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The Sisams

Tottie’s paternal grandfather was English. So was his wife Caroline. Henry Sisam is recorded in the 1861 census as a miller employing six men and a boy. The Arrow Mill, on the River Arrow in Warwickshire, is “presumed” to be on the site of one mentioned in the Domesday Book. According to Peter Sisam, Henry’s family lived in the upper and ground levels at the front of the building, and milling operations took place at the back. The Sisam family owned and operated Arrow Mill until 1962. It’s been a hotel and restaurant since then.

In Auckland Alfred joined Nixon’s Volunteers, “a cavalry regiment for the defence of Auckland”. Later he joined the Armed Constabulary, which was established in 1867 to support the settlement of pioneering areas in the North Island — “building roads and serving both a military and a police purpose”.

Alfred served in the Armed Constabulary until 1871. By then he’d been posted to Opotiki, which is where he met Tottie’s mother, Maria Knights.

The Knights

Tottie’s maternal grandparents were English too. Her grandmother Mary Ann was born in Yorkshire and her grandfather in Lambeth, London, the son of a shoemaker. Just to confuse us he too was called Henry. Henry Knights spent most of his life in the army. He’s said to have been 6 feet tall and well built — a suitable specimen for the 10th Hussars, with whom he served in Ireland, briefly, and then in India, where two of his three daughters, Maria and Emma, were born.

Just before the outbreak of the Indian mutiny in 1857, Henry Knights’ regiment was transferred to Australia. There it was disbanded and the men given grants of land around Melbourne. He served for a time in the Australian Mounted Police, and also visited the Ballarat goldfields. In 1862, with the Māori Wars under way, he decided to enlist for New Zealand. He enrolled for the Waikato Militia in September 1863 and the following year set out, with his wife and three daughters, to report for duty in Auckland.

Henry is said to have been stolid, serious minded and unadventurous. His wife Maryann, by contrast, was “vivacious and attractive”. She’d loved the life in India and Melbourne, liked to go to the theatre and the races, and never lacked for male companions to take her there.

Their three daughters were high-spirited like their mother. During the voyage to Auckland, Emma, the youngest, met a good-looking, well-connected young Englishman named Edward Woodford. She eloped with him — aged 15 when his ship sailed for the South Island — and, lying about her age, married him the following year. A few months after Emma eloped, Ellen, the oldest of the girls, married Henry Charman, a trooper in the Colonial Defence Force.

The rest of the family found themselves living in the Bay of Plenty. Henry had been posted there, to Camp Te Papa, north west of Opotiki, as part of the 1st Waikato Regiment. Soon after the move, on August 3rd 1866, Henry Knights’ third daughter, Maria, gave birth to a daughter, Olivia Marie, our great-grandmother.

Population explosion and the land wars

At this point the family history needs a bit of context — although you should take the following for what it’s worth, especially since it’s now intensely political and I’m not a historian.

In the 19th Century New Zealand was a magnet for European migrants, mainly from the United Kingdom. In 1840, when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, the Maori population was still “overwhelmingly dominant”. To that time it had been mainly whalers, sealers, traders and missionaries who visited what was to become New Zealand.

You might say that the main things the Europeans brought with them were Christianity, muskets and new diseases. The intertribal Musket Wars of the 1810s to 1830s had caused thousands of Maori deaths, perhaps a fifth of the population. Beyond that, exposure to diseases like measles and influenza, to which Māori initially had no immunity, were leading to population decline.

Unsurprisingly there was huge demand for land from all those European migrants. Transfers from Maori to European hands, although supposedly regulated by the Treaty, had often not gone well, the result being the so-called New Zealand Wars between 1845 and 1875 — in the midst of which Alfred Sisam and the Knights family found themselves when they moved to the Bay of Plenty.

In fact those wars exacerbated the land issue, as much territory was confiscated from the rebellious tribes. The four regiments of Waikato Militia — of which Henry Knight was part — were raised to help control the Waikato and Bay of Plenty. Their service entitled them to land grants. The idea was that military settlers would settle and farm the land, but be available for military training or service when required. Once they’d staked their claim the settlers were struck off the pay list, given 12 months rations, and remained on standby for military duties for the next three years, but otherwise free to cultivate their land.

Men in the 1st Waikato Regiment were allocated the Opotiki area for settlement. Henry received a plot in the township and 80 acres of land at Waimana East, named after the Waimana river. This area was part of the land confiscated from the Tuhoe.

Alfred Sisam fared less well than Henry Knights, despite also being involved in the military. Peter Sisam says the Armed Constabulary had been promised land, but never in writing, and never received it.

Nevertheless the Sisam family did gain land eventually — also confiscated from Tūhoe during the wars. In 1896 the government offered a large area of land to the public by ballot, in blocks ranging from 50 to 315 acres. The land lay in the Opouriao Valley about 10 or so miles south of Whakatane. A considerable number of families in Whakatane put in for the ballot and Tottie drew a plot of 100 acres. By that time her husband Jack was dead, so Tottie gave the property to Alfred for the family’s use. Alfred sent two of his sons, Leonard and Walter, to clear and cultivate it.

Alfred and Maria

So for me Alfred enters the story as a good hearted man. Olivia Marie, Tottie, our Great-grandmother, was a Sisam by adoption, and a child well loved.

Meanwhile nothing else seems to be known about Sergeant Thomas Squires except that he may have been born in 1844 and may have died in 1866, the year Tottie was born. It looks like that branch of the family lineage remains a mystery for now.

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Alfred and Olivia lived on Church Street in Opotiki, the town where they met. The street was named after St Stephen’s Church, where the Völkner murder took place. An Anglican missionary suspected by some Maori of being a spy was hung and decapitated outside the church. That led to a reward being offered for capture of the man accused of inciting the incident — Kereopa, an early disciple of the “Hauhau” or Pai Marire religion. The Völkner incident and the unrest that followed led to over 200,000 acres of land being confiscated from the Bay of Plenty tribes, particularly Tuhoe, who sheltered Kereopa for several years. You’ll recall that 100 acres of that land eventually found its way into the Sisams’ hands via Tottie, who won it in a ballot after her husband Jack’s death.

Also on Church Street, a Redoubt was built for the Armed Constabulary, for whom Alfred Sisam was working as a Mounted Constable, mail-carrier and despatch rider. Peter Sisam mentions Maria running a small haberdashery business, and perhaps inheriting something of her mother’s flair for nice clothes. She once ordered a new hat for herself hands, instructing the milliner to ’Let it be handsome.’

Maria and Alfred’s first child, Alice, or Allie, joined Tottie in 1871, and the second, another Alfred, in 1872. Caroline, Emily, Leonard, Walter and Kenneth followed. Maria would have been over 40 when Kenny was born.

Emma Woodford (the younger sister who’d eloped to the South Island) eventually moved to Opotiki and settled down to married life with her two children, and another four to follow. Her husband seems to have fitted poorly into pioneer life. Peter Sisam relates a story where a young boy was drowned in a creek that flowed past the back of the Woodford’s house. Edward never fenced it in, even after that accident. Although the Sisams and Woodfords kept in close touch it’s not clear how Edward made a living.

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There’s not much more I can say — right now anyway — about the Sisam family’s next twenty years. But these people have started to feel very real to me, and I wish I could know them better. There are so many questions I’d like to ask them — or find out about them — including what they’d think of us. And what we’ve made out of what they started. And what they looked like in their workaday clothes instead of all dressed up for the photographer!

There’s the death of Maria’s mother, the vivacious Maryann, in 1878. Maryann had enjoyed the excitement of India, Melbourne and Auckland — the cities and military life. I wonder if she enjoyed the life that she and Henry settled down to in Opotiki. Peter Sisam writes: “Their life was a simple one. They cultivated their plot of land, which supplied many of their needs, although seeds for sowing vegetables were difficult to come by in those days, especially garden peas. Like many folk they would keep the pods and cook them when the peas were finished. Mary was of a generous nature and, in later years, gave away a good deal of the beautiful jewelry to anyone who was kind to her and her husband.”

Henry moved in with Maria and Alfred in 1890, twelve years after Maryann’s death. But Henry outlived both his daughter and his grandson-in-law, Tottie’s husband. Jack Lamont died in 1894, Maria in 1895, and old Henry in 1899, aged 81. Tottie lived on until 1950, just long enough for us to sit in her lap for that photo.

I wonder how Alfred and his father-in-law lived after Maria died — partly because it underlines the overwhelming importance of self-sufficiency back then. Henry was in his seventies, in a frontier town. There was the overwhelming dependence of people on family, charity and institutions like the Church, with no government support beyond elementary education and law and order. Maria had been dead three years when the Seddon government enacted the first New Zealand Old Age Pension, and by then Tottie had her own four kids.

And the pension back in 1898 was a pittance. To qualify you’d need to have almost no assets or income — and be of good moral standing. And not Chinese or “Asiatic”. It was another thirty-odd years before Michael Joseph Savage’s government began to enact the “welfare state”. My father was part of the celebratory crowd in Whangarei that watched the election results come in.

Then there’s the hardship of pioneer life. We have plenty of stories from my parents and grandparents, but this is generations earlier, and they’re silent. But you can sense the frontier, the front lines of conflict. Like little Allie, Maria’s second child, “listening anxiously” at night for the clip-clop of her Dad’s horse’s hooves as he rode past their house on his way back to the Redoubt stables.

And there’s the difficulty of getting an education in a town like Opotiki — although Allie was luckier than most, with the school close by. She did well, and served as a student-teacher for a while.

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