This is a letter from my Great Uncle (Brian Woods) and gives little history on my
Great Great Grandfather, (Keeper) James Anderson.
Dear Nick
I’ve just had an email from your Dad about your proposal for a largely self-propelled journey from Centre Island to Boulder Bank this April, and in it he mentioned that some background history, and photos, would be of use to you. I enclose a photo of the Anderson family, as constituted at the time, on Boulder Bank. It was taken by the well-known Nelson photographer (well-known to historians perhaps) Tyree, and is a print taken from one of the thousands of plates now held by the Nelson Provincial Museum. The Museum will sell you prints. There are other photographs presumably taken at the same time (I don’t suppose that Tyree made multiple journeys to Boulder Bank), and in Keith & Gill’s crib in Riverton there is one of my grandfather standing in a doorway, holding a telescope, and with what seems to be a flag draped about him. I suspect that he may have had a weakness for dramatic poses. Think of the names he gave his poor innocent children; my mother’s sister, my Aunt Cecil, was given the names Cecil Ethan Correze, and indeed may have been registered as a male child, for she was called up to register for military service in the 1914-1918 war, and had to appear before a medical board to have the matter cleared up. Perhaps he had had a little drink to celebrate the occasion of registering the birth. Your great grandma, my mother, was (in full) Athol Muriel St George Anderson.I have collected some facts about my mother’s early life, and her father’s career in the lighthouse Service, and here are some notes on the period covering Centre Island and Boulder Bank.
My mother was born in Akaroa on 5 December 1893. She was the first child of James and Edith Anderson; James was at the time an assistant keeper at the Akaroa Heads lighthouse. On 29 September 1894, James left the Akaroa lighthouse for Centre Island on the Government Streamer, the S.S. Hinemoa. I have this from the Lighthouse log-book, which is kept in the Akaroa Museum. It is not recorded that his wife and child went on the Hinemoa with him. Perhaps they went by land, in which case it is quite possible that my Mum was rowed out, with her mother, from Colac Bay to Centre Island at the end of their journey. She would have been about ten moths old at the time. I do indeed remember being told by Mum that her first conscious memory was of being bounced around in a whaler (long-boat) on the way from Centre Island to Colac Bay, when she was about three or four. Incidentally, it is only quite recently that I realised that Colac Bay was on a railway line even then; it went to Orepuki. (See pl.53 in the New Zealand Historical Atlas (1997).
James Anderson’s position at Centre Island was that of Assistant Keeper. In those days a Principal Keeper wrote a monthly letter to the Marine Dept., reporting on the running of the lighthouse. I have read the Centre Island letter-book for the time (it is in the Dunedin branch of the National Archives) and in the letter for 1 November 1894, there is this passage; “…8th. S.S. Hinemoa landed a quantity of stores: Keeper Anderson arrived…”. There was no reference to a wife and child. The Principal Keeper of the time was under a cloud when this was written, over some matter that I haven’t been able to find out about and was shortly posted on to Puysegur.
The log of the Centre Island Lighthouse throws some light on conditions there: there are quite a few references to wind damage to buildings, and to sledging soil and rock to level the areas around the keepers’ houses.
Keeper Anderson was posted to the Nelson Light in August 1898 and he was Assistant Keeper there until February 1903, by which time Mum was nine. According to Uncle Ivan, Mum’s brother, their father rowed her and her sister Dorothy across the harbour every day to go to school in Nelson.
A final note. Ivan wasn’t born until 1900, so he may not have remembered this directly; it is more likely that he was told about it. The family group in the photo does not include him, unless he contributes to the suggestion of a bump in my grandma’s middle. So the photo must have been taken before, or early in, 1900.
