How important is rugby to New Zealand?
It’s our national sport, our obsession, a huge part of our overseas reputation and worth billions to us. The All Blacks are considered one of the most successful teams in history. And our amazing Black Ferns are hard on their heels. The honour of bringing rugby to New Zealand belongs to Charles John Monro. Monro was born on April 5, 1851, in Waimea West, near Nelson to politician Sir David Monro and his wife Dinah. Monro attended Nelson College until 1865 then in 1867 went to Christ’s College at Finchley near London. He was aiming for an army career. It was at Christ’s that he discovered rugby where he played for the second VX. Then in 1870 he organised the first rugby game ever played in New Zealand - between Nelson College and Monro’s own club at the Botanics ground at 2pm May 14, 1870. He had persuaded the Nelson Football club (who played either soccer or an Australian rules game) to change to the rugby code. About 200 curious people turned out to watch. Monro’s club side won 2-0. Monro set about establishing rugby - organising, selecting and coaching a Wellington team while playing for a Nelson team and even refereeing the first game played in the North Island in Petone on September 12, 1870. Clubs began springing up around New Zealand with a provincial union starting in Canterbury and Wellington in 1879 then the New Zealand Rugby Football Union starting in 1892. Monro travelled a lot for years, living in both England and in Europe before returning to New Zealand and marrying Helena (Lena) Beatrice Macdonald in 1885. They had five children. He bought land near Palmerston North and ironically had by then stopped playing, not retaining much interest in the game. But it wasn’t his only first. He took part in the first polo match in 1871 as well as playing golf, croquet, billiards and snooker. Monro died in Palmerston North on April 9, 1933 and was buried in Kelvin Grove Cemetery. A statue of him stands outside the Te Manawa Musuem of Art, Science and History.
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On a shelf at the Waihao Forks Hotel sits a bottle of beer. Ted’s beer.
There are a couple of stories about how it came to be there but everyone agrees Ted was going to war and the beer was to be opened when he got back.. He never did and now the beer, a bottle of Natural XXXX beer from Ballins Brewery in Christchurch, sits unopened, in a glass cabinet waiting for its hero. Ted d’Auvergne was born La Tour Mollet d'Auvergne to Charles Edward (from Jersey) and Lilian d’Auvergne (from the Channel Islands) in Rangiora on February 21, 1906. He was the youngest of six children. His mother died early in his life and his father remarried. They were a farming family, having a property on Stoney Creek Road near Waihao Forks, right behind the local pub. Often called the nickname Froggie, his ancestors had been French and arrived in Akaroa in 1856. Ted was known as an athletic, humorous inventive man, who once saved the life of a woman at the local swimming hole. He damaged his hearing in a diving accident. Ted enlisted for the Second World War three days after enlistment opened on September 16, 1939. He managed to conceal his impaired hearing. He was posted to the 27th machine gun Battalion. He was invited to the pub for a leaving drink and as the train whistled he handed his beer to publican George Provan and said he’d have it when he got back. An alternative version has two mates leaving the beer for him at the pub. Ted served in North Africa and Crete and was listed as missing in June 1941 and declared dead in 1945. It was a few years later that his family heard from a Cretan partisan who told Ted’s story. Ted had been wounded in a vineyard while his platoon retreated. He was found by a young man who tried to help him but Ted died two days later. Ted was buried in the vineyard but later his body was exhumed (this was common for war dead) and buried in Suda Bay war cemetery. Two years ago a bronze statue of Ted was put outside the pub, forever waiting for the train to take him to war. He stands - or rather sits - remembering all those from the Waimate District - and New Zealand - who served. Pic by Bart ros. To all those who went, to those who came back and for those who waited - Lest We Forget. Ebenezer Halley literally worked himself to death.
Not many doctors were willing to open a practice in the wilds of New Zealand goldfields, ministering to the roughest of men and travelling on horseback to rude huts or just a tent all over the countryside. But Ebenezer Halley did. What he saw led him to push for more comfort than the surroundings could offer. So, in 1861, he set up a cottage hospital in Tuapeka. The first major gold rush in Otago started the same year and with it came a wealth of injuries, along with men falling down and or getting blind drunk. Thousands had rushed there hoping to make a fortune. Ebenezer was born on April 25, 1836, to Rev Dr Robert and Rebekah Halley in Middlesex, England. If the name seems familiar it’s because he was the grand nephew to the man who the Halley comet is named after, Edmund Halley. A doctor for the area was badly needed. There was no chance of anyone seriously ill or injured being taken to Dunedin which was reached by a rough bridle track. As a doctor, he was called out at all hours and he willingly went, off to find his patient. And travel he did, during snowstorms or at night, up mountains and across rivers. His original horse Jordan was replaced with a horse as well known as he was, Smuggler, who had been owned by someone who liked to stop at pubs. Whenever Ebenezer went past a pub, Smuggler would stop and take some persuading to keep going. He had his hands full with patients, from frostbite to broken bones, not to mention stabbings during fights or avalanches and landslides. It was also a time of bushrangers and bandits. Ebenezer however was considered immune. He had treated everyone at one time or another. There wasn’t much he wasn’t called upon to do, even extracting teeth regularly. His dedication to his duty was what he was known for. While helping someone at the hospital in November 1875, he became infected with septic poisoning. Already exhausted by overwork he became ill himself and died on November 20, 1875 aged 39. His funeral was huge, so well respected was he, and was by far the largest Tuapeka had ever seen. He is buried in the Lawrence Cemetery, Clutha District with the words “ Erected by the numerous friends of Ebenezer Halley, MRCS in affectionate remembrance of his many kind acts during a long residence in Tuapeka district.” Picture by Marcelo Leal. Even on holiday Sydney Smith would be involved in murder. It was like he couldn’t help himself.
Fortunately he was on the solving it side rather than the criminal side. In fact Smith might have helped solve more murders than any other New Zealander. Whether it was an arm swallowed by a shark, profiling a cat burglar (from his shoes) or determining what weapon was used, Smith did it all. Smith was born August 4, 1883, in Roxburgh, in Central Otago to James Jackson Smith and Mary Elizabeth Wilkinson. He went to school there initially before going to Victoria University where he studied before going to Edinburgh University. He spent a short time in private practice before making a fateful move - to the Edinburgh department of forensic medicine. It was here in 1913 he worked on his first big case - of two children found in the Hopetoun Quarry. Despite the bodies having been in water for 18 months, Smith was able to provide information to the police that led to the arrest of their father, Patrick Higgins. In 1914, he returned to Otago where he was chief medical officer before serving as a major in the New Zealand army during the First World War. He took up a post as a medico-legal advisor to the Egyptian government in 1917 and with it a senior lecturer in forensics at the University of Cairo. One day in 1920 he was sent a single bone found in a trench by a group of workmen. When he said it was human, police took over the site and found 14 bodies. It turned out to be two men and two women entrapping prostitutes and killing them. Smith also began working with forensic ballistics when the Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian army was shot in the street. Two brothers were arrested and their guns provided to Smith who immediately fired them, proving one had been used. The technique is now routinely used. He returned to Edinburgh in 1927 and was hotly sought to give evidence in court cases. In 1935 he and wife Catherine Goodsir Gelenick went on a world tour intending to spend some time back in New Zealand. While passing through Australia he was sought by the police. Two fishermen had captured a shark that had gone on display at a Sydney aquarium where it promptly vomited up a human arm. Smith was able to tell the police it was not a victim of a shark attack, but of murder, the arm having been cut off after death. ( The case was so strange it was used as the plot of a TV show.) Despite there being a suspect, no one was convicted. During their last world holiday in 1955 - back to New Zealand - a retrial was put off just so he could be there. Among his cases was one where he used forensic podiatry to identify the shoes of a cat burglar and the identification of people by superimposing their photos over x-rays of their skulls. He became Sir Sydney in 1949. He and Catherine had two children, a son who became a poet and a daughter who followed her father into medicine. Smith had been a pupil of Joseph Bell - the man Arthur Conan Doyle is supposed to have based Sherlock Holmes on. Smith died at his home in Edinburgh in May, 1969 where he is buried. Outlaw Henry Rouse, Henry Beresford Garrett, Conrington Revingston or William Green. And apparently so many other names that the stories attributed to them seem like movie plots.
But they are, in fact, supposed to be one man whose exploits are legend now. He was born Henry Rouse, to Thomas and Catherine Rouse on March 18, 1818, in Bottesford, Leicester in England. Catherine died three years after his birth and they lived with Henry’s grandmother until his father remarried. He received little education but did train as a cooper. In 1842, he received his first prison sentence of three months in Leicester for assaulting a gamekeeper who caught him poaching, and in 1845 was sentenced to be transported for 10 years for shop breaking. He left England on board the Mayda with nearly 200 other convicts. Initially he was jailed on Norfolk Island before being transferred to Tasmania. He got into minor trouble and tried to escape at least twice. By 1850, he was living in Victoria and calling himself Henry Garrett before moving to the Ballarat goldfields. On October 16, 1854, Garrett and three others robbed the Bank of Victoria on Bakery Hill. getting away with over £14,000, a fortune of several lifetimes. Within three months Garrett and the woman he called his wife left for London where he changed gold dust into cash. He was arrested virtually immediately - one of his accomplices had turned Queen’s evidence. By now he was using the name Henry Beresford Garrett. He was returned to Melbourne, tried and sentenced to 10 years hard labour. On his release in 1861, he came to New Zealand heading to the Otago goldfields but it wasn’t long before he and some companions carried out a highway robbery, pocketing £400 after overhearing some men boasting about how much gold they were carrying. Garrett immediately fled to Sydney. He was again arrested and returned to Dunedin where he was jailed for eight years. He tried escaping but his plan was foiled. On his release he was returned to Australia who didn’t want him and promptly returned him to New Zealand. He worked as a cooper honestly for a while but was caught burgling a seed merchant in 1868. He received another 10 years, served it and was released only to caught thieving ending up in the Wellington Mount Cook gaol where he was a trusted worker - laying the rail for the jail tram. He fell ill however and was moved to The Terrace jail where he died aged 72 of chronic bronchitis at midnight on September 3, 1885. However not all the stories attributed to him can have been him. Despite the name Codrington Revingston being said to be Garrett that seems unlikely. Garrett was in prison during at least one of the robberies Revingston is supposed to have done. Nevertheless the myth has stuck. During his many years in prison, Garrett wrote about the conditions, and about one of the administrators John Gillies Price who he called the Demon for his violence towards prisoners, and a recollection of convict life in Norfolk Island and Victoria. Garrett witnessed the murder of Price who was beaten to death by the prisoners he treated so cruelly. Garrett is buried at the Bolton St Cemetery. The detective
It was Walter Dinnie who brought an organised system of criminal identification to New Zealand. The experienced London detective was headhunted from England by the New Zealand Government looking for someone to run the police force. Walter Dinnie was born on December 26, 1850, in Aberdeenshire in Scotland to Robert Dinnie and Celia Hay. He received a grammar school education where he excelled in athletics and his first job was as a bank clerk before taking a clerking job with the West Riding of Yorkshire constabulary. It led to him joining the London metropolitan police force earning promotion after promotion until he became a detective before going on to the Criminal Investigation branch. He achieved fame with a number of high profile cases - including the arrest of international jewel thief William “Harry the valet” Johnson who stole £30,000 from the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland and Charles Wells - a gambler and fraudster who was called the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. Dinnie had begun setting up a fingerprint register in 1901 but in 1903 he was approached by the NZ Government to be the Commissioner of Police. Dinnie accepted and retired from New Scotland Yard and boarded the SS Ruapehu with his wife Fredericka, their five sons and niece Isabella Smith. He began putting reforms in place. One of them was organising fingerprint and mug shot databases. The mug shots are not like we think today. Criminals faced the camera and had both their hands in full view - as an extra form of identification. It included samples of handwriting along with details of known associates and methods of operating. He put his son, Edmund, who was trained in modern methods, into the new unit and a year later Edmund was in charge. Edmund also founded the Police Museum. Both were lauded for their success but it didn’t last. Walter became the object of attack in the media for corruption in the police force, especially after Dunedin police were found to be burgling the premises they were supposed to be protecting. It resulted in a royal commission. It ultimately said the police were not corrupt but confidence in Walter continued to drop after discipline problems and a bungled murder investigation. Despite the commission finding there was no issue with police, Walter was seen as incompetent. He attacked back but in 1909 his resignation was announced. He denied resigning but it was too late. He moved to Auckland and took up a position as president of the Tokerau District Maori Land Board, despite his lack of experience. It didn’t last long either, the position ceased to exist in 1914 and Walter settled in Wellington as a private detective. He died on May 7, 1923. It now appears that he was hounded from office by a combination of the New Zealand Truth who had opposed someone being brought from England for a New Zealand job and by a member of Parliament and a magistrate who headed the commission. Whether that is true or just a set of circumstances, Walter brought more modern forensic detective methods to New Zealand. Walter is buried at Karori Cemetery. At 48.5kg, Violet Walrond was a tiny thing - but she was also New Zealand’s first female Olympian. Not the first to win a medal (that was Yvette Williams) but the first girl to go to the Olympics.
She was also only 14-years-old when selected for the 1920 Antwerp Olympics games. She was 15 by the time the games happened. Violet Ethel Mary Walrond was born on February 27, 1905, in Auckland to Cecil and Ethel. Cecil - usually called Tui - was her swimming coach and her chaperone to the games as she was not allowed to go alone. It took a nine week sea journey - delayed several times by bad weather - for them to arrive. It was the first official New Zealand team (often New Zealand had been with a joint Australian team) and there was no Olympic uniform. There were only four of them. The men wore suits and Violet had a cream dress. They did however have the fern leaf on their hats. Violet was not even able to leave the hotel room by herself and could not go and watch her teammates. Violet competed in two events, the 100 metre freestyle and the 300 metre freestyle. They were held in an outdoor pool in chilly weather. She was one of the few using the crawl, a new style that she had copied from a Wellington men’s champion. In the 100 metre she came fifth and in the 300 she came seventh. Once the games were over, she set her sights on going to the Paris Olympics in 1924 but it wasn’t to be. Only three years later, she and her sister Edna - also a competitive swimmer and a top diver - retired on her father’s orders - he didn’t like them in the public eye. Violet married Harold Robb in 1933 and died 1996 aged 91. She was cremated at Purewa Cemetery. The machines of war
Once upon a time nearly every town in New Zealand had a bloody great piece of artillery on display, often a field gun. No, each town was not arming themselves. They were trophy guns and it was common for towns to celebrate and memorialise their war dead by requesting and putting up a huge war weapon. In fact, after the First World War there was a huge demand with towns competing over how much they deserved them, often by trumpetting how many dead they had. The guns were captured goods, taken from battlefields as the spoils of war and they were sent all over the world - and a great many to Australia and New Zealand. They were handed out - and sometimes bought - by towns and cities - and put on display. It was so common that in some places individual suburbs and schools had their own piece of artillery. Although it is unlikely it was done regularly, the big guns were sometimes fired as a salute to those who had died. Wellingtonian and librarian Peter Henry McColl could see what the demand would be like, and while he was serving in France tried to send a trench mortar to a government minister - as a memorial. Wellington City Council chose to display four machine guns which arrived by October 1918 in the Town Hall’s first floor landing and the Newtown Museum. Very few are left now. We became disenchanted with the horrors of war and it was no longer fashionable to have the machines of destruction in every town. Many had war memorials built alongside them at places like Arrowtown, Mt Roskill, Cromwell, Dannevirke, Waiouru, Whanganui and Waipawa - where our photo comes from. The Waipawa 105mm German field gun is still there, having fallen into disrepair and then being restored in 1981. A few have ended up in museums but a great many were scrapped, destroyed Peter McColl never got that mortar home but back then it would have been a popular souvenir. McColl would have been uniquely placed to recognise the contribution something like a mortar would have made. Born June 21, 1880, he had gone on to be a librarian with the General Assembly Library in Wellington. He had sailed as reinforcement for 2nd Battalion NZ Rifle Brigade in June 1916, and returned home in 1919. The husband of Bertha Alice McColl of Northland, Wellington he died in 1956 aged 77 and is buried at Karori Cemetery. Dr Gilbert Bogle’s death - along with Margaret Chandler - was about sex and drugs and is still a mystery 60 years on.
It was New Year’s Day when his body was spotted near a golf course in Sydney by two men out foraging for golf balls. Gilbert was on his back, with his clothes laid out on top of him along with a piece of carpet, weirdly neat. Not far from him was Margaret Chandler whose floral dress was disordered but with three pieces of cardboard covering her. They had met at a New Year’s Eve party run by Ken Nash. Gilbert had left his wife at home and Margaret had come with her husband Geoffrey. The pair had an understanding about sleeping with other people. Indeed, Geoffrey left the party to see his mistress. Gilbert and Margaret left the party together and it was the last time they were seen until their bodies were discovered. Gilbert Stanely Bogle was born January 5, 1924 in Whanganui to Archibald and Bertha. He attended Whanganui Collegiate, then on to Victoria University. Like many men of the right age, he was eligible for war service at the start of World War two but he was allowed to continue working at his laboratory. In 1947, he went to England as a Rhodes Scholar and studied at Oxford where he got his doctorate in physics and three years later married Vivienne Mary Rich. Back in New Zealand he lectured at the University of Otago but quickly he outgrew it and in 1956 went to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's division of physics at the National Standards Laboratory, Sydney. He worked with cryogenics and maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) technology. And by 1962 he was considered by his boss to be the most brilliant of the staff. Then at a Christmas party he met Margaret Chandler, the wife of one of his colleagues. They met again at a New Year’s Eve party and, encouraged by Margaret’s husband, he offered her a ride home. And sometimes before 6am on New Year’s day 1963 they both died on the eastern bank of the Lane Cove River, near Fullers Bridge, Chatswood. How they had died was a mystery and it was generally believed it was poison or a type of drug overdose. But what? Tests revealed nothing toxic. Margaret’s husband Geoffrey was a suspect as was another lover of Bogle’s, librarian Margaret Fowler. Conspiracy theories also abounded, including that Bogle was about to disclose Australian Atomic Energy Commission secrets that led to an assassination. But in 2006 a new theory came to light after a documentary maker uncovered evidence that the nearby polluted river may have let out an eruption of hydrogen sulphide gas. That doesn’t explain how they came to be covered up. Margaret Chandler was cremated and Bogle was buried at the Macquarie Park Cemetery and because no samples were kept, no tests can now be done with today’s advancements. Unless someone comes forward it will likely never be solved. |
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