Moses Spence

Working Bee at Tauranga Hospital, with Moses Spence seated at centre (X), c. 1900s-1910s
Unmounted large format print by unidentified photographer
Tauranga Heritage Collection, Ref. 0435/08

The above image in the Tauranga Heritage Collection depicting a working bee at the Tauranga Hospital, taken early in the 20^th century, intrigued me. A group of men with shovels and a wheelbarrow along with some nurses, all anonymous except for a man marked with an X.  He was Moses Spence and said to be chairman of the hospital board.  This turned out not be entirely accurate: Moses Spence was elected a member, but not chairman of the Bay of Plenty Hospital and Charitable Aid Board in 1911. One cannot imagine a member of our former DHB turning up shovel in hand to do a bit of work about the place.

So, who was Moses Spence? 

Mr Berry outside Moses Spence’s store, Tauranga, c. 1900
Mounted print by unidentified photographer
Collection of Tauranga City Library, Pae Korokī Ref. 01-467

Born in County Armagh, Ireland, Moses Spence joined George Vesey Stewart’s Special Settlers and sailed to New Zealand on the Lady Jocelyn.  It was the only emigrant ship to arrive in the Port of Tauranga and did so in January 1881. Spence drew a farm of 160 acres near Te Puke that he developed and where he persuaded his brother Samuel to join him.  Samuel had emigrated some years before Moses and farmed in the South Island.  Between them the brothers developed several farms including some that had been abandoned by other settlers.

Rev. James Richards in Moses Spence’s gig, c. 1904
Collection of Tauranga City Library, Pae Korokī Ref. 04-460

By 1887 Spence was working for R.C. Roberts, a grain and seed merchant in Tauranga, and the following year opened his own business with partner Phillip Bennet. By the 1890s the partnership dissolved and Spence added to the grain and seed side, selling fertiliser as an agent for Kempthorne Prosser, and selling their flour and bran for the Waimapu Flour Mill.  In 1893 he bought out Carlos Kramer Walters’ share of the Maketu store. He purchased shares in the Herald Gold Mining Company of Whangamata and in the Te Puke Gold Mining Company.

Building Bee at Methodist Church Hall, Tauranga, 1 January 1914
(Moses Spence standing hatless in middle row at far left)
Collection of Tauranga City Library, Pae Korokī Ref. 04-459

Meanwhile he took an active part in the Tauranga Methodist Church, where he sang in their concerts and was involved in building the first Methodist Church on the corner of First Avenue and Devonport Road. In 1897 Moses Spence was elected to the Tauranga Borough Council, then successfully stood for Waimapu Riding of the Tauranga County Council in 1908, and the Hospital and Charitable Aid Board in 1911.  In 1900 he took the first of three trips back to Ireland.

Moses Spence’s gravestone, Tauranga Methodist Cemetery, February 2023
Photographed by Justine Neal

He never married but gave away the daughter of his late brother Samuel when she married in 1918. He moved to Auckland in about 1920 to live near his brother’s family but returned frequently to visit Tauranga for events like the A & P Show. Moses Spence died in Auckland aged 90 in 1942 and was buried in the Tauranga Methodist Cemetery alongside Samuel and Maggie Spence.

Sources

Shearer, Dr. The Hon. Ian, and Wright-StClair, Dr Rex, A Century on Cameron Road. A History of Tauranga Hospital 1914-2014, Tauranga, 2016.

Bay of Plenty Times, Papers Past

Henderson Brothers' Sawmill, Upper Kaimai (Part One)

by John and Julie Green

Alf and Dave Henderson working on a kauri tree

Alfred Henderson was born in 1882 in Whitianga and developed his love of working with timber at a young age. His first job at twelve was as a “pack boy” with the driver of a bullock team in the local kauri forests. Next, he went tree felling with his cousin Dave. He met his future wife Laura Adamson in Thames and they were married there in 1905, with twins following soon after. He soon became bush manager for Ellis & Burnand at Mananui in the King Country, where they had four more children. Before 1914 they bought land near Rotorua and Alf continued to do bush work to help finance the farm. The whole family survived the flu epidemic and a serious house fire in the 1920s, after which they moved to urban Hamilton. 

Travelling to work, bushman-style

Alf began logging and milling white pine near Aria in the King Country in the early 30s, at the height of the depression, and his son Roy was a hauler driver. The workers were busy ten hours a day, six days a week - they earned four pounds per week, a decent income in very hard times. However, the conditions under which they worked and lived were very primitive. The kahikatea grew in swamps where the men had to wear waders. Wielding their crosscut saws and axes and moving the felled logs in this terrain would have been challenging. Roy met and married local girl Dorothy Williams and their first home was a leaky lean-to on the side of the mill office. There were eight married and six single men and their unlined houses were very basic with no plumbing or electricity. The roofs leaked as corrugated iron was re-nailed each time the houses were moved to remain near the work sites. 

Back of the mill and shed housing the Judd steam hauler

By 1936 the call for timber milling was increasing and the white pine getting scarcer, so the Henderson Timber Company was formed by Alf and his much younger brother Fred. They bought the rimu milling rights for a hundred acres at top of the Kaimai Range. Most of the men and families from the Aria camp relocated to the new site, where a mill was constructed to harvest rimu for the local Tauranga and Waikato building trades. Harry Christian from Lower Kaimai was the mill carpenter, while Charlie Anderson was manager (from 1936 to 1945), blacksmith and planer operator. After a couple of years there Fred set up his own mill in Matamata in 1937 and later supplied pine boxing timber for the construction of the Karapiro Dam. Their nephew Harold was involved in carting timber from both mills.

Judd steam-hauler being relocated

The Kaimai mill was electric-powered, but the felled logs were hauled directly to the mill skids by a large Judd steam-powered hauler. As the logging operations moved further from the mill a tramline was constructed and the Judd hauler was moved out into the bush. A second hauler was introduced later, with logs being dragged from one to the other to save extending the tramline.

Rake of logs leaving for the mill (note size of rimu logs compared to workers)

There were two petrol-powered rail tractors and eventually 11.5 km of tramlines for transporting the logs. One was a 1926 Fordson farm tractor converted to run on rails by the Union Foundry in Stratford, the other a 1930s Graham Page truck converted for rail use in 1937 by the Tuakau Motor Garage. Three trucks were used: a Diamond T, an International and a Ford articulated transporter. Another block of bush near Ngamuwahine was also selectively logged by Frank Wilcox, and logs carried up to the mill with an ex-army GMC truck.

In the early 1950s Alf was concerned that there were still large quantities of tawa standing unused and so, along with other millers in the district (see blog article on Tuhi Harvey), a treatment procedure was developed. The extra timber was then able to be felled, milled, treated and utilized, mainly as flooring.

Roy Henderson on his RD7 Caterpillar

Alf’s son Roy drove an RD7 bulldozer on contract, and would take Dolly the draught horse up into the bush each Monday morning, where she dragged the winch ropes to the felled logs. He would take food up there for her each day and bring her home at the end of the working week. His daughter Jean recalls that on Friday nights she and her siblings would go to meet their father and ride down to the mill village on Dolly. In the early 1940s Roy had a nasty accident when a log bridge he was crossing gave way. The family moved down to Tauranga and, after a slow recovery from a punctured lung, he returned to work in the bush daily.

Mill workers

Alf’s other son Bob was the office clerk and yardman. He spent the war years away, about four of them as a POW. Sometime after his return, he married and had a family; they lived in Tauranga, but Bob remained working at the mill until it closed in 1957.

Part 2 to follow

Sources

Memories of the time we lived at Upper Kaimai, 1936-1945, by Eddy Anderson
Henderson Mill, a Landmark, by Ron Lipinski, Bay of Plenty Times, 25/10/2006
Sawmilling Days in the King Country and Kaimai Range from 1933-1945, by Dorothy Henderson
Recollections of the Henderson Timber Company’s Mill, by Dorothy Henderson
More Recollections of Mill Operations, by Bob Henderson (appeared in a 1988 booklet, Kaimai Revisited - 75th Jubilee of the Kaimai School)
The Era of the Bush Tram in New Zealand, by Paul Mahoney, Transpress, 2004
Personal recollections of Jean Cole (daughter of Roy Henderson) and Esme Crawford (daughter of Fred Henderson)
Help with initial images Bill Coster, long time Kaimai Resident
Images courtesy of the Cole family