who did all the work while I dreamed of what might have been.

I would also like to acknowledge the help of Margaret’s sisters, Dianne Wall and Dorothy Wallace who, when asked to critique the script, both said, I got so involved in the story I forgot to write all over it. There could not be a greater expression of confidence for a first time writer.

What we know

Mary Neylon came from Ennistimon in County Clare on the clipper ship Gala arriving in Port Chalmers, New Zealand on 29 October 1864. She was employed as domestic help in Portobello.

As to her age, different documents give different dates of birth ranging from 1843 to 1847. Therefore, when she arrived in New Zealand she would have been somewhere between 17 and 21.

John White was born in Letterkenny, Donegal, somewhere between 1834 and 1842, depending on which records you consult. His parents were John and Hannah White, the elder John being described on some official documents as a farmer. We do not know what he farmed. John junior arrived in Dunedin, New Zealand in April 1865 and was first employed as a farm labourer in Portobello.

Mary and John owned a piece of land, presumably with a house on it. The electoral rolls for 1865 (the year of their marriage) to 1873 show them living at Freehold Section 44, Block 2, Portobello.

Mary and John were married in Dunedin by Rev Dr Stuart, Minister of Knox Presbyterian Church, Dunedin. The Intentions to Marry Register in National Archives contains the annotation that Mary is under age but there is no one in the colony who is competent to grant permission, therefore the requirement is waived.

Mary’s marriage certificate is signed with a ┼. The Archivist from the Presbyterian Church suggests that she used this Christian symbol rather than the more conventional x because she might have been shown that way by Dr Stuart. Mary did later learn to write, because several documents, including the women’s suffrage petition of 1893 and her will, contain her actual signature in a beautiful copperplate script.

By the time of the marriage John had ceased to be a farm labourer and was listed on the marriage certificate as a quarryman of Portobello.

Hannah was born on 23 July 1866 in Portobello and died on 7 March 1867. She is buried in a class 1 plot in the children’s section of Port Chalmers Cemetery.

Of the people in this story, most are fictitious. Mary, John and Hannah are, of course, real, as is Rev Stuart of Dunedin, and Rev Forsaith. The latter is described in one of the histories of Port Chalmers as a minister of the Congregational Church who was one of the few resident Protestant ministers in Port Chalmers. He has been reported in current histories of the district as being willing to stand in for any minister who was not available at a time of need. Jane Steward of Portobello was Mary’s attendant at the wedding. John’s was James Story, Farmer, of Green Island. We know nothing about either of these.

We quote from the Otago Daily Times in several places. These excerpts are true.

Mary and John went on to have 11 children after Hannah, one, Dianah, dying at 12 and the others all living long lives. But they are another story for another time.

Mary and John are Margaret’s great grandparents.

Below is an extract from the Women’s Suffrage petition showing the signatures of women from the Dunedin area, including Mary White of Sydney Street.

The Whites lived in Sydney Street, Dunedin, at a period in their lives later than that covered by this story.

Outline map - Otago Harbour

Prologue

Dunedin’s Otago Daily Times of Saturday 30 October 1864, reported:

The ship Gala, reported as having arrived off the Heads on Wednesday evening has been unable to make the Harbour in consequence of the prevalence of dense fog for greater part of the day in the neighbourhood of the heads. As she does not appear to have anchored, there is no certainty as to the hour of her arrival, though it will probably not be sooner than the mid-day tide on Saturday. She is one of Messrs Potter, Wilson and Co’s line and brings, under charter of the Provincial Government a number of assisted immigrants, a considerable proportion being assisted females.

Young Mary Neylon, on board the Gala, did not see this report. If she had, it would have made little difference to her because she could neither read nor write. The local newspaper, and how to read it, were the least of Mary’s worries. She was more concerned about the disappointment of rolling around the ocean at the mouth of Otago Harbour, after having sighted land five days earlier. She understood the need to travel for several days from the initial landfall to the port at which they were to land, but this fog was so frustrating! Was this new world going to be any better than the Ireland she was escaping from?

She thought back to her family at home in Ireland. In spite of worries about savages and lions and tigers and grass huts, they also saw her going to a tropical paradise. These contradictions made her realise that, while they knew little about this land, she didn’t know much more. There was a lot to learn, and she would rather have been ashore learning it than sitting outside the harbour with nothing to do and no way of even seeing what her new home might look like. Mary had spent more than enough time on board the ship, and had definitely eaten more of its food than she wanted to. Whatever situation she was going to couldn’t be worse than her experiences of the last few days.

Mary was one of the considerable proportion of female assisted immigrants on board the Gala. It was described in another Otago Daily Times report a few days later as, a fine iron ship of unusual strength, 815 tons, general cargo and 72 passengers. Fine and strong the ship may have been, but it was not big, in proportion to the number of people on board. It had been rolling around the world for three months, and Mary was thankful that they had all arrived unhurt, except for a seaman who fractured his wrist in a fall from the main royal yard.

As she sat on the deck desperately trying to see her new home through the fog, Mary remembered the reaction of the people on board as the seaman fell. The screams of the ladies brought everyone else on deck. Then she watched the Captain, the mate and the doctor as they dealt with the situation. There was a quiet calm about them which made a lasting impression on everyone. She recalled the discussion in the steerage compartments that evening.

You wouldn’t catch me being a seaman. If it wasn’t that I was desperate to get away from England you wouldn’t find me anywhere near a ship. I wish someone would invent a flying machine, then we’d be free of all this seasickness and crowding.

A machine that’s light enough to fly, like a big kite or a balloon, would get really blown about. I’ll settle for the sea.

I’ve heard of big balloons called airships. To fly in them you have to choose the day when the wind is blowing in the direction you want to go. Then you have to wait for a change before you can get back. No, there’s nothing in that idea.

Ships depend on the wind too, but they seem to be able to steer them to where they are to go, although when the wind is in the wrong direction the voyage takes much longer.

I’d go for a job like cook, or Captain’s steward, so that I didn’t have to climb up those masts.

The sailors don’t like it either, most of them. They are only here because they were sent by magistrates, or because they were press ganged.

You don’t get press ganged on ships like this. They only bring the press out when there’s a war on.

And so the discussion went on, all being experts on sailing after so long at sea. Most agreed that a life at sea was not what they would have chosen. Several remarked, Most people of our class don’t have the opportunity to choose, they just grab what they can get and do what they are told. Gaining that freedom is why we are all here, so we can get some choices into our lives.

The voyage had been comparatively straightforward. This was attested to by the people on board, in two letters to the Otago Daily Times which acknowledged the skills of the Captain, Thomas Shaw, and the ship’s doctor, Dr A. Laurie. Each letter was Signed by all the passengers, although it was presumably the cabin passengers who signed it, rather than Mary and her friends in the steerage. In respect to Captain Shaw, the letter said that the passengers wished to, express our feelings of respect and gratitude towards yourself for the able manner in which you have navigated us across the ocean and brought us safely to our adopted country.

Dr Laurie was commended for his kind treatment towards the women and children .... We have no doubt that if a case of sickness had visited the ship we should have found you the right man in the right place.

It is to be hoped that both captain and doctor were encouraged by these appreciative remarks. Mary, her friends and shipmates were encouraged too, by the fact that they had arrived safely with no illness. Hopefully they still had the jobs they had been promised, and would have roofs over their heads, and food to eat. The food ashore couldn’t be worse than what the ship’s cook had been serving up for the last few weeks.

The passengers of all classes had complained to each other about the food, the complaints getting louder as the voyage went on. The experts talked about preserving meat for a long journey. They touched on the horrible job the cook had, keeping his pots on the stove as the ship rolled, and the lack of any vegetables, to go with the salty, horrible meat flavour. Most realised that they just had to cope with the deteriorating quality of the food. They had all long ago decided that getting off the ship as quickly as possible was a priority.

As Mary stood on the deck trying to catch a glimpse of her new home, she was totally wrapped up in her thoughts and it was obvious that others around her were thinking the same thoughts. After all, they had shared a lot, especially the younger women, as they had had so little to do these past three months. She spoke to Emma, an English girl who stood alongside her. I wonder what’s behind that big cloud that’s blocking us. Maybe it’s too much to hope that it might be the sun. But, sun or no sun, I am really looking forward to my new life.

Emma’s reply was to the point. I think it will be the same as it was at home, hard work, bad food, long days. I can’t think why I ever decided to come out here. But then, it couldn’t be worse than it was at home.

They both retreated back into thoughts of home, what it was like, and the hopes which had led them to this new country.

Part One — Mary Neylon

Chapter 1

When Mary was born, in the mid-1840s, in Ennistimon, County Clare, the potato famine was just starting to take a grip on the families of Ireland. The plants suffered an attack of blight, withered and died, leading to many deaths by starvation in a country where as many as one third of the people were totally dependent on the potato. The Great Potato Famine had started to recede by the time Mary was old enough to understand it, but Ireland remained desperately poor. Everyone could, of course, see people around them who had survived and even got richer during these times, profiting from others’ misfortune. The famine was still discussed at length, and the number of empty cottages in towns and villages was an indication of how many people had left County Clare.

Growing up in a large family, even one with access to a little land, was hard work and heartbreak, and included a very real fear every year that the crop might fail again. Mary’s father, and her brothers as they got old enough, talked endlessly about the various ideas that they and their friends had to prevent a recurrence of the blight which had led to the famine.

They were also concerned about how they could move out of the poverty cycle. Each family was able to rent a small plot from a landlord, in good times sufficient to grow enough potatoes to last a family for about half a year. They then had to work to earn money to buy food for the rest of the year. The cycle just continued round and round, with no way to break out of it.

Mary and most of her family survived but literally millions of people died of starvation or disease which their undernourished bodies had no means of fighting. People got into debt just to feed themselves, so the effects of the blight far outlasted the period when the fields were producing nothing but heartbreak. A huge number, nearly as many as had died, set off around the world looking for a better life, some only as far as Scotland or England (many of whom would return home later), but many also to countries as far away from Ireland as it was possible to get.

To help ensure the economic survival of her family, Mary, as with most Irish children of the time, spent considerable time in the fields planting, hoeing and digging, and generally working to ensure that the crop would be a success now that the land had recovered. The aim was to produce more than the family needed, so that some could be sold and debt repaid. Some debt could be paid through providing work hours to the creditor, so the children had to spend time on their family land doing what father would otherwise have been doing. In a few cases rapacious creditors would require labour from the children as well. School was therefore second best in the family economies, attended mainly on the days when the weather dictated that no work could be done outside. Most Irish children, even the very young, questioned the need for school, as did their parents. I got on alright without spending much time at school, and you will too. Don’t get these high sounding ideas about education getting you a better way of life. Just knuckle down and do what needs to be done. Feeding the family is the one thing that counts.

Like most young children, Mary questioned everything in life as she grew up. She saw many things she did not like, and her constant Why was a source of annoyance, and indeed hurt, to her parents and other family members. Her response to their resigned sighs and comments that, that’s how life is for poor people all around the world, was to say, I want my life to be one where I can have free time to be with my friends. I want to escape this drudgery.

Her elders’ response to these constant questions almost always ended up with a shrug of the shoulders and words like, You’ll learn in time. The ways of the world are bigger than you are. Meanwhile, get on with your chores. Today was always more important than an unimagined future, and generally more important even than tomorrow.

Mary was mature enough by about ten years of age to know that some people had choices in life, but that people of her family and class did not. The priest talked each Sunday of how God made the world and it was good. But this young lady could see that it clearly was not good, if only because she could see that there were people who had a better life than she, and some who were much worse off. For these latter people the world definitely wasn’t good. Why this was so she wasn’t sure, but she was determined to have a better life than her parents. She would wonder aloud why God would punish her family when they worked so hard, tried to live by the scriptures as explained to them in church each Sunday, and never did anyone any wrong. Her elders were too busy to hold philosophical discussions on matters like this. The children at school were not really interested in anything except their family’s new baby or big sister’s wedding, the new litter of pigs, or other such important events. So she got very much into the habit of trying to think through these things on her own.

Mary didn’t realise until many years later how much she hurt her parents by, in effect, calling them failures. She was to find later that her children, in a different time and a different land, would ask the same questions, and get the same answers, and that she would be hurt in the same way. Every generation is much the same as the previous one. Her parents occasionally pointed this out in words like, I believed all that when I was your age. She knew that they were stuck in a rut, and had no interest in getting out of it. They probably never had the imagination to raise such questions, let alone try to answer them.

Surely all women could aspire to a life in which they had a warm home, a loving man, and children who had a chance to raise themselves to better circumstances?

Most of her school friends saw Mary as a dreamer. Life was what life was, you were born into it, had to make the best you could out of it, and that was that. Mary asked impossible questions like, How did Mr Hanratty up on the hill get his big house? Is he better than us? Does he work harder than us? Does he pray more so God gives him more? The reply from the people around her, both adults and children, always was, Get on with what you’re supposed to be doing. You’ll soon learn that you can’t eat dreams or questions.

As she and her friends walked home from school, some talking about their family’s new baby, the puppies or even the joyful fact that the hens laid two more eggs than usual, Mary thought how she would like to be really warm, and have shoes which belonged to her and fitted her. For her, life was shoes which came to her after being worn and scuffed and twisted out of shape by two sisters before her. And she knew, because her friend Joyce’s mother worked as a housemaid for Mrs Hanratty, that in the big house every child had their own bed, and that there were several rooms for people to sleep in. People of that class did not need to put up with one really crowded room shared with the whole family and their animals and full of peat and tobacco smoke in the winter. Although they smelt, the animals did help to keep the home warm. And the smell was nice and homely too. Most people quite liked it, except on the very hot days of summer. What bliss if you could have privacy for a minute or two, a little place to call your own. Mary sometimes realised that she found her privacy in simply drifting away, in her mind, from all that was going on around her, especially the chattering of her friends.

Mary the dreamer – we’ve lost her a million miles away, the children would chant when she suddenly stopped talking as they walked to or from school. True, they had lost her, because she was thinking of her friend Molly whose married big brother had taken his wife and baby and gone to America. She knew that America was a long way away in a big ship, taking weeks of travel. And Molly had told her about the letters they sent back, about undreamed of wealth available from road or railroad building, because in these new countries there is nothing except land and trees and mountains. You have to work really hard to build your own home and get a pony and trap and so on, but it is worth it because you can get really rich, then don’t need to work anymore.

That was another difficult thing to understand – in County Clare the roads had been around for centuries, and the railways were just there. Sure roads and railways needed looking after, and each summer her father and brothers did some of that work to bring a little extra money into the family. But building roads in a country which didn’t have any, and, Molly told her, using thousands of men to do it – how could you actually believe these stories? And every so often a child came to school with stories from relatives in America about the savages and how they had attacked the road or railway builders, and killed people. Maybe life was exciting in those places, as well as prosperous, but did you really have to die to make your fortune?

She had asked her teacher about America and was told that the distances were just too big to explain. She persisted – she knew about long distances, her father having left once on some mysterious errand to Dublin. He had been gone for a week, and said that it took him two days to get there and two back, even though he had been given rides in pony traps for some of the distance. Was it further than that? Much, much further, she was told, in a crowded ship it could take up to 30 days. And she knew that ships