St Pauls Papanui Cemetery - Christchurch City Libraries

far back as 1635 and Harriet ensured that the family maintain the tradition and
regularly attended the Chudleigh Kneighton Anglican church. During festivals she
was one of those who decorated the building
In the 1860s the economy of isolated rural Devon was in decline. Perhaps prompted
by his wife, Thomas sought financial independence and greater social standing in
Canterbury. Neither could foretell that, in the new land, they would fall out with
individual Anglican clergymen and turn, at times, to the Methodist and Presbyterian
faiths.
On 15 March 1865 the Canterbury left Gravesend for Lyttelton. Cabin passengers
included Thomas, Harriet and their children, Richard Trist, William Luscombe,
Thomas, Arthur, Edith Ellen, Harriet Alice (commonly called Alice) and Ethel. Some
possessions were the tools of Thomas’s trade – for example, two mill-stones, one
wheel, 150 tiles and 200 bricks. Other possessions were personal. These included 18
cases, five boxes, one chest, nine casks, one cistern and 13 packages. There was also a
‘Wheeler and Wilson’ treadle sewing machine with which Harriet made underclothing
for the whole family. Fearing shipwreck, Harriet had warm dressing gowns made for
the family. Those for the children had a huge pocket stitched on the inside and the
servants had strict instructions to fold up each child’s clothes and poke them into the
pocket of the relevant gown when the youngster retired to bed each night. In
Christchurch Harriet discovered that he instructions had never been carried out.
At the time the ship embarked, Harriet was again pregnant. Thomas did what he could
to ensure that all would be well. A widow, Mary Carthew, was midwife/nurse and her
daughter, Georgina, maid and nurse to the three youngest children. Alas, the baby girl,
Georgina, died soon after birth.
Georgina Carthew taught Alice Searell, three, a song: ‘I’ve got a sister in the
promised land’. Alice sang the song so often that one passenger remarked: “Hang the
sister in the promised land.” Other passengers also noted how Harriet drummed an
education into her boys – the girls were too young to be instructed. The passengers
suggested that the boys throw their slates into the sea but they replied: “That would be
no good because we would then have to do our work in exercise books”. When the
children turned four, Harriet started to teach each child music when he or she reached
the age of four. One of Alice’s earliest memories was of being tucked up in bed while
the boys sang part songs and Harriet played the accompaniment on piano.
The food, canned or salted, was monotonous. There were Sunday services and Alice
was later to see her parents’ shipboard hymn book. In the hymn ‘Eternal Father,
strong to save’, the line ‘for those in peril on the sea’ there was an alteration with ‘us’
being inserted for ‘those’.
The Canterbury arrived in Lyttelton on 18 June 1865. The Searells took a house in
Cambridge Terrace near Christchurch Hospital and there little Ethel died of
convulsions.
In 1854 Messrs. Woodford and Stephens had established the Avon Mill – better
known as the Carlton Mill - on the north bank of the Avon, 180 metres upstream from
where the Carlton bridge now spans the river. The mill race originally took water
St. Paul’s Papanui Cemetery
2007
65