1854

Some of my relations emigrate to New Zealand,—Difficulties of a poor gentleman.—My uncle's reasons for emigration.—His departure.—Family separations.—Our love for Hollins.

In the month of April, 1854, an event occurred which was of great importance in our family.

My eldest uncle, Holden Hamerton, emigrated to New Zealand with all his children, and a son and daughter of my uncle Hinde accompanied them. This suddenly reduced our circle by eleven persons, without counting a young family belonging to my cousin Orme.

My uncle, who was at that time a solicitor in Halifax, had reached a very critical period in the life of a pÈre de famille. His children were grown up and expensive, and he had tried various ways of economizing without any definite result. Amongst others, he had given up Hopwood Hall, his mansion in Halifax, and had converted the stabling at Hollins into a residence for his wife and the children who remained with her. The stables were large enough to make a spacious dwelling. I remember the regret I felt on seeing the workmen pull down the handsome oak stalls, and remove the beautiful pavement, which was in blocks of smooth stone carefully bevelled at the angles. My unfortunate uncle lived like a bachelor in a small house in Halifax to be near his office, and only came to Hollins for the Sunday.

It is, of course, very easy to criticize a comparatively poor gentleman with a large family who is trying not to be ruined. It is easy to say that he ought to live strictly within his income, whatever it may be; but to do that strictly would require an iron resolution. He must cut short all indulgences, annihilate all elegancies, set his face against all the customs of his class. His attitude towards his wife and children must be one of stern refusal steadily and implacably maintained. If he relaxes—and all the influences around him tend to make him relax—the old habits of customary expense will re-establish themselves in a few weeks. He must cut his family off from all society, and with regard to himself he must do what is far more difficult—cut himself off from all domestic affection, behave like a heartless miser, and, at the very time when he most needs a little solace and peace in his own home, constitute himself the executor of the pitiless laws that govern the human universe.

My uncle was not equal to all this. He could make hard sacrifices for himself, and, in fact, did reduce his own comforts to those of a poor bachelor, but he could not find in his heart to refuse everything to his family; so that although they made no pretension now to anything like an aristocratic position, my uncle still found himself to be living rather beyond his means, and the expense of establishing his sons and daughters in England being now imminent, and avoidable only in one way, he spent days, and I fear also nights, of anxiety in arriving at a determination.

A journey to Scotland settled the matter. My uncle visited his eldest son Orme, who was then at Greenock, and he discovered, as I had done, that my cousin was married. Of course I had kept his secret, having found it out by accident when a guest under his roof. The young man offered to accompany his father to New Zealand, and my uncle, who loved his eldest son, thought that this would be some compensation for leaving England. He did not know that Orme's irresistible instinct for changing his residence would make the New Zealand expedition no more than a temporary excursion for him.

Another reason for emigrating to New Zealand was this: My uncle's second son, Lewis, had abandoned the profession of the law and gone to Australia by himself, where he was now a shepherd in the bush. He would rejoin his father, and they would be a re-united family. All of them would be together in New Zealand except one, my cousin Edward, who lay in the family vault in Burnley Church. I had feelings of the strongest fraternal affection for Edward, and if the reader cares to see his likeness, he has only to look at the engraved portraits of Shelley, especially the one in Moxon's double-column edition of 1847. The likeness there is so striking that, for me, it supplies the place of any other.

Edward died at the age of seventeen. He had a gentle and sweet nature; but although he resembled Shelley so closely in outward appearance, he was without any poetical tendency. His gifts were arithmetical and mathematical, and whenever he had a quarter of an hour to spare he was sure to take a piece of paper and cover it all over with figures. His early death certainly spared him much trouble that he was hardly qualified to meet. He had that dislike to physical exercise which often accompanies delicate health, though there was no appearance of weakness till the beginning of his fatal illness.

I well remember my uncle's last visit to his sisters. He did not say that it was his last, but left some clean linen in the house, saying he would want it when he came again. In this way there was a little make-belief of hope; but I doubt if my aunts were really deceived, and I did not quite know what to think. My uncle seemed flushed and excited, and contradicted me rather sharply because I happened to be in error about something of no importance. It was a hard moment for him, as he loved his sisters, and had the deepest attachment to Hollins, where he was born, and where he had passed the happiest days of his life. His last visit has remained so distinct in my memory that I can even now see clearly his great stalwart figure in the chair on the right-hand side of the fireplace. Then he left us and passed the window, and since that day he never was seen again at his old place. I can imagine what it must have been to him to turn round at the avenue gate, and look back on the gables of Hollins, knowing it to be for the last time.

His wife and the rest of his family went away without inflicting upon themselves and us the pain of a farewell. I was present, however, at Featherstone when my cousin Hinde left for New Zealand. One of his sisters accompanied him out of pure sisterly devotion. She thought he would be lonely out in the colony, so she would go and stay with him till he married. He did not marry, and she never returned.

The colonial strength of England is founded upon these family separations, but they are terrible when they occur, especially when the parents are left behind in the old country. To us who remained this wholesale emigration in our family produced the effect of a great and sudden mortality. For my part I have received exactly one letter from the New Zealand Hamertons since they left. It was a very interesting letter, interesting enough to make me regret "there was but one."

My uncle's property sold well, and on leaving England he had still a balance of ten thousand pounds in his pocket, which was more than most emigrants set out with; but he built a good house on the estate he purchased, and it was ruined in the war. His wife was a woman of great courage and wonderful constitutional cheerfulness, both severely tested by three months of incessant sea-sickness on the outward voyage. They met with one terrible storm, during which the captain did not hope to save the vessel, and my uncle and aunt sat together in their cabin clasping each other's hands, and calmly awaiting death.

After their departure my guardian and her sister remained at Hollins as tenants of the new proprietor. We still clung to the old place, but it did not seem the same to us. On the night of the sale by auction my aunt said to me, sadly, as we took our candlesticks to go to bed: "It is strange to think that we positively do not know under whose roof we are going to sleep to-night." The change was felt most painfully by her. My guardian had a more resigned way of accepting the evils of life; she had a kind of Christian pessimism that looked upon terrestrial existence as not "worth living" in itself, and a little less or more of trouble and sorrow in this world seemed to her scarcely worth considering, being only a part of the general unsatisfactoriness of things. Her sister had intense local attachments, and the most intense of them all was for this place, her birthplace, where she had passed her youth. This attachment was increased in her case by a strong, deep, and poetic sentiment that I hardly like to call aristocratic, because that word will have other associations (of pride in expensive living) for most readers. My aunt had the true sentiment of ancestry, and it was painful to her to see a place go out of a family. I have the same sentiment, though with less intensity, and there were other reasons that made me love Hollins very much. At that time the natural beauty that surrounded it was quite unspoilt. We were near to the streams and the moors that I delighted in, and the idea of being obliged to leave, as we might be at any time by the new proprietor, was painful to a degree that only lovers of nature will understand.

Even now, in my fifty-fourth year, I very often dream about Hollins, about the old garden there, and the fields and woods, and the rocky stream. Sometimes the place is sadly and stupidly altered in my dream, and I am irritated; at other times it is improved and enriched, and the very landscape is idealized into a nobler and more perfect beauty.

I need only add to this account of my uncle's emigration, that when he landed on the shores of New Zealand in much perplexity as to where he should go to find a temporary lodging, a colonist met him, and said that he had been told by the Masonic authorities to receive him fraternally. This he did by taking the whole family under his roof and entertaining them as if they had been old friends, thereby giving my uncle ample time to make his own arrangements. In a later chapter of this autobiography I intend to give a short account of what happened to the emigrants afterwards.