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Fifty years a Taranaki doctor by Ian St George George Hanbury Farrady St George If an offence come out of the Truth, better is it that the offence come than that the Truth be concealed. —St JEROME. Cabinets of curiosities, also known as “wonder rooms”, were small collections of extraordinary objects which, like today’s museums, attempted to categorise and tell stories about the wonders and oddities of the natural world. —THE BRITISH LIBRARY For a physician everything depended on horses. They were a factor determining his life. —WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS Like other Pioneer doctors, his journeys on horse and foot to attend to those in need in the back country were long, tedious, and often dangerous…. —WH SKINNER No one loves to tell of scandal except to him who loves to hear it. —St JEROME. CONTENTS Foreword 1 Chapters 1. Forebears 3 2. The Queen v. St George 16 3. Medical education 32 4. The voyage of the Amelia Thompson 38 5. A country doctor 45 6. Hardship and compensation 65 7. A doctor’s horses 104 8. Clippings: A Cabinet of Curiosities 112 9. Dr St George’s casebook 153 10. Matilda Jane (Shaw) St George 182 11. Endings 185 Acknowledgements 193 Appendix A. Transcription: The Journal of George Durant, 10 October 1758–30 May 1759. 196 B. Facsimile: Sale of Tong Castle contents 227 C. Materia medica 267 Illustrations George Hanbury Farrady St George frontispiece Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of George Durant 1 6 Tong Castle in 1769 7 Tong Castle after renovation 7 Locket miniature of George Durant 2 10 Map: eastern Shropshire 13 Map: Neachley and the Castle 15 The barque Amelia Thompson 39 Locket miniature of George St George 40 Etching of Bruce Emma Durant 44 Map: central New Plymouth 48 Devon St looking west 48 The second hospital: the Gables 52 Dr St George’s letterhead 53 A second set of accounts 59 Wiremu Kingi: Te Rangitake 68 Leonard & George St George, Volunteers 69 Cartoon from Taranaki Punch 70 Maps: Waitara and Omata rural sections 75 Public notice 98 Vaccination certificates 119 Practising Certificate 1868 139 Matilda Jane (Shaw) St George 182 The St George stone in St Mary’s churchyard 187 Nothing beside remains…. 193 Mount Egmont from the southward 195 Map West Indies 206 repaginate 1 FOREWORD When my great great grandfather George Hanbury Farrady1 St George died in 1893, his daughters, my father’s great aunts, threw his papers down a well in New Plymouth, lest family secrets should see the light of day. Not that there was any great depravity to hide, but there were certainly secrets, and that was an age when propriety mattered more than truth. Now it is different: truth is beauty; we do not feel responsible for the behaviour of our forebears and we are less concerned than we were that it reflects badly on us. We are reassured that our own resolve rather than a gene we inherited is what determines the course of our lives. But we do want to understand our people and tell their story and now we must do so from fragments. Nothing so personal as a diary or so self-revealing as letters—no clues about habits, loves, hobbies, tastes, worries, delights—but that permitted by family stories and that available from public record. For New Plymouth people there is a further complication: many public records relating to the early European settlement of Taranaki were lost in a fire in 1859, as the Taranaki Herald reported, DESTRUCTIVE FIRE. It is our painful duty to record the total destruction of the Provincial Council Chamber, Treasury, and Police Office by fire at an early hour yesterday morning.2 Every small community did have a newspaper, though. In those heady days when newspapers were the only medium for disseminating news to the community, when they were “the only check the people had on their rulers,”3 they were also packed with local information, opinion and plain gossip. 1 I can find nowhere that George St George wrote out his full name, so the correct spelling of his third name is unknown. It was “Farraday” or “Farriday” in the 1840 trial and “Faridy” on his marriage certificate—never “Faraday”. 2 Taranaki Herald 20 August 1859. 3 Thomson AS 1859. The New Zealanders. London, John Murray. 2 There was no such thing as impersonal journalism. Libel was freely indulged in and outbursts of hair-raising vehemence and slander against political opponents or business rivals. Little wonder that diaries and local histories bristle with records of fights, horse-whippings, tar-and-feathering, and even challenges to a duel.4 The Taranaki Herald was like that. Its first issue was printed on 4 August 1852, a decade after George St George arrived in Taranaki. It was founded by William Collins, formerly a printer working for the London Morning Post, and by Garland William Woon, a 21-year-old printer who had served his apprenticeship in the composing room of the New Zealander. Woon was nominally the editor. William Morgan Crompton, sub-editor, was the third member of the staff.5 Woon was of good printing pedigree: his father, Rev. William Woon was printer in Tonga and later in the Hokianga for the Wesleyan Mission—a man admired by Rev. William Colenso, New Zealand’s first real printer. GW Woon would go on to publish the Taranaki Punch in 1860. It tried to deal with the frightening events of the first Taranaki war with racist satire but lasted for only sixteen issues. Woon himself, as well as New Plymouth dentist HF Rawson, drew the cartoons. This then is a compilation largely from the public record, a collection of clippings, of the punctuation marks in the untold tale of a man’s life. I have made little attempt, other than the arrangement of the pieces, to weave a plot, or make specious connections, or even to create a coherent whole. If it is as disjointed and bizarre as a cabinet of curiosities then that is apt: so is a general practitioner’s working day. I am not writing a novel, but gathering in one place what has survived. It should be allowed to speak for itself for it does speak eloquently. 4 Scholefield GH 1958. Newspapers in New Zealand. Wellington, A. H. & A. W. Reed. 5 “Politics and the Early Press”, from An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, edited by A. H. McLintock, originally published in 1966. Te Ara—the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/1966/new-zealand-press/page-2 accessed 14 Aug 2017. 3 CHAPTER 1: FOREBEARS George St George was one of many illegitimate children of George Durant of Tong Castle in Shropshire. His English male whakapapa has been traced back to Henry Durrande of Blockley who died in 1584, but the men of interest to us are George St George’s grandfather (George Durant 1) and father (George Durant 2). George Durant 1 was born in 1732, the son of the Rector of Hagley in Worcestershire; he was educated at Oxford and came home in about 1755. The Lyttelton family seat was Hagley Hall and here Elizabeth Lyttelton, the young wife of Sir George Lyttelton, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was lonesome. Her husband was often away in London and she and George, 15 years her junior, became lovers.6 Soon everyone knew about the affair, including Sir George, who, it was said, blamed his wife for leading the young man astray, so got him a job in the Pay Office in 1857 to pry them apart. From there George Durant 1 was appointed Paymaster to the British expeditionary force to Guadaloupe in the West Indies theatre of the Seven Years’ War against France and Spain. It was a poisoned chalice, for death from disease was very likely. He sailed in the St George in October 1758. Durant’s diary of the expedition, with lovesick references to “Dearest E(lizabeth)” and “My O(wn) L(ove)” is transcribed as Appendix A: it is an important eyewitness account of the destruction, revealing the young man’s dismay at the violence and waste that is war. He almost died from illness—possibly smallpox. He returned to England in May 1759 and in March 1762 sailed again with the British forces, this time to the sack of Havana, where a great deal of booty was captured. George Durant returned to England a very rich man, with a fortune of £300,000. By October 1763 he was negotiating to buy Tong Castle in eastern Shropshire near the Staffordshire border. 6 For a more complete account, see Jeffery R 2007. Discovering Tong, its history, myths and curiosities. Parchment, Oxford. 4 Where did all that money come from? He was abroad less than eight months on the first expedition and less than nineteen months on the second. Four sources are suggested,7 buying and selling coin at different rates of exchange and keeping the profit, booty, and considerable prize money from the sack of Havana, or overpaying himself. The Ven. Robert Jeffery, who was vicar at Tong, wrote, There was probably a further source of income. The Durant papers contain references that imply participation in the slave trade. There is one document referring to a list of slaves. Another mentions…. papers to be destroyed, as well as a subject not to be mentioned in the future. Suffice it to say that the anti- slavery campaign was in progress from 1787. It is also significant that the telephone directory of one island of the Windward Islands reveals that almost everybody is named “Durant”.