The New Zealand Connection
Immediately inside the south door, on the table, there are a folder and a small bound booklet about St.Barnabas’ church, Stoke, Nelson, at the north of South Island, New Zealand. This may appear outwith the concerns of a Suffolk church, but it commemorates the earliest days of the colonisation of New Zealand, in which the Rev. Martin Torlesse, Vicar of Stoke between 1832 and 1881, and members of his family, played a conspicuous role in the establishment of the colony. There is a photograph of St.Barnabas hanging on the first pillar to the west.
St.Barnabas Church
Charles Torlesse
Reverend Martin
Torlesse
His part arose from the fact that his wife Catherine was sister of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the pioneer of systematic colonisation by volunteers, solid citizens with a variety of skills who were not convicts. The colony of South Australia was founded on his principles in 1836, and in 1839 a party of settlers led by his brother William sailed for New Zealand, where they established the town of Wellington in North Island. In 1840 Captain Hobson, as representative of the British government, signed the Treaty of Waitangi whereby the Maori chiefs ceded sovereignty to Great Britain.
In 1841 another brother, Captain Arthur Wakefield Royal Navy, led an expedition to found the colony of Nelson in the northwest corner of South Island. The Torlesse’s eldest son Charles and a number of Stoke people were members of the expedition, and before they sailed from Gravesend his father preached a sermon there for the settlers and mariners, on the text “Who is he that shall harm you, if you be followers of that which is good?” (! Peter 3 v.13). The times were very harsh for the agricultural labourers and their families: one example quoted by Frances Torlesse in her book BYGONE DAYS is of the man who trapped a hare in his garden to feed his seven children. He was caught by the gamekeeper, taken to court, and sentenced to a month’s imprisonment with hard labour, which led to his premature death: the attitude underlying this outcome was that the hare was the squire’s property, and it had been stolen. The magistrate was the squire . . .
It is no wonder therefore that Mr.Torlesse, much to the chagrin of the landowners and farmers, encouraged his parishioners to better themselves by emigrating to the new country, but it is also worth contemplating the enormous courage and fortitude of those who did. On leaving their homes, and probably never having been as far as Colchester in their lives, they went there to travel on the (newly built) railway up to London, and once there they embarked in crowded sailing ships which took anything between 12 and 16 weeks at sea, mostly out of sight of land, to reach New Zealand. Having arrived, they would be landed on the beach with a tent and their hand tools, and left to their own devices to survive.
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William and Sarah Sowman travelled from Stoke by Nayland to New Zealand aboard the sailing ship Randolph.
One such was William Songer (1814-1904) of Stoke by Nayland, whose wife was Naomi Emeny, the children’s sometime nanny, at the Vicarage. He was a founder of the community at Stoke, Nelson, in 1841. Others went to Christchurch, where in the suburb of Sumner there is a Stoke and a Nayland Street, while Mount Torlesse (Mt.Otarama) stands as the highest peak at the edge of the Southern Alps west of Christchurch. The Misses Priscilla and Frances Torlesse lived in Christchurch between 1884 and 1889, and came back again in 1891 and 1896: Priscilla died there in 1896, and Frances finally returned to England in 1905.