Byles Family plot at Karori

When I looked at the prompt photo for Sepia Saturday this week I initially thought the dark shapes were nuns walking amongst the graves, but then realised they were trees. It looks like a small, neat cemetery layout, unlike many that I've visited in the past, while searching for graves of family members. Often those searches have proved futile, with the person apparently having no headstone, just an unmarked grave that I may or may not have managed to pinpoint somewhere.  

Karori Cemetery in the hills of Wellington NZ is large, covering over 40 hectares and being the last resting place of more than 83000 souls. I went there by bus and am not sure now whether or not I was able to ask directions at the office but I had a grave location and map and surprisingly enough was able to discover the family plot for my Byles great grandparents Mary Ann and Thomas Alfred Byles and their oldest daughter Ellen Mary, known as Nellie or Nell. Nellie died first aged only 29, and according to my aunt this was because she was broken hearted after her fiance was killed in WW1. Her mother Mary died 3 years later aged 54. Thomas survived his wife Mary by 27 years and is buried here with them.

 My grandmother Myrtle May was the nextborn child of Mary and Thomas. She died in Rangiora in 1959 but both she nor her husband/my grandfather Oliver Cruickshank who died in 1985 were cremated and do not have memorial plaques, so I was happy to be able to pay my respects to Myrtle's parents and sister there by their graveside. I was also glad to leave because the weather was threatening and because it felt rather an isolated place late in the afternoon where you wouldn't want to meet any unsavoury characters. It can also be quite sad reading the heartfelt memorials even when you have no connection to the people, particularly if they are for young children or babies.

Mary, Beloved Wife of Thomas Byles, died 11th Oct. 1924, aged 54 years
Thine Forever, God of  Love

Nellie, Beloved daughter of Thomas and Mary Byles
who fell asleep on 14 June 1920, aged 29 years
There is a link death cannot sever
Sweet Remembrance Lasts Forever

Thomas A Byles ,
Beloved husband of Mary
Passed away 12th March 1951
At Rest

Byles family plot

http://mp.natlib.govt.nz/detail/?id=36283

The photo above from the National Library of NZ shows people laying wreaths on ANZAC Day, 25 April 1921, less than a year after Nell died.

Marriage announcement for Thomas and Mary Ann in the Evening Post, April 1889.

I've posted about Thomas Byles before, for example here, in relation to the fact that I haven't yet been able to discover any documentary evidence to prove or disprove the family story that he arrived in New Zealand after having been discovered to be a stowaway in the late 1870s, but finding the Byles family plot was certainly a lot better than discovering during the same trip that his wife Mary's grandmother, Jane Key nee Berry, had been buried in the Bolton Street Cemetery in Wellington but that her remains had been dug up to make way for a motorway and the remains deposited in a common grave, together with over 3000 others. At least her name is recorded here.  

For more blogs on this week's prompt, go to Sepia Saturday #402

From good gardening stock

Although not a great gardener myself, I do come from good gardening stock and have found a few photographs to prove it.  The first one shows my great grandfather Thomas Byles and his daughter Myrtle Cruickshank, displaying their abundant garden produce in the late 1940s. Thomas seems to have been an interesting character. I've related his story in an earlier blog which you can check out here.. I believe he lived with Myrtle and her husband Oliver Cruickshank in his later years, so of course Oliver probably had a hand in this garden too. Myrtle must have been flat out making pumpkin soup or whatever with all that lot, or perhaps she sold or gave away a fair amount to friends and neighbours.

Thomas died in 1951 aged 88. Sad to say that despite all those healthy vegetables, Myrtle only survived her father by eight years, passing away at 65 from bowel or stomach cancer in 1959.

                             

The next photo taken in 1958 shows Myrtle's son Ian and granddaughter Joanna admiring the very tall sunflower that I'd apparently grown at our Canberra home in about 1958. We can't see the colour of the sunflower so you'll just have to imagine it.  I assume it was yellow but it might not have been (see below). Ian didn't see his mother again after we left NZ in 1956. 

Jack and the beanstalk?

Ian's life's work was that of a scientist, specialising in research into plant diseases, and he was also a keen vegetable and fruit tree grower himself, when he wasn't off at work experimenting in his lab. Those experiments often called for late night lab visits, in order to give his numerous trays of pea specimens another drop each of the specially formulated test solution and graph the results.

Ian's wife Jean in the well-tended garden of our home in O'Connor Canberra, c. 1973. I think those flowers are chrysanthemums, not sunflowers.

Jean's father Jack Morrison also loved gardening.  I've previously featured photos of both Jack and Oliver Cruickshank weeding. Here's Jack sitting relaxing for a minute or two on a seat amongst his flowering shrubs, in February 1965, according to this helpfully dated snap.

and in the early 1970s, he's working away in his Christchurch garden with the help of two young grandchildren. Their father Peter was Jack's youngest son.

In 1976  we visited my husband's relatives on their property called Yew Tree Farm, near Hereford in England. Here are his uncle Cyril and grandmother Doris Olds {nee Newth) at work in the family apple orchard. We helped them to fill sacks with windfall apples, that would then be collected by Bulmers and made into scrumpy. The trees are still there but these days they don't really produce very much fruit. 

Doris's beautiful garden that you can catch glimpses of below provided an attractive park-like setting for the very English garden party celebration of her 100th birthday in 2003, which we were lucky enough to be able to attend. Here's Doris and her #100 balloon, with great granddaughter Claire and yours truly. The shawl over Doris's shoulders was our present to her, made by yours truly, of Tunisian crochet. I made several shawls around that time but have since totally forgotten how to do it! Claire's new baby Isabelle whom we are presently visiting in London is Doris's first great great grandchild. I'm sure Doris would have loved to meet her.

Doris's park-like garden as it is today, maintained by her son Cyril

We went back to NZ on holiday last year, and I took a couple of shots of the impressive greenhouse and garden cultivated by Cruickshank descendant Helen and her husband Frank at their farm in the South Island. Helen told me that she and her husband planted out over sixty tomato plants last summer, and as a result had large quantities of tomatoes to turn into sauce, pickles and chutney for family, friends and her church stall, plus plenty of other vegetables as well. 

                               

My sister Louisa has definitely inherited the family green thumb from her father Ian, grandparents Oliver, Myrtle and Jack, and great grandfather Thomas. Here's a collage of her photos, showing scenes of bountiful produce at the community garden near Kerikeri in the far north of NZ, of which she is a member.

 In return for a morning's work each week, everyone gets a substantial weekly box of vegetables to take home.

Louisa's home garden is pretty impressive too. It probably helps that she works at a garden centre several days a week. Here are a just a few shots of it, including both red and yellow sunflowers loved by the bumblebees, and my daughter Laura admiring one of them on a visit from Australia. Louisa no doubt harvests the sunflower seeds. Beautiful Monarch butterflies are regular visitors to the swan plants in her garden, as seen below.

I'll finish with an appropriate garden song from the late great Pete Seeger:

Now flit on over to Sepia Saturday 224 for more Sepian takes on this week's gardening theme. 

Best wishes for a very happy Easter from the bilbies in my autumnal garden. Bilbies look a little like bunnies, but are a native Australian marsupial threatened with extinction, unlike rabbits that can quickly take over the countryside in plaque proportions, and in the process compete with the bilbie for food and habitat. For a little information about Bilbies and the campaign to 'ban the Easter Bunny', click here or alternatively go to  http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2014/04/14/3871404.htm?WT.mc_id=Innovation_News-Environment%7CEasterBunny,EasterSchmunny_FBP%7Cabc 

This bilbie toy and his chocolate bilbie friends have travelled over to England with us, and hopefully are enjoying some early spring weather.

                                        

Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside...

I don't have any photos of photographers or cartoon style cats, but I do have lots of pictures of people and beaches. Here in Australia we take the glorious golden sand at most of our beaches for granted, and are horrified at much of what the English call the seaside - gravelly, pebbly, rocky grey sand that you couldn't walk on without shoes, let alone lie back and sunbathe on a towel, although somehow the locals seem to do just that. Alternatively they lounge about sunning themselves  in deckchairs under a pale sun. At some English beaches I've visited  the children were making mud castles, rather than sand castles like this lovely one snapped at St Kilda beach Melbourne earlier this year!

So what to choose for this week's blog topic? I decided to be rather self-indulgent and to display a few more of the photos from pages of the scrapbook my mother made for me as a momento of our year in England from 24 October 1953 to 1 January 1955, when my father was on a research fellowship at Cambridge.

Jean and Joanna visit Gt Gt Aunty Kitt and her friend Hetty, in August 1954

In the summer of 1954 Dad, Mum and I went down to Margate Kent, to visit my father's Great Aunty Kitt. Kate Annie Byles was Dad's grandfather Thomas Alfred Byles' youngest sister. Thomas was born in 1863 in Mile End London, and according to family legend he left home in his early teens and stowed away aboard a ship called the Rakaia, bound for New Zealand. He was certainly living at home with his parents and siblings at the time of the 1871 census, but by 1881 he was not to be found either with the family or elsewhere in England. The Rakaia made voyages to NZ in 1878 and 1879, but I haven't yet managed to discover any documentation confirming that Thomas was made to work as a cabin boy when discovered on board, or that he was kept on Somes Island in Wellington Harbour until he was of age, but nor does he appear on any passenger list that I can find. Apparently Thomas told my aunt that he ran away because he didn't like his father's new wife, but the evidence does not bear this out. His parents George William Byles and Mary Catherine Daw were first cousins, who were married in 1847 and in fact remained together until George's death in October 1889, which occurred just a couple of weeks before son Thomas was married in Wellington NZ. Brother Alexander, a ship's steward, was a witness to the wedding. Alexander travelled the world and eventually settled in NZ himself. Born in 1871, Kate must only have been around seven or eight at most when her brother Thomas left home, and she never saw him again.  He died in 1951, but must have kept in touch with his English family. Consequently in 1954 my parents were able to meet his youngest sister Kate, the last surviving member of George and Mary Catherine's twelve children. She never married, and passed away in 1958. Hopefully she enjoyed the visit of her great nephew and great great niece. I think she must have been the only 'great' relative I ever actually met!

10 Holly Lane  Margate, home of Kate Byles, 1954

I'm not sure which half of this house belonged to Miss Byles, but as this street view below snipped from Google maps shows, it has changed little in almost 60 years.

Just in case  you're wondering about the relevance of all this to the topic, here it comes: 

After visiting Great Great Aunty Kitt, Mum, Dad and I headed down to the seaside to enjoy the 'leisure and pleasure' offered there.

Enjoying  icecreams at the beach - yum! Note my Dad did not feel any need to remove either his shoes, his jacket or even his tie.

Testing the water

Mum's caption here reads: "Joanna demands a donkey ride!"

 I think the donkey looks happy too.

Donkeys were a beach attraction at Margate for 118 years, and it was the first beach to have them. In 2008 they were retired, due to illness in the donkey owner's family. A Daily Mail news item about their history can be read here.  When I visited Margate again in 2009, the town and its beach were looking rather depressed and neglected, but it seems the donkeys are back again now and hopefully the seaside town of Margate  has also been revived. Unlike most English beaches, it does have the attraction of good sand!

Visiting in May 2009, we practically had Margate beach to ourselves

Which way to ...?

Deckchairs and Sunbeds,  For your Leisure and Pleasure, as the sign says

In the scrapbook Mum also pasted these two postcards together with the snaps, and there's even a piece of seaweed that has been preserved all this time.

I love those chalky white cliffs

To finish, here are some views of one of my favourite Australian beaches, at Hawks Nest on the mid north coast of  NSW,  where we are lucky enough to have a beach unit. There's a 15 km stretch of sandy beach, if you care for a stroll. Margate, eat your heart out!

Winda Woppa, Hawks Nest NSW

View to Cabbage Tree Island from Bennetts Beach Hawks Nest

 Looking along Bennetts Beach to Yaccaba Headland 

Now for more subjective seaside reflections, just kick off your shoes and socks and head on over to Sepia Saturday