OBITUARY: Leonie Muriel Marks December 12, 1924 – March 1, 2018 Leonie passionate about music and art
The longer the life, the more likely there is an anecdote about crossroads and paths taken.
Leonie Marks’ crossroads came early on, when she was visiting her grandmother Lydia Orbell just outside of Napier on February 3, 1931.
Leonie had been promised a trip into town, but some boys had been discovered raiding the orchard, and her grandmother was delayed bottling the retrieved fruit.
As it was, Leonie was always to remember the sight of the fields rolling as the earthquake that flattened the town passed through the farm.
By the time she was in her early 20s Leonie Marks had lived through the Great Depression, the Napier earthquake, and World War II.
As a young girl in Wellington she saw men, their jobs gone in the Depression, drinking methylated spirits out of brown paper bags.
She was one of the generation who learned early that the world could be a tough place.
She lived through a time when women often were discouraged from tertiary study and thought difficult if they wanted something other than marriage, children and a home.
A bright student, she hoped to study medicine after school, but her family saw her career choice as unsuitable. The closest she could get was settling for a science degree at Otago, and a qualification as a dietitian – a common career pathway for women of her day.
Leonie’s parents divorced when she was young, which was extremely unusual then and a shame she keenly felt. Daughter Catherine Marks noted at her mother’s funeral that Leonie, much like the rest of us, was shaped by her time and her place.
She was therefore, almost by definition, a bottler, a seamstress, and a cook. But she was also a progressive thinker, a conversationalist, and a feminist by example.
Leonie grew up in Roseneath, on the slopes of Mount Victoria in Wellington, overlooking the harbour.
She was by the sea when at university in Dunedin, and then lived near the beach in Kohimarama in Auckland.
The ocean was in her heart – she often told her children she never stopped missing the sea when she came to Hamilton.
Leonie married civil engineer Paul Marks in Auckland in December 1947 and came to Hamilton in 1953 as he set up a firm in the city – PC Marks & Partners.
However, she threw herself into the cultural life of her adopted city. She was a founding member in 1969 of the Awatere Club, which continues today, and has the primary purpose of providing a stimulating experience for women to gather and hear lectures that foster the community and increase world understanding.
Leonie pursued her passion for music and art – she was active in the Waikato Society of Arts, a secretary of the Chamber Music Society, and a secretary for the Film Society, a fine bridge player and, on the sporting side, a Christiania Ski Club member. A wide reader, she was always in pursuit of the meaning of life and a better understanding of world. She devoured books on philosophy and psychology. The writings of theologian Lloyd Geering, who faced charges of heresy in 1967, resonated with her and she would go out of her way to hear him speak.
Catherine told the small farewell gathering in her sister Jane’s Tamahere garden that she remembered as a young girl being her mother’s helper on the fringe of cultural events – delivering club sandwiches and tea to performers backstage at the Founders Theatre, watching when the Cambridge King’s Singers came to a post-performance party at Leonie’s house, listening in to the living room soirees in the family home at which local classical musicians would perform and sing.
Leonie was in her 50s by the time feminism brought sweeping changes in New Zealand. But she had already been fighting the dominant culture through her own determination to be educated and to have her opinions heard. She was socially progressive, supportive of homosexual law reform and a member of the local Abortion Law Reform Committee in the early 1970s.
She worked for many years at the hospital as a dietitian, first part-time while her children were at home, later moving to full-time when, with five of her six children out of the home, she left her marriage. While Leonie was highly efficient in the home, her relationships with her children were difficult, – but that in itself was part of what she had to contend with and the time she was born in to. Her childhood memories of the 30s ensured she was careful with money – she had to be as a divorcee in the days before the domestic purposes benefit and the Matrimonial Property Act.
Her circle of friends changed as a result of her marriage break-up and, as a single woman, she was largely dropped from the dinner party circuit. But her new friends, some many years younger than her, reflected the diverse society in Hamilton at the time. Many were from overseas, coming to Hamilton as a result of events in the world at that time. Among her coterie were those who had escaped Fascism in Spain, communism in Lithuania, and the draft for the Vietnam War in the United States.
As a result, there were lively and heated debates in her house.
Despite her challenges, Leonie embraced life – with an energy friends marvelled at.
She was stylish, and a good seamstress, and made many of her children’s, and her own, clothes. Catherine said she remembered sitting in Pollock and Milne going through the fashion books – for Leonie it was always the Vogue patterns, not Simplicity or Butterick.
As a dietitian she subjected her children to healthy food on a scale not experienced by their peers. Catherine said there was no hope, for the Marks children, ‘‘of swapping our brown bread, lettuce, and Vegemite sandwiches in the playground’’.
Leonie considered herself a great wit and was once described as a ‘‘flirt without peer’’. ‘‘This,’’ said Catherine, ‘‘made me cringe as a sullen teenager but I came to appreciate she was sharp as a tack and funny‘‘.
Loved mother of Philip, Richard, Graeme, Jill, Jane and Catherine. Onie to 14 grandchildren and a growing number of great-grandchildren.
This life story relies on notes by Catherine Marks. ●➤ A Life Story tells of a New Zealander who helped to shape the Waikato community. If you know of someone whose life story should be told, please email Charles.riddle@wintec.ac.nz