We are so lucky to be in touch with the Harris Family descendants based here in New Zealand. This week we hear from one of them about their recollections. ________ I am Roseanne Cranstone (nee Briant), a great-great-granddaughter of Sarah Harris, who was one of the first settlers in New Plymouth. She is also the Read More…
News
Joining the Dots: England
Sometimes what was (the past) is a heartbeat away from what is (the present, ourselves standing in a particular location). Worlds coalesce for a moment and then move apart. Here are some highlights from our searches in England that seem to join the dots between one world and another. We are in Liskeard, Cornwall, and Read More…
What Happened at Ilchester Mansion
The clue was staring at us all along. Edwin’s youngest sister Ellen Susan Harris, writing to New Zealand in 1842, gives an insouciant account of leaving her position as a governess and then continues with family news: But I will say no more of myself as I think you will be better pleased to hear Read More…
Emily’s Plymouth, 1840
Can we reconstruct Emily Harris’s Plymouth from traces in family letters and what the city archivists can show us now? Nigel Overton takes us on a tour of central Plymouth based on material compiled by Graham Naylor from the addresses we forwarded a couple of weeks ago. It’s a magic experience that suddenly makes vivid Read More…
Edwin Harris, Interior of St Andrew’s Church, 1825
The year is 1896. Edwin Harris and his youngest daughter Ellen are dead, and Emily is living alone at 34 Nile St in Nelson. On black-edged notepaper she writes to her sister Mary Weyergang with some important news from England. A letter has come from cousin Bessie Harris in Plymouth, thanking Emily for the condolences Read More…
Emmanuel college, Leo Greenwood and Kareena
Leonard Hugh Graham Greenwood (1880-1965) was a New Zealand-born classicist who was a Fellow of Emmanuel college, Cambridge, between 1909 and 1943. He made periodic visits to family in New Zealand and continued to live at Emmanuel until his death at the age of 85. An obituary in the 1966 Emmanuel College Magazine begins: In Read More…
Kew and Clianthus puniceus
When botanist Daniel Solander went ashore 21 October 1769 at Anaura Bay in the East Cape district of the North Island of New Zealand, one of the first plants he collected was growing near the dwellings of the local people. The shrubs Solander saw were covered in clusters of bright red flowers and he named Read More…
Meadows and Lila: The Hobson Connection
Just a few minutes’ walk from Kensington Palace gardens is 44 Lancaster Gate, an elegant four-storey terrace in Bayswater. For many years this was the home of Stuart Rendel’s older brother Alexander Meadows Rendel (1829-1918), who was a prominent civil engineer and the driving force of the Rendel business after the death of his father Read More…
Mountain Flora: The Rendel Connection
We know where Emily Harris’s New Zealand Mountain Flora is now. It was an artist’s mock-up of the book she planned to publish, couldn’t afford and then sold to her English cousin Lord Stuart Rendel for his private collection. By way of the estate of collector Kenneth Webster, the Alexander Turnbull Library was able to Read More…
Emily at the Natural History Museum, London
As the onset of war in 1914 closed sea lanes to Europe and turned international scientific delegates for home sooner than planned, Emily Harris wrote to the Keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum in London: I have been looking forward for months for the visit of the Scientific visitors to New Zealand & Read More…