90 years on since WWI's Passchendaele battle

WWI's Passchendaele battle is being noted this week and over the next few months. I am reluctant to use words like commemorated or celebrated... the only triumph was folly. Something like 500,000 allied soldiers died at Passchendaele - the sheer stupidity of the manner of many of those deaths is the lasting legacy. New Zealand has its own 'noting' over there in late October marking a day when 2,500 NZers died on one horrible day.

I guess my somewhat cynical view of what took place was reinforced reading Ben Elton's The First Casualty, watching the 4th series of Blackadder and the excellent French movie A Very Long Engagement. Of course I recognise that the soldiers themselves were courageous in dire circumstances - they had little choice - they deserved better from their leaders and from the people who got themselves into the mess that was early 20th century Europe.

Edmund Anscombe at Otago University

Photos by Mart the Rev

As mentioned earlier in a blog, my great grandmother's brother was an architect. One of this masterpieces was the archway at the University of Otago where I earned degrees in Arts & Theology in the 1980's.

The Stewarts of Warepa

Here's my great-grandmother on the Stewart side - Eliza who gave up a fairly straight-forward life in Dunedin as a painter to be farmer's wife and mother of seven. I think I can name them all... Gilbert & Eliza, Winifred, Grace, Alice, Nora, (I'll have to come back on this!) & Lloyd my grandfather. Lloyd was born in 1908 - he looks about 8 years old here - thus the picture was taken around 1916.

Alice McIntosh was the one I knew the best. She lived in Balclutha and was the last survivor in the family. Alice also painted (as did Nora) and I have two of them. Alice was a character who drove everywhere picking up hitchhikers and visiting the extended family. I attended her 90th birthday some years back.

Those who have been

This week the church youth group had a as our guests a couple who are into genealogy in a big way. The question 'who am I?' is addressed in part by how we have been shaped by those who have been before us.

It kind of reignited my interest in my forebears. So far I have got the birth, death and marriage dates of the two generations prior to me (not that hard really) and I'm slowly working backwards. I don't know many of the names of my great grandmothers & g-fathers, but have some idea on a few of them. One of them has a little bit of notoriety - Eliza Stewart (nee Anscombe) was a reasonably talented painter. Half a dozen of her works are stored in the Hocken Library in Dunedin and she is listed in a publication and on the web. Her brother Edmund was the famous one - he was a significant New Zealand architect, designing many buildings (including churches) in Dunedin and Wellington as well as being the designer of the 1940 NZ Centennial Exhibition in Wellington and the 1925 NZ & South Seas Exhibition in Dunedin.

One of the delights of looking back was finding out (after she was named) that my daughter Hannah had a great-great grandmother with the same name. Hannah Dawson died in 1946, I'm off to find out where and when she was born and what her maiden name was.