Summer Heartbreak Remembered 120 years on

 

Boer War veterans with enteric fever return to New Zealand
The New Zealand Graphic and Ladies Journal, 22 September 1900
Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, Ref. NZG-19000922-0544-01

“In January 1903, a great blow struck this little town when an epidemic of enteric fever swept through the district carrying off our baby sister, as well as dozens of other children. This might have been the aftermath of the Boer War – or caused by impure water supply but as we were still using individual tank or well water the latter could hardly be blamed. However, the community mourned this tragedy for a long time.”[i]

Historian Jinty Rorke once told me that she approached oral histories and personal reminiscences with a degree of caution, wary of incorrect facts and false memories obscuring events that had occurred years prior. Recently I was reminded of Jinty’s words when I came across this quote in a 1963 Tauranga Historical Society journal. Surely, dozens of Tauranga children dying of enteric fever over the course of a single month would be a well-remembered and sad chapter in our town’s history - even if it occurred more than 100 years ago.[ii] I knew I needed to investigate, especially as, in my experience, truth can dwell within the fallibility of memory.

Learning the name of the baby sister ‘carried off’ was my starting point. Fortunately, the writer, Mrs Rennie Gordon, provided a clue in the form of her maiden name - Daines.[iii]  A search of the Bay of Plenty Times produced this death notice: [iv]

The same edition of the paper also yielded information supporting Mrs Gordon’s account - an article which made it clear that Laura was one of several children who died of a ‘dysenteric complaint’ at the beginning of 1903:[v]

 

Laura is buried in the Catholic Cemetery with her parents Edward and Katie Daines. The first image was taken several years ago and the second is the current state. (Images courtesy of Fiona Kean, Private Collection & https://www.tauranga.govt.nz/council/services/cemeteries/cemeteries-search)

Further research produced the names of several children, amongst the pakeha population, who died of the ‘complaint’ in January 1903:

Edward Francis Castaing (aged 7 months)

Arthur Harold Jackson Smith (aged 4 years)

Robert (Roddie) Henry Smallbone (aged 5 years)

Frances (Fanny) Constance (aged 13 months)

Tom Eric Griffith (aged 4 months)

More deaths occurred in the ensuing months, and it seems likely the true number will never be known. [vi] However, the Department of Public Health Report for 1902-1903 documented that:

“Tauranga Borough has suffered, like Rotorua, from an outbreak of diarrhoea, especially among children; sixteen deaths occurring from this cause in six months. This, in a population of a thousand persons, shows an alarmingly high death rate.”[vii]

The deaths were not attributed to enteric fever but were believed to have been the result of summer diarrhoea - a worldwide phenomenon whose cause is still not fully understood:[viii]

“In January, February, and March 1903 an unusual number of cases of diarrhoea occurred in Tauranga and Rotorua, the illness being severe and of a dysenteric type … the sufferers were chiefly children and a number of deaths occurred in both places. Probably this is more of the nature of the summer diarrhoea commonly found in places where there is pollution of the soil by sewage, as this condition obtains in both Tauranga and Rotorua … In conclusion I would again draw attention to the necessity for placing acute diarrhoea on the list of notifiable diseases, since it is only by chance reports that serious outbreaks are discovered.”[ix]

At this point it would be natural to wonder what was done in Tauranga to combat the spread of the disease and to save lives. According to the Health Department’s report, very little: “Recommendations to the Council as to improvements in the night-soil service, and the protection of public wells, have not resulted in any action being taken.”[x] This is corroborated by a politically motivated letter to the editor written in April 1903. The writer, M. J. Stewart, asserts that Councillors were more concerned about keeping rates low than saving young lives:

“At the coming elections will the people of Tauranga, with whom the onus lies, return only men to the Council who will stop the sacrifice of little children to the Moloch of low rates and the party vote?[xi] It is deplorable that party should enter into a question of life and death at all, but it is a plain fact that one side stands for the Rights of Man and one for the Rights of Property, and there is no sign that those in the latter, who run the Council, have any conception that on their heads is the responsibility for the Massacre of the Innocents by municipal neglect of plain duty. It is deeply to be hoped that the sufferers will only choose Councillors of a stamp to whom sanitation and not cheapness will be the first object.”[xii]

Laura’s death had a significant impact on her older sister Rennie, who never forgot about her family’s loss, or the losses suffered by other Tauranga families in the summer of 1903. And although 60 years later all the facts of the tragedy might not have been at her disposal, the heartbreak she felt was. Rennie’s memories give us a glimpse of what she experienced and allow us to better understand how communities are changed - or not changed - by heartbreak such as this. Perhaps in one-hundred-and twenty-years’ time those looking back at the impact of coronavirus will turn to oral histories and personal reminiscences for the same reason.

References

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[i] Mrs D.L. Gordon, ‘My Story – And Yours, Perhaps’, Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society, No.17, 1963.

[ii] Enteric fever or typhoid fever is caused by eating food or drinking fluid contaminated with Salmonella typhi bacteria. It can cause high temperatures, stomach pain, constipation, or diarrhoea.

[iii] Rennie Daines (b.1891) married Douglas Gordon in December 1946. Rennie was a well-known teacher and local identity.

[iv] Bay of Plenty Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4405, 2 February 1903.

[v] Bay of Plenty Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4405, 2 February 1903.

[vi] Percy Edward Wayte (aged 11 months), Susan McDowell (aged 2 years 11 months), Christina Victoria (aged 1 year 9 months), Madge Haliday (aged 5 years), Henry Tanner (aged 2 years 10 months).

[vii] Department of Public Health (Report of the), By the Chief Health Officer, Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1903 Session I, H-31, (page 25).

[viii] For more information on summer diarrhoea see ‘The phenomenon of summer diarrhea [sic] and its waning, 1910-1930’ by American academics Anderson, Rees and Wang www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8112734/ 

[ix] Department of Public Health (Report of The), By the Chief Health Officer, Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1903 Session I, H-31, (page 9-10).

[x] Department of Public Health (Report of The), By the Chief Health Officer, Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1903 Session I, H-31, (page 25).

[xi] “A Canaanite deity associated in biblical sources with the practice of child sacrifice” – Britannica.

[xii] Bay of Plenty Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4436, 17 April 1903.

Tauranga Photographers: Alf Rendell

Alf Rendell and the Tauranga Aero Club Tiger Moth that he used for aerial photography
Photograph by Lee Switzer, 2006
Lee Switzer Photographic Collection, Tauranga City Library, Pae Korokī

It was perhaps inevitable that Alf Rendell would become a photographer. He was born in 1917, son of Whakatāne photographer Robert John Rendell who had plied his trade throughout the central and eastern North Island for at least the previous two decades. When Alf was a mere eight months old the family moved to Tauranga, Bob Rendell becoming a meter reader for the Power Board while taking photographs for the Auckland Weekly News. Eventually Rendell senior purchased the existing business of Robert Meers in 1926, situated in the old Triangle building at the bottom of Devonport Road, and he soon became the town’s leading, and most prolific, studio and scenic photographer.

The Strand from Taumatakahawai Pa, 1949
Photographed by Alfred H. Rendell, hand-coloured by his sister Marjorie West
Tauranga City Library, Pae Korokī Ref. 99-385

Alf left school in 1934 during the Depression. He had little chance of finding a job so he started working for his father, following the footsteps of his older sister Marj (Marjorie) who was already working in the darkroom and hand-colouring prints. He soon graduated to taking photos himself using a half-plate camera with glass plates to produce scenic postcards, printed by the thousand, and cut film (5”x4”), film packs and roll film for other large and medium format work.

Mauao from Otumoetai, c. 1950
Photographed by Alfred H. Rendell, hand-coloured by Marjorie West
Tauranga Heritage Collection, Ref. 0243/11

At the end of 1938 his father retired due to ill health. Alf took over business in January 1939, moving from the Triangle building to premises further up Devonport Road at No 10 (opposite the Star Hotel), and running it as a retail photographic shop. He also did outdoor photography, mostly on the weekends, including taking a number of yachting photographs, and keeping him extremely busy. The shop had to be closed when he went into the army in 1941, after the outbreak of the Second World War.

Allen Unsworth Subdivision, Omokoroa Peninsula from the air, 15 August 1956
Photographed by Alfred H. Rendell, hand-coloured by Marjorie West
Tauranga City Library, Pae Korokī Ref. 21-1307

Alf initially served in an infantry battalion (34^th Battalion, 3^rd Division), garrisoned on the island of Tongatapu (Kingdom of Tonga) from October 1942 until March 1943. On arrival they were ordered to hand in their cameras but Alf, with credentials as a professional photographer and a good stock of film, was selected to be the Battalion photographer. He was issued with a bicycle, given permission to roam the island, and took photographs of local Tongans during his spare time (Fioan Kean, pers. comm.) He was soon transferred to the Public Relations Group, and then spent the rest of the war in New Caledonia, running a ramshackle dark room with “very, very modest” equipment, printing and publishing press and archival photos taken all over the Pacific theatre, including the Solomon Islands. Occasionally Alf would get out to take photographs, for which he used a large format Speed Graphic press camera with cut film.

B

Rendell’s Camera House (at right), Devonport Road, July 1965
Photograph by Bay of Plenty Times staff photographer
Tauranga City Library, Gifford-Cross Photographic Series, Ref. gca-9714

After three years overseas, Alf returned to Tauranga in 1945 on being demobilized from the army and started his business almost from scratch. Fortunately, his landlord had reserved his old premises downstairs in the “old Chrysler building,” for him while he was away. Materials were in very short supply in the first few years, but he opened the retail shop, did outdoor work on the weekends, and took candid photographs from a small canvas studio set up in the street. Glass plates were out, and film was in. Street photography had become very popular during the war, a trend probably popularized by American servicemen on their way to and from the Pacific. His postcard views included the ever popular views of the Strand, the gardens and the floral ship.

Greerton from the air, looking down Cameron Road, 1950s
Photographed by Alfred H. Rendell, hand-coloured by Marjorie West
Tauranga City Library, Pae Korokī Ref. 12-625

In the mid- to late 1940s oblique aerial photos, and in particular hand-coloured enlarged prints, were being popularized countrywide by White’s Aviation and a number of other operators. Alf started to use the Tauranga Aero Club’s Tiger Moth as a platform for taking a series of views that showed a rapidly growing Tauranga. He described the experience as tricky, requiring him to be seated in the front cockpit and operating the camera over his shoulder while the plane travelled at an altitude of under 2000 feet. He also hired out movie projectors, which may have been a key reason to why he hardly ever had a moment to himself (Fiona Kean, pers. comm.)

Main Beach at Mount Maunganui, c. 1958
Photographed by Alfred H. Rendell, hand-coloured by Marjorie West
Tauranga City Library, Pae Korokī Ref. 21-1919

Other outside work included commissions for commercial buildings, school photos, wedding portraits, a variety of events and occasional press work, but he did not take studio portraits. He used a Linhof 5”x4” rangefinder on a tripod with cut film or film packs for large format work, Zeiss Ikon folding cameras and a Rolleiflex twin-lens-reflex – his favourite – with 120-format roll-film for other work.

When he opened a studio in Cameron Road in the late 1940s, Alf employed an assistant who had previously employed at Amy Harper’s fashionable Belwood Studios in Auckland’s Queen Street and Karangahape Road, and who came up with the name Renwood Studios, which was used for the new business. In 1957 he sold the outdoors part of that business to assistant Adrian Orr, who then went out on his own, opening premises in East’s Building, Devonport Road. Alf continued with the photographic supplies retail shop. Although he needed to be on the premises from 8am until the close of business at 5pm every weekday, this gave him some freedom for family and other pursuits at weekend. In the twelve years since the war ended, Alf had taken only two four-day breaks from his business.

From the early 1960s his son Graham came to work for him. They built a branch at 155 Maunganui Road, Mt. Maunganui, opened in 1970, with a small studio and retail outlet, and where Alf’s wife Joan operated a gift shop.

Bernie Judd, Alf Rendell (right) and Rendells Camera House, Devonport Road, December 1974
Photograph by Bay of Plenty Times staff photographer
Tauranga City Library, Gifford-Cross Photographic Series, Ref. gcc-27235

When the building his shop was in was demolished in July 1972, Alf bought out the business of Jim Kirk, who had a little shop in the Regent Theatre building, and operated from there until the new Bay Savings Bank building was finished in December 1974, when he moved back in. He sold the branch at the Mount in 1975, when Graham took over the Tauranga shop and Alf helped out part-time for the next four to five years. Graham started another retail shop in the Mid City Mall across the road on the corner of Spring Street in 1974, named Mid City Fast Photos. The business was later sold to Ashley’s Magnificent Photo Shop.

Alf didn’t keep count of the photographs he had taken, but the films used for postcard production (each containing 8, 12 or 14 exposures) were numbered and reached eight or nine thousand. A further series of other films was numbered up to around 2000. At a conservative estimate, that amounts to perhaps 100,000 photographs. Alf died in December 2019, aged 102, leaving a huge legacy of prints and negatives in Tauranga’s institutions and homes, and a place in our hearts. Thank you Alf, for your friendship to many and huge generosity to anyone who showed an interest in your work. You are missed.

Alf Rendell loading a Rolleiflex camera, 2015
© Moana Bianchin | cloudnine.co.nz

Alf Rendell may not have needed much introduction to long time residents of Tauranga, where he lived almost his entire life, or to members of the Society, of which he was an active and long-time member. He and his photographs have featured in Journal articles and in the magnificent volume Rendell’s Tauranga accompanied by an exhibition eight years ago, prepared with Fiona Kean. A 1997-1998 interview with Alf by Jinty Rorke has recently been digitized and made available on the Tauranga Library’s Pae Korokī digital resource, supplemented with a second interview by Harley Couper in 2012. This account leans heavily on material gathered during both of these interviews, as well as in numerous informal conversations with Alf by Fiona Kean and myself.

References

Payne, Brett (2014) Omokoroa Point, by Alf Rendell, Tauranga Historical Society Blog, 30 Sep 2014

Payne, Brett (2018) Robert John Rendell, Historical Review, Bay of Plenty Journal of History, Vol 66, No 2, p19-26

Kean, Fiona (2013) Alf Rendell, photographer, Tauranga Historical Society Blog, 2 Aug 2013

Kean, Fiona (2015) Rendell’s Tauranga: Historic Tauranga from Above, Tauranga Historical Society Blog, 30 Oct 2015

Kean, Fiona (2019) Alf Rendell turns 102, Tauranga Historical Society Blog, 2 Nov 2019

Kean, Fiona (2020) Alf Rendell, 1917-2019, Tauranga Historical Society Blog, 28 Jan 2020

Rendell, Alfred H. & Couper, Harley (2012) Alf Rendell interviewed by Harley Couper for the Tauranga Memories website, Tauranga, 2012, Digital file, Tauranga City Library, Pae Korokī.

Rendell, Alfred H. & Kean, Fiona (2015) Rendell’s Tauranga: Historic Tauranga from Above. Paper Plus, Tauranga

Rendell, Alfred H. & Rorke, Jinty (1998) A. (Alf) H. Rendell (1917-2019) interviewed by Jinty Rorke, 1997-1998, Digitised Video8 Tape, Tauranga City Library, Pae Korokī Ref. AV 21-002/21

The Newsletter: A Moment in Historical Research

Extract from Tauranga Historical Society Journal, Aug 1971

For someone seeking a sense of the local energies at work in any given social moment between, say, 1950 and about 2010, the search term, “newsletter” will prove to be unexpectedly powerful.  It is plain, from even a simple exploration of the records held on Pae Koroki, that the (usually) month-to-month business of putting together a set of pages designed to encourage, entertain and inform a (usually) captive audience can be a rich and apt illustration of historical force and even importance.  Provided, of course, your research field is timed to be after the cyclostyle machine and before Facebook.

Two hundred and thirty results – 129 of them digitized - from Pae Koroki show the power of the newsletter as an instrument of history.  Where better to start than with an example from our own Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society, August 1972:

Observant readers will note the search-term in the white field on the upper left; and the power of the search engine to drill deep into the digitised document to find the exact match at the centre of the image, mauve. 

Newsletter policy can be important.  In the Tauranga Historical Society, for instance, the Journal was the place for long-form, considered and often rather scholarly writing.  The Journals were intended to be kept and were archived by the Society as well as being made available to the public library (and, eventually, digitized on Pae Koroki).  Newsletters, on the other hand, were intended to fill the gap between Journal publications with updates and administrative details about near-future activities.  Their shelf-life was brief and few early examples survive.  In practice, however, there was a lot of overlap, as can be seen from the extract above.

Compare this approach with that of the Hauraki News[1]:

Cover of Hauraki News, No 11, May 1998

.. a cheerful (and enduring) mix of serious military history, ceremonial commemorations, personal reminiscence and soldierly cartoons, firmly in the tradition of WW1 trench newspapers[2].

Title Page of Trench Echo, Easter 1916

No doubt these both were considered to be ephemera, things of the moment, intentionally disposable.

But not always.

A sad event in Te Puna – the disestablishment of its Community Library – led to the acquisition, for the Te Puna Archive, of a near-complete series of the Pirirakau “X”Press.  Some 29 issues of the 36 numbers that came out over the period February 2002- 2004 were accumulated in a humble cardboard standing file, labelled, but with no accession number or other catalogue information.

 

Pirirakau "X"Press standing file

It turns out that a full series of the Pirirakau “X”Press  is held at the Tauranga Public Library, although it has not yet been digitised or accessioned on Pae Koroki.

The holding at the Te Puna Archive represents the second iteration of the “X” Press, which had an earlier life between 1994 and 1998, at the inception of Mark Nicholas, who took over the Chair of the Pirirakau Incorporated Society with the aim to keep people informed in the face of diminishing attendance at meetings.  He also wanted to collect Pirirakau history, and to funnel this into what became the WAI277 claim.  The “X”Press was a means of gathering and spreading information on the process of the claim before the Waitangi Tribunal.  Funding was provided by the Crown Forestry Rental Trust.

Your writer knows all this from a recent interview with the editor of the “X”Press, Chrissie Rolleston[3].  When CFRT funding ran out, at Issue No. 37 in 1998, people found that they missed this link with their past and their future.  With the residue of CFRT funding and a pretty prompt injection from the Lottery Grants Board, publication resumed in 2002.  The second series of the newsletter is another lively mix of history notes, often contributed by Patrick Nicholas, news items and practical panui, legal articles that came through from the team working on the WAI277 claim, personal reminiscences and adventures, an op-ed column from a hard-headed woman pseudonym’d Panemaaro, quizzes to stimulate the critical reader (and the purchase of the next issue, which had the answers) and a great deal of reo.  At the front: usually a mihi from an eminent Pirirakau personage and always Nga Mate o te Marama – those who had passed away.

Chrissie Rolleston
Photograph by Beth Bowden

Chrissie put the publication together on a computer at the Pirirakau Environment Centre, and printed it using variably reliable photocopiers, often having to clear jammed paper in the middle of the night.  Print run:  about 200.  “The problem was,” says Chrissie, “that people loved the “X”Press and sent it on and around their whanau.  They didn’t get that they should take out a subscription to help it go on.”

So, the Pirirakau “X”Press ran out of steam.  Valiant but sad messages in the last three issues show that efforts were made to maintain its flagging inputs and rising costs.  The writing, however, was on the Facebook wall:  social media would soon overtake the solid look and feel of a folded A4, black and white, mail-delivered magazine.   So many things together amount to an historical force, one that is generally recognised but rarely locally documented.  The story of the Pirirakau “X”Press is a real example of the impact and consequences of relinquishing expensive print to ‘free’ web-based publication[4].  Easy to access; very very hard to archive.

Parish records, rent rolls, proceedings under the Black Act[5] and the Inquisition[6] have all provided rich source material to European historians.  A search for original voices among source materials available to local NZ historians need not be confined to diaries and personal letters.  Those editors who troubled to collate and publish (and send to their local library) the notes and heartfelt contributions from the communities they were working within have also created a resource in which the authentic reactions of locals, beset by larger historical forces, can be identified.

References

[1] An example: part of the May 1998 cover of the Official Newsletter of the 6^th Battalion (Hauraki) Regimental Association (1995-2012)

[2] Image credit: https://www.europeana.eu/nl/

[3] Kōrero on 5 December 2022, Oikimoke, Te Puna

[4] Corey Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, McSweeney’s 2015

[5] E P Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, Peregrine 1977

[6] Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, Penguin 1978 (trans. Barbara Bray)