Considering that their eldest child was my maternal grandmother, I know very little about Jack and Olivia Lamont’s family. Nor do I know how Olivia (Tottie) lived or worked after Jack died, aged 27, just seven years after they were married. So this little is all I know, or understand, so far. ~ Ian
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Jack and Tottie had four children together. My grandmother, Anna Elizabeth Violet — “Vi” — was born in Te Aroha in 1888. I don’t know how or where she met her husband, Hugh McCarroll, whom she married in 1911.
Their second child was named after his father, John Alexander Campbell — or “Uncle Cam” to my mother.
There were two more boys, William Alfred and Marshall Leonard, whose tragic end at Passchendaele you can read about here.
Uncle Cam married Nora Ariell and they had three children, Olivia, Doreen and William. I think we called them Olive, Doreen and Bill, but maybe I’m misremembering. Somewhere there’s a photograph of the three of them dressed up and striding along together that I’d like to include.
We had little contact with Mum’s family after she and Dad moved to Hikurangi in 1953, but I know she thought of them affectionally and with pride, and enjoyed meeting up with them.
Olive married a friendly, engaging man we called Johnny Spence. This photo was taken at their wedding.
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Dorothy kept a clipping of an article from New Zealand Geographic about Olive:
“I earned my first wages at twelve and from then on you paid five bob a quarter in tax. Looking after my uncle’s sheep was the job I had. Go round them every day every evening. See there were none cast, and pick up any lambs, and see their mothers feed them. Then I was doing housework after that.
“I was in Land Service tor a while — Women’s Land Service in the war. A Iot of my girlfriends were doing Land Service. We had to wear our uniform it we went out anywhere. After about four or five months I ripped all the muscles in the side of my leg. I was doing farm work that girls shouldn’t be doing, probably. Heavy lifting, I suppose. The day I did it, I was only lifting a cream can. which I’d been doing year in, year out. It was heavier than the one we had at home but still, it was only a cream call. I just lifted it wrong, I suppose, or slipped or something.
“During the war I was all over the place. I went to the South Island — actuallv that was ’47 that was after the war. Moved down for apple packing, Motueka. Lived at the hostel and went out tobacco tying in the weekends. Some of them went hop picking but that was awful; it ripped the hands to bits.
“I was involved with the Country Women’s Institute sixty years. I’m stlll involved but I don’t do much nowadays. I just go to the meetings, that’s all I do now. I joined at Mararetu, which is about six miles from Paparoa, when I was nearly fifteen. There was nothing much else In those days — you played tennis, you played basketball, and went to dances in the truck.
“Incidentally, I’ll be seventy-five tomorrow.
“We bought our house twenty-four years ago. Part of it was the old Post Office. Those couple of sheep’s all we got now, and the dog and the cat. We don’t like the towns I suppose. Don’t like the town life.
“I haven’t got any children. He’s got a daughter from his first marriage. But I didn’t have any.”