St Pauls Papanui Cemetery - Christchurch City Libraries

Beadel ‘betrayed’ her mistress by marrying the farm manager, Tom Beadel, and
producing several children.
Eventually Heaton Rhodes employed Vera Hynes, a woman who was prepared to live
permanently at Otahuna and look after Jessie. Jessie came out of her illness but
collapsed and died, as the result of a stroke, after church, on Sunday 13 October 1929.
To commemorate her life, Heaton commissioned the architect Cecil Wood to design
St. Paul’s Anglican church, Tai Tapu, which was opened in 1932. The church was
built with stone from Mount Somers and from places which Jessie had known well,
the Otahuna estate and Australia.
Heaton Rhodes chaired the board of trustees of the Rhodes Convalescent Home and
gave land in Christchurch for a school which was named after him, Heaton
Intermediate. Fond of playing the benevolent squire, he would, each year, send
buckets of cherries to the Tai Tapu School. On Christmas Day he visited his
employees with a leg of lamb for the wives, cash for the husbands and sweets for the
children. Banks Peninsula Maori appreciated that he learned their language. On one
occasion he acted as interpreter for an elder who was addressing the Governor-
General. ‘Blessed with intelligence, talent, good looks and wealth’, Robert Heaton
Rhodes made the most of his advantages. He lived on at Otahuna till his death on 30
July 1956. His titles included K.C.V.O., K.B.E. and Bailiff Grand Cross, Order of St.
John, Jerusalem.
Today ‘Otahuna’ has, from the New Zealand Historic Places Trust, a Class One
classification.
Row C
No. 291
Hack
Edward Hack was from Lincolnshire – ‘a man of the Fens’. An assisted immigrant, he
arrived in Lyttelton on the Sir Edward Paget in July 1856, and celebrated his 22 nd
birthday a month after his arrival. He carried his swag over the Bridle Path – ‘it was a
case of taking your bed with you in those days’- and put up at the White Hart Hotel,
then nothing more than a canvas tent. Christchurch he thought ‘a very desolate
place …. I don’t suppose there were a dozen places about’.
Edward worked in the Hoon Hay bush extracting totara and black and white pine. In
1919 he was to recall:
The bush then was full of birds – parakeets, tui and kakas among them – and the
kakas used to kick up such a row that we could hardly sleep in the whares for their din.
Edward went on to do survey work under W. B. Bray. Starting at Ferrymead, the
surveyors measured up and over the Port Hills and into Lyttelton. He also did survey
work on the old Sumner Road, now the Captain Thomas Walkway, on the hills
between Sumner and Lyttelton.
Edward’s wedding day was memorable. Tommy Thompkins drove the wedding party
in horse and trap through Cathedral Square which was ‘then nothing more but high
sandhills and water holes’. Thompkins ran the wheel of the trap up one of the
St. Paul’s Papanui Cemetery
2007
47