St Pauls Papanui Cemetery - Christchurch City Libraries

… due rather to a love of horses than to a liking for racing. He was a shrewd
judge of thoroughbreds, with a good knowledge of both the theory and …
practice of breeding, and he obtained a great deal more pleasure from his stud,
where he achieved very considerable success, than he did from the racecourse,
where he was unable to reconcile himself to some of the methods that were in
vogue in the days when he was running horses.
Of quiet, unassuming disposition, frank and open, Nosworthy ‘earned the respect and
regard of all those connected with the turf who came to understand him and appreciate
his integrity’. On selling his stud, he became manager of the Middle Park Stud at
Riccarton ‘with complete satisfaction to his employers, but without the scope he
wished for the development of his own ideas’.
The Nosworthys retired to a house at Canon Street, St. Albans. Rebecca, 75, died on 8
December 1917. Stephen, a member of the Shirley parish, was ‘well known to many’,
and died at his home, aged 89, on 22 May 1918. Perhaps he was the archetypal
Victorian paterfamilias. He left ‘a family of two sons … and four unmarried
daughters’.
One of Stephen and Rebecca’s sons, Sir William Nosworthy, held the famed
Mesopatamia station from 1917-45 and was M. P. for Ashburton. He was a member
of the 1912-28 Reform Government, his portfolios including Agriculture and External
Affairs. He was the most senior Cabinet minister when Prime Minister William
Fergusson Massey Massey died in 1925. His name was put forward for the post of
prime minister but colleagues chose instead the colourful Gordon Coates.
With their parents or nearby are buried the Nosworthys’ unmarried daughters: Jane
Louisa, 64, who died on 23 February 1940; Mary, 72, who died on 1 July 1941;
Rebecca, 80, who died on 28 November 1950; and Amelia Bertha, who died on 6
January 1961.
No. 754
Cooke
In 1882, aged 20, James Cooke obtained his M.D. from the University of Ireland. He
went on to become a Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, in 1884.
He came to New Zealand and for many years resided at Lincoln ‘where he was
extremely popular in a wide country district’. He left a wife, two sons and two
daughters.
No. 761
Lange
Carl Augustus Frederick Lange and his wife, Whilhelmena Dorathea, were Germanic
tenant farmers at Rhodes’ Swamp or, as it became, Marshland. In the W. J. Walter
papers at Christchurch City Libraries there is a statement:
St. Paul’s Papanui Cemetery
2007
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