My paternal grandparents, Matthew and Leonora Miller. The old grainy black and white photo showed up here at some stage. I have no knowledge of its provenance, but I got to thinking about it. These are the paternal grandparents also of Joan Bell, my sisters Marilyn and Barbara, my brothers Morris and Duncan, and our late cousin David Miller.
It is a wonderful photo, full of life and humour. The old battered woolen suit, long since conformed to the particular human configuration, and long since past any ironing. It is comfortable. I understand that. The clerical collar and black bib are pristine, because that is the badge of office. Otherwise the trousers hang ready for sitting, the abdomen is comfortably advanced. The smile on Matthew Miller is perhaps the best smile the Millers have ever produced. Below, almost out of sight, there were serviceable and sensible boots.
Leonora is not quite so generous with her smile. Is she in her Good Dress, normally worn on Sundays? I think not. It looks to me like a working dress. What is the apparent white dressing that comes down her right arm to beyond her top knuckles? A plaster? Did she break her arm? (If you click on the photo you may get a larger version of it.)
Where was this photo taken? They emigrated to New Zealand in November 1921, because (goes the family story) some Scottish doctor had told my grandmother that a new climate would cure her asthma. It didn’t. But also, the NZ Presbyterian Church at that time had sent some bloke to Scotland to recruit likely Scottish ministers to uproot and come out to the Colony to make a new life. I think Leonora persuaded Matthew that they should emigrate. By that time they had Lex (13), Tom (my father, 11), and Len (called Spud, 2).
It would have been a huge wrench. Matthew Miller had been minister of his parish, Stevenston, Ayrshire, already for some 20 years. Scottish ministers were bound to their parishes by ties of love and vows and commitment. In many instances it was assumed to be a life-long commitment, like marriage. When Mary and I visited that church in 1964, some 43 years later, it was still known locally as Miller's Kirk. We walked into the church one day in the middle of the week, a woman was there cleaning and polishing, she looked up at us and said, "You'll be Tom Miller's son."
Matthew must have been powerfully persuaded by Leonora, and by the lure of evangelical service in far lands, in those theologically simpler days. They may have decided that the prospects for their sons were bleak in Scotland, given the social realities and the scant income of a parish minister. For all the innate conservatism of many Scots, Scots have also been hugely adventurous.
There is some evidence that Matthew expected to arrive to a significant city parish in Dunedin or somewhere similar, and had been led to false expectations by the NZ church before they left Scotland. On arrival, he was sent to Dargaville. Let me tell you where Dargaville is. It is at the end of nowhere. There is a lovely phrase in the late Justice Peter Mahon’s published letters to his son, where he says that he and his wife went driving, and came in sight of “the gleaming spires of Dargaville”. I think of it now every time I catch the first view of Warkworth from the south. What Thomas Hardy described in Jude The Obscure, his first distant view of the dreaming spires of Oxford, scarcely applies. You drive north from Auckland for maybe an hour and a half, to the Brynderwyn turnoff, then left for perhaps another hour and a half to Dargaville.
In 1921 those were dirt or deep mud roads. Transport was mainly by boat across the Kaipara from Helensville, and on up the river to Dargaville. To a Scottish minister who had always lived within a couple of hours by train from the granite fastnesses of Glasgow or wherever, this must have seemed the abyss of lostness. And at the same time they had become aware of the shadow side of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand. It was a colonial church. It was nothing like the stability of his ecclesiastical support system in Scotland.
I am unsure of the sequence of events during the 1920s. They arrived in the Colony in 1921, and Matthew Miller died in Devonport on 6 October 1930, of bowel cancer. So my guess is that that smiling photo was taken in maybe 1923 or soon after, to cheer people up back at Home. They would have said, “Ah, but Nora looks to be having a hard time of it…”
Matthew and Leonora were not long in the parish of Dargaville -- November 1921 to March 1923.There is a brief stay at Point Chevalier in Auckland in 1923, and then the parish of Helensville, September 1927 to March 1929. I wonder when he began to be depressed and unwell. The progress of bowel cancer must have been an increasing nightmare in the days and nights when nothing could be done about it. I have had bowel cancer, but by that time there was understanding and successful treatment.
Lex was sent to board at Mt Albert Grammar School -- one of the few wise decisions my family made. I have no idea who paid for it. Maybe he got a scholarship. Tom, my father, never went to secondary school. At some stage they tried orcharding at Kumeu or some such place. But by then Matthew was sick, and Leonora arranged to rent a substantial house at Cheltenham, Devonport, down in Auckland, where she could nurse him and also take in boarders to help with the finances. There Matthew died. One of the boarders was Eulie Armstrong, our mother. So life generally tries to renew itself.
It’s likely that this photo was taken outside the old Dargaville manse, about 1923, while Matthew still expected to make a go of his new life. The brevity of his tenure in Dargaville and Helensville, however, indicates to me the onset of depression, sorrow, grief... cancer. Did he feel he had abandoned his parish far away… to say nothing of his Scottish colleagues and commitments? Well, it would not enhance healing.
I never heard my grandmother talk about her husband. That is extraordinary in itself. My father remembered him mainly as a big strong man who exercised a firm and painful discipline on himself and others, and could smash open a coconut with his fist. My mother seemed to have no direct memory of him. It’s all very sad. I think Matthew broke his heart and his health by walking away from Stevenston, Ayrshire. But by that broken heart, most of us came to be born.
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