Bottom: Robert, Father (John), Jack
Missing: Artie. Photo: ancestry.com
My mother Dorothy was very proud of the McCarroll boys, and showed it in the newspaper clippings and memorabilia she passed on. I don’t know when this photo was taken, but given my grandfather doesn’t look much older than in his 1911 wedding photos, I assume it was before the war. Tom and Jim look younger than their wartime photos too. As always I wish we had photos in their everyday dress. I’ll use their everyday names, however — how they addressed each other — even Jim, the Lieutenant-Colonel.
§
What follows here is how they’re described in that newspaper story on Robert’s 90th birthday — gross simplifications of very full lives, and occasionally a little slapdash. I’ve arranged them from oldest to youngest. Except for the unfortunate Artie they all require a page or pages to themselves — to explain what they did, and what their lives illustrate of the period from the 1880s to the first World War and beyond.
Robert 1863-1954 went into dairy farming and fattening cattle once he’d cleared his land of kauri.
John Hawthorn (Jack) 1866-1948 was a Kauri bushman at Northern Wairoa, and became manager for the Kauri Timber Company.
Joseph William (Willie) 1868-1945 became a dairy farmer at Mareretu.
James Neil (Jim) 1873-1961 was Colonel of the North Auckland Mounted Rifles.
David (Dave) 1875-1965 was an educationalist and a Northland member of the Auckland Education Board.
Thomas (Tom) 1882-1945 was a sugar planter in Fiji who jumped on a transport vessel and dramatically joined the 1st NZ Expeditionary Force as a private, was commissioned on the field and became a Major in the Camel Corps.
Hugh Shields (Hugh) 1884-1960 was a Southdown sheep breeder and show judge, and farmed at Mareretu on a property adjoining the original McCarroll block.
Arthur Henry Ardis (Artie) 1888-1913 died in Auckland as a young man. (Apart from the fact that he’s listed as a farmer at McCarroll’s Gap in the 1911 electoral roles, that’s all I know at the moment.)
The boys’ father John (1845-1930) worked the Mareretu property with the boys, but had been living in retirement there for several years when he died. Their mother Jane had passed away almost twenty years earlier, “having enjoyed the highest esteem and confidence of the people of the whole district, and beautifying her life with many acts of kindness and love to those who at all times made claims upon her ready sympathies”.
§
A family of J.P.s.
The clippings my mother saved highlight how active the family was in the community. Excluding Artie, who was only 25 when he died, all the brothers became Justices of the Peace. Their father John was also a JP, “probably the oldest active” in the Dominion.
All the boys except Robert were active in local body affairs.
It’s no wonder my father Cliff’s goal, when he married Hugh’s daughter Dorothy, was to avoid being known as “Dorothy McCarroll’s husband”. That in itself would have been a challenge.
§
The Masons
I know nothing about the Masons, and my mother never mentioned them that I can recall. But the Masonic Lodge was very important to the brothers. David was one of a group that first established the Masonic Lodge in Paparoa in 1906. The Franklin Lodge charter was signed by Prince Edward in 1885 and transferred to the new Paparoa Lodge in 1905.
At a McCarroll reunion I remember my cousin Ross speaking to me almost reverently about the Masons. He pointed out the Lodge in Paparoa where Hugh — my grandfather, the youngest brother — was installed by the others as chair.
Due to falling numbers the Lodge closed in 1993. Its charter was transferred to Hikurangi and its building became a Kohanga Reo pre-school.
There’s a remarkable story of how Jim helped organise a Masonic meeting in the Shrine of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.