Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  The building of Maori led to a dispute that is revealing. John James was charged with the assault of his shipwright partner, George McAuley. The case came to court in July 1880. McAuley alleged that ‘John Northe’ came up to him when he was working on the deck ‘and used very foul language … Northe said to him “Now the money is all done you try to do as little as you can.” … He accused witness of being lazy and struck him,’ one witness said, with a hammer. ‘They scuffled together and McAuley sang out “Murder!” Northe challenged witness to go on the beach.’

  The beach was a place that was slightly beyond the purview of the law — a neutral, unpatrolled place where bareknuckle fights were often fought, sometimes with onlookers laying wagers. The crowd vanished the minute a copper appeared. ‘Here John Northe said “Put up your props!”’ and McAuley had to defend himself. They then had what John Northe described as ‘a set-to’. When McAuley ‘said “he had enough” they ‘knocked off’.11

  The language is as colloquial as Days’ letter of complaint. The magistrate saw it in the same light: local lads having a bit of a scrap. He decided that though ‘Northe had lost his temper the assault was not a very grievous one he thought a small fine would meet the case’.12 Make of that what you will. It offers some sense of the doubleness of John James Northey, I think — the quick temper, rough language and the challenge on a beach to ‘put up your props!’ He was a man to take a grievance and go with it.

  But there had been an incident three months earlier that offers some further insight. This was a case of indecent assault against a woman called Sarah Martin. ‘The charge against Northe was the result of a drunken spree,’ John James’s lawyer asserted, without saying specifically what had happened. ‘And … from what he had been told by the police,’ his lawyer added, ‘he did not think they would prosecute.’ Contemporary attitudes to women infuse the Hawke’s Bay Herald’s report, from the jokey headline (‘A Curious Prosecutrix’), to the cavalier treatment of the offence (the collusion of Inspector Scully saying ‘he did not think there was sufficient evidence to warrant a committal, and he would therefore decline to go on with the case’), to the judge saying he would ‘decline to take any evidence, as he did not think Sarah Martin could be a respectable woman to offer to take £5 damages for an indecent assault’.13 (She had gone outside the court to consult with an unknown person and had come back into the court asking for £5 damages.) The implication is that she was a prostitute operating at the port and her case lacked credibility.

  But it was still an indecent assault. John James Northey was captain of the Union Rowing Club at the time, and it would be safe to assume he was a popular man, a friend or at least an acquaintance of all the other men involved in the case. It was a small town, after all. What is key here, though, are the words ‘a drunken spree’. Was this part of John James’s doubleness? Was it his way of coping with what a newspaper looking at the prevalence of alcoholism in Napier described as ‘a narcotic to the overwrought and excited brain, a restorative to the tired and jaded body, and a calmative and soother to the distressed and troubled mind’.14 Was his mind troubled? We know his wife Jane had taken the pledge and joined the Salvation Army — a move often prompted by personal acquaintance with the devastation alcohol could bring on a family. Was John James an alcoholic or just a heavy-drinking colonial dude? One of the boys? Often out on a spree?

  John James Northey, his preferred name, was obviously feisty. All of Sergeant John Northe’s sons were volatile men, ready to assert their rights, physically strong. This was part of the burden of masculinity. There were other burdens to do with masculinity, too, one of which was being emotionally inarticulate. A man did not emote, cry or talk about his feelings. John James, as we have seen in his business dealings, was also disputatious. This included writing letters to the newspaper on a variety of topics to do with the port. He was, it appears, literate in a way Charles Days was not. His letters to the paper were briskly opinionated pieces that displayed evidence of a strong ego: ‘The plan adopted by the Harbor Board to “protect” the beach is so stupid and senseless that one would think that member of the Harbor Board had reached an advanced stage of senile decay …’15

  In fact his letter writing led him to being chief suspect in a sensational court case in 1903 in which A. E. Eagleton, a Napier borough councillor, sued the Daily Telegraph for libel. An anonymous letter had appeared in the newspaper suggesting that the councillor was behaving inappropriately. The letter was full of innuendo — ‘Considering the reasons to which I refer, reasons which are well known to a large number, possibly the majority of citizens’. As Cornford, Eagleton’s lawyer, said, ‘in a small community everyone knew all that went on’. As well as being a borough councillor, A. E. Eagleton was a tobacconist and hairdresser, and used his shop as an illegal betting shop. He was a bookie. Even the local vicar dropped in to lay the odd bet. Moreover, Eagleton was supported on the council by a variety of publicans. Coincidentally he sat on the licensing bench, which decided key questions to do with selling alcohol. In a way it was the familiar intertwining of alcohol and gambling interests, a nest of small-town corruption.

  John Northey, finally named correctly after a lifetime of being ‘John Northe’, took the witness stand, the chief suspect as source of the anonymous letter. He was there ‘to interpret’ it. His responses were wilfully laconic.

  ‘Mr Cornford: Do you sometimes write to the newspapers? — Yes; but I always sign my own name.

  ‘On what subjects? — Mostly harbour subjects, the breakwater in particular.

  ‘Not on literary subjects — literature? — No.’

  The lawyer and judge constantly sought to catch him out as the letter writer, but John James parried their questions with obsfucation.

  ‘Are you interested in the turf? — Sometimes I go to the races.’

  ‘Might I call you a sportsman? — Well, not exactly; I don’t bet very heavily.’

  When the judge, irritated by John James’s responses, which always managed to hint that he shared all the opinions expressed in the letter without ever admitting he had written it, challenged him to say whether he thought ‘a man who violates the law is fit to be a member of the licensing bench and of the City Council’, John James’s response was a diffident, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ He was stood down after this.16

  What drove him to write such a controversial letter, if indeed it was he who wrote it? That ‘everyone in a small town knows everything’ hints that ‘everyone’ knew he was its author. (An earlier letter to the newspaper had stated ‘The majority of your town readers know who Mr John Northe is.’)17 Possibly the editor of the Daily Telegraph recognised his handwriting. Moreover the letter writer had followed up his first salvo by doubling down with another letter hinting at further ‘grave concerns’. Surely a drinker and a gambler, ‘a sportsman’ who a few years before had been vice-president of the Port Ahuriri Football Club, was the least likely person to object, on moral grounds, to a spot of illegal betting or a councillor in charge of licensing pubs being in cahoots with the sellers of alcohol? Or had the man who had assaulted a woman on a drunken spree become an advocate for sobriety and high morality in public life?

  It’s that doubleness I was talking of. Was this part ‘of the tensions and contradictions that touch any real life’? The Northe sons were macho men. Drinking and running wild was part of the colonial ethos, and John James also carried the burden of being a first-born son. His stroke as an oarsman was described as ‘relaxed and confident’ when he won a widely watched race on the Waitematā in 1863.18 This could have described his natural mien if something more volatile, something darker, was added in. On 17 May 1904, John James took his own life by eating arsenic.

  The newspaper report of the inquest that followed (‘Mr J. J. Northey’s Death’) said that the sixty-three-year-old was depressed by a bout of influenza which he had not been able to shake. But many people get depressed by influenza and do not kill themselves. There was something darker at wo
rk. Was one of the central agonies of his life, as is often the case with men, ‘an inability to communicate an internal state’?19 He had begun drinking whiskey and beer in the way of a determined and fatalistic drinker who drinks to oblivion. He had asked Jane to go and buy him some whiskey. When she refused, he had gone out to a shed to find arsenic. He took only one spoonful mixed with water. ‘I have done it this time,’ he said to Jane. ‘He also said he had taken the arsenic because he wanted to get rid of himself, as he was tired of drinking and tired of life.’20

  Anyone who has read Flaubert’s masterly description of Emma Bovary’s death knows how protracted and agonising death by arsenic would be. (Flaubert took some arsenic to get an idea of the effect.) This included, the newspaper said of John James’s death throes, ‘violent vomiting and diarrhoea’. Jane could only stand by his side, helpless. A doctor was called, and for a while it seemed John would pull through. The doctor went out to dinner but was late calling back, and by 9 p.m. John James Northey was dead.

  Suicide is always the deepest and most damaging of enigmas, the unsolvable conundrum that everyone left behind must wrestle with for the rest of their lives. He was reported to often say, ‘I would like to get out of it’ or ‘It’s time I was out of it.’ His wife Jane denied he ever used the word ‘suicide’, but his son John Northey was more artlessly transparent. ‘He did not drink to such an extent as to get drunk every day, but he was always in a muddled state. The liquor changed him greatly — made quite a different man of him. Prior to the last twelve months deceased had not touched any liquor at all for thirteen years.’21

  If we count back, we head towards that period of both the fight on the beach at the time of the launch of Maori and the ‘drunken spree’ — the sexual assault — on the woman at the port. We can conjecture that the shame of the public exposure, especially in a small town in which ‘everyone knows everything’, led to his long spell of sobriety. What led to John James’s breakdown so much later we shall never know, but we do know that his abstinence broke down under a degree of melancholy so intolerable he switched from whiskey to arsenic. ‘I’ve done it now.’ ‘It’s time I was out of it.’ ‘He was tired of life.’

  Biography, too, is an enigma, and we have to leave John James Northey in the labyrinth, the son of a migrant to a new land, the man who swam ashore to announce a shipwreck, who built a ship called Maori and tried to shape his destiny by changing his name.

  Notes

  1 Hawke’s Bay Superintendent’s Local Inwards Letters, 1871, 69/300-112/71/2, Archives New Zealand.

  2 ‘Loss of the SS Star of the South’, Hawke’s Bay Herald, 28 June 1870.

  3 Daily Telegraph, 4 April 1871.

  4 Hawke’s Bay Herald, 29 December 1871.

  5 New Zealand had been broken into six separate provinces by Governor Grey in 1853, with Hawke’s Bay as part of the Wellington Province. ‘Although it formed a distinct geographic region bounded on the north by the 39th parallel, on the west by the ranges and on the south by the Seventy Mile Bush, it had insufficient settlers to qualify as a separate province’ (Picture of a Province [Hawke’s Bay Provincial Centennial Council, 1958, 11]). As Hawke’s Bay became more populated, there was a feeling the province was contributing too much to Wellington’s revenues without getting equivalent value. Effectively, Wellington loans were being raised on Hawke’s Bay land, with little financial benefit to the region. In 1858, the central government of E. W. Stafford was petitioned by 317 Hawke’s Bay residents, and Hawke’s Bay was granted local self-government. The foundation of the province was celebrated, in typical colonial style, by two days’ racing, a public dinner, and a ball. (Ibid., 13.)

  6 In the 1850s it is calculated that 75 per cent of European migrants could read and write, which seems extraordinarily high. Only 17 per cent could read but not write. ‘History of Education in New Zealand’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ education_in_New_Zealand (accessed 9 August 2017).

  7 Richard Halkett Lord was a sophisticated Londoner, who commented ‘that snobs are sure to abound’ in a society in which ‘money is admired above all’ (Daily Telegraph, 10 March 1871). His newspaper commentaries revelled in exposing the hypocrisy and social shortcomings of both Napierites and Hawke’s Bay’s self-created aristocracy. In the end he was hounded out of Hawke’s Bay, attacked with a whip by a solicitor at a social event.

  8 Daily Telegraph, 12 May 1871.

  9 The Maggy Northey referred to in my grandfather Ern’s 1946 letter as dying in the back seat of ‘Jack’s’ car was the wife of Jack Northey, John James’s son, who carried on the shipwright business after his father’s death. This business lasted until the 1960s. The present shipwright business on Westshore is a continuation, under different ownership, of John James’s original enterprise.

  10 Adam Gopnik, ‘Are Liberals on the Wrong Side of History?’, New Yorker, 20 March 2017, 90.

  11 Hawke’s Bay Herald, 8 July 1880.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Hawke’s Bay Herald, 1 April 1880.

  14 Daily Telegraph, 15 April 1871.

  15 Hawke’s Bay Herald, 30 June 1900. ‘Harbor Board Bungling’ is the heading for the letter.

  16 Hawke’s Bay Herald, 16 May 1903.

  17 Daily Telegraph, 28 September 1894.

  18 Daily Southern Cross, 12 February 1863.

  19 Ariel Levy, ‘Elizabeth Strout’s Long Homecoming’, New Yorker, 1 May 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/elizabeth-strouts-long-homecoming (accessed 5 September 2017).

  20 Hawke’s Bay Herald, 17 May 1904.

  21 Ibid.

  Local Hero

  ‘Trooper Sidney Northe comes from Hastings, Hawke’s Bay, and was a member of the Hastings Rifles when he volunteered for active service with the First Contingent for South Africa. He was with the Contingent right up to Pretoria, when he joined the Mounted Police. He returned to New Zealand in December 1900, and returned to South Africa in 1901, and is in the Imperial Military Railways, Natal, South Africa.’1

  HOW DOES AN INDIVIDUAL RELATE to a vast event like a war? How much can an individual carry the blame for actions taken in the name of the military authority under which he fought, in however small or unimportant a capacity? How is a human implicated in large events which might have perpetrated racism and other evils, and to what extent was that individual knowingly implicated? Or was he or she simply implicated through a kind of passivity, being a fellow-traveller as much as an active perpetrator? Or are they one and the same?

  This question of historical guilt interested me as I interrogated the degree to which my mother’s family, the Northes and the Northeys, had been implicated in the injustices of nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand. They were essentially a military family — of a lesser sort, definitely not of the officer class. But what is an army without its loyal troops? They were also small-business people of the type who contributed to the creation of infrastructure of towns.

  But how specifically did they contribute to, say, the land confiscations that so plagued Māori in the nineteenth century? Not one piece of land the Northes bought was purchased illegitimately or through improper channels. You cannot say the family contributed in any active way: no Northe or Northey sat on any official body which made the confiscating decisions. Rather, you could say they contributed a kind of opinion from which these unjust decisions arose: they held the tacit and sometimes vocal opinions that allowed these injustices to be created.

  Or could you say the way two of the sons of Sergeant John Northe became Napier Rifle Volunteers at the time of the land wars indicated very clearly where their sympathies lay? William Henry Northe fought at Mōhaka against Te Kooti Arikirangi. He also fought at the Battle of Ōmaranui in 1866, in which twenty-two Māori and one Pākehā were killed. Today the Waitangi Tribunal presents ‘the one-day war’ as a trap skilfully laid by the eminence gris of colonialism, the ever-wily Donald McLean.

  His master plan was to seduce the Pai Mārire (or Hauhau, as Pākehā tended to call them) in
to compliance, then eradicate them.2 This was in preparation for confiscating their lands. Even my Northe ancestors are presented, in the Tribunal, as land confiscators dressed up in military uniform. If this was so, their presence at the battle led to spectacularly unsuccessful results. William Henry obtained the New Zealand War Medal, which he subsequently mislaid, and he was incorrectly listed in a gilded tome The Defenders of New Zealand as part of the militia.3 Neither man directly obtained any land, confiscated or not, from these actions.

  Or could one extrapolate and say that the peace which followed these small and bitter battles laid the groundwork for Robert Northe’s financial success as a contractor and small-time businessman? In 1871 both brothers, Robert and William Henry, listed themselves in Harding’s Almanac, a Hawke’s Bay trade directory, as ‘contractors and builders’, yet only one brother went on to financial success. William Henry filed for bankruptcy in 1879 and lived a modest life thereafter, working as a carpenter. He was the first superintendent of the Sunday School for the Hastings Presbyterian Church. He believed in abstention from alcohol, and joined the Grand Templars Lodge which was open to women as well as ‘all races’.

  The individual comes into play within this broad schema of ‘all Pākehā were racist land confiscators’ and ‘all Māori were noble fighters for indigenous justice’ — even as we find, fighting alongside William Henry Northe, though in their own independent force, Karaitiana Tomoana and Renata Kawepo of Ngāti Kahungunu. Colonialism presents a complicated picture.

  Hindsight, of course, is a great thing: a false thing, really. As humans we are all caught in the cage of the present, and we look at events through seemingly predestined portals which dictate, to a degree, how we foresee the outcome. As historian Michael King wrote: ‘… the past can only be understood in and on its own terms. People are limited always by the viewpoints of their own age, and by the amount of information and the degree of insight that has reached them.’4