Journalist and mountain climber
A pioneering New Zealand journalist is coming back into the limelight, reports Philip Matthews.
When New Zealand journalist and mountaineer Constance Barnicoat died in Geneva in 1922, The Press told its readers “her untimely death has cut off a brilliant member of the journalistic profession, one whose career and accomplishments reflected credit on the land of her birth”.
But most readers would have already known that. Barnicoat had been writing for the paper from Europe for more than two decades.
The Press went on to praise “the lightness of touch associated with women writers” that was combined with “a masculine grip of facts”, adding to Barnicoat’s intimate knowledge of European politics.
While it’s easy to scoff at those dusty old views of male and female qualities, The Press did recognise the New Zealand-born journalist as a global pioneer, “in the front rank of women journalists” along with the likes of Flora Shaw of The Times.
And when Shaw died in 1929, she was remembered by her own paper in much the same way, as “a womanly woman who possessed the reasoning capacity of a man”.
A little over a century after her death, Barnicoat is not as well remembered as she should be. Journalists may write the first draft of history but they seldom appear in it.
Yet there are signs that Barnicoat’s posthumous fame is growing. A short biography appeared last year, and she was the subject of a feminist podcast at a 2019 book festival. There is a brief Wikipedia page and a Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry is online at the Te Ara history site.
She was born in Nelson in 1872, the youngest of the seven children of John and Rebecca Barnicoat. Her father was a well-known local politician.
It was a comfortable life in which education was prized, including for girls. Nelson College for Girls had only been open for five years when Barnicoat enrolled there under headmistress Kate Edger, who was both the first woman in New Zealand to get a university degree and the first woman in the entire British Empire to get a bachelor of arts.
Did one education pioneer inspire another? Barnicoat went south to Canterbury College in Christchurch where contemporaries included Sir Ernest Rutherford and Sir Āpirana Ngata.
After graduation, she worked as a shorthand stenographer in Wellington, before setting sail for England in 1897.
That’s where journalism happened. She became a secretary to WT Stead, sometimes described as the father of investigative journalism, and at that time the editor of the monthly Review of Reviews.
Her first story for The Press was a long feature about the Passion Play in the German town of Oberammergau, in 1900. Many hundreds of stories for diverse publications followed, while The Press remained a constant outlet.
She had a parallel career as a mountain climber, and was believed to be the first “Englishwoman” to attempt to climb Mt Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains, although illness prevented her from reaching the top. When she died of cancer in 1922, she was just 49.
‘The most badass photo’
Nelson journalist Annabel Schuler discovered Barnicoat five years ago while researching in the online newspaper archives at Papers Past. She kept noticing the name and sensed there was a good story here, worthy of a book.
“We (older) journalists like to think we have one book in us and I knew this was it,” she says by email from Nelson.
It was obviously a labour of love. Research took three years and writing took another two. But Schuler saw that Barnicoat’s work needed to be acknowledged. As former University of Canterbury journalism educator Jim Tully says in the book’s foreword, there are too few histories of New Zealand journalism and its practitioners.
Along with digitised newspapers, a biography published in 1925 by Barnicoat’s husband, Julian Grande, was an important source. A Romanian Jew whose original name was Israel Julian, Grande proved to be a perfect match – he too was a journalist and a mountain climber.
Mainstream publishers turned Schuler down, so her book Constance Barnicoat: A Cool Head and a Sharp Pen, is selfpublished.
She sells books when she does talks and says that even those who recognise the surname from Nelson, where there is a Barnicoat Hill, a Barnicoat Place and a Barnicoat House at Nelson College, are surprised to find the politician from history had a daughter with a fascinating life story. “I always point out he was a forward-thinking man.”
Barnicoat was honoured in a different way in 2019 in a New Zealand edition of the Dead Ladies Show podcast, which recalls great women from history.
Nelson historian Jessie Bray Sharpin presented the highlights of Barnicoat’s life before an amped-up audience at Wellington’s Verb festival. Attention was paid to Barnicoat as a pioneering feminist who wore men’s clothes when climbing.
It was in that context that Sharpin thought the photo of “Connie B” in her mountaineering gear was “the most badass photo in New Zealand history”.
The photo was taken when Barnicoat, back in New Zealand on family business, joined a group who were the first Pākehā women to cross the Copland Pass in the Southern Alps in 1903.
Her journalism also gives us a strong sense of both Barnicoat and the turbulent times she wrote about. Her personality seemed to be learned, sophisticated and no-nonsense.
She went looking for traces of New Zealand at the Paris Exhibition in 1900 and found none. She disliked “the immaculate stiff and starched specimens who infest the regions roundabout Piccadilly” in London and preferred meeting a fellow colonial, Australian war correspondent Alfred Hales.
Her travel stories may be her best work, such as a long piece in The Press about attempting Mt Elbrus in remote southern Russia in 1907, among the Tartars, who she saw as “tall, slim, wiry-looking men, usually dark, and, truth to tell, often disquietingly ferocious in aspect”. But the Tartars were hospitable and the Circassians were even better.
The world she described was enormously distant and exotic to New Zealanders. She wrote evocatively about pre-World War I Palestine, then under Ottoman control.
“Going from Jaffa to Jerusalem I counted, from the windows of the slowrunning train, between fifty and sixty different wild flowers. The first part of this journey, that through the plains of Sharon, is through one of the loveliest stretches of country I have seen.
“It is not till later that the stoniness, desolation, and melancholy of Palestine become manifest. For some miles the train runs through vast groves of orange-trees, bearing in April both flowers and fruit, the scent of the blossom coming in through the train windows, and even penetrating the filthy streets of Jaffa itself.”
She wrote about Asturias in northern Spain, the Iguazu Falls in South America and the Schreckhorn in the Swiss Alps. It was in the Alps that she met Julian Grande, while writing a story about winter climbing. They married in 1911 and from then on, confusingly for historians, her byline in The Press switched to Mrs Julian Grande. They had no children.
She had personal connections to events. When the Titanic sank in 1912, her old mentor WT Stead was on it and perished. She wrote his obituary and didn’t flatter him.
When Bolshevism threatened Europe after World War I, she told readers she had known Vladimir Lenin and Karl Radek in Switzerland, and they were not “mere fanatics” but people to worry about.
During the war years, her journalism crossed over into propaganda. She saw maliciousness as a national characteristic of Germans, was active in undermining German morale and was critical of pacifism.
Her pieces on the despondency of postwar Europe are more interesting. She wrote with feeling about starvation in Austria and described a kind of madness breaking out in Munich in 1920, at the same moment the Nazi Party started in that city.
There were other ways in which a new world was taking shape. Before the war, she had covered a Zionist conference in Basel. After the war, she reported from the League of Nations, the failed forerunner to the United Nations. But she didn’t live long enough to see how these stories turned out.
‘I have never forgotten’
In the year after her death, her husband came to New Zealand for the first time. Grande told The Press that the view of Christchurch from the Port Hills reminded him of Damascus. He was touched by more than 100 letters of condolence from readers that were simply addressed to “Julian Grande, Geneva”.
He was treated as a celebrity journalist, and gave lectures on mountaineering and his adventures in Arabia. There was a minor controversy when he described the West Coast as “the most depressing, neglected, and dirty-looking place he had seen in New Zealand”, but otherwise he was positive in the way grateful New Zealanders liked then, and still do.
Between his interviews and appearances, he climbed the highest unnamed peak in the Fritz Range in the Southern Alps and named it Mt Barnicoat, which was a fitting tribute.
Was Constance nostalgic for those mountains near the end? In a story published in The Press just two months before her death, Barnicoat remembered home.
“So far as I have ever been able to learn, nowhere in the world are there glaciers like those on the western side of the Southern Alps – the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers, which do not end in moraines and descend not between barren rocky mountain slopes, but between slopes clad with thick bush.
“I have never forgotten those rivers of ice between evergreen trees and even ferns, with their terminal faces ending almost at sea-level. Neither in the Caucasus nor in the European Alps do any other glaciers which I have seen even faintly resemble them.”