by Peter Wells
On 9 November 1876, at the age of seventeen, Polly married my greatgrandfather Robert Northe, who was twenty-six. He was already a man of business. (And interestingly, Polly’s blend of Irish and Devonshire genes was the exact same mixture of Robert Northe’s own mother, Nancy O’Donnell.) The marriage took place at the home of Polly’s mother, Agnes, who had now scrambled back to respectability. Her husband Thomas Campbell was no longer a labourer but a cab driver. He also owned several sections in Main Street, Onepoto Gully, as it was known (rather than the elevated ‘Onepoto Valley’ of the obituary).
Both Robert and Polly were New Zealand-born, and both had grown up in the steep, dark Onepoto Gully, where Polly’s father, Private John Summers, and Robert’s father, Sergeant John Northe, had converged in February 1858 when the British Army arrived in Napier. The Gully was where the ‘other ranks’ (the non-officer class) dwelt. When, almost twenty years later, Robert Northe and Polly Campbell met and married in the same gully it was a demonstration of what historian James Belich calls ‘ethnic persistence’.2 Both Robert and Polly were army brats — descendants of
other-ranks soldiers, a close, rather tight and inward-looking caste, never shifting far from where they had come. Given the fluidity of much colonial life, one might ask why neither Robert nor Polly married ‘out’. Ethnic persistence argues for a consciousness of race and caste, but perhaps in this case the distinctiveness came from the army’s other ranks creating their own small microcosm of a world, slightly separate from the rest of colonial Pākehā society. Like kept to like. If one looks closely, not only had Polly’s mother been married to an other-ranks soldier, but two of Robert’s sisters also married men who started out as other-ranks (non-commissioned officers, like their father). Moreover, the Northe sons mostly kept living on a hill closely associated with the barracks that their father, Sergeant Northe, had managed. It was indeed ‘residential clustering’ and almost fiercely inward-looking.
In fact, the connection between Robert and Polly was even tighter than this. Robert Northe grew up on the other side of Main Street from Polly and could remember her arrival as a baby. It was he who as a boy had run to call the midwife.
It was a love match. I am tempted to say, ‘It began as a love match’, a subtext to many a marriage, I suspect. There is a report in the Hawke’s Bay Herald of 11 November 1876 of high-spirited shenanigans on the night of the wedding. A group of six men, playing piccolo and banging tin drums, went to serenade the newly married couple outside their house but had the wrong night. ‘Northe knew we were coming, and said it was alright.’
Robert eventually took his wife to a house he had built in Havelock Road; Polly would spend the rest of her life there. The house and stables were set in half an acre on the top of Hospital Hill, and overlooked the Onepoto Gully, as if to demonstrate how far Robert Northe and his bride, in one generation, had travelled.
They began in high style: 1876 was the last year of a six-year boom which had followed the successful war of attrition against Kingite Māori. (Successful for colonists, that is. Disastrous for most Māori, who now faced unrelenting pressure to either sell land or have it taken from them in outright confiscation.) The colonial government had borrowed heavily in London and an artificial boom blossomed across the ‘peaceful’ land. The colonial state expanded rapidly, and Robert Northe as a carpenter and contractor was well placed to take advantage of the changed conditions. He had obtained a contract to help clear the area around Takapau and the Seventy Mile Bush. The spec was to clear a ‘roadway, 33 feet wide, of all timber and roots, so as to form a perfectly even surface. The timber and scrub, 16 and half feet on either side of the roadway, has to be cut down to within 15 inches of the surface, and to be removed, together with all fallen timber, so as to leave 66 feet in width clear of all timber or scrub’.3
Now that the wars were over, what was once Māori land was being ‘opened up’ and ‘cleared’, in colonial parlance. Deforestation was integral to the infrastructure that created contemporary New Zealand. As citizens of Aotearoa we weep for the loss of the primeval forests; however, we also enjoyed good roads and efficient rail travel throughout the twentieth century, and suburbs full of elegant villas built of kauri and rimu. This is part of the ambiguity of all New Zealanders’ inheritance. The creation of this infrastructure, as well as the decimation of the primeval forest, was part and parcel of how Robert Northe, like many others, progressed from being the son of an indigent migrant into a small-scale capitalist. In the 1870s contractor Robert Northe was earning £20 a week when the average working man was earning less than £5. He was on his way.
There is a sense that he was a square peg in a round hole. His cautious father had wanted him articled to a trade. Sergeant Northe, as patriarch, chose printing. But Robert was not a suitable candidate for patient, intricate and attentive work. There was something of the wild colonial boy about him, some fiery spirit that pushed him away from the cautious and circumscribed world of his father towards something riskier, more entrepreneurial. He was born in New Zealand after all.4 It was not foreign territory — it was all he knew, and he was anxious to take advantage of this local knowledge.
His Cornish father had worked hard all his life to pay for four small town sections (and a family plot in the cemetery) but Robert was more interested in exploring a rambunctious free market. He worked for Robert Holt, who owned a timber mill and was an entrepreneur, perhaps something of a role model. In the following years, Robert Northe set himself up as a carpenter, a builder, a contractor. He appears in the newspaper in a variety of guises, as if trying on clothes to see what fitted him best. In 1871 he was a contractor; in 1877 he had a timber yard in the Spit; in 1878 he was listed as a carpenter in Hardinge Road, with a yard going through to Waghorne Street; in 1891 he joined A. H. Wilson in an ironmongery that sold a variety of items from spades and bedsteads through to trusses. He also had a contract team with a steam-thrashing machine that mowed grass and stacked bushels of grass seed, Robert Northe ‘working the same as the rest, sometimes helping on the stack. He appeared satisfied when the work was done, and gave the men some beer’.5 He had a brick yard with quarries in Faraday Street and lower Burns Road in Napier; was a Land and Commission Agent and dealer in general stock at Whetukura near Ormandville. He expanded the business so it incorporated potatoes, beans, bran, pollard. He gave estimates on building and filling in sections. He bought five acres alongside Taradale Road in 1898. He had a company supplying manure. There was a sense of a restless, volatile energy, seeking profit wherever he could.
He lived off rents and investments for a while, a kind of imitation gentry. But he was still a rough, wild character, a colonial larrikin with a booming voice and bristling beard. He was tall and almost cadaverously thin, with big raw sticking-out ears. It was not unusual for him to vanish with a carpetbag on a ship going to Australia, leaving behind his wife and children without any explanation. (His mother had family in Australia, the O’Donnells.) Even as a forty-one-year-old (weighing nine stone one pound), he was competing as a rower and winning races, speaking at rowdy dinners following the all-male regattas.6 He took part in local politics and was a prominent member of the Harbour Board League which advocated for a port placed in the inner harbour. He was restless, energetic and irascible.
But what of his wife? One can trace a man through his ownership of property, the jobs he had; nineteenth-century women are more difficult to trace. A woman was meant to be sexually compliant to the man who provided the roof over her head. There was no contraception; the concept of rape within marriage did not exist. Hence a nineteenth-century colonial woman is chronicled through the children she bore, often in appallingly quick succession. (This coincidentally also set the pace for the expansion of the colonial state: fecund young Pākehā women were as much a part of the creation of colonial New Zealand as the march of armies and the clatter of guns or the cutting down of trees.) James Belich argues that Māori society in the 1880s juddered to a halt partly because Pāke
hā birth rates were so high they swamped those of Māori, whose birth rate was, if not declining, not at all robust.7 Societies work in complex ways. Polly gave birth to four sons in quick succession and more children were to follow.
Robert Northe decided to dabble in farming in Clive in the 1870s, but this ended in disaster when the deforested landscape provided no absorption during an epic downpour and the Clive River rose and flooded the low-lying paddocks. Like so many settler Pākehā, he was really a townsman at heart. He returned to Napier, and in 1894 set up the wood and coal company that would later employ his sons just as the ‘Long Depression’ of 1876–1895 eased and conditions changed for the better. Like all things, it was a matter of timing. He started the company just as the economy began to improve.
NOW WE FAST-FORWARD TO Robert Northe’s shocking death a decade later. On Thursday, 23 March 1911 he was at his quarry in Faraday Street. The mode of obtaining clay for bricks was to insert gelignite into a cliff, light it, stand back and take it from there. On this occasion, one of his quarrymen lit the fuse but there was no explosion. Robert Northe was impatient, irascible — and when he went forward to re-light it, the gelignite exploded. He had first-degree burns all over his chest, face and head. He recuperated, then complications set in, and he died in agony several days later. The bold entrepreneur had lived by risk and taken one risk too many.
There was no inquest, no newspaper report. (Did the family exert pressure? At a time when the smallest incident in town life was eagerly covered, there is nothing.) An odd silence seemed to fall — apart from his screams, which had sounded all over Hospital Hill when the nurse undid his bandages, ripping away his skin. My grandfather Ern elected to sit by him in his death throes. Where was Polly? you may ask. A woman missing from her expected place also indicates a story.
Robert Northe’s obituary (this was a time when almost anyone merited an obituary in a small-town newspaper — it helped sell newspapers, after all) listed his sporting achievements and business prowess: he was ‘a noted oarsman and represented the Union Club in many a hard fought race … Of sterling character, honest and upright, deceased gained the personal regard of scores of friends and the news of his death will be learned by them with genuine regret. Deceased leaves a widow, eight sons and one daughter to mourn their loss.’8 As was the custom, Polly was not mentioned by name. After thirty-five years of marriage, nine children and ten births — one child had died soon after birth — she was now the ‘widow’.
What of Polly’s life after Robert? Once again there is an official silence. We find her, in silhouette as it were, in the minute book of R. Northe & Sons on 10 December 1912 in the oddly formal attire of ‘Widow of late General Director’, even though it is her son Ern writing up the minute: ‘Resolved that as the company use stabling & paddocking at the property of Mrs R Northe the Company Pay all rates & taxes on the property & allow firing not to exceed £1 10 shillings per month.’ This was by way of the filial duty of sons to make the Widow Northe’s life slightly more comfortable. The company would pay her rates and taxes on the Havelock Road property, a considerable help. Note the caution, though, of that ‘not more than £1 10 shillings’ a month of coal and coke and wood to keep warm. There are no extravagant gestures. Each Christmas she got a present of five guineas; for the rest of the year she had to eke out the small annuity Robert Northe had left to her.
Robert Northe left a tidy estate of more than £9000 — not bad for a man who had started off with nothing. Of this he left his wife £150 a year. She would not starve, but she would not prosper. It was the equivalent of a very short leash. Everything else was to go to his offspring. The catch was that nobody could inherit until the youngest was twenty-one, a tough caveat in a family that ranged from middle-aged men to boys in short pants.
It was as if Polly was a mere conduit through which the children had emerged, each male carrying the proud imprint of his surname, each son to a degree indentured to the family firm, forever part of R. Northe & Sons, and each less an individual than part of something Robert Northe himself had created. They had to bear the weight of expectations he placed on them just as, to a degree, he both offered them a future and imprisoned them in the past. It was patriarchy as gift, patriarchy as imprisonment.
Or this may just be a twenty-first-century misreading of the situation. How about: Your father offered you work and eventually part-ownership of the business? You weren’t on easy street, but you had the pride of being part of a family business — a family business that did well, too. Remember that encomium: ‘honest, upright and of sterling character’. It was an assured future, which was something when circumstances can always change for the worse and there are a great many desperately poor people around you.
There is plenty of evidence that the sons were proud of the family firm. Each Mardi Gras they entered floats in the procession: pastiche houses made of bricks with a flue; an imitation whare with the Northe boys in grass skirts (actually sheep skins). It was a time of unconscious appropriation of Māori motifs — less a celebration than a sign of Māori defeat and loss of control of their own imagery. The Northes were colonials made good. But still the boys, or now married men, were imprisoned by the yoke Robert Northe had placed on their backs.
But why would his will so overlook his wife of so many decades, who had stuck with him through thick and thin, through flood and the birth of ten children and the harrowing death of a child? Marriages wear thin. What begins as a love match between a young man and his very young bride becomes, over the years, something different? Perhaps self-made men, with their bristling egos, their sense of having created the world through sheer brute force and street smarts, make impossible husbands? He was a contractor, used to assessing and pricing labour against profit. Did he think he could have got a better bargain than a wife who was the daughter of a laundress and a deserter? Or was he just a bastard? Or is this again an ahistorical misunderstanding?
In 1918, long enough for the rawness of Robert Northe’s death to have faded away, his sons decided to file a case in the Supreme Court challenging his will. Polly is the silent witness in all this, though we find her again appearing like a phantom in the minute book of R. Northe & Sons as ‘Mrs R Northe’. As always, it was left to Ern as the brains of the firm to undertake the task. He went to Wellington and, by way of doing a tidy little bit of business on the way, sold some R. Northe & Sons land in Pahīatua. It was not until March 1920 that the Supreme Court judgment was received: ‘trustees after providing £3600 in war bonds to secure Mrs R Northe [an] annuity’ could subdivide the estate. Polly at last could be comfortable, with a reasonable annuity. His children could get on with their lives.
The eight fond sons and one loving daughter had all championed their mother. The daughter, Grace, who had a tubercular hip which limited her chances of marriage, had shared her bedroom with Polly. Despite what could only be described as a rough beginning, Polly was indeed, as the obituary observed, kind, warm-hearted and beloved. Is that not something to place on the historical scales beside the absence of a career or ownership of property as indicators of character and achievement? I dare to suggest that Robert Northe, the founder of a small family fortune, was not loved. He was certainly someone of whom you could be frightened. He may even have been hated.
Here’s a family story that explains this. At Polly’s fiftieth birthday party — the only birthday party she had ever had (what does that tell us of her life?) — Robert Northe decided to disrupt the proceedings. He made a public announcement that when he died he intended to leave her a pauper.
Here is another family story. She shifted out of the marital bedroom. She never spoke to him again.
Here is another family story. When he lay on his death bed, shrieking with pain, she simply walked out of the house. She refused to talk to him as he lay dying. There was no reconciliation. She did not forgive. I do not know if she walked in his funeral procession. Probably she did, since to not do so would invite the public into private discord. But
the only time she ever visited his grave was when she had to lay her one daughter, Grace, beside him twenty years later.
Here is another family story. All her life she wrote a diary. Bessie told me, ‘If ever there was a question of when something happened, Grandma would run away to her room and look at her diary.’ This implies the diaries were factual, lists of events rather than introspective maunderings. But let’s take this another step. A diary presumes privacy. The fact she ‘ran away to her room’ gives the sense of someone who went out, perhaps even opened a locked drawer, consulted the oracle in private, then came back and passed on the information. There is no suggestion that she would bring the diary into a crowded room and point out a line or a date.
What happened to these life-long diaries? Here is another family story, Bess’s version: ‘Dad was so furious when he found out Queen [a sister-in-law resident in Polly’s home when she died] burnt the diaries. They were full of the history of Hawke’s Bay.’
Another family story: ‘The diaries were buried with her, placed inside her coffin … The coffin was so heavy the boys struggled to lift it.’
Whatever the method, the diaries vanished. And a vanishing is really a signpost to a story. Why were they destroyed? My theory is that Queen, Polly’s daughter-in-law, read them and realised they were the record of an unhappy marriage. Unhappiness is an uncomfortable vision, especially in the context of a grieving family.
Why do I think Polly recorded the unhappiness of her married life? We might read it in reverse, as it were, in the stoicism Polly practised — perhaps even a stoicism she learnt in that hectic period when she had three ‘fathers’ in seven years: a mode of endurance, a practised silence, an inward turning towards the solicitude of recording your own impressions of things in private. Given that women had such a severely restricted area in which to express themselves in public life, diaries were often a place where the self could be set free. The self could talk to the self.