Memory boxes
On this day in 1942 the Women Jurors Act was passed, allowing women, between the ages of 25 and
60 to serve on a jury, if they wished. Women could be automatically granted an exemption if they requested one and, according to Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, it was not until 1976 that men and women were held to the same requirements for serving jury duty. There’s a brief video clip of Elaine Kingsford, the first woman to serve on a New Zealand jury in October 1943, on the Te Ara website. In it she notes that one of the consequences of the war was that women were being called to jury duty and predicts that one day
‘12 good women and true’ might comprise a jury.
An all-male jury would have heard a case that played out in two heritage courthouses and featured a woman in a very different role to that of Miss Kingsford.
In late August 1902 Myra Taylor was charged with the attempted murder of Michael Whelan in the Thames courthouse. She had been travelling dressed as a man under the name John Lennox when she was arrested at Paeroa aboard a steamer bound for Auckland. The arrest and subsequent trial in the Auckland Supreme Court was reported throughout New Zealand. Mrs Taylor was acquitted in November 1902 after it was determined that the gunshot wound Whelan received was probably as the result of an accident.
‘The Thames Sensation’, as the case was described by the media, drew crowds to the Thames courthouse to watch Mrs Taylor being charged. An earlier courthouse in the Shortland settlement at Thames had been opened by the Superintendent of Auckland Province in April 1868. As Grahamstown grew and quickly began to outshine Shortland the focus of government activity in the settlement shifted north. Consequently, a group of government buildings, including a post & telegraph office, courthouse and police station, were erected in Queen Street in 1870. The land on which these buildings were erected was initially leased from Robert Graham for a period of 21 years, on condition that the courts were removed from Shortland, where they stood on land ‘reserved [by chief Taipari and others] for the use of the Government’ [Daily Southern Cross January 26, 1870, p4]. The government buildings were built at a cost of £3941, tenders having been called in September 1869. They comprised four interconnected pavilions with the courthouse at the northern end and the telegraph office to the south. Tenders to alter the courthouse were called by the Auckland District engineer, Frederick Bigg-Wither (1852-1934), in 1914.
All but the courthouse was demolished in 1955, the Post Office having been replaced by a new building in Pollen Street in 1938. The Crown vacated the courthouse in 1981, and later used as a recreation facility and youth centre. The building has since been used as a funeral home, was briefly the subject of plans to turn it into a Baha’i church, and is currently the headquarters of the Supported Life Style Hauraki Trust.
Buildings are typically characterised in gender-neutral terms. They are places in which ‘people’ live and work, although they are occasionally singled out because they are associated with a ‘great man’ or, less often, a notable woman. It is the story of people that makes buildings historic, whether those people are rich and famous or ‘everyday’ women and men who, like Elaine Kingsford and Myra Taylor, briefly stand in the spotlight of history.