9 minute read
A CREATIVE LEGACY
WORDS: SARAH CATHERALL / IMAGERY: ROB SUISTED
One hundred years after the passing of Katherine Mansfield, her birthplace remains a place of pilgrimage and inspiration for admirers of the influential author
Entering the home in which Katherine Mansfield, New Zealand’s most internationally renowned writer, was born and spent her first four years is like stepping back into the late 19th century. Her parents, Harold and Annie Beauchamp, were a fashionable, middle-class colonial couple who followed the design movements of the time and would have decorated their first house accordingly.
For 35 years, Katherine Mansfield House and Garden has welcomed visitors and served as a memorial to the writer. In 2019 the house – a Category 1 historic place – was closed for maintenance work and an extensive interior refresh. This work helped to ensure its future preservation and better convey a sense of what it was like when Katherine and her family lived there.
This is a big year for the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society – the charity that runs the house museum – and for Katherine Mansfield fans around the globe as they celebrate 100 years of her creative legacy and commemorate the centenary of her death.
On her birthday, 14 October, entry to her birthplace will be free and the house shop will sell the Katherine Mansfield NZ Post centenary stamps the Society helped to create in recognition of her work, her life and her legacy. Each stamp includes a quote, a photo of Katherine and a watermarked item of significance in her life. The centenary is likely to bring in even more visitors keen to see the house in which the writer was born. In Avon, France, a global conference organised by the international Katherine Mansfield Society will be held on the day before her birthday.
Katherine Mansfield House and Garden Director Cherie Jacobson is a huge admirer of the writer’s work, particularly the way she wrote about characters who were generally overlooked at the time, such as women and children.
“The centenary of Katherine Mansfield’s death is an important opportunity to recognise and celebrate her creative legacy. One hundred years on, her works are still in print – they’ve been translated into more than 25 languages – and her life and writing continue to inspire people in all sorts of ways.
“In my role I get to see that every day – in visitors to the house who tell me how strongly they’ve connected with Katherine’s letters and journals, and in writers, musicians, artists and choreographers who have created new work inspired by her. It’s a pretty extraordinary legacy that shows no sign of fading.’’
Katherine was born in the house on Tinakori Road, Wellington, in 1888 and lived there with her parents and older sisters Vera and Charlotte, and her younger sisters Gwen (who died in the house aged three months) and Jeanne, along with her maternal grandmother and two aunts.
It is easy to imagine Katherine playing with wooden toys in the children’s upstairs nursery, and running up and down the original staircase with the bamboo-shaped balusters, or sitting quietly in the apple-green drawing room while her parents entertained visitors.
In 2019 colonial furniture expert Dr William Cottrell was commissioned to source furniture and objects that were in vogue in the late 19th century, so the house also offers a glimpse of what life would have been like for a middle-class colonial family at the time.
For the Beauchamps, the Italianate totara weatherboard villa house was their first step on the social ladder. Harold was a clerk at a general merchant store at the time, and they would later move to three larger houses around Wellington when he became a partner in the firm and later the Chair of the Bank of New Zealand.
There are no known photos of the house’s interior during the Beauchamps’ time there, so Cherie describes the house as “an educated imagining’’. The family wanted to present themselves as fashionable, modern and confident about the future and are likely to have expressed these ideals in their home.
They moved into a larger home in Karori when Katherine was four and the Tinakori Road house was leased to other families. (Plunket founder Truby King and his wife lived in the house when they first moved to Wellington.) In the 1940s the house was converted into two flats, and that was how it was when it came up for sale in 1987 and a group of passionate Wellingtonians set out to buy and renovate it, then run it as a house museum.
Led by art historian Oroya Day, then a Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Board member, they formed the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society to buy, preserve and restore the house. Oroya and her husband, artist Melvin Day, raised a mortgage to get the project off the ground, and obtained further grants from the then Department of Tourism and Publicity, the Stout Trust and others.
When the house was bought by the Society in 1987, Cherie says, they undertook a major renovation. It was returned to its original layout, and plasterboard was removed from the walls and ceilings to expose the original rimu. Five archaeological investigations found fragments of china and glassware.
Behind the skirting boards, fragments of original wallpaper, different in each room, were revealed, and Wellington artist Rachel Macfarlane designed reproduction wallpaper based on those designs. The Society put out a call for people to help furnish the house and it was opened to the public in 1988, on the anniversary of Katherine’s birth.
In its 2019 refresh, William overhauled the colour scheme, lighting and furniture. Part of his mission was to shake off the idea that Victorian homes were dark and dull. He points out that homes of that era were often alive with colour, with bright furnishings, wallpaper and paintwork, right through to objects scattered throughout.
Houses of that time are generally remembered in black-and-white photographs, so historians must rely on archaeological investigations and their imaginations. In the formal rooms, William arranged for the repainting in authentic heritage colours of all the stripped doors, skirtings, fireplaces and tongueand-groove and bead wall linings.
Each room was themed to emphasise individual character. The drawing room was painted a feminine apple-green, while the underlit dining room was painted a cobalt-blue to add dramatic colour and complement its heavy, dark furniture.
The door mouldings and panels are shown in three contrasting colours, typical of 19th-century paint themes, to create a sense of unity between rooms and further introduce character.
“Victorians liked colour as much as we do,” says William, “and there would have been a mix of painted and varnished wood at the time.’’
William also sourced furniture and objects to showcase the era and design movements of the time. Where possible, he found and bought New Zealandmade furniture.
By the late 1800s, many New Zealand homes had pianos and music rang out as families entertained themselves and their guests. Katherine and her sisters all had music lessons – Katherine played the cello and wanted to play professionally – and the Beauchamp family were praised in the society pages of local journals.
Cherie explains that the back rooms of the house – the kitchen, servery and scullery – were the engine rooms, in which food was prepared and clothes were washed. The Beauchamps were lucky enough to have a servant.
The original kitchen bench and the coal range remain, while pots and pans hanging on a rack hail from the era, and crockery resembles that found during the archaeological investigations. The investigations also provided clues to what the Beauchamp family ate: roasts of mutton, soups made from beef bones, and the occasional meal of rock oysters. Meat dishes were served with spicy sauces. Puddings (sometimes two) were important parts of a dinner, along with a cheese dish. Adults drank tea, beer, wine and spirits in moderate quantities.
Katherine loved plants and flowers, often mentioning them in her writing. In 1988 the Society began planting the garden with plants available in her lifetime, including French heritage roses – a nod to her time in France, where she is buried, says Cherie.
Native shrubs and trees flourish in the back garden, while each autumn a medlar tree produces fruit that a volunteer turns into a delicious jelly sold in the small shop. Volunteers also grow seedlings that are sold at annual fundraising garden sales.
It’s the site’s tranquility and calm and its sense of walking back in time that have inspired Cadence Chung since she first visited the house in her early teens. The 19-year-old Victoria University of
Wellington music student won Katherine Mansfield House and Garden’s annual secondary school short story competition in 2021, and on the anniversary of Katherine’s death this year she read a poem at an event at Katherine Mansfield Memorial Park in Thorndon.
“I enjoy history and historical houses. I first visited the house when I was about 13, when I started loving her work, and was amazed by its rich history and the way it was presented around her life,’’ says Cadence.
“I’m a big fan of Katherine Mansfield. Her work is so modern, and I relate to her as a writer, a musician and a woman.’’
Centenary events
2023 marks 100 years since the death of Katherine Mansfield from tuberculosis in France. A website (km23.co.nz) has been created to promote the range of events being held around the country throughout the year, as well as ideas for DIY activities, such as whipping up an orange soufflé from a recipe Katherine herself copied in a notebook and hosting a dress-up party in honour of the fashion-loving writer.
