www.waikatotimes.co.nz
MONDAY, AUGUST 29, 2011
7
Trench warfare futile at Maketu
East Coast Maori tribes’
plans to attack Maketu
were thwarted by a wellorganised British force
fresh from the battle for
Waikato.
By the end of April, 1864, the battle for
Waikato was over. Rewi Maniapoto and his
followers had retreated far to the south
with the Maori King Tawhiao to mourn the
loss of their lands. They had lost several
hundred men and women in the conflict
and many had been the more accomplished
young people from leading families,
leaving several tribes bereft of leaders in
the next generation.
A number of fighting contingents from
neighbouring tribes had arrived in
Waikato too late to be involved in the
fighting and most slipped away again
unnoticed. One group from the East Coast,
however, while attempting to reach the
battle front, clashed with the Arawa people
who had sided with the British. After
sporadic fighting along the eastern shores
of Lake Rotoiti, the East Coast people,
probably a combined group of Ngati
Kahungunu and Ngati Porou, withdrew
into the surrounding swamplands, vowing
to attack and burn the coastal settlement of
Maketu about 10 miles away.
The British garrison at Tauranga was
alerted and hurried plans were made to
meet the expected attack. But after about 10
days, it was assumed the attackers had
given up and gone home and the people at
Maketu began to relax.
It was the beginning of autumn and the
nearby wetlands were teeming with
waterfowl, so a party of officers set off for
a day of duckshooting while others went
fishing or gathered firewood for the
This week’s instalment is about
Woodlands. Should you go there today, you
can gain an idea of what life was like in a
large New Zealand home c1900.You can
have a guided tour recorded in the EastLondon accent of ‘‘Alice the maid’’. The
homestead is full of period decorations,
furniture and photographs. The gardens
are beautiful. The bridges and water
features suggest the paintings of Monet.
The Homestead was the effective
headquarters of the Waikato Home Guard
during World War II. The defence of the
Waikato against the Japanese was planned
from Woodlands.
The long involvement of the Riddell
family began with the purchase of the
homestead and 2400 acres by James Riddell
in 1905. Riddell descendants continue to
farm in the area to this day.
Today, in the Riddell Room at
Woodlands, you can see a great deal of the
family’s history on display. The homestead
and acreage were gifted to the (then)
Waikato County Council in 1987.
A tremendous fundraising effort
succeeded in bringing in enough money to
make restoration feasible, and literally
years of community effort have sustained
it.
Of these efforts there are only silent
memorials today. Yet the entire estate is
testament to an outpouring of community
generosity and the on-going efforts of
volunteers.
Consider the Kauri Room. All that wood
was once covered in paint. Volunteers
painstakingly worked to strip that back.
Then look again at that wood. All that
kauri was adzed by hand when it was cut.
Just by looking at that wood, you can see
back through time.
Go there. Have a look through the
Homestead. Enjoy the gardens. Have a
drink and something to eat. Sit out on the
lawn on a fine day, and spare a thought for
all that has gone before.
❏ Contributed by Mark Smith, whose Waikato
University doctoral research looks into how
history is used and understood within
organisations. Woodlands is one of the
organisations participating in Mark’s research.
Mark would particularly like to thank Lex
Riddell.
Rolling on: Te
Awamutu’s
Regent Theatre,
opened in 1932,
now contains
five boutique
cinemas
furnished
according to
movie theatre
traditions.
coming cold months. In the middle of the
day, a sudden volley of musket fire from
the scrub surrounding the wetlands
shattered the peaceful scene. The invaders
had arrived.
The British troops and their Arawa
allies withdrew behind the hilltop
fortifications at Maketu and waited for the
assault, but the East Coast invaders were
reluctant to face artillery and dug a series
of trenches about a mile inland. It is not
known what strategy, if any, they had in
mind. It is thought they either expected the
British to attack any Maori trench
position, as they had during the Taranaki
Land Wars, or that they were preparing a
fallback position after launching their own
attack on Maketu.
It has also been suggested that they were
probably led by men who had little, if any,
battle experience who made a number of
tactical errors. The East Coasters’ trenches
were within range of the cannon at Maketu
and several rounds were fired at them
before nightfall, but no damage was
inflicted.
Overnight, more Arawa reinforcements
arrived at Maketu and the steam-powered
warship HMS Falcon arrived from
Tauranga and anchored near the town.
Although the Arawa fighters were keen to
launch an immediate frontal attack on the
enemy trenches, they were persuaded to let
the navy test their gunnery skills.
The whole garrison of Maketu then took
grandstand seats in the hilltop fort and
watched HMS Falcon pound the trenches
to dust and smoke for several hours until
the invaders were forced to abandon their
position. But instead of retreating into the
cover of the wetlands, they advanced closer
to Maketu and dug new trenches on the
beach to the south of the township. It was
another tactical error, as they were
No matter what the era, sex has always
sold newspapers. The more officially moral
the times the greater the faux sense of
indignation when human beings obey their
natures and not socially confining norms
of behaviour.
In 1901 the colony was treated to a
scandal of the first order. Mr Justice
Martin, a judge of the Supreme Court of
New Zealand, left his home in
Christchurch for what was to be a short
trip to Australia to attend constitutional
celebrations. He never returned.
Shortly afterwards his neighbour, a
certain Mrs Simms, also departed the city,
nominally to stay with her mother in
Brisbane. Apparently Mrs Simms and her
husband had been having marital
problems. These had arisen in part because
immediately attacked by the Forest
Rangers and Arawa before they could
consolidate their position. The Forest
Rangers, led by Captain Thomas
McDonnell, charged the trenches and
drove the East Coasters south along the
beach. The land forces were assisted by
HMS Falcon – which steamed in close to
the shore, keeping with the running battle
and shelling the invaders as they ran for
their fleet of waka they had left pulled up
at the foot of the cliffs about five miles
away.
It was an exhausting, terrifying ordeal
made worse by loss of their waka, which
they found had become bogged down in
heavy sand.
Before they could launch the heavy craft,
the Arawa contingent arrived and drove
them farther along the beach towards
Matata, where they made a final desperate
stand against their tormentors. But, by this
time, they were too exhausted to put up
much of a fight. The Arawa fighters fell on
them with muskets and tomahawks in
aferocious attack. The casualty rate is not
recorded, but the invaders fled again, this
time inland into the swamps.
Satisfied that they had successfully
defended Maketu and prevented the
invaders from giving assistance to Rewi
Maniapoto, the Arawa fighters and the
Forest Rangers trudged back to the
township to celebrate their victory. The
last known sighting of the invaders was at
Te Teko, during their long overland
journey home. They had come to help
defend the Waikato and fight the Pakeha
soldiers, but had lost many of their number
as well as their fleet of seagoing waka.
of the attentiveness of the good Justice
Martin and his habit of taking the young
lady on ‘‘long excursions’’. It was thought
that she could do with a change of scenery.
Mrs Simms also failed to make it back
home.
Rumours began to fly about the pair’s
extended absences. Innuendo in the
Lyttelton Times sowed the seed for a feature
article on the Martin/Simms affair that
was published the length and breadth of
the country. It emerged that Justice Martin
had resigned and that Mrs Simms had
written to her estranged spouse informing
him that she was now cohabitating with
the former judge in Sydney.
Whilst Martin’s actions were taken as a
mark of hypocrisy from a jurist who on
occasion pontificated from the bench – ‘‘he
is known to have expressed strong
opinions as to the heinousness of
transgression of the moral code’’ – there
was equal outrage when it emerged that in
one of the last cases in which he sat Martin
had stated that there was little difference
between marriage and ‘‘living in sin’’. The
man was clearly ahead of his times.
Daniel Dee Hyde
circa 1836-1894
Daniel Hyde provided early
Hamilton residents with an
essential trade: he was a tinsmith.
In the period before the
throwaway society to which we
have become accustomed,
tinsmiths mended pots and pans
as well as made a variety of house
fittings and domestic wares out of
tinplate and other light metals. In
1878, he advertised in the Waikato
Times as ‘‘tinsmith, plumber and
stovepipe maker. All kinds of
Tinware, Stovepiping, and Zinc
Goods made to order. Umbrellas
repaired with despatch and at
reasonable prices.’’ One item he
made was a lamp, intended for a
hotel. It was ‘‘fully six feet high
made of No 11 zinc and
handsomely ornamented with
scroll work. The workmanship for
both strength and elegance
reflects most creditably on Mr
Hyde who has turned out a piece
of work which shows that we
have no need to send to Auckland
tinsmiths for the same articles
that can be produced better and
cheaper here’’. Competition with
Auckland existed as far back as
the 1870s.
Daniel Hyde was in the No 2
Company of the Fourth Waikato
Regiment, having enlisted in
Melbourne at the age of 28. His
one-acre allotment was on the
corner of Willoughby and Mill
streets, but he must have kept his
50-acre rural allotment, as in 1876
the Times announced that Mr
Hyde had brought into its office a
bouquet of hops, the vines of
which were growing luxuriously
in his garden ‘‘on the
Ngaruawahia Rd’’. He seems not
to have had a shop, as in 1878 he
was decrying the lack of a
marketplace, even though there
was council land set aside for the
purpose. He and others hawked
their wares from house to house.
In a photograph taken in 1889
for the 25th anniversary of the
landing of the regiment, Hyde is
shown as a smallish man (5 ft 5
inches or 165 cm) with the
ubiquitous full beard, the fashion
of the times.
Hyde was a prolific breeder,
acknowledged wryly with
‘‘Number Ten’’ in an 1888 birth
notice. On his death in 1894, he
was survived by his wife, 12 sons
and one daughter. He is buried in
Hamilton West cemetery with son
Henry, who died in 1926.
Old marker: Daniel Hyde’s grave is marked by the broken headstone on
the right. The central marker is his son’s and wife.
Photo: LYN WILLIAMS
PIAKO
Between the world wars last century, New
Zealand had the second-highest per capita
level of movie attendance in the world (not
surprisingly, the US was the frontrunner).
The first motion picture was screened here
in 1896 and after several decades of silent
films, the talkies arrived in 1929, the first
year of the Great Depression. The movies
offered many people some light relief from
the privations of the early 1930s.
The opening of Te Awamutu’s Regent
Theatre on March 12, 1932, was a gala event
attended by Mayor C G Downes. Some 1500
people watched Daddy Long Legs and the
first episode of Battling with Buffalo Bill on
opening day. The feature film starred Janet
Gaynor, who had moved successfully from
silent films to the talkies and was the lead
character in the 1937 movie A Star Is Born.
Te Awamutu contractors and local
materials, including 52,000 bricks, were
used during the short three-month
construction period. The Waipa Post
described in great detail the modern
apparatus and facilities available to
patrons but, somewhat unusually, made no
mention of the building’s architect.
Since 1974, the theatre has been managed
by Allan Webb, who has developed the
building so that it now houses five
cinemas, at the same time treasuring its
movie heritage. Webb’s account of the
travails of managing a provincial cinema,
posted on the Regent’s web page, are
fascinating. It’s certainly hard to
remember the days when it cost 80 cents
for a night’s entertainment.
The Regent competed with the 1915
Empire Theatre,, Sloane St, until the latter
closed in 1975. Happily, the Regent
survived the impact of television, the death
knell for dozens of cinemas. Like the
Embassy Theatre in Thames, it continues
the main-street tradition of movie theatres,
something Hamilton has sadly lost.
Piako, near Morrinsville, was named after a place in Hawaiki by early Tainui
people. The name translates as shrunken or hollow. It has also been
translated as the emptying waters and may be a reference to the outflow of
water from the vast swamplands that once fed into the Piako River.
Sources include Places Names of New Zealand (Reed) and New Zealand
Encyclopedia (Bateman).