Rose Cottage. Norfolk Villa. Overton Cottage. Park House. These were all names of houses in nineteenth century Christchurch. As with any name, they tell us things about the people who bestowed and used the name. Names, after all, are a fundamental part of our identity, and much thought goes into their careful selection, from both the name itself to the particular spelling used. House names, in fact, have quite a history, dating back to the Roman era in Western Europe, although they have become less common since the middle of the nineteenth century (Garrioch 1994: 20-21). Once upon a time, they were the only form of ‘address’ a property had (side note: researching this blog led me down quite the rabbit hole about the history of street numbers – basically: capitalism – stay tuned for that blog post in the coming weeks). The use of street numbers was one of the factors that led to the demise of shop signs and house names, but others include changing social organisation and the changing nature of the street itself (Garrioch 1994: 39).

Not an actual house name from Ōtautahi Christchurch. Just an image to break up the long text.

How common were house names in nineteenth century Christchurch? The short answer is, I don’t know. The trick to answering this question is, somewhat obviously, identifying whether or not a house had a name. Let me explain. I’ve identified quite a few named houses in the city, but only through historical research. None of the houses we recorded in post-earthquake Ōtautahi had any physical evidence of a name on the building. Which isn’t to say that that was always the case – in fact, an excellent example of a house name has been recorded by a colleague in Dunedin, where the name was in the fanlight above the front door (Petchey and Brosnahan 2016). The house names I recorded were ones I identified in nineteenth century newspapers, most commonly when a house or its contents was advertised for sale or lease, or when its occupants advertised for servants. Sometimes, too, a birth or death might be recorded at a particular house. But the point is, someone had to be putting notices in the paper for me to find the name. Given that this (a) cost money to do and (b) required you to be doing one of these things, you can see how this means that the house names from potentially quite a large part of society wouldn’t be historically visible.

Were these names I found in the paper visible on the houses at the time? Good question. On the balance of probability, I think so, otherwise what would the point of putting the name in the newspaper have been? (Although there may well have been a status element to this.) Further, where a house name was used by more than one occupant, I think it’s more likely that the name appeared on the house.

Read on to find out more about a selection of the house names I have found, and why the occupants were using that particular name. Fair warning, in some cases the answer is far from satisfactory (reminding us yet again of the frustrations of historical research and how people can remain ultimately unknowable, in spite of the wealth of information it is possible to find about them).

Como c.1878-c.1883*

Como sale notice. Image: *Press* 2/2/1878: 3.

No clue. Actually, that’s not quite true. The best I can come up with to explain this house name is that it is a reference to Lake Como, in Italy, an area famed for its beauty (and, more recently, celebrities…). The couple who built the house – Mr and Mrs Richard Rossiter Palmer – were only in Christchurch for about two years, and I’ve found little information about them. It’s possible that they had been to Lake Como and loved it, but it is also possible that the couple simply liked the name and all that it stood for: beauty, holidays, the glamour of Italy (some things don’t change). I lean towards this latter interpretation, partly because this was not the only house called Como around at the time: there was a Como Cottage in St Asaph Street and a Como in Rakaia (Lyttelton Times 8/4/1878: 1, Star (Christchurch) 12/6/1878: 2).

Cora Villa c.1879-c.189

Cora Villa, to let. Image: *Lyttelton Times* 27/11/1879: 1.

This one is quite simple, and sad. The house was built by Joseph and Harriett Francis, and it was named for their daughter, Cora, who died in infancy, just before the house was built (BDM Online n.d.).

Aubyn House c.1883- c.1893

Aubyn House, a name that only applied to the house on the right of this pair of semi-detached houses. Image: M. Hennessey.

The sale of furniture at Aubyn House. Image: *Press* 28/6/1883: 4.

Another elusive connection. The St Aubyn family were (and still are) a prominent family in Cornwall, owning and living at St Michael’s Mount since the seventeenth century (St Michael’s Mount 2023). However, I could not find any connection between the family who used the name – Alfred and Alice Thompson – and Cornwall, or the St Aubyns. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t a connection (absence of evidence and all that…).

Aorangi c.1884- c.1916

Aorangi, which functioned as a school as well as a home. Image: *Lyttelton Times* 3/5/1884: 7.

Cultural appropriation. And a puzzler. Some readers will be familiar with ‘Aorangi’ as the name by which Aoraki Mt Cook was referred to by some in the mid-late twentieth century, before this error of dialect was corrected. However, the references I found to Aorangi in mid-nineteenth century newspapers were to an Aorangi in the North Island and, in early 1884, to a new steamship called the Aorangi (New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian 5/11/1856: 3, Press 26/1/1884: 2). Not a single reference to the mountain. The steamship was owned by the New Zealand Shipping Company and called at Wellington and Christchurch on its maiden voyage to New Zealand in early 1884, bringing passengers (and freight) to New Zealand and taking the same, and frozen meat, back to England. There was A LOT of fuss about it in the papers.

The Yaldwyns, who gave the house its name, had lived in Otago and Wellington before moving to Christchurch, and William Yaldwyn had been a government-appointed auditor for a number of areas in the lower North Island. It’s possible that this is how they came across the name or, more prosaically, that all the media coverage of the ship introduced them to word, they liked it and thus they used it to name their house in May 1884.

Cotswold House c.1884- c.1895

Sarah Fisher, of Cotswold House, advertising for a servant. Image: *Lyttelton Times* 13/2/1884: 1 .

Named as such by Sarah and the Reverend Thomas Fisher. In fact, probably just named by Thomas, who was from the village of Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, just on the outskirts of the Cotswolds (Ancestry 2019). Of note is that Sarah and Thomas named their earlier house in Christchurch Alcester Lodge (Star (Christchurch) 30/12/1871: 1), a name preserved for a time in the adjoining Alcester Street (CCL 2016: 21). As it happens, the street immediately to the north is Winchcombe Street, named for Thomas’s place of birth. Alcester is about 35 km north of Winchcombe.

St Vedas c.1896- c.1930

St Vedas, for sale. Image: *Press* 13/121930: 28,

Not even an actual saint. There is a St Vedast in the Catholic pantheon of saints, and it’s possible that ‘St Vedas’ was an error by the newspaper (or even by Jane and John Nicholson). St Vedast, however, was typically anglicised as St Foster – although there have been three St Vedast churches in England (two of which remain standing; Wikipedia 2023). But John Nicholson was from Ireland (of course I don’t know where Jane was from), where there are no recorded St Vedast churches, although it does increase the possibility that he might have been Catholic.

Tainui c.1896-c.1916

Tainui, to let. Image: *Lyttelton Times* 17/5/1895: 1.

More cultural appropriation. This time by Henry and Susan Kirk. For those readers who aren’t familiar with the word, Tainui are a North Island-based iwi, more commonly known as Waikato-Tainui. Waikato-Tainui were attacked by the Crown, and their lands invaded, in the early 1860s. Some 1.2 million acres of their land was subsequently confiscated, as punishment for their ‘rebellion’, a process known as raupatu. Would the Kirks have known about this? It’s hard to say. The story had certainly disappeared from the local newspapers by the 1890s (although Waikato-Tainui continued to fight for redress; Waikato-Tainui n.d.). As with Aorangi, there was a ship called Tainui that was frequently mentioned in the newspapers in the 1890s…

Or there’s another factor, and it’s relevant for Aorangi too. By the late nineteenth century, te reo Māori names for houses were becoming popular, frequently chosen for the way they sounded, rather than with any recognition of the meaning or cultural context of the word (Cowan 1900: 1, Petersen 2000: 57). This was part of a broader trend of Māori art, decorative details and carvings starting to be used in Pākehā houses (Petersen 2000: 57). In her discussion of this, Petersen situates this development within a growing nationalism on the part of New Zealand’s Pākehā population, coupled with a developing sense of national identity, and that, for some at least, the country’s Māori culture had a role to play in this. Furphy (2002: 59-60) goes a step further in his discussion of a similar trend for using Aboriginal words for house names in Australia, siting this within a process of indigenisation. This was a process by which colonial settlers sought to become ‘indigenous’ by assimilating and appropriating indigenous culture, thereby carving out a new identity for themselves that drew on that culture to firmly embed them in that new place, at the same time as they rode roughshod over the indigenous culture in question. There is an argument to be made that the Yaldwyns and Kirks were active participants in this process in New Zealand.

Furphy’s detailed examination of this trend notes that indigenous names were typically used without any knowledge of their cultural significance or context, but chosen simply because they sounded good – a conclusion that is striking in its similarity to James Cowan’s (1900: 1) observation that New Zealand’s home owners experienced “a genuine delight when they discover a smoothing-sounding and appropriate combination of liquid Māori words”. There is no record of how Māori felt about this trend, but the fact that, in te ao Māori, names are typically gifted, not simply taken, indicates how problematic choices like those made by the Yaldwyns and the Kirks were. Add to that the fact that ‘Tainui’ in particular is a name of immense significance, and affixing them to a house is likely to have been particularly offensive.

These house names, then, demonstrate something of the range of approaches people took to naming their home. There were the Francises, memorialising their lost daughter; the Fishers, looking with nostalgia to the place they – he – had left behind; and the Palmers, selecting a name that embodied rest, relaxation and retreat. And then there were the Yaldwyns and the Kirks, who chose te reo Māori words, possibly just because they sounded melodious... And possibly after being introduced to the word via ships, of all things. But there’s another element to this, too. The Fishers, in selecting an English name, essentially looked to the past and the place they had come from, reinforcing their cultural background to their neighbourhood and community. The Yaldwyns and the Kirks, however, for all the problems with their name selection, were looking to the future. Perhaps they even saw themselves as New Zealanders or, at least, closer to their colonial home than to the home they had left behind.

Katharine Watson

*These are the dates the name is known to have been in use.

References

Ancestry, 2019. Rev. Thomas Richard Fisher. [online] Available at: https://www.ancestry.com.au/family-tree/person/tree/28849058/person/12514637379/facts?_phsrc=AxX295&_phstart=successSource [Accessed 25 January 2019].

BDM Online. Available at: https://www.bdmhistoricalrecords.dia.govt.nz/

CCL, 2021. Christchurch Street Names – A. Available at: https://my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/christchurch-place-names/

CCL, n.d. Frederick Thompson, 1805-1881. [online] Available at: https://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Heritage/People/T/ThompsonFrederick/

Cowan, James, 1900. Maori place names. New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, 1 June 1900, p.1.

Furphy, Sam, 2002. Aboriginal house names and settler Australian identity. Journal of Australian Studies 26(72): 59-68.

Garrioch, David, 1994. House names, shop signs and social organization in Western European cities, 1500-1900. Urban History 21(1): 20-48.

Lyttelton Times (Christchurch). Available online at: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/

New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian. Available online at: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/

Petchey, Peter and Brosnahan, Sean, 2016. Finding meaning and identity in New Zealand buildings archaeology: the example of ‘Parihaka’ House, Dunedin. Journal of Pacific Archaeology 7(2): 26-42.

Petersen, Anna K. C., 2000. The European use of Maori art in New Zealand homes c.1890-1914. In: B. Brookes, ed. At Home in New Zealand: History, Houses, People. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2000, pp.57-73.

Press. Available online at: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/

St Michael’s Mount, 2023. St Michael’s Mount. [online] Available at: https://www.stmichaelsmount.co.uk/about-us [Accessed 19 October 2023].

Star (Christchurch). Available online at: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/

The Argus. Available online at: https://trove.nla.gov.au/

Waikato-Tainui, n.d. Te Hiitori o Te Raupatu. [online] Available at: https://waikatotainui.com/about-us/history/ [Accessed 19 October 2023].

Wikipedia, 2023. Vedast. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedast [Accessed 19 October 2023].

What's in a name?