Dr. Arnold's Land

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 774, 21 May 1954, Page 16

Dr. Arnold's Land

by

ANGUS

ROSS

N Book Shop for April 28, the reviewer of the latest biography of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, mentioned that Arnold acquired two sections of land in New Zealand. His opinion that it would be interesting to discover more about this land was reiterated by the session chairman. . When it is recalled that Thomas Arnold, son of the great headmaster, visited New Zealand with a view to farming his father’s land, and later left an account of his travels, it is not difficult to obtain some information about Arnold’s land. My own story of how I became interested in this sub‘ect illustrates how large a part the fortuitous can play in such matters. When I was in Cambridge, England, in ‘1949, my friend, W. G. MeClymont, author of the centennial publication, The Exploration of New Zealand, wrote suggesting that I should try to locate the diary of Thomas Arnold. He told me that Mrs. G. M. Trevelyan, wife of the historian who was then Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. had asked Miss Brenda Bell, of Shag Valley, Otago, with whom she had_ become friendly during the last war, whether she knew where Thomas Arnold, Mrs. Trevelyan’s gtandfather. had lived in New Zealand. McClymont was able to tell Miss Bell that Thomas Arnold had lived for a time with her own grandparents, the Francis Dillon Bells, at Nelson. After Arnold left New Zealand, he lived for a time in Tasmania, and it was there that his daughter, later well known as Mrs. Humphry Ward. herself a writer of note, was born. | In 1904, Janet Penrose, second daugh-

ter of the Humphry Wards, married George Macaulay Trevelyan, and therefore it was to the Lodge of Trinity College that I went in search of the diary of Thomas Arnold. I did not find the diary, but that did not matter very much since Thomas Arnold had committed most of his mémories of New Zealand to paper when he wrote his article in Frazer’s Magazine of August, 1861, and his autobiography, Passages in a Wandering Life, in 1900. From these sources we learn that he was so impressed by his father’s purchase of land from the New Zealand Company that he read everything about New Zealand that he could lay his hands on. Then, in November, 1847, he took a cabin passage in the ship John Wickliffe to Wellington. He thus travelled with Captain Cargill and the ‘first settlers of the Free Church settlement of Otago. Arnold was not very impressed by Cargill nor by conditions at Otago: "The old captain himself was, I should have thought, a case to which the rule of superannuation was justly applicable. . . His glass of toddy sometimes elevated him. considerably, and on such occasions he would walk about the cuddy, trolling .out with flushed features the burden of some old Scottish song." After spending nearly two months at Port Chalmers, the John Wickliffe took Arnold on to Wellington where, after some sightseeing and a visit up the west coast, he tells us, he "lost no time in ascertaining the situation of my father’s country land." His description of the land is reasonably full: "The two sections, each of 100 acres, were in the Makara Valley, about eight miles due west from Wellington, in the peninsula which separates ‘Port Nicholson from the main channel of Cook’s Strait. For about half the distance there was a good road; for the rest of the way only a bridle path which

had been recently cut through the bush across the steep ridge which bounded the Makara valley on the east. The sections were near one another, but on opposite sides of the valley; about half of each was pretty level; the rest lay on the slopes of the bounding ridges. If I remember right, not an acre of land on the Makara had as yet been cleared; a dark bush, consisting mostly of red pine, everywhere obstructed the sight." Thomas Arnold quickly came to the conclusion that "the Makara Valley was out of the way, and hard to come at," and, after some discussion with Colonel William Wakefield, decided to exchange for a good section on the Porirua road. After he had put in some hard work on this section and built a hut on it, he was disgusted to find that the trustees of his father’s estate refused to sanction the exchange. Arnold then turned to work for which he was better fitted by his Oxford training. His "true and kind friend," Alfred Domett, urged him to try to become the first head of Nelson College, a fitting post -for a son of Arnold of Rugby; but, although Arnold spent some time with Frederick Weld and met the Staffords, the Bells and others in Nelson, and began some tutoring there, the College had not been opened when he received an invitation to become "Inspector of Schools in the Colony of Tasmania." He accepted this offer and left Wellington in December, 1849. "I made no fortune in New Zealand," he wrote later, "but as I had not dreamed of making any I was not disappointed."