Who exactly William Frederick Eggers was is still uncertain more than 100 years after his death..
Even his name - William Frederick - or Frederick William Eggers - or McMahon is not sure.
Whichever it was, he thought he would get away with robbing the State Coal mine payroll - holding up a car driven by John Coulthard whose two passengers were the manager of the company Isaac James and another employee William Hall.
The three men had just come from the Bank of New Zealand in Greymouth on November 17, 1917, with the payroll - in cash - and were heading for Runanga.
They had only been driving for a few minutes before they were forced to stop, seeing something in the road that they crashed into.
It was a makeshift obstruction made from a ladder and a box.
As they began to get out of the car a man rose from a nearby bush and shouted hands up.
The man did not give them a chance, he began firing his guns - one in each hand - immediately.
He killed Coulthard outright, Hall took a bullet to the spine and James was shot in the thigh, calf and hand but he managed to flee.
As it turned out, they weren’t alone. Hidden nearby was Peter and Leonard Manderson - a father and son who had been on a bike ride. As Eggers made off with £3659, Leonard rushed for help.
A huge manhunt started and on November 19 a man calling himself Fredrick Eggers McMahon was arrested as he came out of a hotel in Christchurch. He had a bag of money and a gun on him.
Living with him at a boarding house was his girlfriend Elizabeth who told police the gun was hers and that McMahon was her surname, that Fredrick was using.
He was found guilty at trial and found guilty of one murder - it might have been two since William Hall died of his wounds weeks later.
On March 5, 1918 he was hanged.
Eggers had been born on December 17, 1886 in South Australia. There are little records about him other than at one point he had been arrested for forgery.
By about 1914 he was in New Zealand.
It seems he spun a number of tales about himself, including that he had been enlisted (and then deserted), that he was rich and that he had served a detention on Wellington’s Somes Island.
A few things are known, he had a military service card on him when he was arrested. He claimed his parents were in Adelaide but they were originally from America and of German extraction.
That at least may be true. In records, Henriette Roenfeld had married a Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Eggers in 1850. Henriette was German by birth. Those names could well have been Anglicised to William Frederick Eggers for their son. They did indeed live in Adelaide. But the timing is a little uncertain - Henriette would have been 55 when he was born - and her husband had died years before.
He was the last man to be hanged in the South Island.
Eggers is buried in Lyttelton Cemetery.​

John Henry Holmes did not deserve his death or the fuss that accompanied it.
He had been born into a cultured English family on October 20, 1820, to James and Ann.
Indeed, his father was court painter to King George IV. Some documents give his name as Henry John Holmes - but he was known as Henry.
He would have lived in a strata of society with great benefits, including his education which was at Harrow, a boarding school founded by royalty.
He went to Australia about 1853 and married a widow Catherine Martin about 1860 and they went on to have five children. Catherine died in 1872.
Some time after he came to New Zealand living in Auckland and working as a scenic artist at the Opera House.
By then he was alone. And he liked to drink.
On January 24 he was in bed reading - he suffered from insomnia - when he heard the call that there was a fire.
The two storey building on Elliott St was a series of workshops, including Holmes’.
Delilah Harris, who lived with her family in another of the rooms, knocked repeatedly on their joint wall. She later told an inquest that he did not answer but she heard a man walking about quickly as if trying to get out.
The fire was put out, but it had damaged a good part of the building. It was never discovered exactly how the fire started.
Holmes was found by the stairwell, nude with his trousers in his hand overcome with smoke inhalation.
That would have been tragic enough but he was to be buried as a pauper. It took some theatre friends to raise a collection for him. They gave some money to John Mackinley, who had his workshop in the same building.
HIs friends wanted a Christian burial, Mackinley and his group - called Freethinkers - did not.
An argument broke out at the cemetery and poor Holmes’ body waited in the nearby hearse. Finally at the gravesite the Freethinkers kept interrupting the reverend brought in for the funeral.
It nearly came to a fight with neither side agreeing what religion or school of thought Holmes had belonged to.
Despite the two sides, Holmes ended up buried decently but even the newspapers of the time called it a disgrace.
Holmes is buried in the Symonds St Cemetery in Auckland.
Photo by Maxim Tajer.​

Have you ever wondered why storms have human names?
It’s because of Clement Lindley Wragge, an English meteorologist.
The story goes that Wragge decided storms needed names and he used a variety, including the use of figures from Polynesian mythology, historical figures and, hilariously, politicians he did not like.
Wragge was born on September 18, 1852, in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, England. His parents died early in his life and he was raised by a grandmother who taught him the rudiments of cosmology and meteorology.
After a disrupted education (mostly because he hated boarding school and would run away) he began studying law.
At 21, he inherited money and opted to travel to visit Egypt. That travelling led to more travelling, to India, Australia and the United States and Canada. He travelled so much he gave up law and joined a nautical academy, working his way back to Australia.
Once there he joined the Surveyor-General's office, surveying the Flinders ranges. He had to learn how to read the weather and set up two weather stations.
Wragge married Leonora Edith Florence d'Eresby Thornton on September 13, 1877 and they returned to England where in 1881 he learned of the Scottish Meteorological Society's plans to establish a weather station on Ben Nevis, He offered to make daily ascents and take meteorological observations.
This offer was subsequently accepted, with Wragge climbing to the top of the mountain on most days between 1 June and mid October, while his wife took comparable readings near sea level at Fort William.
When a Summit Observatory was opened in 1883, Wragge applied for the job of Superintendent, but was unsuccessful.
That led to him returning to Australia without his family where he set up more weather stations.
The Government was impressed with his work and in 1887 he was appointed Government Meteorologist for Queensland. Within three weeks of his arrival in Brisbane, 18.305 inches (464.9 mm) of rain fell, earning him the nickname "Inclement" Wragge.
Wragge began making weather predictions - which earned the displeasure of other meteorologists. He set up more and more weather stations, right across Australia.
He had the idea of naming storms - mainly cyclones.
He also published an almanack including his predictions and advocated for a national weather service.
When his funding from the Government was reduced he resigned and returned to travelling, ending up in New Zealand, living in Dunedin with his de facto wife Louisa Emmeline Horne and lecturing on meteorology.
Now most weather organisations use a list of names (rather than particular people) to name storms.
He died in Auckland of a stroke on December 10, 1922 and is buried in the Pompallier Cemetery in Birkenhead.​

When we think of famous New Zealand shipwrecks we think of the Wahine or the Penguin but in fact the biggest loss of life was from the wreck of the Orpheus in February 1863.
Out of the 259 people on board, 189 died.
HMS Orpheus was a Royal Navy corvette - the flagship of the Australian squadron.
ON January 31, 1863 the Orpheus left Sydney heading for Manukau Harbour, bringing naval supplies and troops to New Zealand.
She was running late and a decision was made by Captain Robert Heron Burton to cut through the harbour rather than go around North Cape.
The harbour had a series of dangerous sandbars, one of which had shifted and there were updated guides. But when the sailing master intended to follow it he was overruled by Commodore William Farquharson Burnett who was on board.
When the ship got too close to the sandbar it got a message from nearby Paratutua Island advising them to turn.
By the time the ship paid attention, it was too late and the ship hit the sandbar.
She hit with force, and the ship turned, presenting one side to the waves, which hit over and over, shattering windows and bursting hatches until the ship began to take on water.
The crew tried to get off but the waves drove them back and many ended up going into the sea.
The Wonga Wonga immediately diverted to try to help and pick up survivors. It found crew clinging to the masts which began to break, killing many.
A few survivors were found but many were dead. The crew of the Wonga Wonga buried some in sand dunes on shore. Many of the graves remain unmarked.
Three sailors, however, who were washed ashore were given a burial near Cornwallis beach and the site carefully marked by a local family, the Kilgours.
In the 70’s the site was marked when naval chaplain Father Cronin rededicated them and unveiled a bronze commemorative plaque at the site. This reads:
‘This plaque marks the graves of three unknown sailors of the Queen who lost their lives when H.M.S. Orpheus foundered at the Manukau entrance on February 7th 1863 Unknown friends who recovered the bodies from the sea below laid them to rest in this quiet place.’
Many of those who died were boys aged 12-18 learning how to be able seamen.
Although there are a few graves on land, the majority of the bodies were never recovered.
Illustration from The Illustrated London News.​

When we think of prisoners of war we think of the terrible pictures of those liberated from the camps of World War II.
But there were other types of camps and other types of prisoners.
Lilian Gladys Tompkins was born on March 10, 1893, in Halcombe in northern Manawatu to Lilian Jane Crabb and her storekeeper father Arthur Henry Tompkins.
After a private education she began training as a nurse, completing her training at the New Plymouth Hospital in 1927.
Gladys worked in several places in Australia before returning to New Zealand to do her maternity training in Wellington before training as a Plunket nurse in Dunedin.
In 1939, Gladys intended to go to India to nurse but during a holiday in the Malay Peninsula with her mother she took a position working for three months in a children’s ward of a hospital in Johor.
For a while she worked in the Batu Pahat district.
But during the Japanese invasion of the Peninsula she was sent to Johor to the general hospital before being evacuated to Singapore which was considered safe.
It fell to the Japanese and Gladys was detained in the Katong Internment camp then marched 8.5 miles to Changi in 1942.
Changi was known for its brutal treatment of prisoners, many of whom died of malnutrition, disease and mistreatment.
Gladys helped run an improvised hospital for the prisoners.
She had been able to take two suitcases of possessions which included her watercolour paints.
Among the sparse food supplies Gladys was able to grow papaya which helped supplement her diet.
Two years later she was moved to the Sime Road Internment Camp where the conditions were better but the diet was worse. She lost a great deal of weight by the end of her time there in 1945.
She and the prisoners were sent to Madras then on to Bangalore to recover before she returned to her family in Hamilton.
Gladys returned to nursing at Johor Hospital. It included visiting nearby villages to hand out medicine and food to the starving villagers.
She then went to Taiping before retiring in 1950 and went back to Hamilton.
She recounted her experiences to a niece and published a book Three Wasted Years. Her watercolours were reproduced in colour.
The diary she had carefully kept during her internment and her paintings were donated to the Alexander Turnbull library.
Gladys had never married and she died on March 18, 1984, in Hamilton and was cremated at the Hamilton Cemetery.​

For nearly 150 years a ghost girl has been reported near the Lyttelton Cemetery. She seems lost and vanishes when approached.
Whether that is true or not, it fits with the horrible murder of Isabella Thompson whose body was found on Oxford Terrace very close to the cemetery.
Eleven-year-old Isabella had been in a good mood, she was heading to buy tickets to a school picnic when her father last saw her.
John Blair Thompson had given her a few coins to buy the tickets and she had skipped out of his view about 4.45pm on January 9, 1875.
Not long after a drover noticed a piece of white fabric near a hedge but thought he saw a drunk sleeping it off. He told a couple of friends, Thomas and Richard Rouse who went to have a look.
Instead they found Isabella’s body under a gorse bush. Her throat had been cut. Her underwear had been removed. She had been on her way home - the tickets were found not far from her body.
Police came and the hunt began - it was just after 6pm.
Initially the suspect was Alfred Osborne - recently released from prison and essentially homeless. But it was soon discounted as sightings came in of a man in grey stumbling down Oxford Terrace about 5.30pm and then seen on a train heading to Christchurch with blood on his hands.
It did not take long for police to track down John Robinson Mercer who was working as a cook on the ship Cleopatra.
When asked about his bloody clothes he claimed he fell down. Police found bloodstained trousers and a jacket.
At his trial in Christchurch a shipmate of Mercer recounted him saying he wanted a girl and that he would cut her throat.
He also had marks all over him like he had been in gorse.
It took the jury all of 12 minutes to find him guilty.
There was some suggestion that when he had been in Buller a short while before he had been implicated in an indecency against a girl there.
He was returned to Lyttelton and on May 8, 1875 he was hanged at Lyttelton Gaol.
Isabella is buried in Lyttelton Cemetery - not far from where her body was found.
Photo by Julian Magata.​

Two weeks after Robert Wilson took in a stray terrier from the streets of Wellington, he woke early one morning to the dog barking repeatedly.
It was about 3.30am and Wilson was the porter for the Commercial Hotel on Lambton Quay.
About 60 people were asleep at the hotel at the time.
Wilson rose to find out why his new dog was barking and discovered a fire - already beginning to burn the hotel.
The fire alarm was raised and people evacuated.
But it was already too late.
The fire had begun in a wooden room of a nearby auction house on October 22, 1906.
It surged along the street and tore through the buildings, getting perilously close to buildings on The Terrace and huge volumes of smoke billowed into the sky.
But the real threat was a gale force northerly wind, driving the fire further and further along Lambton Quay.
Several buildings were destroyed already by the time the Fire Brigade managed to get in place but another problem was a lack of water to the site.
Not long before the fire started (and proving that there really are no new problems) the main water pipe had burst leaving virtually no water in the inner city.
Desperate, the fire brigade ran their hoses to the sea to begin pumping water on to the fire.
Hours later with the fire under control the list of buildings destroyed was the Wellington Auctioneering Mart, Trocadero, Dryer's Commercial Hotel, Job Corban's fancy goods, Shields tailor, Whitcombe and Tombs, Bank of New South Wales, the New Zealand Insurance buildings, with several offices upstairs, the Wellington Trust and Loan Office, A. T. Bate, commission agent, The Strand Cafe, and the Union Bank L. ,H. Wilson sharebroker, the Alliance Assurance and the Imperial Insurance Companies.
Even then sparks kept reigniting small fires for some time.
There were many questions about the lack of water problem and city engineer William Hobbard Morton began improvements to the water supply, sewers, tramways and public reserves. Of particular note was the construction of the “Morton Dam” in Wainuiomata in 1911 which supplied Wellington city with water until 1988.
It also led to electrical wiring being put underground since the fire ran along the lines to new buildings.
Morton had been born in Melbourne in 1866 and educated there before going into the Public Works department coming to New Zealand in 1904.
Picture from Te Papa’s collection.
He died on June 23, 1923 and is buried at Karori Cemetery.​​

The rations New Zealand soldiers had overseas left a lot to be desired.
Bully beef (fatty and oversalted) and ship’s biscuits which were hard as rock were staples.
In fact the food was so deficient in essential vitamins that it left them vulnerable to scurvy as well as illnesses like dysentery and typhoid.
So anything that arrived from home were more valuable than gold.
Families along with the Red Cross organised things like condensed milk, coffee and cocoa to be delivered to the fighting men.
And around the country families also sent personal care packages.
One was a gingernut biscuit. Not quite the ones that are our favourites today. But one from a recipe made by Taranaki woman, Helena Marion Barnard, who received the British Empire Medal for baking and sending a truly astonishing four and a half tonnes of biscuits.
Helena Marion Brown was born in Nelson on April 3, 1865 to Alfred Joseph Brown Rosenberg and Sarah Elizabeth Brown Rosenberg.
She married Henry James Barnard in 1884 and they went to live in California during a gold rush but ended up back in New Zealand and they went on to have a daughter and eight sons.
By the time World War 1 broke out they were living in Eltham. Six of the boys went out to serve in the war, three of them at Gallipoli. Two died there and the other four succumbed to illness, shell shock or serious wounds.
Helena said she first started making the biscuits for her sons to take tramping but during the war she began sending them overseas packed in tins.
The biscuits were considered tiny - only about the size of our $1 coin now, but that made them perfect to put a handful in a pocket.
She was prolific making them and also with knitting socks and balaclavas.
Not long after the end of the war she and Henry moved to Wellington but he died in 1922.
Marion bought a bell for her two boys that died at Gallipoli which is part of Wellington’s (currently silent) National War Memorial Carillon.
Then in 1939 when World War II started, she was 80 and she began all over again.
Food rationing made it harder but she managed to get a special permit for extra rations. She made nearly a million biscuits that were sent to troops.
Letters from all over the world came to her, simply labelled to Mrs Barnard, The Gingernut maker.
Marion lived to 100 - telling her story to Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision - before she died on August 16, 1965 and is buried in Bolton St Cemetery.
For those who want to know here is the recipe: https://www.ngataonga.org.nz/.../mrs-barnards-gingernuts.../

The astonishing price paid for a single huia feather - $46k - in an auction in May came 116 years after the last confirmed sighting of the bird.
Huia, and their feathers, are considered sacred.
Overseas there are many pieces of New Zealand, either in private collections or in museums.
New Zealand was the last country on earth to be discovered. And it came with a new range of extraordinary creatures.
The feather (and fur) trades were massive. The demand for more and new exciting feathers to adorn hats or other fashion items was so large that whole species have been killed off for it. Women, after all, were not properly dressed without a hat.
Even now, Te Papa holds a number of items that would be considered extremely bad taste now, a muff made from a kiwi, another made from a Southern royal albatross.
Other museums hold similar pieces, like a muff made from a king penguin in Otago.
It was, of course, considered completely normal then and there were a number of businesses who offered the pretty bits for sale.
One was Liardet’s in Wellington.
Hector Evelyn Liardet had been born in Kent in 1827 and left England with his father and six brothers headed for Australia, landing near Melbourne at a beach that ended up being called Liardet’s beach.
For a while the family lived in tents before the father Wilbraham built a hotel and a jetty and set up business.
The family also went back and forth to New Zealand - and Hector came to Otago for the gold rush there.
He ended up in Wellington where he set up as a naturalist and a dealer in Maori curiosities - including things like feathers with his wife Elizabeth.
In 1876 he showed off the fur and feathers of New Zealand at the Philadelphia Exhibition, revealing new things to the world.
The Evening Post reported:
“The manufacture of muffs is now a local industry in Wellington. Unkind punsters might insinuate that the community was already amply supplied with muffs, but any lady who saw one of the seagull muffs manufactured by Mrs Liardet would immediately think otherwise. These muffs are made from seagull skins, the feathers being of dazzling whiteness. The birds are shot by Mr Liardet, jun., the skins preserved by Mr Liardet, sen., and manufactured into very beautiful appendages to a lady’s outdoor toilette by Mrs Liardet. They are much superior to any imported articles of the kind.”
Hector often got skins from sailors that called into the port in Wellington. In January 1875, Liardet received “130 splendid skins of albatross and mollyhawks” from the officers of the French transport ship La Vire, which had returned from the sub-Antarctic islands, along with an order for “25 sets of muffs, tippets &c” destined for Paris.
They sold their goods both locally, and internationally.
After Queen Victoria and Princess Alexandra admired their work at the Indian & Colonial Exhibition in 1886, the exhibition’s New Zealand commissioner, Julius von Haast sent Queen Victoria a muff and collarette made from the skin of a pūtakitaki, and Princess Alexandra a snowy white albatross muff. The Liardet's priced their albatross muffs for between £2 and £3.
Eventually the fur and feathers trade died out.
Hector died on November 28, 1891 and is buried in the Bolton St Cemetery.​

The fear of Russia invading has terrified New Zealanders for years.
As far back as 1873 we would panic at any hint that the Reds were coming.
So when the news broke in February, 1873, that a Russian warship was in Waimate harbour and that troops were on land, people were aghast.
After all, any mention of Russian ships in our waters already had people panicking.
But it wasn’t true.
The report was published in the Daily Southern Cross, of a Russian invasion of Auckland by the ironclad cruiser Kaskowiski – ‘cask of whisky’. Despite an asterisk in the story’s headline referring to a date almost three months in the future, gullible Aucklanders were alarmed to read that marines from the Kaskowiski had seized gold and taken the mayor, Philip Philips, hostage, captured ammunition and attacked a British ship in the harbour.
Quite a number of people were taken in by the article.
But it did its job, the Government commissioned a report into the country’s defences.
David Luckie, the editor and publisher of the newspaper, believed the threat was such that a fake report was needed to wake people up.
While perhaps not the most responsible way of trying to wake up the public, it was indicative of how the public viewed the Russians. The continuing fear led to the building of a series of fortifications in coastal cities to protect from attacks from the sea, some of which included large artillery guns.
Luckie was born in Scotland on October 5, 1827, the son of Thomas Luckie and his wife Mary. Initially he worked in a mercantile office and a law clerk before starting work for a newspaper.
In Lancashire he married Fanny Clara Dickinson in 1861.
In 1863 he and his family came to Nelson on the Electra to become editor and part owner of the Colonist newspaper.
One of the first big stories was of the four men found guilty of the Maungatapu murders.
He also became active in local politics - gaining a seat on the Nelson provincial council.
Luckie became editor of the Daily Southern Cross after moving to Auckland in 1873, then was editor along with William Berry of the New Zealand Herald when the two papers merged.
Later he moved to Wellington to become editor of the Evening Post but only remained six months before becoming government insurance commissioner.
He stepped down due to ill health in 1889 but went on to write articles for Wellington newspapers for years. He retired in December 1908 and died in Wellington on May 6, 1909.
He is buried in Karori Cemetery.​