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As darkness fell on a late September night in 1906, the Hutt family of Te Awamutu began turning in for the evening. Henry, manager of the local creamery, his wife, Edith, and their nine children lived in an old cottage somewhat eccentrically laid out, which belonged to the New Zealand Dairy Association.

Henry and his eldest son, 13-year-old Charles, came into the kitchen together from the shed where they had been doing some carpentry. They sat talking for about 20 minutes before Charles went off to bed. The other children were asleep - four girls in one room and two of the boys in their room which opened off the kitchen. Sixyear-old Hector had been sick and had been put to bed in his parents’ room. One-year-old Linda also slept in her parent’s room at the top end of the dwelling.

Edith, who had had a busy afternoon baking and sewing, spent her time after tea relaxing in the sitting room. She and Henry headed for bed around the same time as their eldest boy. Henry put out the dining room’s hanging lamp before the couple passed through two other rooms to get to their room. The family never closed bedroom doors and the parents could see that all was dark and quiet.

Around 20 minutes later something woke 12-year-old Eileen. A fire was blazing in the corner of the room. She leapt out of bed and tried to put the fire out with a blanket, screaming for her father. Henry rushed into the room and saw fire in the ceiling. He told the girls to get outside and began picking up children and carrying them out, then returning for another. He couldn’t get to Ethel as the ceiling fell in.

By this time the boys’ room was all smoke and flames. Henry initially hadn’t known an unwell Hector was in their room. He tried to get to Hector but was driven back by smoke and flames. Heroic efforts were made by neighbours and others, including Constable Lander, who worked like Trojans, but the old cottage burned like matchwood and its peculiar construction made escape difficult.

At the inquest Henry said the family had lived in the cottage for three years and five months. He had never noticed any signs of the chimney being defective. He was wary of fire. They never allowed the children to have a candle in the bedroom. He had experienced a bad fire 14 years previously about a fortnight after he was married.

Edith Hutt said she had had a good fire going all day long as she was baking. It was put out at about 6.30pm. On a shelf right up alongside the chimney she kept bottles of vinegar, oil, and medicine. That afternoon when she took the oil down she noticed that it was heated. This often happened and she sometimes remarked that someday the chimney would catch fire.

Constable Lander was of the opinion that the fire originated through a faulty chimney. The jury’s verdict was that Charles, 14, Hector, 6, Edith, 5, and Willie, 3, met their deaths through the accidental burning of their parents’ residence and no blame was attachable to anybody.

The children were buried together in one coffin at Te Awamutu’s St John’s Anglican cemetery. Despite heavy rain there was a large attendance at their funeral. Their memorial stone mentions two siblings who died as infants, an earlier heartbreak for the family.