HE LATE MRS ELIOTT.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume XI, Issue 1310, 17 April 1883, Page 4

HE LATE MRS ELIOTT.

The many friends of Mr G, Eliot Eliott throughout the Colony will regret to hear of the death of hie wife, after a long and painful illness. Mr Eliott is one of our oldest colonists. He landed in Auckland, from Sydney, in December 1840, and entered the Government service the following month (January 1841). His late wife joined him the following September, and they were married by the Rev. Mr Churton, Colonial chaplain, in the old raupo whare which did duty for a church in those days. They remained in Auckland until the removal of the Seat of Government to Wellington in 1864, and passed through all the trials and vicissitudes which befell the early Auckland settlers. During the Heke war they left their home at Mount Edon and went into town for six weeks, taking nothing with thorn but the clothes they stood in and their first baby boy—now a man of 40 years old, and Under-seoretary for Lands and Immigration, and the father of six children, During the Waikato war Mr Eliott went to Sydney and brought down a company of 125 men to serve as militiamen ; while his throe eldest sons went to the front as Volunteers, the present manager of the New Zealand Insurance Company being one of them, leaving Mrs Eliott alone in Auckland with five yonng children in those troublous times, when 400 of Auckland's citizens mounted on guard and patrol every night, expecting an attack from the Natives ; and well and nobly she then played her part as a mother and a patriot. She remained with her husband in Wellington until 1873, when he retired from the Government employ, after 32 years’ service, and visited the old country after an absence of 37 years, returning to the Colony and settling in Dundin in 1876. There may be some few in Dunedin who remember Auckland, a village of raupo whares, when pork and potatoes were the staple diet, when Queen-street was a swamp, and boats went up the Ligar Canal to the old courthouse, when housewives did their cooking in the open air (as did Mrs Eliott for the first 18 months of her married life), when such a person as a “ lady help ” was both unknown and unheard of, when Felton Mathew (police magistrate) and his black hone were notabilities, when it took a long summer's day to go to the top of Mount Eden and back to Auckland, when the British Army was represented by a company of the 80th Regiment under Major Bunbury, when you knew everybody and everybody knew you, not your person only but your business, and often better than younelf. These old identities who knew Auckland in those days are fast passing away. One more has joined the great majority fn .the person of Mrs Eliot Eliott, and there are those in Auckland, Wellington, and Dunedin who, knowing her when they read this will pass upon her that highest encomium of her sex, " She was a true woman.” She had seven eons and three daughters. Three of the former are buried in Auckland. She leaves seven of her family and 20 grandchildren in different parts of the Colony to mourn her death.—Utago Daily “Times,"