There are references to Jack and Annie Baugh throughout their son Cliff’s stories from the time he left home aged twelve through to his wartime service, but I had a deep affection for them and I want to add something of my own.
In a word, they were our loving grandparents.
Grandpa was a quiet, retiring man, so it’s no wonder Nana features more in my memory than he does. Dad had a troubled relationship with her, but to us she was always caring and affectionate. My favourite photos by far are of her nursing Stephen. Strangely, I can find none with Colleen, Lynne or I.
Nana was rather “loud”, like her visitors. Most of them were fellow Lancs — coal miners and their wives.
Waro was a real community, so we’d walk up the road to visit Mrs Ackers, Mrs Laurie and the rest in their little workman’s cottages. They all kept their Lancashire accents until they died.
She seems to have disliked having her photo taken — a trait I’ve inherited — and there aren’t many to choose from. It’s good to have that one of her at nineteen, but that’s the lot until Cliff was already a growing boy, when you’ll find one or two that include her at the beach, or up in the Waro Rocks.
The best are where she doesn’t seem self-conscious — comfortable in what she was, a strong working class woman.
The only formal family grouping including her that I can find is the one above, when Evelyn was a young girl and her mother in her forties.
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Cliff wrote an obituary when his Dad died in 1980, which the Advocate printed in abbreviated form. John was born in 1897, Cliff wrote, and his father, who was also a miner, died when John was quite young. That meant he, his brothers and sisters were raised under the conditions of great hardship by their mother, Nancy, who sewed to earn a living, and, like many back then, was illiterate.
Like his son, John began work when he was 12, spending a half day at school and half a day working in a cotton mill for 3/6 a week. His first full-time job, at the mill, was for five 12-hour days and a half day on Saturdays, for 10/6 a week. He became a miner later and married Annie in 1917, with Cliff born in 1918. John’s last job before leaving for New Zealand in 1923 was hewing coal on contract, with a minimum wage of six shillings per day.
When they arrived in New Zealand, John and the family lived on Carters Road for a while with the Corness family — Cliff’s “Uncle Jack”: his mother’s brother John and his wife Nellie — before buying a small one room shack, in which they lived while their first two room house was built. John built this himself with the help of neighbours, and it was later transported by sledge from Carters Road to its final destination on King Street, where more rooms were added. John did this work himself, and considering his lack of experience, Cliff wrote, it was a fine effort, which he took great pride in, and maintained with love and care. Their second child Evelyn was born in 1928, much loved but adding to their difficulties during the Depression years. Cliff by then had long left home.
Annie suffered a good deal of illness during their married life, and Cliff says, perhaps with some forbearance, that “John displayed a very high degree of love, patience, understanding and tolerance throughout some very difficult years.”
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According to the Maori Dictionary the word waro means “deep hole, pit, abyss (due to natural causes), chasm, mine”. And it was in the Waro — or more broadly Hikurangi — mines that Grandpa worked until they were closed by flooding. At that stage he moved to the Kamo mines, and eventually to the Public Works Department until he retired.
As a little kid I remember seeing him dropped off in front of their house after work, and the truck heading up the road to deposit the other miners. He started work early and arrived home early too. “Tea” would follow soon after, maybe 4.30 in the afternoon. Afterwards he’d be happy to sit in his chair with his pipe and humour me. In Winter the coal fire would be lit. They’d have supper later in the evening. Every meal was accompanied by strong tea from a teapot, served in cups and saucers, with or without milk and sugar.
In latter years, after we were married, the little boy coming to visit was Paul, Evelyn’s younger son. Evelyn and Bob had bought the neighbouring house, and Paul would come over after school. The love the three of them shared was obvious.
I say Grandpa was quiet but I do remember him chiming in at the odd neighbourhood shindig with a piano accordion. Heather reckons it was a rather more modest concertina and now there’s no one to settle it. But I know for certain that his drink was a shandy.
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Will you come walking with me, Annie?
After Annie died John was lonely. He still remembered her, he said, and thought of her every day. He couldn’t help it, they’d been very close. He’d never had another woman but Annie, and she had chosen him too.
There’d been four, maybe five, of them on the street in Bolton one day when she walked by.
She was a beautiful woman, and they all begged her, “Will you come walking with me, Annie?”
She’d rejected all of them until she came to Grandpa, a handsome boy, younger than her, and always strikingly young looking.
“Will you come walking with me, Annie?” he asked.
“Aye, I’ll walk with you, John Baugh.”
People told her that her father would kill her when he found out, but she said, “Not with John Baugh, he won’t.”
Grandpa didn’t know whether she heard him or not, but he still talked to her. After she died in the early ‘70s, he grieved deeply, but he survived happily enough. He’d always been a solitary sort, and he’d done almost all the cooking and housework for years because of her various illnesses.
“We never had a cross word,” he said. “I can say that honestly. Every week I brought me wages home and put them in her hand, and the docket too, so she knew I were honest. She never spent anything for herself without she came and asked, and if I wanted something, I only had to say so.
“Aye,” shaking his head, “She were an honest woman. We never had a cross word. Never needed to. What more could a man ask?”
All this contrasted with their son‘s memories of his demanding mother. Cliff reckoned the peace was kept only by our self deprecating, pacifying grandfather.
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We weren’t with either of them when they died. We had a young family in Auckland when Annie passed away in 1972, three years after that photo with Stephen was taken. Adrienne was only a few months old, but we drove up to the service in Whangarei, where we found Joe Wellington, a school friend of mine, playing the organ. Afterwards a surprising number drove down to the committal in the Waikumete crematorium chapel. It was our first time there, and I recall the dreadful finality of her coffin suddenly sinking out of view. We gathered outside. There was quite a crowd, and Grandpa looked frail and grief-stricken in his suit. Suddenly there was a plume of black smoke from the crematorium stack and I saw him glance up and look away.
When he followed in 1980 we were back in the Solomon Islands. His son made sure he got a good send-off with an obituary in the Northern Advocate — the last of his era and a man of unwavering principle.