The inspector of old soldiers’ graves.

There are many dedicated to caring for the graves of the war fallen now.  There has been a resurgence of interest in not letting the legacy they left behind go.
But before that there was one woman.
Edith Mary Statham was born April 14, 1853 in Bootle, Lancashire, England to William and Ellen.  The family came to New Zealand in 1863 and settled in Dunedin.
Edith was a nurse and also trained as a singer.  But poor health led to her giving up nursing for secretarial work and she moved to Auckland.
Her skill was organisational talent, working with volunteer groups, with the most significant being the Victoria League.  The League was set up to conserve the memory of Queen Victoria.  
When a branch opened in Auckland in 1910, Edith became the secretary of its graves committee, looking at restoring the graves of soldiers from the New Zealand wars.
In 1913 she became a part time employee of the Department of Internal Affairs which took over the restoration work and Edith gained the title of inspector of old soldiers’ graves with a £65 salary.
She went on inspection visits, wrote reports and letters as she asked for relatives or local communities to donate and negotiated with stone masons.  Sometimes it was easier to put up a collective memorial and despite the Victoria League being about soldiers from the British side, Edith was soon erecting memorials to the Māori that died too.
The league however thought there was a conflict of interest and she was forced to resign in 1914.  With a new war underway, there was no money for memorials and she went to the office of passports and permits.
By 1919, she was responsible for a dozen collective memorials in the North Island including the one at the corner of Wakefield St and Symons St in Auckland and 78 cemeteries were under her care.
At the end of the First World War, she became involved in commemorating the dead of that war and continued her work on other memorials until her retirement in 1928 when she became honorary inspector of war graves for the Auckland RSA.
But it was not the only organisation that benefited from Edith’s skills.  She was secretary of the Navy League, the women’s branch of the Medical Service Corps, district secretary of the Girl Peace Scouts Association as well a Plunket Society, a church, the St Helier’s Kohi Society, a founding member of the Society for the Protection of Women and Children in Dunedin and by no means least an avid cyclist and secretary of the Mimiro Ladies’ Cycling Club.  
She was awarded the King George V Silver Jubilee medal in 1935 and died, aged 97 on February 13, 1951 and is buried in Waikumete Cemetery.  She never married or had children.

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