How They Fared When They Got Here: The Subsequent History of the Staplehurst Pauper Families

Abstract

In my previous article for this publication' I described how the Rev T.W. Hornbuckle, philanthropic Rector of the Parish of Staplehurst in the Weald of Kent, managed to subsidise the passage to New Zealand of the A very, Farmer, Hunt, Nash, Peckham and Relf families on The Bolton, arriving in Port Nicholson in April 1840. He did this in the face of Colonial Office and Poor Law Commission opposition by keeping a secondary accounts book, which still exists. The principle of funding the emigration of paupers from the Parish Rates was not illegal, but the Colonial Office did not think it proper to send women and children to such a wild part of the world where there was as yet no British Colony. One suspects too that the Liberal Government of the day had had sufficient brushes with Wakefield and the New Zealand Company to relish the chance to be disobliging.