That big fat Cyclopaedia tells of towns
In the local history room of the Hawera Public Library there is a collection of six, heavy bound books more than a century old. Their very appearance can deter people from even opening their covers.
Each one weighs about 10 pounds, thus disqualifying them for bedtime reading.
Each is a collection of stories and pictures about people, particularly men who were the prominent citizens in their districts around New Zealand in the early years of the twentieth century.
These rather intimidating books are a most remarkable view of our late colonial world, premotorcar and before the turmoil of the Twentieth Century.
This is the Cyclopaedia of New Zealand produced from 1897 to 1908.
The volume containing the Taranaki entries was the last to be produced and shares its place with sections about Hawke’s Bay and Wellington Provincial districts.
This great work was a commercial enterprise of McKee and Gamble, publishers, of Wellington, whose agents visited every locality and township throughout the country offering to print a short biography of every prominent citizen for a set sum.
Often the best test of the book’s value is to look up a topic that is familiar and compare the text with what one already knows.
The first chapters of Volume six are about Taranaki, 271 pages of a total of 767 that also cover Hawke’s Bay and Wellington District, and after recounting the known history of Taranaki and New Plymouth treats each settlement and town to a brief description and stories about local citizens, their families, occupations and activities.
Hawera is the largest of seventeen South Taranaki towns and villages listed.
There are thirty pages that describe in twenty categories the town’s prominent citizens.
Between the columns of text are fifty pictures of local citizens, who without exception adopt a pose of serious honesty.
The first potted biography describes the Hawera Member of the House of Representatives and former Mayor of Hawera, Charles Edwin Major, who is followed by a description of the Borough of Hawera and items describing the councillors, ex-mayors and county councillors.
Those items are frequently referred to later where he is described as a professional man or a businessman, such as Mr Edwin Dixon, a businessman and later mayor of the town, thus giving a multi-dimensional view.
All kinds of people, all men, are described, including dentist W D Johnson, who shared a partnership with the remarkable and flamboyant ‘Kickapoo’ Hunter.
Joseph Quin and his brothers employed more than thirty men at their Sash and Door factory and submitted a fine photograph of their staff in front of processed timber stacks.
Many of the biographies tell of the origins of their subjects, where they were born and on which ship they had travelled to New Zealand.
We learn that Mr A A Fantham arrived in the ship Duke of Portland with his family from Buckinghamshire in England and Mr John Finlay was born in County Wicklow and arrived as a young man on the ship Zealandia.
We learn too of the draper Mr AJ Whittaker, who married Miss Guerin, a daughter of an early Taranaki family and that they had a family of two sons and six daughters.
The information is very useful to people wanting to know more about their forebears and their associates living in the last years of the Victorian age and the Edwardian years.
The items are both rosy and lacking in criticism but the survey of New Zealand life in each district with photographs is without comparison before or after the Cyclopeadia’s publication.