Jocelyn and the King of Siam

Jocelyn Dumbleton at Pilot Bay, c. 1930s-1940s
Tauranga Heritage Collection, Ref. 0211/21

Many of us remember the splendour of the great musical shows of the 1950s and 60s such as “My Fair Lady”, “Oklahoma” and “The King and I”. The latter was the story of the King of Siam’s desire to modernise and westernise his country, which he had protected from colonisation, and had an English governess teach his children. This world attracted Jocelyn Dumbleton, a young English civil engineer who specialized in designing and building railways, to apply for a position in the Siam (Thai) State Survey and Railways Departments.

Jocelyn Charles Dumbleton (1877 – 1964) was born in Southsea, Hampshire, educated in England, and died in Tauranga, New Zealand. He was the son of General Charles Dumbleton and brother to Arthur Dumbleton, who had arrived in New Zealand some years earlier and married one of the daughters of George Vesey Stewart in Katikati.

Dumbleton spent the years from 1902 to 1909 in the Siam State Survey Department, and from 1909 to 1917 in the Siam State Railways, during the reign of King Chulalongkorn of Siam. It was the King’s father, King Mongkut, who had avoided the power of the European colonialists and began instituting modernisation in Siam. He is the King on whom the film ‘The King and I’ was based, and had appeared in the book “Anna and the king of Siam”. The internal reforms continued during King Chulalongkorn’s reign included instituting a uniform and centralized system of administration over the outlying provinces, abolishing slavery, establishing law courts and reforming the judiciary. He also introduced a modern school system and constructed railways and telegraph systems. 

After several years of successful work developing the railways, Dumbleton contracted malaria and returned to England on sick leave. Jocelyn Dumbleton was awarded the Order of the Crown of Siam third class, by King Chulalongkorn. The law in England required the permission of the King of England for any subject to accept an award from a foreign monarch and George V permitted acceptance by Dumbleton.

Wyke Lodge, Wellington
Tauranga Heritage Collection

He did not return to Siam, and eventually resigned from his position, settled in Wellington in 1919, and set up a private civil engineering practice. Dumbleton married Winifred Alexander (1894 – 1961) in Auckland in 1918, and they had one child, Phyllis Joyce (1919 - 1986), who spent most of her life in Tauranga.

In Wellington, he designed and built a house “Wyke Lodge”, named after the family home in Hampshire. This is where Phyllis spent her first few years.

Dumbleton’s Rotorua house
Tauranga Heritage Collection

By 1923 he was practicing as an architect in Rotorua where he built his next house in Pukakai Street. Dumbleton appeared to be listed in the 1930s as a farmer in River Road, Hamilton while their daughter Phyllis attended the Waikato Diocesan School.

Dumbleton’s Mount Maunganui house
Tauranga Heritage Collection

In 1931 Jocelyn Dumbleton appeared on the Tauranga electoral roll and built the house at Mount Maunganui on a block in the Cedric Banks subdivision. The house was built in the dunes facing the sea but the address was then Te Ngaio Road.  The address of the current building is 54 Marine Parade, Mount Maunganui and consists of an apartment block.

Dumbleton’s Mount Maunganui house
Tauranga Heritage Collection, Ref. 0179/21

The house was built on a timber frame with weatherboard cladding and a corrugated iron roof. It was a two-story building with bedrooms and a living room upstairs, all with sea views. He repeated a feature of his Rotorua house, installing bi-fold windows in the Mount house. Possibly the use of these windows enhancing air flow may be a carry-over from his years living in the tropics.

 

Dumbleton’s Mount Maunganui house
Tauranga Heritage Collection, Ref. 0186/21

Dumbleton built another dwelling he described as a “cottage” on the plan so it is difficult to tell if he regarded that one as a bach as he had other Tauranga addresses over time in Ohauiti, and Turrett Road before their last address in Grange Road. This building has an unusual roof line and from the east elevation, the roof appears to be mainly a hip roof with a skillion at the rear.  The large voids for windows on the seaward (front) wall may indicate he planned to use the bi-fold window style visible in the image of his Rotorua house.

As well as being a keen photographer since boyhood, Jocelyn spent much of his retirement sailing. During World War Two an escaped prisoner stole Dumbleton’s yacht “Jeanette” and sailed for the East Cape, where he was apprehended within a few days. Jocelyn Dumbleton may not have been your average Mount Maunganui retiree but was representative of a class of Englishman who found returning to the British Isles after working for years overseas unsatisfactory and chose instead to live in one of the Dominions.

Plans of Dumbleton cottage
Tauranga Heritage Collection

Max Avery ably told Phyllis Dumbleton’s story in his article in the Historical Review, Volume 66, No.2 November 2018.

Sources

Dumbleton Collection at Tauranga Museum. (photographs and documents)
Various NZ newspapers Papers Past
Online British newspapers
Wises NZ Post Office Directories
NZ Electoral Rolls
Bob Scott

April Fool's Day and the Tauranga Ladies Rest Room

April Fool's Day and the Tauranga Ladies Rest Room

 From Tauranga City Library’s archives

A monthly blog about interesting items in our collection

An April Fools Day prank reported by the Bay of Plenty Times in 1964 was flour footprints leading to Tauranga's Ladies' Rest Rooms in Spring Street...

April Fool's Day Prank (Ladies Rest Room) (Photo gca-6426)

Although the joke isn't readily apparent sixty-one years later, the front of the Ladies' Rest Rooms were clearly visible, which caused some excitement when this negative was discovered as part of the ongoing Gifford-Cross project to re-house and digitise approximately 140,000-180,000 negatives contributed by local photographers to the Bay of Plenty Times.

There is another view of the building, tucked between Hayman Sharplin's Real Estate Agents and the New Zealand Insurance Company, in the 1965 Bay of Plenty Times photograph of members from the Australian Salvation Army Youth Congress...

Aust. Salvation Army Youth Congress - Wellington (Photo gcc-11226)

The rest rooms visitor's book is in our archives (Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Ams 106), unfortunately in very poor condition, it is still possible to carefully turn the pages and read entries from Mrs' and Misses noting the date, where they were visiting from, and what they thought of the facilities.

 

Detail from the first page of Ams 106 - Ladies’ Rest Room visitors' book, Tauranga, 1937-1946, showing comments from 2-5 February 1938.

 

Not an April Fools Day prank was the first meeting of the Tauranga Women's Representative Committee on 1 April 1935, where those present agreed to draft a letter to the Borough Council along the lines of...

 

"We the undersigned, being residents in and near the borough of Tauranga, emphatically protest against the action taken by the Borough Council, in deciding to build the Ladie's [sic] Rest Room on the Town Wharf, believing that such a position would be dangerous to life and limb, and detrimental to health; and urge that further investigation be made before the work is proceeded with."

excerpt from Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Ams 22

 

Eighteen months later "the rest room scheme provided another animated controversy at the Borough Council meeting", with the Bay of Plenty Times describing the debate where Councillor McKinnon opposed 'anything being erected on the waterfront

 

They had a waterfront that was unequalled in the Dominion. It could not be measured in pounds, shillings and pence. In the waterfront they had glorious nature and nothing should be erected that was detrimental to it'

Bay of Plenty Times, 15 October 1936, p. 3.

 

After over two years of debate, discussion and public petitions, the rest rooms were finally constructed in Spring Street in 1937. Stephanie Smith's blog and Abby Wharne's talk, provide more of the history.

 

The Strand retaining green park spaces for people to walk and play.

 

 

The Strand, Tauranga, from the Taumatakahawai (Monmouth Redoubt). 1939 or 1940. Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Photo 02-346

 

Sources:

Bay of Plenty Times. (1936, October 15). Ladies' Rest Room. Waterfront site. Vetoed by Council. paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19361015.2.30

Smith, Stephanie. (2015, December 25).  Friday, 25 December 2015 The Spring Street Ladies’ Rest Room. Tauranga Historical Society Blog. taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2015/12/

Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries. (2021, March 3). Women’s Organisations in Tauranga: The Past and the Curious - talk by Abby Wharne. [Video]. Pae Korokī. AV 21-003/2. paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/42917

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Written by Kate Charteris, Heritage Specialist at Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries

Archaeology in a Small Locality

 

Like love in a cold climate, there may be more of it around than you might think. My initial search of the Heritage New Zealand database admitted some vagaries - it counted all references to the Katikati-Te Puna Purchase and included some reports concerning the Te Puna Mission Station in Northland. My own count of the ‘matches’ it presented found 31 reports of archaeological investigations in the rohe between the (southern) Wairoa River, along the Minden ridge and down to the Te Puna stream. All but one of them, (Motuhoa Island, 1983) were dated after the turn of this century.

Harper’s Farm, Munro Road East, Te Puna

Even before it became fashionable – or necessary – to establish evidence of prior settlement, I have long known we had archaeological sites at our front door. As a child I thought that two hillocks on two neighbouring properties on Munro Road were “made” – their shapes were too regular, their tops too flat, to be entirely natural. Celtic myths of the faery hunt in hollow hills, mixed with tales of waka being hauled into caves[1], fed my fantasies. I had to wait some decades to have the facts, revealed – as is often the case – by plans to subdivide and develop house plots on what had been open paddocks (and, within living memory, the site of a 1940’s cowshed).

Harper’s Farm map (Real Estate advert)

The realtor’s 2016 advertisement disclosed this hill to be a kainga site. It shows as the slightly irregular pink-shaded circle on the right-hand side of the following image. (The other pink areas were described as middens and possible storage pits.) In a map[2] surveyed after the Te Puna Quarry Reserve was gazetted in 1911, the same area is labelled, tantalisingly, as a “Village Res.”, indicating at least some memory of previous settlement. I suppose (I am not an archaeologist) that this flat-topped knob would be called a ‘platform’. Around 2020 a modern house was built at the bottom of the slope, its back garden shaving off a small flank of hillside. The rest of the hill has yet to attract the attentions of anyone with a trowel, brush and measuring stick, so material evidence of pre-European habitation remains in the ground. But the patterns of landform and geography – an undefended, nevertheless dominating, site adjacent to a watercourse and hillside forest – make it easy to imagine a way of life from 500 years ago.

This is but one example of the outburst of energies and archaeological attention stimulated by the growth of horticultural and “lifestyle block” development all over the western Bay of Plenty[3]. Even more locally, the creation of the “Minden Lifestyle Zone”[4] had the effect of intensifying modern settlement across an area that was, as the result of efforts by the Historic Places Trust and, in particular, post-grad students from the Anthropology Departments of Auckland and Otago Universities, much better understood as a landscape richly endowed with evidence of past existence. 

When Mary O’Keeffe published her thesis in 1991, she could refer to the (then) Tauranga County as “archaeologically unknown”, until it became the subject of “recent field work [that] has shown there to be a very large number and a wide variety of sites…”[5]. Her work was founded on an appreciation of the qualities that have continued to recommend themselves to subsequent populations: the benign environment and congenial climate of the countryside between the coast and the Kaimai range. Less appreciated, perhaps, is her other salient observation that “many features present do not show on the surface.[6]”

Maybe it is a feature of settler society to be unappreciative of anything much below the surface.  Writing in 2002[7], Garry Law reported to the Department of Conservation (in respect of a much larger area, DoC’s Bay of Plenty Conservancy)  that although Māori archaeological sites were better known and recorded (albeit in somewhat erratic fashion) than “historical” – that is, post-European – archaeology: “the forestry, mining and transport history readily seen on the ground”. To this we could add farming infrastructure. The aforementioned cowshed’s materials were all (except for the concrete milking floor) repurposed. Its floor survived until new foundations were laid for another 21^st-century house.

Even a cursory analysis of the Heritage New Zealand database shows that, in the tiny area of Te Puna, there are two main drivers for archaeology:  roading and housing. The advent of the Takitimu Northern Link has generated a significant number of reports across a broad swathe of landforms, from the Wairoa River floodplain to the rolling uplands of the Minden Ridge. Because of its scale – at the time of writing it is the largest archaeological site in New Zealand – it has revealed patterns of settlement and itinerant activities (including the unfortunate effects of careless development) from the present day backwards to about 1350. Already it is altering Te Puna’s history, as it (we trust) stands the test of time and becomes, itself, “historical”.

As to housing: many of the addresses in the database search results were familiar. Building consents, even on ostensibly bare land in Te Puna, now very frequently require an archaeological report. So I got in touch with Murray Lloyd, who has lived all his life at 350 Wairoa Road[8]. In fact, the fourth generation of Lloyds now live there too. Murray’s family, starting from his grandfather, have been on the property since 1909. “Getting the report done was really pretty special,” Murray told me. “We always knew it had been lived on before, being right on the river – the main ‘road’, so to say – and my dad had a good relationship with Ngati Pango, especially the Apaapa whānau…  we thought it was important to know where it would be ok to put our houses. It was a bit of inconvenience, but it wasn’t a surprise, what we found out.”

Basalt adze found on Lloyd’s Farm, Wairoa Road
Image courtesy of Matthew Campbell, CFG Heritage Ltd

No-one should be surprised by the discussion in this essay.  Our locality has been lived in, worked over, and modified for centuries[9].  The powerfully haunting outline of the Papamoa pa system on our eastern horizon is a constant reminder.  My friend Kiritoha Tangitu said once:  “Whenever I look at them, I think: the work!  The work!”

So I approach with humility and admiration the whenua kua ngaro at the corner of my road.  It too took labour to create.  I also hope the whānau whose home it once was had times of peace and plenty before they had to abandon this small toehold at the foot of Rangituanehu.  I’m glad they left its shape behind them.

References

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[1] Park, Ruth, The Hole in the Hill, first published 1 January 1961

[2] Survey plan  SO13702, South Auckland survey district

[3] https://heritage.nzdl.org/greenstone3/library/sites/hnz/collect/pdf-reports/index/assoc/OKeeffe9.dir/OKeeffe9.pdf

[4] https://www.westernbay.govt.nz/repository/libraries/id:25p4fe6mo17q9stw0v5w/hierarchy/property-rates-building/district-plan/plan-review-2009/minden-structure-plan/documents/PR%202.pdf

[5] O’Keefe (1991) p. 4.  Later, however, she states Tauranga County to be one of the most intensively investigated regions in New Zealand… some 4723 recorded sites within County boundaries.”

[6] O’Keefe (1991) p. 20

[7] https://heritage.nzdl.org/greenstone3/library/sites/hnz/collect/pdf-reports/index/assoc/Law1.dir/Law1.pdf

[8] https://heritage.nzdl.org/greenstone3/library/sites/hnz/collect/pdf-reports/index/assoc/Campbell/50.dir/Campbell50.pdf

[9] https://heritage.nzdl.org/greenstone3/library/sites/hnz/collect/pdf-reports/index/assoc/Piriraka/u1.dir/Pirirakau1.pdf