Category: History

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A Remarkable Man

Relatively few people have ever heard of Sir Julius Vogel, and this is unfortunate, because he was a remarkable man.

Having studied metallurgy at the Royal School of Mines in London (his birthplace), he moved to Australia during the Victoria gold rush and became…logically…a journalist and newspaper editor.

The ODT's 100th anniversary supplement, showing the first front page and a drawing of the cottage where the paper was first printed.

After moving across the Tasman to New Zealand in October 1861, he co-founded the Otago Daily Times – now New Zealand’s oldest surviving daily newspaper – the following month, and plunged into politics the following year, becoming an MP the year after that. Over the next quarter of a century he would represent five different electorates in the New Zealand Parliament, ranging from “Dunedin and Suburbs North” in the south to “Auckland East” in the north.

Another of his electorates was Goldfields – a special interest electorate which covered the same geographical area as other electorates but was only open to voters with a valid miner’s license. No electoral roll was kept – just show your license and vote.

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A Holiday Assortment

being a selection of crafts, games, incident and etymology which have enlivened the holiday season for me and may well perform the same service for you.

We don’t usually have a Christmas tree in this household. I don’t like plastic and I don’t much like felling trees either. We did try a living tree in a pot, but keeping it alive proved more than we were capable of. Thus the usual absence of tree. This year, however, as I was hanging out the washing on Christmas Eve, I accidentally broke a branch off the rosemary which grows beneath the washing line. So this year, we had a tree, albeit not a very large one.

A spiky green branch of rosemary in bud rises from a yellow plant pot on a white shelf. Around it are a small corked ceramic jar, a sheathed paperknife, and a small metal model of a camel.

It did manage to bloom at one point – you can see the buds in the photo above if you look carefully – but alas, it didn’t put down roots in the soil provided, and it did not long survive the Twelve Days of Christmas.

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Strange and Heroic Police Deaths

The New Zealand Police website, I recently discovered, has a couple of pages dedicated to the memory of police staff who have died in the line of duty – either as a result of a criminal act, or as a direct result of duty. And there are contained in these two pages stories both poignant and strange.

Drowning

Drowning was a common cause of death for coppers, particularly in the early years, including a number who died in various bodies of water over the years “while on police business” – unspecified.

The first New Zealand police officer to die in the line of duty was Senior Constable Henry Porter, who “died while doing night rounds” in Port Chalmers near Dunedin in the winter of 1887. He was checking that a hulk in the port wasn’t being targeted by arsonists again, and due to a lack of site safety, he accidentally fell in and drowned.

View of old Port Chalmers looking from the hill above the harbour, looking down towards the wharves, 1870s

Ten years later, Sergeant Florence O’Donovan and Constable Alfred Stephenson drowned while rescuing people during floods in Napier. (It is worth noting that Florence O’Donovan was a man, with a great big bushy beard to avoid any confusion. The first woman to become a sergeant in the NZ Police was Betty Bennett in 1961 – later Inspector Bennett.)

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