WALKING UP FROM THE HARBOUR TO WAKEFIELD HOUSE
My previous posts on the re-development of Wellington’s waterfront have kicked me into writing about New Zealand’s early settlement – and the attempted imposition by the founding fathers of shabby gentility and conformity at the expense of enterprise and innovation.
When I kept a workplace in town, I used to regularly walk up from Lambton Quay (the shoreline in 1840) by way of Woodward Street to my office in Wakefield House on The Terrace. The existing 8-storey Wakefield House stands on the site of the house that was built by one of the city’s earliest and ostensibly illustrious citizens 'Colonel' William Wakefield.
It was he who commanded the first fleet organized by the New Zealand Company and, having been a soldier with Portuguese & Carlist armies in the period 1832 - 1837, he built his house on the sandy heights that commanded a direct view of the comings and goings in the harbor. It was also strategically placed opposite the Maori Pa at Kumutoto but separated from it by a ravine and stream (the line of which is now followed by Woodward Street).
The house was as near as Wellington ever came to having its own fort or castle knoll.
Whether by accident or design, the local Maori did not take to the new building or their new neighbour and their numbers soon became depleted.
And it was in the house though that William’s brother Edward Gibbon Wakefield died on 18 May 1862. He even trumps his brother in reputation and has been credited as being New Zealand’s ‘Founder’, no less.
So I was walking in the footsteps of a great man, up from the old beach at the harbour’s edge to the sandy terrace above – at least according to the conventional history books (and I have to say that the New Zealand histories appear to lead the way here searching desperately for a hero - albeit a reputedly repentant kidnapper).
Well, I have at least two gripes about the hagiography. In the first place, it seems to me that he was an unreformed swindler who merely substituted virgin lands for virgin heiresses. And secondly, I have a strong objection to the shoddy land development policies that he espoused, which purported to deliver structured societies in settler colonies at the expense of battler backwoodsmen (and which rode slipshod over native land rights).
There again, I have to admit also to a certain amount of animosity stemming from a Northerner’s distrust of parvenu toffs from the South of England, as the heiress that he abducted was a Cheshire wench.
And it is perhaps remarkable that first-footer Northern Lad and Whaler-Trader Dicky Barrett piloted the first ominously-named settler ship ‘Tory’ past the reef that now bears his name - without deliberately wrecking it.
Dicky could, I feel, have been forgiven for regaling Colonel Wakefield with the words that were overheard back in a pub in Melbourne in the 1960s, as a Northerner responded to an effete Southerner fronting up to the bar with:
‘I’ve come twelve thousand bloody miles to get away from bastards like you – and I still can’t!’
So let’s start by getting the kidnapping on the table.
THE CHESHIRE CONNECTION - THE SHRIGLEY ABDUCTION
Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a London land agent's son (good start eh?), was born on March 20, 1796.
Even his grandmother Priscilla had her doubts from the start, writing in one letter: “My mind is painfully engaged with the perverseness of dear little Edward – his obstinacy if he inclines to evil terrifies me’.
He was unsurprisingly a poor student and was expelled from his school in Edinburgh, with influence being exerted to get him a job in the Foreign Service in 1814. However, his sponsor wrote:
“I can tell you very little respecting Edward Gibbon Wakefield; his conduct is wholly inexplicable. He despises his father’s advice, he laughs at his opinions; he talks largely of being in his own hands, and independent of his father…. I wish his father could make up his mind to see only a common man in him”. [Francis Place, (1815)].
At the age of twenty he eloped to Scotland with a 17-year-old heiress, Eliza Pattle. Luckily for him, her parents accepted the marriage and settled £70,000 on the young couple. However, Eliza died four years later after giving birth to her third child in 1820.
Then Edward tried to break his father-in-law's will and was suspected of perjury and forgery.
In February of 1827, 31-year-old Edward then conspired with his brother William Wakefield to get his hands on the person and inheritance of a 15-year-old schoolgirl Ellen Turner by lying to her and her guardians at her school in Liverpool.
He apparently based his plan to marry Ellen on the expectation that her parents would respond as Eliza's had.
Ellen was the daughter and only child of William Turner, a wealthy resident of Pott Shrigley, Cheshire, England, who owned calico printing and spinning mills in Blackburn, Lancashire. At the time of the abduction, Turner was a High Sheriff of Cheshire. He lived in Shrigley Hall, near Macclesfield (see pictures below).
Ellen was told that her father William Turner had become paralyzed and wished to see his daughter immediately. Later Wakefield informed Ellen that there was an agreement between two banks that some of her father's estate would be transferred to her or, to be exact, her husband.
He also said that his banker uncle had proposed that Wakefield marry Ellen, and that if she would agree to marry him, her father would be saved. Ellen allowed them to take her to Carlisle. There they met William Wakefield, who claimed to have spoken to Mr. Turner and that Mr. Turner had also agreed to the marriage.
Wakefield then married Ellen at Gretna Green and took her off to France, telling her that she would meet her father there.
But unfortunately for Wakefield, William Turner was made of sterner stuff than Eliza Pattle’s father. He had apparently expected that William Turner would accept the marriage rather than face a public scandal. Instead, Turner went to London and asked for help from the police.
There he learned that his daughter had been taken to the Continent. Turner sent his brother to Calais, accompanied by a police officer and a solicitor. There they soon found the couple and Ellen expressed pleasure at seeing her uncle, subsequently discovering the truth of the whole affair.
However, Wakefield claimed that since they were legally married, she could not be taken from him by force. In spite of this the French authorities interviewed Ellen and finally let her leave the country with her uncle. Wakefield, trying to make the best of his situation, wrote out a statement that Ellen was still a virgin and left for Paris.
The consensus of society was that:
“His sole motive was of the most sordid and vulgar description. In order to possess himself of the fortune of a mere girl, whom I had never seen, he did not scruple to employ falsehood, fraud, cruelty and the vilest hypocrisy, in feigning a passion he could not have entertained” [‘The Kaleidoscope’ (1827)].
BROUGHT TO HEEL
The English police issued warrants for the Wakefields' arrest and William was arrested in Dover a couple of days later. William and the Wakefield’s stepmother Frances were taken to Cheshire and then committed to Lancaster Castle to await trial.
The trial of William Wakefield began on 21 March 1827 with great publicity - but without Edward Wakefield, who was arrested later. On 23 March 1827 all three defendants were put on trial in Lancaster. The jury found all of them guilty the same day. They were committed to Lancaster Castle a day later.
On 14 May the Wakefields were taken to the Court of King's Bench in Westminster Hall in London for sentencing, where William claimed that he had been working under the guidance of his brother. Both were put in prison for three years, with Edward being incarcerated in Newgate prison and William in Lancaster Castle.
Since the marriage apparently had not been consummated, Parliament annulled it immediately.
POSTSCRIPT
Somewhat subdued by his experience, Wakefield appears to have transferred his affections from maidens to the virgin lands of the colonies (of which more later).
However, he did pause to write about prison reform and the desirability of abolishing the death penalty, noting the succession of prisoners at Newgate who were executed for minor offences.
From a modern stance, one can only marvel at the blatant bias in the judicial system that condemned men to death or transportation for offences like petty theft or poaching while the wealthy and influential suffered minor sentences. Wakefield did not comment on this anomaly.
It is perhaps something of a shame then that he was not transported for seven years to New South Wales to gain some first-hand colonial experience. And that he did not then settle as a trader like Dicky Barrett and become a friendly ‘Pakeha’ who abducted but then successfully married one of Te Rauparaha’s daughters. Wow that really would have been a risky venture but it would have given him a sounder claim to have been New Zealand’s 'Founding Father'!
As it was, I fancy that Edward spent his declining years at 90 The Terrace mulling over his various falls from grace. I suspect that he would have happily swapped his bungalow in a colonial backwater for Shrigley Hall but that would have required an altogether more fortunate outturn from this “tale of anguish, deceit and violation of the domestic hearth”.
No comments:
Post a Comment