Hawke’s Bay Knowledge Bank – Linda Bainbridge

Joyce Barry: It’s a lovely subject tonight; I’m not going to go on because Linda has a lot to tell you, but it’s with great pleasure that we introduce Linda Bainbridge. She’s manager of the Knowledge Bank, and this coming summer is the tenth anniversary of the Knowledge Bank. Now everything you hear tonight plus screeds of other things [microphone interference] would never, ever’ve been recorded unless James Morgan had had that big idea. And we were very late in Hawke’s Bay to do it, but boy, they’ve been catching up fast, haven’t they, Linda? He was obsessional about it, and he had to be ‘cause he had to break through lots of walls to get there. But the Council came on board in the end, and they didn’t find another use for Stoneycroft so it suited in the end and the rest is history now, true history. So over to you Linda; it’s a great pleasure to have you tonight, and I believe there’s quite a few of your volunteers here tonight.

Linda Bainbridge: Unfortunately, yes. [Laughter]

Okay, over to you, my dear.

Okay. So this was sprung on me, and it was suggested that next year being our tenth anniversary would be a time for me to come and talk at Landmarks. So I calculated that I had a year to find a new job before I had to be here. [Chuckles] It took them about three days to tell me that it was like, in six weeks … well, near …

So most of you have heard of the Knowledge Bank? I see lots of faces that are familiar to me … excellent. So I’ll tell you a bit about us for those of you that don’t know, and then I’ll go on and show you round our website; about what we’ve done so far.

So we are lucky enough to be working out of Stoneycroft. Most of you would know Stoneycroft at the corner of Omahu Road and the Expressway? It was built in about 1875, [and] it was believed it was built in Auckland, bought down to Port Ahuriri and then onto the newly built railway line to Hastings, and then on a horse and dray to the site, where it was erected. This picture is actually of Nathaniel Beamish outside Stoneycroft around 1900. This is what Stoneycroft looked like in 2012, when we took over after spending over $200,000 refurbishing the inside. So that’s where I’m going to leave that. If you would like to come and have a look at Stoneycroft you are more than welcome, we are open from 10.00 [am] until 4.30 Monday to Friday.

So what is the Knowledge Bank? We are trying to provide a safe and digital archive to record all the history of Hawke’s Bay; we’re trying to create an encyclopaedia of people, places and events. The Council are mandated to record the history of the region, but they’re more likely to record [that] the Mohaka viaduct was finished in 1932, but they don’t tell about the trials and tribulations of who actually built it. Did they actually travel? What happened to the families? How did their relationships suffer? Did the families come with them or did they go by themselves?

One of the most important things is we’re actually making it [the information] freely available on our website. How many of you have tried to get some information out of the National Library? You have to write to them and tell them what you want and what pages you want, they send you back an email to say, ‘Yes, you can come and look at that’. Then you decide that ‘Oh no, I need the next page!’ So you have to go through that whole process again to find the information.

So as Joyce was saying, it was James Morgan’s baby; he was the editor of the Hawke’s Bay Herald Tribune. He saw a need for a dedicated archive in Hawke’s Bay and he formed the Digital Archives Trust and signed the lease for Stoneycroft. While James was editor he actually made this huge room which was his archive. He kept all sorts of information in there; the newspapers and books on Hawke’s Bay. And then [when] he left, the new editor decided, ‘Well, we don’t need that”, and threw the whole lot out.

So why do we do it? We do it because material deteriorates, memories fade. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone out and spoken like this, and I hear people say, “I just wish I’d asked Dad”, or “I wish I’d spoken to my grandma a bit more”. People’s memories fade, and of course people died. We have a lot of information, and we rely on people to give us the information; we don’t actively search for it. A lot of people think that their information is insignificant, but it might be the missing link that someone’s been looking for for such a long time. And you know, what are you going to do with all those boxes that you’ve collected over the years? You know, it’s not until your parents have gone that you actually take a real interest in history, and by then you’re not interested in taking those fifty boxes off your parents. But quite often I say to people, “Well if you actually digitise it, then we’ve actually got the facility to handle a USB.” [Universal Serial Bus] And they’ll go, “Oh! Yeah, whatever, Mum”, throw it in the drawer; but then they’ve actually got the information there.

So what do we collect? We collect photographs and negatives and slides, documents and maps, newspapers – now I know that there’s a volunteer here tonight that [who] absolutely loves receiving newspapers – diaries, magazines and commercial records. I know that a lot of you are of the generation that would remember the Women’s Institutes; we’ve got quite a few of the Minute books from those now. A lot of them now are defunct, but it’s the only record that Hawke’s Bay has got that that club ever existed. I actually got a book in this afternoon from the toy library; and again, toy libraries are not to be found any more. And it was the Crippled Children’s Toy Library, and I’d never heard of it before.

We have a team of volunteers that do it. I’m the only paid staff member and we then have a committee and Board of Trustees. The volunteers … anyone want to have a guess at the average age? [Chuckles] ‘Cause they’re all really old [laughter] … I’ve just got a look of horror over here. I quite often discuss that the reason I like working at the Knowledge Bank is ‘cause I’m one of the youngest there. [Chuckles] Our average age would probably be around about seventy-five; our eldest, being someone I won’t name, is ninety this year, and our youngest would probably be around eighteen, but on average our medium age would be around about seventy-five. So it gives me great joy to be able to teach these guys new tricks, [chuckles] and actually, they’ve taught me so much as well.

So we scan all the photographs and all the documents, and then we have to transcribe everything because otherwise we’re just putting images up online. The transcribing is probably one of the biggest jobs – typing out everything word for word. We convert video and slides to digital data, and the other thing we also do, is oral histories. I prefer to call them a conversation. So we have a team of interviewers who go out into the community and they record people talking about their lives or an aspect of their life, and we try not to interrupt them. We’ve now got over 390 interviews online as well as all the Landmark[s] talks.

Who pays? Well we are heavily subsidised by the Hastings District Council – this year we got $30,000 from them – as well as the Lotteries Commission. The rest of it we have to make up ourselves by doing funding applications to the various organisations throughout Hawke’s Bay. We do rely heavily on private donations, especially people who have donated items – we sort of try sometimes for a bit of a donation. And we also do [private] work, so we will take your items and we will digitise them for you and give them back to you. And of course our volunteers give their time freely. And that’s that … that’s all the housekeeping stuff. Any questions on that?

Question: Yeah – are you saying … could I bring my family photos in which are quite small, and you’d blow them up and put them on a memory stick and then I’d …

Linda: Absolutely.

… give you a donation? Oh, okay, ‘cause I haven’t got a decent camera.

Linda: Yes. We do them at a very high resolution, or very good quality, so you can take a photo that’s about yay big and blow it up to about this, so yes.

We actually have a team of seven interviewers who actually go out into the community and talk to people. What we try to do is we give them like, a prompt [coughing] sheet, about a week before, and then we say to them, “This is the type of stuff we want you to talk about.” And then in a week’s time, or when it’s convenient, they go back and actually talk to the people about what they want to talk about.

Question: How do they record it?

Linda: We record on a [coughing] little digital recorder in house; we’ve got two different types of recorders that we use. If you wanted to know more specs I can talk to you about that later if you like.

So – what have we done in the last ten years? Our biggest collection to date is the Hawke’s Bay Photo News. Everyone know about the Photo News? Yes. So we had two goes at scanning this and it took over twelve months to get it completed. There is [are] over a hundred issues of this – this is the first year it was published, 1958, and this is how it is displayed on our website. We finished it and we sat on it for about twelve months to two years; then we heard whispers that someone else was going to publish it online, so we got in quick. [Chuckles] Quite a funny story about this … I had been at the Knowledge Bank about four days when this decision was made [that] we were going to publish this. And I had a guy drop in … he’d driven past Stoneycroft for many years, and decided he needed to call in today [that day] and check what was happening in here. He walked in the door and he said to me, “Oh, my mum was the first cover-girl of the Photo News.” And when I said to him that we were publishing it online, we’d made the decision today, he got really quite emotional, so it’s really good to know that it’s out there. So as you can see, here’s the picture and then you’ve got the transcript next to it. Okay, so having the transcript there makes it searchable, so you can actually search for any word within this document. Does anyone want to know how to search? Okay, you can go [to keys] Control [and] f. We’ll try that … she’s Doreen Stewart on the front page, so that has actually popped up there. There’s over a hundred issues that would highly recommend that you go and have a look at.

The next thing I wanted to show you is [the] largest collection that we have to date. This is the Russell Spiller Collection. Does everyone know Russell Spiller? I’m just assuming that you all said yes. Russell Spiller was a photographer in Napier for over fifty years; we have his life’s work; we have forty-five banana boxes with trays about yay deep, with rolls of film completely covering the inside of it [them]. We’ve estimated that we’ve got over a million images, and it’s going to take us twenty years to get them processed. We’re very fortunate that we now have some volunteers who are just solely concentrating on this collection and digitising it. A lot of the stuff that’s online in the Russell Spiller Collection is actually unnamed, so if you wanted to have a look through we try and encourage people to give us any feedback, so if you recognise anybody get in touch with us and we will put a [the] name to the face.

Likewise, something I should’ve said with the Photo News, is we’re not perfect unfortunately, as much as we try, there are errors sometimes in our transcripts, so if you come across an error while you are looking on our website can you please email me and let me know and I will get that fixed straight away.

I was going to talk about this soon, so I’ll just quickly find it. There we go … he [Russell Spiller] was born in 1920 and he died in 2015, and he was ninety-five. I think he worked right through.

So another collection that’s really quite big is our Earthquake Collection. We have six hundred-odd photos from the Hawke’s Bay earthquake, as well as various stories. So what I like about this is while we’ve got the publications which come from the media, we’ve actually got some personal stories as well. So this is actually from Frank Logan, but we’ve actually got stuff on here from Hamilton Logan as well …

Comment: They were father and son.

Linda: This is Hamilton Logan. This is a story that was in the newspaper this year. We’ve also got a lot of personal perspectives as well, which leads me to the newspapers. We have hundreds and hundreds of newspaper supplements on our website. One of the things I’d like to encourage is – don’t always assume that we’ve got something. If you think, ‘Oh well, that’s a newspaper article – they’ll have that’ – we don’t have everything, we rely on people of give us stuff, so if people haven’t given it to us then we don’t actually have it.

Some [One] of the oldest things that we have on here is the Hawke’s Bay Times, and that’s from 1972.

Joyce: 1872.

Linda: Yes … see, I knew you guys were watching [laughter] – you’re paying attention, eh? [Chuckles] We also have in the Harding Collection, the Weekly and Mercury News. These are from 1877, and we’ve got over fifty copies of those, and of course the Te Wananga … which if you’re fluent in Maori, we need proof readers.

The other interesting thing, which … I know Grant Nicholson just loves doing this job … is the newspaper articles. One of our earliest newspaper articles is from 1891, and as we get through the years we get quite a few more. We’ve got 1891 and [189]6, and then if you just click into each of these … Horne family – Constant [Constance] Horne was a William Nelson connection, and you can see it’s all been transcribed underneath.

One of the things that really surprises me is the language that they used; if they’re talking about weddings, because obviously there was [were] no pictures back then, the descriptions and the writing is just absolutely amazing. You can just make this full picture yourself of what everything looked like.

Now this is our person record; so we are trying to build a web of people. So far we’ve got quite a few … how many person records would we have, Linda?

Thousands … yes. So just to show you briefly what we actually do here … this is Elizabeth Hill, and Elizabeth Hill wrote a book called ‘Between the Rivers’. So here we have all her details, we have her maiden name, the date of birth, death; usually we try to get date of marriage, as well as her children. As you can see here she married Vyvyan Dudley Hill, so if we click on him it will actually take you to his profile, and you can see his parents here, and there’s Elizabeth. So now we’ve got her [his] mother, who was Nina Hill, in the information here. She was born in England so she obviously emigrated here, and her father was Thomas Tanner. Now everyone must know who Thomas Tanner is … one of the ‘Twelve Apostles’, who set up Hawke’s Bay, or Hastings I should say, [and] here we’ve got all the information that we can gather on him. And as you’re coming down here you’ll see that one of his children was Ellen Gordon – she married Frank Lindsay Gordon. Now Frank Lindsay Gordon sold the block of land called Cape Kidnappers to the Nelson family. His father was Thomas Gordon, and his father was James Gillespie Gordon; he was [also] one of the Twelve Apostles. So the Tanner family and the Gordon family were part of the group that set up Hastings, or the Heretaunga Plains. So that’s one thing we’re trying to do with everybody [coughing] in Hawke’s Bay; it’s going to be an [coughing] absolute mission.

As you’re going through here we’ve got lots of pictures of people, but if we don’t have a picture and they’re your relation … well, send us a picture. We’d be most appreciative.

Question: Are you sort of crossing over with Papers Past?

Linda: Absolutely not. One of the things we try not to do is reproduce anything that’s already online, because there’s not much point in … digitising’s actually really expensive. And if you think it’s not – we’re using a team of volunteers – it’s the equipment that we use that is really expensive, so we don’t try to do anything that is already online elsewhere. We don’t compete with anybody, we just do our own thing.

Question: So you’re just really interested in stuff that relates to Hawke’s Bay as such?

Linda: Absolutely – we’re a Hawke’s Bay archive and we’ve chosen the boundary of the Hawke’s Bay province, so we actually go from Woodville all the way up to Mahia.

So this is what I like to do … anybody got a Hawke’s Bay name they’d like to throw at me? Fryer? So we’ve got fifty results for the name of Fryer. These two here are people records; this is a photograph. And the name Fryer, or potentially the word fryer, is also in the history of F L Bone, so lots and lots of different things. This here is a cadet magazine from the Order of St John, so service club members from the Hawke’s Bay Farmers’ Service Club; newspaper articles, oral history, and there’s three pages there. Anything else?

Reply: Joe Nimon?

Linda: Okay, so you’ve said Joe Nimon? For me to search Joe Nimon I have to use apostrophe [single quotation] marks. The reason I do that is now I’m searching for ‘Joe Nimon’. If I didn’t use the apostrophe [single quotation] marks I’d be searching for everything with ‘Joe’ and everything with ‘Nimon’. Okay, so we’ve got sixteen results for Joe Nimon, and this looks like an interesting photo.

Audience member: Studebaker … [chuckles] …

Linda: To me that’s a treasure – you’d never be able to find that photo again.

Havelock North Tennis Club … mentioned John Beaumont interview; I believe that John Beaumont was the only person that I know of that has spoken at his own funeral and told his own life story, due to the interview at the Knowledge Bank. So celebrating a hundred and fifty years of Havelock North; Photo News; City to the Swamp.

Oh look, I have to show you this, because this will be my last slide, okay? We’ve got one volunteer who just doesn’t think there’s anything historical about a cat; so this is especially for him. This is Rona Tong with a cat – she was Rona McCarthy, and as Rona Tong she went to the British Empire Games in 1938 and won a bronze medal for hurdling. Why would we not have a picture of her with a cat? [Chuckles]

This one here I particularly like … this is a cat getting a piece of … looks like bacon or something. [Chuckles] What does it say? Eva Longley at Tawadale [near Wimbledon, south of Wallingford] about 1921. So that’s just a little dig at the little volunteer over there that doesn’t want to scan historic cats. [Chuckles] Not all cats are created equal. Anyone else got any names that they would be interested in having a look at?

Reply: What about Archie Lowe?

Linda: Archie Lowe … there you go.

Comment: He’s the father of George.

Linda: Yes. So these two articles in here have Archie Lowe in it [them], and there’s a picture of the Lowe family; books there, and the … ‘Development of Hastings’ by Martin Beck. I know who George Lowe is – I have learned so much history working at the Knowledge Bank. Anything else that anyone would like to have a look at?

Comment: Linda, often I put in a [inaudible] and I find a photo, click on it, and all of a sudden five photos are there to look at; but unless you click on it you don’t know there’s five there.

Linda: Okay – so this one here is what you’re sort of talking about, Digby – you can’t really tell that there’s multiple photos there. Along the side here you’ll see the arrows, and then down the bottom here you will see the marks, so you can actually go across and actually see the photos together.

This is Joyce Ballantyne, and she was the owner of Stoneycroft from 1954 until 2003. This is Tim Hull who is a leading cardiac surgeon in New Zealand, and these are her godchildren, I think; Robert Holden I think that is. So you can actually also click on photos and make them bigger, and you can also download them by clicking on the link down the bottom here.

Joyce: Linda, you did mention to us how you’re looking at outreaching, so what’s [what’re] their ideas on that?

Linda: Well we’ve got an idea that … we have a presence in Hastings, and because of the fact that Hastings and Napier have such a bad relationship with one another – because it’s just such a long way to go to Napier – [chuckles] we’re looking at potentially making satellites of the Knowledge Bank. So we are tentatively … the idea is out there at the moment that we have something in the centre of town, whether it be manned or unmanned; and then we set up places in Napier and Central Hawke’s Bay etcetera where people can actually come in and work, or drop off collections, or anything like that. We are fast outgrowing Stoneycroft, and we have a full house there probably at least once or twice a week, so all our computers are busy; we’ve probably got about fifteen to twenty people in the building. So that is one of the things we are looking at.

Another way we’ve combatted our growth is by having volunteers working at home. Lockdown was a classic example, where we completed so much work during lockdown; we grew our volunteer database; we have people working in Australia; a lot of people working in Auckland and Palmerston North, transcribing from home as well as proof-reading. So you know, if anyone is interested in doing something like that …

That’s all our sort of talking points at the moment. We don’t quite know which direction we’re heading in because it’s going to cost money and we don’t necessarily have the money at this stage. We’ve thrown a lot of money into equipment this year and we’ve bought nearly ten new computers, and we’re looking at upgrading our camera system as well to take up the larger newspapers.

Question: You were going to have a memorial for James Morgan …

Linda: Yes.

… but it was cancelled because of Covid?

That’s right. We’ve planned that a couple of times now, so we have a date now of 10th September, probably at ten o’clock in the morning. So it will go ahead no matter what, because we can’t put it off any more. But numbers will be limited, or be Covid-dependent, and if that is the case it will be by invitation only unfortunately, to make sure some of the key players are there. But we’re planting a tree and the plaque is … I shouldn’t say is already in the ground. But you’re welcome.

A lot of people don’t know that Stoneycroft is actually a reserve, and you can actually go in and use the grounds at any time of the weekend or any time during the day; so you’re welcome to come in and have a picnic or whatever, and have a look through the house.

Question: [Inaudible] … it’s an inspiring idea and unique to Hawke’s Bay? What about other regions – have they picked up on it?

Linda: No. A lot of the archiving’s actually attached to a museum or a library or something like that, but we’re actually the only dedicated archive running on the structure that we’re running. So I’m the only staff member, and all the work is done by the volunteers. The rest – there’ll be like, ten, fifteen staff members and five volunteers. [Coughing] So it’s quite unique; and volunteers … they’re so willing to help all the time and they are just willing to work. One of the beauties I like about working there is that they come in, they do their job; if they don’t like their job they just say, “Well let’s do something else”, and off they go with a hiss and a roar. and find someone else to do that job. So it’s wonderful. It’s an absolutely amazing place to work, it really is.

Comment: The moral of the story is that dedicated volunteers will do far more than professionals.

Linda: Absolutely, absolutely, ‘cause they’re there ‘cause they want to be there. Some people will only work a couple of hours a week and other people … we’ve got this person who has just absolutely blossomed over the last year, and she’s now doing more hours than me a week.

Question: Is the proof-reading done at Stoneycroft or can that be done remotely?

Linda: No, no – that’s all done on our website. Once it’s actually online, that’s when we go ahead and proof-read it; but unfortunately we are not perfect so we miss things all the time. That’s where you will just get sent a link of what needs to be proof-read, you download it and then you compare the two.

If anyone would like to come in in October we getting this great big cake. It’s about this big, and it’s going to have ‘90’ written on the top of it. So we’ve got two birthdays coming up next week. Sorry, there was a question down the back there.

Question: Where is all the data stored?

Linda: Oh, that’s a very good point. We actually have a server at Stoneycroft that stores all the data, and also another one in Palmerston North as well as Auckland. So we’ve actually got about four to five copies of all the data. To give you a sort of an idea, if you guys’ve got a computer at home, it’s probably at the most, one terabyte of capacity to store. We have twenty-four terabytes of data. That’s how much the capacity is, but we’ve got five terabytes of data stored.

Question: Do you do entertainment … like, the programmes?

Linda: Absolutely, that’s what I’m doing at the moment. We’ve got two collections online of programmes. This is quite an interesting collection here, so we’ve got sixty-four theatre programmes in this collection, as well as the Tomoana Players. He was a fireman for the Tomoana Fire Brigade. So here we’ve got all the programmes; these were actually found on the way to the dump, I believe. [Gasp] Yes – this one here, ‘Brigadoon’ and the producer – you probably can’t read that – was James Morgan, at twenty-six the youngest stage director in New Zealand. And he looks so young there. No, there’s a few that he directed. With theatre programmes, we’ve got lots. So all sorts of things – anything with people’s names basically, we’re interested in.

Joyce: They were good questions weren’t they, Linda?

Linda: Yes.

Joyce: Well, that’s fantastic, thank you. Who learned quite a lot tonight that surprised them? I’m pleased, ‘cause the story of how this came together was a bit of karma, because James was adamant to do something and we had to get a place to go. I know on behalf of Landmarks, we lobbied Council very hard to do something about history ‘cause it was so poorly recorded, and Stoneycroft was a lucky coincidence at the time because Joyce and Diamond Ballantyne had bequested it … I think I’m right, Cynthia? To the Council in Jeremy Dwyer’s time … but it was when you were really under really very strained circumstances with economic downturns; the Council couldn’t afford it. They also offered it to Historic Places, and the upkeep was so huge they couldn’t afford to look after it – they might’ve taken it over but not looked after it. So the one thing that the Ballantynes did was put a caveat over that whole property; that’s why you didn’t have real estate signs all stuck on fences; ‘cause they couldn’t. There’s [there’re] certain trees registered, and the land itself.

And then another interesting thing [coughing] happened. Those who were councillors at the time – the Lyndhurst block was voted as the last big residential area before going onto any more of the Plains. So that was it. Lyndhurst and new big blocks need (x) number[s] of green space, and sitting there was this lovely park of Stoneycroft. Tragically, it’s happened; the fruit trees next to Stoneycroft are now gone, because this was the last big thing in about the fifth or sixth or seventh subdivision; and Lyndhurst is ready to start and the houses will come down to Stoneycroft. But there’ll be links from all those different subdivisions up in Lyndhurst; there are now – there’s walking links and cycle links and they will come down to the park.

So the park is public, it belongs to you, the people of Hastings, and it was bequested. When it came up again it [Stoneycroft] was offered to the Council, and I think one or two councillors here must’ve elected to buy it. They got it for a good price, but it did need a lot of work, so that meant sprinklers as you could imagine, new roof, new wiring, new plumbing; and James oversaw a lot of the refurbishing inside. But it was a big, big job, but the Council did it. And the painting – those colours have come up as interesting, because people said, “Oo yuck, you’re sort of doing these carnival green stripes outside.” But go into your old pictures and you’ll see … in fact there’s a book we’ve just had given to us, and a lot of these old farmhouses throughout New Zealand at that time had these striped verandas – it must’ve been the in-thing at the time.

So it’s an interesting thing how this whole circle came together;  that James was looking for somewhere. It’s also opportune because it was on the main road south, and just like the Sports Park, will pay itself off by dragging in Napier as well – under duress, but it will … [Laughter] So will Stoneycroft, because it is seen sort of on the motorway, and it is a lovely halfway point between the two; and that’s what’s proved.

But Linda, thank you very much. She would love to take names of volunteers tonight, [chuckles] because I think you’re a very merry group up there, and you’re so keen, and it’s great. Thanks, Linda.

[Applause]

Thank you very much.