The striking fact remains that certain places in southern England developed long traditions of sending people out to New Zealand. Take Helston in Cornwall, which suffered from overcrowding and the downturn of the tin-mining industry. As Raewyn Dalziel has shown, those who came out with the Plymouth Company to New Plymouth in 1841-43 came from particular townships in the area, of which Helston was one. Eleven families, five of whom were neighbours in one street, migrated with the company. One of those who migrated was 21-year-old seamstress Caroline Julian. With her came her father, an agricultural labourer, her mother, her sister, who was married to a miner, their three children, another sister as a domestic servant, three brothers who came out as a labourer, a blacksmith and a mason respectively, and three younger siblings - a grand total of fifteen people.
Things did not improve in Helston, and in 1863, taking advantage of Canterbury's assisted passages, ten members of Henry and Grace Penberthy's family came out [...] They were probably attracted by the presence of a friend and relative by marriage who was the preacher in the Wesleyan chapel in Christchurch. Nor did the flow from Helston stop then. Bob Fitzsimmons, the 'freckled wonder' who became heavyweight boxing champion of the world, came out from Helston to Timaru with his mother and policeman father in 1873. Today the many cabbage trees and flaxes in Helston may be an accidental echo of the town's New Zealand links, but the presence of 'kia ora' on two doorways is perhaps less coincidental.
- Jock Phillips & Terry Hearn, Settlers: New Zealand Immigrants from England, Ireland & Scotland 1800-1945, Auckland, 2008, p.76-6.
See also:
Blog: The Tuckers of Calstock, 31 August 2010
Blog: Eden Project, 6 April 2009
Blog: A sunny day on Dartmoor, 29 April 2011
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