Milton Terrace Napier – Robert Bergen McGregor

Peggy van Asch: I’d like to welcome you to Duart [House] this morning, to Robert’s talk on Milton Terrace, [Napier] which I’m sure we’re all going to be fascinated to hear about; the fact that your family’ve been there right from the 1860s. Robert was very supportive when we first went to the Havelock North Borough Council saying that we wanted Duart House; when we eventually got Duart House we had no furniture for our idea of a museum upstairs. And at that stage Robert was the director of the Museum and Art Gallery, and he very kindly agreed that he would loan [lend] us furniture, which we still have upstairs. [Chuckles] And for the first time last year someone came to check how their furniture was, [laughter] and if we were still looking after it we were allowed to keep it. So we are most grateful for your previous support and your continued support for Duart House. And thank you very much.

Robert McGregor: Thanks, Peggy. Well, getting rid of furniture solved a storage problem, [laughter] which they seem to still have.

Well first of all, why did I write this history? The reasons were that I had lived there all my life, apart from the first year when my father had a farm at Oak Road in Greenmeadows. So I have an awful lot of information about the residents, some of it quite interesting, [chuckles] that I remember; and if it didn’t get written down it would be lost when I disappear. But also because Milton Terrace is a short cul de sac, and is a sort of community, although not perhaps as much as it used to be in the days when people lived in houses for long periods of time; when everybody in the street knew everybody reasonably well. Also, I not only have my own memories but things that my mother passed on to me because she grew up there; her father grew up there – my grandfather. It’s had some interesting and even eccentric people living in it, and of course it needed someone who had listened into adult conversations as a child and remembered what was said. [Chuckles]

[Showing slides and photographs during talk]

So this photograph was taken by the Daily Telegraph I think, before it became Hawke’s Bay Today. For their real estate page they ran a series of aerial photos of parts of Napier and Hastings and Havelock [North], and that just happened to focus [door closing] exactly on Milton Terrace.

Milton Terrace was laid out over two suburban sections, Number[s] 45 and 46. Napier was surveyed in 1852 and 1854 by Alfred Domett, who was Commissioner of Crown Lands and Resident Magistrate, and later became, briefly, Prime Minister of New Zealand. As you probably know, he chose Indian places for street names, and indeed for some of the outlying areas; and also the names of British admirals who were active in India, like Havelock and Napier, [cough] Charles Napier; these people who were believed to be heroes of the Indian Mutiny. And they were certainly heroes if you were English, but not if you were Indian. [Chuckles]

There was a Pakistani man on an Art Deco walk some time back, and somebody in the group asked, you know, “What’s Napier named after?” And the guide said, “After Sir Charles Napier, hero of the Indian Campaign.” And the Pakistani man said, “He was a thug!” [Laughter]

Anyway, he has a plinth in Trafalgar Square, and once when I was in the National Portrait Gallery in London there was a bust and a painting of him, and he had the largest nose I’ve ever seen. [Chuckles]

So when he ran out of Indian names he used the names of writers, because he was a poet himself, and admired literary figures. So Milton Road was one of the main roads over the hill, along with Shakespeare Road and Spencer Road, and Milton Terrace was laid out ten years later as a branch off Milton Road, so it was called Milton Terrace.

The first owner of the two suburban sections in the circle was a man called William Seed, who arrived in Wellington with his parents in 1840, as a child; and between 1851 and ’53 he was private secretary to Governor Grey. William Seed came to Napier and was sub-collector of Customs; and then he moved to Wellington and the property was possibly sold to somebody else, but in 1865 it was surveyed into … few sections and some others that he also owned … surveyed into Milton Terrace, and Milton Terrace looks a little different from that now because the two [coughing] zigzags have disappeared. The one on the left is where the road zigzagged up from Milton Road, and at the top it zigzagged down the hill in steps to Milton Road, and both of those zigzags were subsequently eliminated. So in 1865, that’s when the street was laid out, and this is what Napier looked like then – this is where the Court House was being prepared to be built. This is the Mechanics Institute which became the Philosophical Institute, then the Athenaeum, then the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery; and now it’s MTG. [Museum Theatre Gallery] You can see all the water in the distance in the swampy areas, and down at the bottom is the port, which is mainly water.

This is a photograph in 1883 of the end of Milton Terrace. This house you can see on the left is Margaret Hay’s house – Margaret’s here – which is the only house left in the street … the only original house … and it’s pretty much exactly the same as it was, and you can see the steps zigzagging down the hill here. Much later they were realigned into one long straight flight of steps with a little bend at the bottom; a hundred steps in all and they would’ve been quite useful; although not used much now, because in the days when trams operated from 1913 to 1931 you could walk down the steps to Battery Road and catch a tram into town.

So looking at the various properties, this is what used to be Number 1; and this driveway is what’s left of the original zigzag which went up there, and that was eliminated in 1916. That wasn’t surveyed and closed officially until about 1970 when those flats were built.

Number 2 Milton Terrace was remodelled in the 1960s, and it’s got the original house still inside it in the left hand side of the house … inside that is the original cottage. And when I was a boy it was owned by Jack Fairclough and his wife. Jack was well known in theatrical circles in Napier. He had a radio shop where you went to buy tickets to Municipal Theatre events, and his assistant in his shop was a woman called Mrs Nielsen, who was known to everyone as Olive Oil because she had a striking resemblance to Popeye’s girlfriend [laughter] in the comic strips. And I believe that somebody once went into the shop and addressed her as Mrs Oil [chuckles] thinking that that was her proper name. My mother once said that as Mrs Fairclough was a Christian Scientist, she would no doubt have acted on the idea that Olive Oil, like Elvis, didn’t exist. [Chuckles]

The next house was an old house on two sites. There were originally seven houses in Milton Terrace; now there are seventeen. Because the properties were so large they’ve been cut up into two, three or four sections. On this site – it was sold off in 1939 or thereabouts – two brothers, the Hummerstone brothers, bought the property and built a little art deco house. Mrs Hummerstone married one of them; and they both died and so when I was a boy Mrs Hummerstone lived there. She was a member of the Salvation Army, which is why the Salvation Army always played at the corner when they did their carol rounds at Christmas, because she would come out and give them a cup of tea. [Chuckles] One year when we had hosing restrictions and you weren’t allowed to water unless you held the hose in your hand, she paid me a shilling an hour to sit on her front porch and spray the lawn with the hose. [Laughter] And my mother dropped in to see her one day with my brother, Ewan, who was quite small at the time. Ewan had his own language, and … well, he had his own words for certain things … and one was [noise made by forcing air through lips] for biscuit. [Laughter] And Mrs Hummerstone said, “Would Ewan like a biscuit?” “No, no, no”, my mother said. [Blows air, chuckles] “What’s he saying?” “Nothing, nothing.” “Are you sure he wouldn’t like a biscuit?” [Blows air] [Laughter] So I think he got a biscuit.

Then it was bought by Mr and Mrs Sykes, who had an orchard at Pakowhai … first house on the right after you cross the Chesterhope Bridge, I think, heading towards the Expressway … a nice house with immaculate gardens. [Cough] They moved in; and eventually it was sold to the present owners who have added on to it considerably. You can still see the trace of the original art deco cottage from one side.

And the other half of that property was bought and [a] house built for Jean Nesbitt, who had a dress shop in Hastings Street. The little ad [advertisement] is from the new Napier Carnival newspaper in 1933, that was published to celebrate when the carnival was held to celebrate the reconstruction of Napier. She was a successful businesswoman, partly because she had an elderly frail mother who did all the cooking and housekeeping for her. There’s Mrs Nesbitt with Ewan. My mother used to get quite upset by the way in which Jean talked to her mother and treated her. And then when she died, [of] course, Jean was prostrate with grief and fits of weeping, and became religious and was frightened to be alone in the house at night. I don’t know what help her mother would’ve been if there’d been a home invasion, [chuckles] so my mother lent me to go in at night and sleep in the house. [Laughter] I was twelve, so I don’t know how much help [laughter] I would’ve been in a home invasion. [Laughter] And it’s had a few owners since then – that driveway has been put in the last year or two, completely demolishing the original garden.

The next house, Number 7, is where I grew up. It was built in 1865, the year the street was laid out by my great grandfather who’s the man on the left, William Ward Yeats, who came to Napier in 1856 having just married his wife in Auckland, we think as an arranged marriage; apparently he went to Auckland to meet her. He had come out to New Zealand in 1852, and then went to Melbourne to build houses during the gold rush. And he kept copies of his letters home to his family, and one of them says that he doesn’t like Australia because he doesn’t like the heat, the flies and the dust, and he missed the romantic landscapes of New Zealand. So he came back and lived in Wanganui where he had a Maori partner, and he wrote home describing his Maori partner, saying that all the officers at the 65th Regiment had their Maori partners. He actually used the term ‘partner’, which was interesting. And she was a woman called Helena; she had a shark’s tooth worn in one ear, and a piece of worsted in the other. Her feet had never been tortured by shoes; she was ‘as adept with a canoe as any Thames waterman, and her fishing skills would put Isaac Walton to shame’. [Chuckles]

However he then met his wife, Emily, and they came to Napier and had six children. My grandfather, the boy on the left, was the only one of the six who lived beyond the age of two; and in 1865, the year he moved into Milton Terrace, the last two of the five who died passed away, and his wife also died of meningitis. So he lost two children and a wife in the same year, and was a widower for forty-seven years. There’s the house; in 1910 it was enlarged and my grandfather was living there; my great-grandfather must’ve moved out and handed the house over to him when my grandfather got married. That’s taken about 1910 … my mother and her sister and my grandparents’ and our old Gran. That’s my grandmother on the left in fancy dress, and on the right with two of my uncles on the veranda of the house.

These were taken in the 1920s and ‘30s … my mother on the lawn after a snowstorm in 1926; my [whispering] mother, father and my aunt in the 1920s, leaning against the picket fence on the boundary with Margaret Hay’s property. And then not long before the earthquake a brick wall was built, designed by Louis Hay, with a concrete band on top – you can see the band that they’re sitting on. In the earthquake the concrete band jumped off the wall and landed on the ground … you can see in the bottom left photo … and it’s still there. I think, apart from some fallen gravestones in the cemetery, I think it’s the only bit of earthquake damage that hasn’t been cleaned away. And on the right is the house the day after the earthquake, with the chimneys down and the retaining wall collapsed.

When my grandmother died she had the property cut in two, and my aunt got the house and my mother got the empty half. We moved to a farm in Central Hawke’s Bay in 1952, and at that time my Uncle Rex who lived in Auckland was retiring. He was a bachelor, and he wanted to come back to Napier. He used to come down every Christmas for a holiday and to visit all his old friends and party with them, so he suggested he build a cottage on the empty section. It seemed like a good idea, so he built that little cottage; moved in as we moved away. The parties soon dried up, and he’d never looked after himself, he’d always boarded, and as my mother said, “He couldn’t boil an egg.” So six months of that and he’d had enough, and went back to Auckland. [Chuckles] So the house [coughing] was let until my mother died and left it to me. It wasn’t common so much in those days, round 1970, for a single man to have a house, so that made me eligible, [chuckles] and I was married within the year. [Laughter] So we put a top floor on, and there’s the fourth and fifth generations – me and my wife, and my daughter, Isobel, and my son, Angus. And the sixth generation is my grandchildren, who visit from Wellington. So there’s not many houses in the city … I mean, it’s quite common for country properties to run in the family, but it doesn’t happen very often in the city. So in the 1960s the house was looking like this, owned by George Wade and his wife, and in front was this massive copper beech tree that my grandfather had planted, probably around 1900. When George died the property was bought by Brian Titter, and he was going to put two townhouses on it but he developed a brain tumour, and although he recovered he lost interest in the project and David Marshall, the dentist, and his wife bought it. I think the Titters had had the tree cut down as part of their plans – there’s the picture on the right of the tree being cut down – and the house was demolished. And there’s the empty site in the centre.

So the Marshall’s new house went up in 1993. The summer house was built for my grandmother, who used to have croquet on the lawn and serve afternoon tea to her friends in the summer house. When the property was subdivided, the boundary goes through the summer house, so I own two thirds of it and the Marshalls own one third, [chuckles] but I’ve got the door. [Laughter]

The next property was owned by Captain Bowers, who was Napier’s first Town Clerk. And there was an interesting scandal associated with him, because I found when researching this in the newspapers that his son was sued for breach of promise by a young lady who he had decided not to marry after all, and she had a child. And it turned out that she was no better than she ought to be; [chuckles] but the newspaper carried not only all the details of the breach of promise case, but two letters written by Captain Bowers’ daughter to the lady in question telling her what a hopeless person the brother was, that she was far better not to marry him, he was absolutely useless. Couldn’t possibly support her, and wrote on and on, running him down. But she was awarded some damages apparently. My grandmother actually bought a music cabinet from Captain Bowers’ sale when he moved away, which I still have.

The next property is Margaret Hay’s; the house is there, the brick walls were built – as well as my boundary wall – by her father, Louis Hay, who liked brick. He was a great admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect, who also liked brick. And Margaret’s garage was built as part of a planned development of the upper part of the property; he planned to build a house there, a new house. This is the Hay family, Louis on the left, his wife Peggy, Margaret and brother Robbie, and an interesting trick photo of Louis in army uniform, sitting around a table. One person sitting around a table. And this is the house that Louis planned to build; [background conversations] it would’ve been very much like some of the houses that Frank Lloyd Wright built in the Chicago area. Louis Hay was the second most prolific architect in the reconstruction period in Napier, and designed many beautiful buildings. This one at the top is the Amner House in Coleman Terrace, built for the family who owned Amners Lime Works, which used to be in Milton Road before the earthquake and moved down to Pakipaki afterwards; it’s now Firths. And at the bottom is a house he designed for Muriel Holt in Lambton Road, very much in the Frank Lloyd Wright style.

This is a lovely little garage he designed for the Husheers who lived in Coleman Terrace … Ingolf Husheer. And the photo on the right shows the garage when it was new, on this steep hillside … massive foundations right down to here. And the Husheers – because Coleman Terrace didn’t exist then – their access was from Lambton Road up many steps and winding paths, so they had to take the groceries and the pushchair and the baby up all these steps and paths to get from the garage to the house. After Coleman Terrace was put through and gave them access from the top, they just parked the car in the street.

These are some of Louis Hay’s garages and gates in Elizabeth Road where Gerhard Husheer lived; one of the garages and three of the different gates to the properties all individually designed. And these are the lead light windows in Gerhard Husheer’s house, just some of the windows; another house up near the lookout on Bluff Hill in the Frank Lloyd Wright style.

The earthquake grave at Park Island cemetery; [of] course he’s most famous for the National Tobacco Company building. And this is the design he did for the Municipal Theatre rebuild after the earthquake, which unfortunately didn’t get used. It was going to be too expensive so we got a cheap version designed by somebody else.

After Louis died in 1948 the top part where he was going to build his house was sold to a farmer from Hatuma called Dick Stratford, who had sold his farm at the height of the wool boom in 1952 or 1953 and so made a lot of money and built this large house … large footprint, although it only has two bedrooms … with a double garage that you could drive through, or you could bypass and drive right around the house, because Dick couldn’t reverse. [Laughter] So he just had it designed so that he never had to reverse. [Chuckles] And later it was owned by Allan Smith and his wife, Elsie. He was the manager of Dalgety’s, and they did a lot entertaining and they were able to accommodate all their guests on the property; they just had to leave in the same order as they’d arrived. [Chuckles] Then it was owned by Doctor Brian Hill and his wife, Virginia, who died quite recently.

And then the bottom part of the Hay section was also sold off; it’s an unusual little dog-leg shaped section, and a new modern house was built in the sixties or seventies by Billy Fraser who was the Master of the dredge. And at the bottom you can see the steps going down the hill, and there’s a view down the steps; just a reminder of how they used to be, zigzagging down. As I said, they’re not used a lot now.

Across the road is a house – the one that’s been bought and sold more than any other house in the street – about twenty owners since Rosie Clark on the right, who was an interesting woman. She was a spinster; she was involved with the Museum and Art Gallery in its formation. She had a little shop in Hastings Street that sold a few books and a bit of furniture and some rugs – I don’t know how she made enough money to pay the rent, ‘cause half the time if you passed it there was a sign on the door saying, ‘Back in Ten Minutes’. [Chuckles] She’d be taking her beloved ducks and Dinah for a walk. Dinah was the apple of her eye, and Dinah’s birthday was celebrated each year with a birthday cake and a poached egg. [Chuckles] And she told us one day that she was feeling awful; she hadn’t slept a wink all night because Dinah hadn’t been well. So she had Dinah in bed with her, so that she couldn’t sleep and she’d be able to look after Dinah’s needs.

One of the owners subsequently covered the whole property in concrete by putting in a driveway right around the house to a new garage, as far from the street [cough] as is possible; all the runoff from the concrete went over the cliff, and also the downpipe from the garage went over the cliff and caused a slip. So the downpipe was removed and a pipe was run down the cliff. But we then had another downpour and the pipe came apart and caused another slip.

The house at the bottom was built by Jim Munro, the Director of the Museum, and his wife, and designed by Nina’s son who was an architect. He had foreseen the possibility of a slip so he designed the house to withstand it. The house is concrete block; the back wall had no windows; the internal walls were designed to act as buttresses to support the back wall; the rafters were massive so that the roof could hold a considerable weight, and the space between the back of the house and the cliff was filled up with pea metal right up to the roof, so that if there was as slip it would just go woosh! And that’s what it did. It was all repaired – this was taken when it was being repaired – by the Earthquake and War Damage Commission … paid for by you and I, presumably … and ended up looking like this, with a concrete retaining wall behind the house. And that upper part is pinned into the cliff. I don’t know why they’ve cantilevered the shed right out over the cliff, [chuckle] but there you are.

The next property was owned when I was a child by Mary Connor, whose father, who had owned it, had been the Reverend Charles Connor Presbyterian Minister at the Port. And his father had also been [a] Presbyterian Minister. My mother told me that when she was a girl she used to run down to the front fence [coughing] to watch the Reverend Connor go by in his gig, because it was the only vehicle in the street. Now each house has two or three cars. So there’s the tombstones in the Napier Cemetery for both of the Reverend Connors, and for Mary, his daughter. Mary sold the property in 1949 to Mr and Mrs Smith. Mr Smith’s name was Jack, and I don’t know what Mrs Smith’s name was because she was always Mrs Smith; and my mother was always Mrs McGregor. And this is the house they built. Because it was when building restrictions were in force they could only get a permit to build if they built two dwellings, so there were two storeys, both identical; top floor reached by a bridge from the upper part of the section across to their upper floor unit.

The Smiths had a son, Archie, who was a [an] RAF [Royal Air Force] pilot and was killed just before Dunkirk in what was called the Battle of the Barges, where the RAF was trying to destroy all the barges being assembled to cross the Channel and invade Britain. He was shot down and killed. Jack was a keen golfer, and Mrs Smith didn’t have any real interests; I don’t think she was ever very happy. She didn’t settle, and she didn’t like flies and she didn’t like the heat, so she had all the windows shut tight all the time, which didn’t help the heat problem. Anyway, we were quite friendly with them, and one day my mother was having afternoon tea with Mrs Smith on the front verandah, and looking at the Auckland Weekly with – this is in 1951 – Cecil Beaton’s photos of Princess Margaret on her twenty-first birthday. And my mother said, “She is lovely, isn’t she!” And Mrs Smith said, “Huh! Fine feathers make fine birds! Give us the clothes, Mrs McGregor, give us the clothes!“ [Laughter]

When Pania [Pania of the Reef, bronze statue on Marine Parade] arrived in 1954, they needed something for her to sit on and Jack offered to give them a huge rock that was at the bottom of his property on Battery Road. I don’t know if it actually belonged to him, because [laughter] there were actually separate titles along Battery Road but there were no houses there. [Cough] So he offered them this massive rock, which they took and reduced in size, and that’s what Pania sits on today.

Now the next property was a huge one, it’s now got four houses on it. It was owned by the Hitchmans and these are two photos my grandfather took. My grandfather was quite a keen photographer in the days of glass plate negatives, and I found these negatives, somewhat damaged, of the Hitchman family in front of their house around 1900, I think. You can see one of the Norfolk pines; there were two Norfolk pines on the property. There they are – these are taken from the road, looking down. They must’ve been about the same age as the Norfolk pines on the Marine Parade, and I often wonder whether they were some leftovers from the batch that was planted on the Parade.

It was occupied or rented from 1937 to 1953 by the Taylor family … Jack Taylor, his wife Catherine, John who lives in Havelock North, Margaret who lives in Wellington, Nancy who lives in Napier, and Frances who lives in Levin. Jack was an interesting man. His occupation was meter reader, so he knocked on everybody’s door and came in with a torch to read the meter, which was in those days usually in a dark passage. And it must’ve been a very menial [cough] job for someone who had such an exotic private life, because he was a member of Stella Matutina, the Temple here in Havelock North. I, [of] course, didn’t know that, but I read an account by somebody describing Christmas at Whare Ra, and I thought, ‘That’s funny – that’s exactly the same as Christmas at the Taylors’. Because every year Jack would arrive home in his Austin with a large pine tree sticking out of the dickey seat, and it would be set up in their sitting room which had a very high ceiling; it seemed like a massive tree to me as a child. And it would be decorated with glass baubles of the type that you couldn’t buy after the war and the room would be draped with those red and green ropes with little silver bells and pine cones that you also couldn’t buy after the war. We just had to make do with plastic baubles and paper streamers. And the tree was decorated with candles and the baubles and there was a wonderful crib set up; and on Christmas Eve people would arrive and incense would burn and candles would be lit, and just as it was becoming interesting the children would all be shoo’ed out and the door would be shut. [Chuckles] So this was really very similar to Christmas at Whare Ra, and when I told someone about that … Margaret Cranwell, she was the Exhibitions Officer at the Museum … she said, “Oh, Jack Taylor, yes – he was one of the members of the Order.”

It was a big house; as well as the bedrooms upstairs it had a kitchen, a breakfast room, a sewing room, a sitting room, a dining room, a study for Jack, and a chapel. They of course were Anglicans, as were most of the people who were involved in the Order. He was also a colour therapist, and people used to come and have coloured lights shone on them to cure their ills. And one day I saw one of their many cats on the back of an armchair draped in a sheet with a coloured light shining on it. [Chuckles]

I think about the time the family had all left home, Mr and Mrs Taylor moved to Havelock North to Tainui Drive, probably to be closer to the centre of the Order’s activities.

These were taken of the Taylors’ home in the fifties; it was full of trees, the large part of the property was an old overgrown orchard. On the bottom right you can see Thumper the Angora rabbit’s hutch. I was given the job of feeding Thumper one year when they went away for a holiday, and to my horror when I went over one day Thumper had dug a hole under the hutch and disappeared. [Chuckles] Fortunately he was found. I suppose he was bored because there was nobody around.

So in 1950 the section was subdivided, and one part of it was built on by Mrs Cuthbertson who had moved up from Waimate to be near her family. She had a daughter married to Frank Charles in Waipawa; the daughter had died quite young, and one of the children, Prue, was intellectually impaired. And Joy was his [her] governess but eventually she stopped doing that and came to live with her mother. She was quite different; as her niece once said, “Joy was different.” She was given to very flowery language; she once saw some tomatoes growing in our garden and said, “Oh what a joy to see the fruits of the earth in abundance!” [Laughter] One day she came to the door fresh from the bathroom, which was right opposite the front door, wearing nothing, but flapping a towel around vaguely. And of course it spread around the street instantly that Joy had come to the door in the nude. [Chuckles] And John Graham, the grocer at the top of Milton Road, on hearing this was very interested to know at what time of day this … [inaudible, laughter] The house has had a number of owners and it’s now much bigger than what it was, and that’s what it looks like now.

When I was a boy the street was like a country lane; there were so few houses, there were so many trees and sort of rickety old fences. Now there are only two large trees apart from those ones up at the back there, and they’re both in my garden. They’ve all been cut down where houses have been expanded and built. And the upper part of the Taylor’s property had a lawn, and that was built onto about twenty years ago. The Taylor’s old house was replaced in the 1950s; you can see it’s nearly all covered in structures. And the top part of the section was where there was one of the two Norfolk pines … there were two Norfolk pines on this property, as I mentioned. The one nearest the cliff which you can see on the right, the owners had it trimmed while they were away on holiday and the people who trimmed it didn’t know when to stop, so it ended up looking like a telephone pole with a Christmas tree on top. And the other one was taken down when this top half of the section was sold. The first one came down one Sunday morning; my wife and I were sitting up in bed looking at the view, and Helen said, “Look!” And I looked up, and the tree went … [Chuckles] We’d heard this sort of buzzing of a chainsaw without taking any notice; and she saw it shiver and she said, “Look!” And it just toppled down the cliff. They had it cut down because they thought it might blow down and take some of the cliff with it.

The other one was removed in order to build this house, so it was taken down in stages; it must’ve cost almost as much as the house cost to have it removed. There’s the stump on the bottom left and there’s the hole left after the stump was removed … so big that this house not only has a basement garage, but it has another room under the basement garage, [chuckles] where the hole was, so that garage on the lower floor is actually three storeys high.

And the last property and the most interesting one is right up at the corner. The first owner after it was subdivided was John Chilton Lambton Carter, who was Napier’s second Provincial Superintendent; came from aristocratic families, the Chilton family and the Lambton family. That’s Lambton Castle at the bottom right, where some of his distant relatives live … still do. And the Coats of Arms of the Chilton [family] and the Lambton family. He came here from India with his wife and six children, I think, and he bought this property, and then his wife died and so he married the sixteen year old girl who looked after the children. And they had two more children; then he died and she married Mr Margoliouth and had several more children. Mrs Margoliouth lived to a ripe old age in this property. When I was researching this book I had a lot of information from a website called Papers Past, which … I just put in ‘Milton Terrace’, and hundreds and hundreds of references came up to do with Milton Terrace. And one that constantly recurred was Mrs Margoliouth advertising for domestic staff almost on a weekly basis, [chuckles] so either there was a great shortage of domestic staff, or she was an awful employer.

In her later years she was friendly with Algernon Gray Tollemache, who was an aristocratic Englishman whose family owned Ham House which is now a National Trust property. There it is in about 1890, and as it is today. Mr Tollemache who came out to New Zealand … he was the younger son of the Tollemache family; he made a lot of money out here and then went back to England. There’s a Tollemache Road near Hastings named after him. And he bought a lot of property around here, all this property I think, on her behalf; and … well, it actually appears from the copies of letters I was given by Mrs Margoliouth’s descendants that he was buying it with his own money and giving it to her. He seemed to think very highly of her. In one of his letters he says, ‘Generally women are not considered to be skilled in business but I do not find this to be the case with you.’ [Chuckles] When he died he left her £95,000, in 1893 I think, which is [was] an awful lot of money then.

So the land he was buying – some of it was owned by Thomas Gore Browne who was Governor of New Zealand, but didn’t seem to have any other connection with New Zealand … there were with Napier … other than that he had land here. And all the land that Algernon bought for Mrs Margoliouth was used to subdivide to form Lambton Road, part of Coleman Terrace, and Chilton Road … Lambton and Chilton Roads named after Captain Carter’s first names. So Mrs Margoliouth must’ve been a very wealthy woman by the time she’d sold all these properties.

And there were two houses on the property, one built for Captain Carter’s son which is now this one, [a] lovely old home owned by John and Colleen Gahagan, which was lived in [in] my childhood by JG Wilson, who was an accountant in Napier and Session Clerk at St Paul’s Church.

There’s Mrs Margoliouth in old age, and her grave at the cemetery; and Captain Carter’s grave. And the family – the descendants of the first wife of Captain Carter – have added a little plaque with her name on too. I don’t know how Mrs Margoliouth would feel about having the first wife’s name on her grave. [Chuckles]

So after Mrs Margoliouth died in 1929, the old house you can see on the left was bought by Bill Angus, the builder, and that’s Mrs Angus in front of it. Bill Angus had started his building firm in Hawke’s Bay, and built a number of the major buildings here after the earthquake. By the 1930s a large part of his operations were happening in Wellington; he was a major building firm in New Zealand. And he bought the property and demolished the old house and built this new one, which was an unusual house designed by his son, Douglas Angus, an architect in Hamilton. The front has a Frank Lloyd Wright influence and it even includes a lot landscaping with terracing and patios. The back looked more like a prison from the street – it was brick, flat roof with this balustrade around it, and a staircase that you could walk up outside and walk all over the roof, with narrow, slit windows painted battleship grey, so from the street it looked really grim, and you couldn’t really see this side of it. The Angus’s only lived there occasionally; they just came up from Waikanae where they lived, and visited for short brief spells. But they were living there in 1942 when Rita Angus, their daughter, the painter, had a nervous breakdown after she miscarried a baby fathered by Douglas Milburn, and came home for a few months. That’s how Rita looked at that time; that’s a self portrait of her. And she wrote a letter to Winston Kerner from Milton Terrace … that letter says Number 2 Milton Terrace at the top … and she’s illustrated the letter with little watercolours:

‘Dear Winston,

Today has been very windy and stormy. Next week I am travelling by car, by train and by boat. We hope to see you all soon,

Love,

Rita’

[Chuckles]

When the house was bought … well Mrs Angus continued to live there long after Bill had died, and it was bought in the early seventies after she died by Doug Knight, the surgeon, and his wife, Alice, and they put a top floor on designed by Paris Magdalinos which has made the house a lot more appealing from the street. And a few years ago their garage door was tagged, so they had it painted. And I didn’t realise for some time what the design was all about until I happened to be looking through the biography of Rita Angus and found one of her paintings called ‘Growth’, of 1968, and that’s it, on the garage door. They reproduced one of her few non-representational paintings.

So the street has changed a great deal. There’s the street now on the left, and looking up, as I said, there were some huge trees on what was the Angus’s property, German oaks, which are the most awful trees. They leave a carpet of leaves that never decay; they blocked the sun from the house across the road, but the Knights don’t seem to be interested in paying the enormous cost to get rid of them.

Top left is a photograph taken of Milton Terrace from Milton Road about 1900. The three houses in the foreground have all gone now, the one on the right is the one that I grew up in. The second photo was taken from the same spot in 1953; of course the inner harbour is now dry land and the last one is taken by me earlier this year with the trees growing up the cliff blocking some of the view. The Norfolk pine you can see, it’s visible in all three photos, somewhere just up there.

And these are two aerial photos taken of Milton Terrace; the first one is not very clear because it was taken by the Air Force. They didn’t have a camera of the quality of Aerial Mapping’s cameras so it’s not very clear, but taken in 1936. The one on the right taken in 1950 shows the street pretty much unchanged from 1936 – you can see how much empty land there is all around here. There are ten houses there at that stage; as I said, there are now seventeen. And that’s a photo taken from Google Earth of the street now. So it’s nothing like it used to be, and sometimes I look at it and I think it’s sad that it’s lost so many trees and it’s so full of houses and garages, most of which are on the street because the sites are too steep for cars to be got onto the sites. But it’s still a nice place to live and has some great views. So that is the end of my story.

[Applause]

This the book that I produced if you want to have a look at that I have some copies here.

Thank you very much indeed, Robert – are there any questions?

Question: [What] was the reason for which the building inspections meant that this person had to build two dwellings on the site rather than one?

Robert: Well there was a housing shortage after the war, and there was a shortage of building materials because so many of them were imported. One of the reasons why so many Art Deco houses were built after the war was because you couldn’t get corrugated iron and you had to have flat roofs with bitumen. You know, people didn’t want flat-roofed houses but they didn’t have any choice. So it wasn’t until the wool boom of 1951, ‘52 that suddenly all these restrictions were lifted.

Reply: So they were just trying to maximise the site?

Robert: Well, the Government was trying to create more houses, but they were also trying to limit new construction really, I think, because we didn’t have the overseas funds perhaps, to pay for imported materials.

Question: Did you say that the house that you own part of the section and David Marshall owns part of the section …

Robert: Yeah.

Reply: I’m just wondering how that works?

Robert: Well the section was cut into two titles. You’re talking about the summer house that we jointly own? When the Titters bought the property we were told by the Titters’ neighbours that the Titters were obsessed about the boundaries, and anything that grew over the top of the fence would be hacked off. [Chuckles] And they told us that the summer house had to go, they couldn’t possibly have it over the boundary. We didn’t know what to do because it could’ve been moved, but we couldn’t think of anywhere else where it could go that it would look right. So when he decided to sell it and the Marshalls bought it, they were quite happy to have it, ‘cause it’s quite picturesque-looking and it didn’t really bother them that it jutted out. However, it was hit twice by trucks during the building of their house and one side of it moved about six inches. But the builders put it back and put some extra bracing in. So ever since I can remember it was used to keep the lawnmower in and the firewood in, and it had a door on it. I decided that in return for the Marshalls allowing us to keep it, I would take the door off and turn it into the shade house which they can look into; in fact, they see into it more than I do. And so I have it with ferns and bromeliads and things growing in it. It’s actually too shady to be a shade house ‘cause it’s got a solid roof, but it works quite well so they’re quite happy.

Question: Was there at some stage a rest home up there somewhere? I can remember very vaguely as a small girl, I had an aunt who was in charge of one, and I thought we went up Milton Road?

Robert: Not in Milton Terrace, and I can’t think of one in Milton Road. But I didn’t mention the oil company; Amners Lime Works … in this photo, there’s the Lime Works. They quarried the hill back to the point where Roslyn Road was actually undermined and there was a slip, so Roslyn Road is closed – you can’t drive right around it, you have to walk. Then presumably during the war Caltex built their oil storage tanks here, probably because they felt they wouldn’t be seen from the sea by the Japanese invaders. And it wasn’t until about 1980, I think, that the oil companies moved out and it was developed into the houses that you see here now. And this is Amner Place named after the Amner family who operated the lime quarry. I just wish I had taken photos of the oil tanks when they were there; it never occurred to me to do it. Funny place to have oil tanks in the middle of a residential area.

Question: I was interested in finding out why that person was allowed by Council to put so much concrete down?

Robert: You don’t have to have a permit to lay concrete [chuckle] … to cover your section with concrete.

Last night I was rung by Jenny Foster who lives in Coleman Terrace, who said that the Coleman Terrace people wanted to write a history like this one, and would I come and help them. [Chuckles] And [coughing] that’s a street where you could do this because although it’s not a cul de sac, everybody tends to know each other there, and there’d be lots of stories that could be put together.

Question: So you had the Norfolk Pines up there; when were the pines planted on Marine Parade?

Robert: 1890.

Question: I was inclined to ask about Husheer when he lived there when you mentioned him, ‘cause he had a house here in Havelock …

Robert: Yes, well the house that I referred to was Ingolf Husheer, one of the sons of Gerhard Husheer. Gerhard Husheer owned three houses in Elizabeth Road, and when they were damaged after the earthquake, instead of camping on the lawn like other people did, he bought a house in Havelock North. A big one! Which is now Duart Hospital Aged Care Centre.

Reply: And spent the weekends there?

Robert: Yes. Well, just the day I think. My mother’s cousin was married to Ingolf Husheer, and one day Auntie Ilna, as we called her, invited us to go over to Duart House for afternoon tea. And I had never set eyes on this fabled Gerhard Husheer; occasionally I’d see the Pierce Arrow parked in town, but I was always curious about Grandfather Husheer, as he was called. So I was quite excited, we were going to go and have afternoon tea and we’d finally meet Grandfather and Grandmother Husheer. And as we drove along the Marine Parade what should be see but the Pierce Arrow driving in [laughter] the opposite direction. So when we got out there we had tea with Auntie Ilna and Uncle Ingolf, and still didn’t meet Grandfather and Grandmother Husheer. So they’d obviously gone for part of the day, and didn’t even stay for afternoon tea.

Question: One last question – Louis Hay used a lot of brick and that was [coughing] long before the earthquake?

Robert: Well some of the brick walls that he built around his property might’ve been built before the earthquake. He used brick on three buildings in Napier after the earthquake, but they’re reinforced concrete buildings with a skin of brickwork over them, so they’re not of brick construction.

Thank you very much indeed for a fascinating story, and you know, an insight into Milton Terrace, and thank you very much indeed.

[Applause]