Memory box

Having written something like 35 articles about heritage churches in the Waikato, this is the first Memory Box devoted to a Salvation Army hall.

As is often the case there’s no information about the building on the Heritage New Zealand website, although it has been listed as a Category 2 historic place since 1985. Better to go to the Cambridge Museum site on which an abundance of heritage information can be found. This includes extracts from the Waikato Independent that chronicle events in the town between 1904 and 1912, with the exception of the second half of

1910.

In March 1908 the original Salvation Army barracks were removed from Duke Street by traction engine. This building had been erected in 1873 for the Loyal Duke of Cambridge Lodge and was then acquired by the Army in 1893, four years after it had established a corps in Cambridge. At that time (1889) the local Catholic priest, Father Fox, advised his congregation not to ‘molest the Salvation Army or allow their children to do so as the army most undoubtedly did good work among those who were not in communion with any church’.

In August 1907 the Army had its building permit remitted by the borough council because the organisation was deemed to be a philanthropic one. The building was opened on 14 December of the same year by Mayor Buckland after an address by Adjutant Thurkettle. Earlier in the year the Mayor had attended an army social and made the comment that with the new high-level bridge under construction ‘the Army would soon be able to march across it and conquer Cambridge West’. The military terminology of the Army was thus common parlance among other members of the community.

Plans for the new barracks were prepared by the Property Department of the Army and built by day labour at a cost of over £400. Brigadier Edward Saunders

(1850-1923) of Melbourne, who was a trained stonemason and co-founder of the Salvation Army in Australia, was responsible for the design of the barracks. In truth there was not a lot to design, but the simple hall form is given an ecclesiastical feel by the decorative door and window surrounds on the facade, which is topped by a trussed gable with scalloped bargeboards. Totara, rimu, matai and kauri were used in its construction; a veritable cornucopia of native timbers.

Today the Cambridge Corps of the Salvation Army meets in a hall in Williamson Street and the 1907 barracks are in commercial use. Modern buildings on either side of the former barracks attend to its built form and style, demonstrating that new build can be sympathetic without being sycophantic. I’m not sure the same could be said about the fire station across the road, with its gable end truss motifs and picket fence.