Here is the headstone, below, and the grave, right, of Arthur b12 Dec 1874 in Wing, but baptised in Stanbridge. He married Sarah Jane Adams of Linslade and sailed to Wellington, NZ on 20 July 1911 on the ship Tainui from the Tilbury Docks, London. They were living with his sister, Ellen in Islington and had their 8yr old son, Frederic Arthur with them on the ship. Harry Blake, one of the Stanbridge cousins, had been to NZ and had come back to Wing with wonderful stories of sheep farming in the Nelson district of the South Island and had determined to go back there.
When he was just 15yrs old, my father built his mother the cottage (above) she lived in for the rest of her life, in Haumoana, near Hastings and close to the beach. The house is still there, in Hyla Rd.
He married Levi’s daughter Ellen instead and became a London policeman. Arthur and Sadie tossed up whether to emigrate to Canada or NZ and I suppose Harry’s stories inspired them more. Besides, they said they were cold in London and NZ offered less of that.
This little plaque in the Hamilton Lawn Cemetry, Newstead, marks the grave of my own son, Jason Gordon b 3 Jan 1979 in Hamilton NZ. He was helping his school raise funds for a tour of England to play cricket. One of the venues was to be Rugby School. He was struck by a car and tragically killed.
His school, Hamilton Boys High School, commissioned a memorial called the Jason Tearle Memorial Trophy, which is awarded annually to the best all-round Year 10 student in the school. To date almost every recipient has gone on to become Head Boy.
While he was actually born in Waikato Hospital, in Hamilton, Jason was a son of the Waitomo District, in the King Country. Here is his memorial on the window of the Millennium building in Te Kuiti, NZ.
Jason’s branch is also John 1741.
In 1915 my father Frank was born in Hastings and in 1916, Arthur died, leaving Sadie to bring up the two boys. His memorial is in the Hastings cemetery. Arthur is of the branch John 1741.
Here is the obituary I wrote for Mum’s funeral:
For my mum, Tia Tearle.
For longer than I care to remember, I have dreaded this day because from this day forward I have to face the future without Mum. I can no longer ring her up and talk to her, and I can no longer write to her. All I can do now is to commune with the memory I have of her. But this day had to come; death is one of life's absolute certainties, it happens to us all and there is no appeal.
The Queen recently said, "Grief is the price we pay for love." The hurt and the pain we feel, and the tears we cry, are all because of the love we have for Mum. But in spite of that, however sad we feel and however much loss we suffer, today is not a tragic day; it is a day of rejoicing in a life full of richness and many friends, full of laughter and a wicked sense of humour.
Tia Tearle, Lakeside Flats Rotorua C1952
Marguerite Matilda (Tia) Tearle 1921 Wgtn
My Mum was also a lady of definite opinion and she hated pretension. She was home early one day from her job as a nurse's aide in Rotorua Hospital when I was still in Intermediate School. She was sitting with her neighbour at the table in the window of our Western Heights house and she was alternately laughing and crying.
"They've sent me home early," she said. "This horrible woman had moaned and complained about everything from the moment she woke up. When we made her bed she wanted to be left alone. When we left her alone she complained because we hadn't adjusted her pillows. I took her the morning's porridge. It was nice and warm, I had poured the milk on it and there was a heap of brown sugar just as she liked and she said to me, "What's this stuff? I don't want porridge today I want toast." I couldn't stand her any more! I said to her, " Well if you won't eat it you can wear it," and I threw the plate of porridge all over her."
She had genuine steel in her, too. I was very sick in my third form year and Mum stayed home to look after me. I was hot and feverish and she rang the doctor, but he was busy. I can still feel the resolution and determination, I can still hear that icy tone as she instructed him to come and see me. And he came. After his examination he declared I had tetanus, but it should be treatable because it had been diagnosed at an early stage. I ate pills the size of Oddfellows for a week, but it may well be possible that she had saved the life of her middle son.
Tia and Frank’s wedding cake
During the summer of my 6th form year - my second 6th form year, I think - Mum didn't go to work and she asked me to come home for lunch. As I walked along the road behind our house I could see the house across the gully and Mum would wave to me from the dining room window. When I arrived home we would sit at the table in the window and eat our lunch. It seems to me now that every day was a sunny day because I can only remember blue skies and bright sunlight across our back yard. There are few more precious memories in my life.
I had trained for weeks to do well in our annual High School Cross Country race. The day of the race was sunny and warm and we ran up the very steep slope of Ngongotaha Mountain, down the newly sealed roads and then past our house in the last mile of the event. I was exhausted. Suddenly I heard Mum's voice. "Go, Ewart - you're third!" I couldn't believe that Mum had come outside to watch me run. I don't know why, but I was really surprised. I tried to run down the boy in front of me but he heard me coming and kept surging away any time I got closer than about 50 feet. I ended up third, all right. There is a little corner of my mind where I can still hear Mum encouraging me.
Tia comes home with a new baby, our sister Tups.
Tia and Frank cut the cake.
She taught me a lesson about women. Whenever it was Dad's birthday, or at Christmas time, I would get him something he wanted, like a drill or a chisel, so when I was about 10 and Mum's birthday was coming up, I heard her complaining about her eggbeater being almost useless and a lot of work to get it to go properly. So I bought her an eggbeater for her birthday. To my utter horror she just cried.
"What's the matter? What have I done?"
"It's my birthday and you have given me tools," she sobbed.
"What should I have done?"
"You don't buy a woman tools," she said. "I am not someone who just works for you all in the kitchen. You could have bought me something nice, like perfume."
I had never thought of her as a woman. I was shocked. It is a lesson I have never forgotten and a lesson I have completely subsumed.
Frank, Tia and Gertrude the Anglia at Sadie’s, Hastings, Hawkes Bay, 1958
So what are the memories of my mum that I shall particularly treasure?
Mum drove me to Hamilton each month for a year to see Mr Davies, the orthodontist, who straightened my teeth. Gertie the Anglia could run at 45mph "cruising nicely," said Mum and 60mph downhill with the wind behind her. We drove up the narrow, winding metal road through the Mamakus and Mum would curse at the car in front if it slowed her down on an
especially steep, windy bit. "Look at that," she fumed, "a bloody great Vauxhall. That silly bugger's got more power in his car than a dozen of mine, and he slows me down on tight corners like this. It's all right for him, but Gert takes a long time to get back to speed if she's slowed down right now." She tooted and the car ahead surged away. "See?" she said. "He just needed reminding to concentrate on his driving and stop thinking about his floosie in Rotorua." I don't remember a single conversation - if we had one - but I remember the feeling of being special because Mum was doing something for me alone.
Mum's fundamental belief was that nothing would happen of its own accord - you had to want it to happen first. If you wanted change in your life, you had to recognise that change was necessary. Until then no-one could help you, and she wouldn't hesitate to say so. She had half a lifetime of helping people and she gave them the help they needed, even if it wasn't always what they expected. People loved her because she gave. But she had a keen eye for the bludger and she didn't suffer fools at all.
So in the midst of your sorrow, reserve a space for happiness and laughter. Mum had a huge and infectious laugh and if her sense of humour didn't always overwhelm her immediately, she could see the funny side once she calmed down. Today is a time of music because she loved to sing and dance and play; today is a time of sadness and tears because she is gone and we shall not see her again in our lifetime; and today is a time for laughter and telling stories. She was our Mum; no-one can ever take her place and we shall love her for ever.
In a little chapel in our wonderful St Albans Cathedral two small candles are burning bravely. One is for my beautiful son and other is for my lovely, lovely mum.
Fly towards the Light, Mum, for in the Light there is peace.
Ewart Tearle
St Albans 2002
For the last 20 years we have taken our Christmas holidays at Pauanui. Every year we have had Christmas with Mum and Dad and for the past 10 years or so, they have travelled to Pauanui on Jason's birthday, the 3rd of January. It has been a time that brought us closer together and given our children a good sense of their grandparents.
She had so many friends! Any time you sat in Mum's living room for more than an hour, you would meet someone who was just dropping in to say hello. Some of them were her friends and neighbours calling in to give back a plate that Mum had given them full of biscuits, some were calling in to give her a present. Some of them were the stray pups she picked up as part of her AA work, calling in to get a little encouragement, a few words of advice or a good kick up the bum.
Frank, Tia, my brother Graeme and his children, with Elaine sitting. Pauanui, Christmas 1994.
Frank Theodore Tearle 1915 Hastings, NZ
Here is the obituary I wrote for my father, who died a few months after Mum:
"If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well." My dad's life and my dad's guiding principle in a single sentence. There is only one way of doing something - do it right the first time, do it right every time. It didn't matter if he was doing a small job on a model motor, or whether he was working on another project on his house, he approached every job with the same serious concentration, meticulous planning and careful execution. I have stood for hours and talked with him while he worked at his lathe and made those beautiful boats and engines for which he is justifiably famous.
Frank Tearle at his lathe, Hahei.
Frank and Sadie 1925 Hastings NZ
I can remember many nights on the porch in Western Heights watching him work his magic on a small piece of metal, a magic I longed to weave, but had no gift for at all. I always felt close to him when I stood there and watched him work.
Frank and Peter at Sadie’s 1958.
Here in Hahei, Dad made a boat for Jason and we all went down to the little stream at the end of the Hahei beach to watch this delicate little steam engine drive Jason's new boat and to marvel at the intricacies of the remote control mechanism by which it was steered. Jason absolutely loved it and promptly christened it Genevieve, in honour of his sister. This boat is now a lovely and graceful monument to Dad's beautiful grandson. One of the very best portraits I have taken is a photo of Dad, in his workshop in Hahei, looking over his lathe at me while he worked. I am proud of it, and he thought it was pretty good, too.
I remember a few things very vividly from my childhood about Dad. The first thing was that he knew everything. There was no subject brought up at the table - and we had dinner as a family every day - that he couldn't teach us things about. While he wasn't very educated, he always read very widely and thus he was very knowledgeable. No man I have ever met, then or since, was as knowledgeable as Dad.
He always had a vegetable garden. He could never see any reason for growing flowers, but he had the biggest vege garden that would fit onto any back lawn he was allowed dig up. And he grew the most beautiful vegetables; fat potatoes, huge and perfect carrots, beetroot, parsnips, cabbages, cauliflowers, rhubarb and in Rotorua he had this 15 feet high trellis for the chinese gooseberries, as they were called then, right at the front of the garden. They are called kiwifruit now. He had a thing about the soil in Rotorua being too porous and he wanted lots of organic material in the soil to give it some body and retain the water properly. He dug in people's old hay and he grew lupines and dug them in, too.
I went with him one afternoon to a fishmonger in Rotorua whose freezers had failed overnight and after Dad had fixed the freezers, the man gave him the contents; some sharks, barracudas, groupers, mostly big fish, which Dad heaved onto the back of the truck. When he got home, he dug some trenches through the garden and dumped these fish into the trenches. For years we dug up fish scales. It took the neighbour fully five years to get to know Dad well enough to ask him the burning question, "What were you trying to grow when you sowed the fish?"
Dad wasn't a big man - I suppose five feet eight - but he always had physical jobs and so kept very fit. You know he built his mother's house in Haumoana when he was only 15, don't you? In Hyla Rd. It was originally a shed on a section his mother bought with £100 her brother sent her. Levi Tearle, her father-in-law sent her £80 and with that she dug a well. The house Dad built is still there and the well is still there. He left school and went to work for an apiarist, so he knew a lot about bees and how different honeys are made. Then he went to work for a builder and during World War II he was building houses in Wellington. He wasn't allowed into the army because he had had rheumatic fever as a boy and it had left his heart with an irregular beat. He had also had mumps at fifteen and that left him deaf in one ear. He met Mum in Wellington and after they were married he had work as a builder in Whakatane, a farmer in Te Aroha, a refrigeration engineer and a joiner/fitter in Rotorua so he knew his way around wood and metal. That's well documented - everyone here will know what a lovely job he made of building his own house in Hahei and how talented he was with his lathe - what you may not know is how unbelievably strong he was.
He and Mum used to gather strays and one of them was a lady called Marlene and her boyfriend. Now, he was a weightlifter, bigger than Dad, with muscles on muscles that he liked to display. One day he and Dad replaced the big ends on this chap's car, filled the motor with oil and tried to start the car. The starter motor did nothing, just growled, so Marlene's boyfriend took the crank handle and gave the starter motor a hand. Still nothing. I can see him in his singlet, sweating in the warm autumn sun, muscles bulging as he strained to turn the motor over. Still nothing. "I'll have a go," said Dad, stepped forward, set his feet, grabbed the crank handle in both hands, and turned it over, just like that. But the motor hadn't made a sound. Dad pulled the crank out of the hole and we saw that he had made a very tidy 360-degree worm in the middle of the crank handle. "You don't have to have lots of muscles to be strong, you know," he murmured to me later.
Frank and Sadie, Haumoana 1967
Is it too much to say that for all my life Dad has been my hero, the one person I never wanted to let down, the one man I always hoped would be proud of what I do? I shall miss him. I shall miss his presence in the back of my mind as I walk around London and get to know the world so familiar to his parents, composing the letter that I write to him each month about what I have seen and what I have discovered. I shall really, really miss him.
Ewart Tearle
St Albans 2002
The third thing that stands out so powerfully about my dad is that he was so generous. He gave so willingly of his time and of his patience and of his considerable talents. He was kind, outgoing and friendly. You know all the work he did here in Hahei for the fire brigade and for his local water supply. You know that he did the work only because it needed to be done; he never asked for recognition and he never asked for pay. He did the work because one day he put his hand up and said, "I can do that," and he did, not just for that day, but for years and years and years. My dad didn't do things by halves; if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well.
When you think of him today, think of his family here in England also grieving for a lost cousin and friend. He was very, very moved when they came to see him and to correspond with him over these past few years. Thelma Shepherd, Sheila Leng, John Wallace, Jenny Pugh, Norah Lowe, Ivor and Iris Adams and lastly Roland Adams, his cousin who sent him his first lathe in about 1930 - the very one he worked his magic on for me, for his model motors and for the people in Hahei. I have spoken to all his English family, many more than just the list above, and each of them wishes to send you their heartfelt greetings and their deepest sympathy.
Frank and Genevieve, NZ 1994
It is a source of great sadness to me that I should have to speak to you about my father so soon after farewelling my mother. I had hoped to be able to speak with him and to write to him for some time yet. I shall miss him. There is no-one in the world who has had such an influence on me and on my life as Dad has.
Ewart Tearle
School Days. Glenholme Primary School, Rotorua. I’m 5th from the right, second row down. Nice school. The principal’s name was Mr Bassett. My friends and I spent an awful lot of time on our knees playing marbles in chalk circles on the asphalt, while other boys played rugby or soccer on the school fields.
James Ewart Dawson, Tia’s father (left) with Maurice, her brother, at the Wellington races. James was known as Lofty by all who knew him. The Dawsons were from Lisburn and Belfast.
few years ago and helping her to lay the ghosts that had so haunted her life and the memories of her family. James Ewart Dawson was a tall, gaunt man of immense physical strength and strong moral fibre, with a wonderful laugh and a generous, humane nature. Her father gave her from his huge heart the unbounded generosity which so enriched her life. He also gave her a lifelong love of horses. This was a mixed blessing. "Racehorses," she used to say, "kept us poor." But it was a passion she shared with her father and through it she met jockeys, trainers and some memorable horses. She had even groomed the mighty Phar Lap.
Although poverty was a constant companion in her childhood, Mum grew up in a relationship with her father and older brother Maurice that was rich with incident and variety. I shall be forever grateful to her younger brother, my Uncle Dick, for coming to New Zealand a
Tia’s boys. I’m the one in the middle, in my school cap and jersey. The boxing is around a pipe that fed hot mineral water into a very large bathing tub. It was closed later due to fears about poisonous gas.
Tia and Maurice Dawson. Morrie ended up slightly brain-damaged after a fall from a pony, and died in his late middle-age, never marrying.
Here is the historic photo of Harry Blake working on the sheep farm in Nelson. He is in the back row, fifth from the left.
Here are Arthur, Fred, Sadie and Frank in the garden of the company house in Hastings, NZ, probably 403 Arvedsen St, Hastings, which was renamed French St during WW1 because its name sounded too Germanic. Arthur and his family landed in Wellington in 1911 and Arthur got a job to deliver a car for the Hawkes Bay Fruitgrowers Association (which became Watties) in Hastings. The roads were so bad and the trip was so horrible, he vowed never to leave Hastings. He was a driver/mechanic for the company until he died, in 1916. Sadie then ran a guest house in Hastings and purchased a small section in Haumoana with £100 her brother sent her and farmed it with strawberries until Dad built the house on it, converted from an existing shed. She had a well dug from £80 that Levi sent her.
Jason Gordon Tearle 1979, Hamilton
Jason, 1993
Jason, 1994. This is his school photo, taken two weeks before he was killed.
We met the first of our English relatives in the summer of 1993, when John and Corinne Wallace came to see us with photos and news of Levi and his family. John took this photo of Jason, and taught him a few things about cricket. This visit was the beginning of our association with our English family and was the inspiration for Jason’s desire to go to England on the cricket trip. John’s mother, Sheila, was one of the three women who came to see us late in 1994 and to plant the walnuts from Wing in the story I have told on Thelma’s page.
I hitch-hiked to see Sadie one summer and this was the photo she took of me in her garden in Haumoana. She was so short she fitted under my arm, but she was very nice to me and I went fishing in the mouth of the Tukituki River not far away, whilst she had an afternoon nap.
This is the inside of Sadie’s cottage, exactly as I remember it when I visited her. The picture above the mantlepiece is of Leonard Adams, a Navy man (a marine) who visited her when his warship the Renown, carrying the Prince of Wales on a voyage around the Colonies, called in at Napier and Wellington and he was allowed some time off to go and see her. He says on his copy of the sailing plan “Napier - Where I left to see Auntie. May 4th 1920.” The radio was made of black bakealite and she listened to the six o’clock news every day, as she had during two world wars. She knitted peggy squares for the Red Cross. She was still knitting them both times I visited her. She must have made thousands of them.
My 21st. I didn’t know they were planning it and the occasion was quite a surprise. Doesn’t Mum look gorgeous - and young!
A boy and his dog. I was too skinny to go sailing and couldn’t hold the yacht upright. I took my dog to obedience classes and he got quite good at it. Dad made the gates in the background.
Frederic Arthur Tearle 1907, Islington
You can tell that these two pictures of Fred (6m, left and 2yr, Right) were taken in London, can’t you? I have left the photographer’s signature, just in case.
Dad always used to tell the story that Arthur crashed Baron Rothschild’s best car, and then his second best car, on the same day. The first was when he hit a horse as he was speeding back from Leighton Buzzard railway station, being a bit of a dare-devil for a younger house member, and the second when he backed into a gas standard He had to pick up My Lord in a horse-drawn carriage and was dismissed for the transgressions. He and Sadie were married in St Barnabus Church, Islington, London in 1904 and Fred was born in Holloway Hospital, London, in 1907. Dad told me that Sadie had got Arthur the job as a mechanic driver with the Rothschilds because she lived there. She worked from aged ten as a maid for the Rothschilds, and for Ella du Cane, the artist and book illustrator. Ella’s family were friends of the Rothschilds in both Ascot and in Mentmore Towers.
Fred and Evelyn Latta married in Invercargill on 22 Dec 1945 “in the residence of Mr R Latta, Moa St, Waikiwi,” says the marriage certificate. Robert Latta was a sawmiller and neither of the witnesses’ names mean anything to me, since they are both Invercargill residents. The family story is that Fred, getting near 40yrs and with no marriage - or even a girlfriend - in sight, put a letter in the lonely hearts column and Evelyn responded. This is the official photo of their wedding.
Fred returned to Hastings and took a job as a freezing company worker in the Tomoana Freezing works not far from where he and Evelyn lived in Haumoana. He kept this job until he retired. I don’t know exactly what he did there, but the work can be heavy and physically demanding.
There was real tragedy for Fred and Evelyn over the welfare of their girl, Edith, seen here with Fred and her grandmother Sadie. I met her only once, as a teenager, and we went for a walk around the park not far from home. She was a simple girl with limited language, and she lived in a sheltered home. However, she had enough ability to work as a maid in the home, and she earned a little money.
We received a telegram from Fred on 23 Jan 1978 saying that Edith was very sick in Hastings Hospital. On 31 Jan came the awful news that she had died. She was just 31yrs. Fred told us that she had become very depressed and that she had drunk a terrible poison. She must have been in the most horrible agony for all those days between the telegrams.
Fred was a volunteer fireman
Elaine is tending the two seedlings that grew from the Wing walnuts. One of them was planted out on the farm with a service by Rev Fred Day of Te Kuiti, conducted in Latin.
Jason had a very good sporting and academic record. He played soccer and cricket for King Country and was capped for his role in a King Country v Taranaki tournament in Taupo. At HBHS he was in the choir, he was learning the guitar, played soccer and he was, of course, selected for the cricket squad to tour England. He was in the the first five in all of his academic subjects and, as the Headmaster pointed out was “A good kid.” It was because of his all-round excellence that the school determined to remember him with a major school trophy, named in his honour, and given to a boy who has those qualities. She told us that Jason would probably have gone on to be Head Boy, which is why she is not surprised that most of the recipients of the trophy have done so.
