Blog: Row 0

By Roselyn Fauth

When I walk through the older parts of the Timaru Cemetery, I often notice the stretches of grass where no headstones stand. At first glance, it looks like empty space, but it isn’t. Beneath rest hundreds of people who were buried in what was once called free ground. These were the sections reserved for those who could not afford a private plot, who had no one to claim them, or who were buried with the help of government assistance.

By Roselyn Fauth

Gates of the timaru cemetery. A newspaper article states that iron gates were gifted by Mr Richard Turnbull. His grave and monument are in the center of these gates on the lawn. - Photo Roselyn Fauth 2025.  paperspast/THD18691204.2.9

Timaru never had graveyards, (churches with burial plots onsite). From the early years of European chapter our dead were laid to rest in public cemeteries shaped by surveyors, local boards, government acts and, later, the council. Our story is written into the land itself. Here is how it unfolded.

By Roselyn Fauth

A bridge between Britain and New Zealand, death in our colonial settlement chapter of Timaru.

I did not expect a area of grass to change how I see our city. But it has. It is not always pleasant reading. But I have pushed through the tugs, discomfort, and cringes because the silence here was not accidental, it was on purpose and I would really like to better understand why this Row 0 exists. So I started reading. I looked through the old cemetery registers, burial maps, and the handwritten lists that survive from Timaru’s earliest years. Now I want to look more broadly to attempt to understand row 0, and the world our settlers left behind. ...

If you have been following our blogs, you'll know we have been on a deep dive into the history of the Free Ground burials at Timaru Cemetery. I thought I might try and learn about some of them.. here is the progress.. maybe you would like to join this history hunt?

These are 222 people are listed in order of burial date. I haven't included the names of the still born babies.

By Roselyn Fauth

As you move along the rows of stones at the cemetery you'll notice just how many people lie here with no marker at all. It was while trying to understand that idea of unmarked resting places that I found myself circling back to the very beginning of the cemetery. The first recorded burials tell a story that says more about memory and visibility than any polished marble ever could.

At first glance the cemetery looks like neat rows of stones. Look closer and you notice the gaps, not because there are no graves, but because some people never received a marker at all. I never noticed that before. Once you’ve seen it, though, you can’t unsee it.

By Roselyn Fauth

I found this really challenging to read about. There are so many people who know the grief of loosing a child. There are 250 names of stillboarn babies listed in row 0. Could you help me learn more?

The Free Ground at Timaru's cemetery looks pretty ordinary at first glance. Grass, sky, a neat line of later headstones standing beyond. Nothing here calls attention to itself. Yet this unmarked space holds some of the smallest and most vulnerable members of Timaru’s early community. Many of them were babes who lived for only moments, or not at all, and whose brief presence in the world was carried quietly into the cemetery.

In 1879 the Timaru Herald published a piece titled An Unwelcome Discovery. It described how the cemetery keeper found a number of tiny coffins hidden under footpaths and placed inside other graves. These burials had taken place without permission or record, often at night. Some appeared to contain still-born infants. Others gave rise to concern about whether the remains had been properly identified at all. Whatever the circumstances, the common theme was silence. These were losses carried quietly by families who, for many reasons, felt unable to approach the cemetery through its official channels.

By Roselyn Fauth

In the final months of 1918, Timaru faced a wave of sickness and loss unlike anything the town had seen before. The influenza epidemic swept through New Zealand with startling speed, carried by troop ships, trains and the movement of people returning from the First World War. Within a matter of weeks, families who had waited anxiously for soldiers to come home found themselves grieving for loved ones taken by a different enemy.

The impact can be seen clearly in the cemetery records. A short note in the Timaru Herald compares the number of burials in November 1917 with those in November 1918. In the earlier year there were fourteen burials. Twelve months later there were sixty. The figures speak plainly. This was not a slow rise. It was a sudden and overwhelming surge.

In early 1874, twenty seven year old John Mann was a carpenter living in the small village of Everdon, Northamptonshire, with his wife Ellen and their five children.

Like so many other British families of the time they joined the Government Assisted Immigration Scheme and headed off to London to board a ship bound for New Zealand.

John had secured an engagement with an architect in Timaru named Francis Wilson, who was reported to have practically rebuilt Timaru’s central business district after the great 1868 fire.

By Roselyn Fauth

Cited from contemporary newspaper articles

If you wander into the Free Ground at the Timaru Cemetery, listed as Row 0 in the council database, you will notice how many graves here have no headstone at all. Among them is one recorded under the name “Bridgett Fynmore.” There is a Bridgett Fynmore in the online cemetery records but no Frederick. Apart from newspaper articles you wouldn't know he was there. I can't find any burial references anywhere else. You also can't pin point him exactly because he was buried without a marker. I wonder who Bridgett was, or if maybe its a mistake and it is actually Frederick's grave? He left behind a life where he once carried the weight of war on the other side of the world. Frederick's story is one of promise, pressure, and a very human unraveling that ended far from where it began...

Frederick’s father was Lieutenant-Colonel James Fynmore, Royal Marines. The last surviving British officer from Trafalgar. His grandfather was Major (then Captain) James Fynmore, also at Trafalgar.

If you wander through the older part of Timaru Cemetery, past the family plots with their Edwardian and Victorian headstones, you'll reach an area of lawn known as free ground. It is quieter there. No marble angels, hardly any headstones, if you didn't notice the humps and hollows in the lawn, then you wouldn't know who lay beneath the lawn. But somewhere there, is a unmarked grave for Dr Joseph Ashe Day.

By Roselyn Fauth

As we prepare to unveil the new monument honouring those who lie in the Free Ground and in unmarked graves in the wider Timaru Cemetery,  I have been curious about who some of the people are who rest there. I pulled up the Timaru District Council website, searched for those in Row 0, and put their burials into chronological order. They have no physical markers. No families noted. Just names, ages, and dates online whose burials were assisted by the government.

These were the men and women who fell through the cracks in those early years — the ones with no money, no relatives nearby, or no one willing or able to pay for a burial. Then, out of curiosity, I typed each of their names into Papers Past. I would like to share what I found in Papers Past, about Cornelius O’Connor, buried on 14 July 1863, Row 0, Free Ground, Timaru Cemetery.

He is is one of the earliest recorded government-assisted burials in Timaru, along with: George Miller, 30, buried 27 February 1863, William Peters, 37, buried 18 April 1863, Cornelius Connor, 30, buried 14 July 1863, Joseph Ashe Day, 49, buried 21 July 1863, John Hammond, 47, buried 19 September 1863.

I expected just a death notice, but I found a full Supreme Court murder trial, a night of terror at an accommodation house on the road to Washdyke, and the voices of ordinary people caught in a moment that none of them could undo — all preserved in the pages of the Press and Lyttelton Times.

These men lived hard, itinerant lives in a young settlement. Their deaths passed with little ceremony. Telling O’Connor’s story today restores the dignity of a life that might otherwise remain only a line in a ledger.

His story — which begins in a wooden hotel on a winter’s night — is one of the earliest recorded "row 0" deaths in Timaru to require government assistance for burial. I think it reveals far more about early South Canterbury than a name on a map ever could... I a hunt for history at my local cemetery is more than the interesting headstones, its the un marked humps and hollows too.

This is his story, pieced together entirely from newspaper reports.

Robert Drake had been living in Waimate for about a year before his death, earning a living doing light work in the bush. The Timaru Herald described him as a man who had “evidently seen better days” and who kept a quiet and reserved disposition. Nothing in his early months in the district suggested trouble. But two or three months before his death, his mind became unsettled. Neighbours noticed his behaviour changing. He grew anxious, confused, and increasingly distressed.

By Roselyn Fauth

My dad, Geoff Cloake, helped me on this history hunt. Turns out that the sixth person ever buried in the Free Ground at Timaru was a man whose life had shaped our maritime history in ways few people today realise: Duncan Cameron, coxswain of the Alexandra Lifeboat.

When I first noticed the name John Blackmore listed in Row 0 at Timaru Cemetery, I expected to find at least a death notice to anchor him in the historical record. Instead, there was nothing. So I began looking in Papers Past, Timaru Cemetery registers.

In April 1873, Timaru woke to upsetting news. Thomas Bottomley, a familiar figure in town and known locally as “the bellman”, was found dead at the foot of a steep cutting beside the Timaru Landing and Shipping Company’s premises. The discovery set in motion a formal inquest and a stronger public conversation about alcohol, public safety, and the responsibilities of the town’s growing businesses.

Died 18 November 1873. Buried without a stone.

William Thompson was just thirty nine when he died in Timaru in November 1873. He had come into town the day before, a Friday morning, and later wandered into the Commercial Hotel asking for a bed for the night. The publican thought he looked a little dazed. Not drunk. Just tired or troubled. William drank one glass of beer, said he would return... He never came back.

Born 6 February 1842 at Latheron, Caithness / Highland, Scotland.
Died 19 June 1874 in the Timaru District, aged 32.
Buried Timaru Cemetery, Row 0, Plot 25.

There are names in the cemetery that have long slipped from memory. Some lie beneath carved stone, others beneath nothing at all. Row 0, the old Free Ground, holds many of the latter. This is where people were laid to rest when there was no family plot, no savings for a headstone, and sometimes no one left to speak for them. Among them is a woman whose life was far more than the few lines she received in the newspapers of 1874.

Her name was Christina Ellis. Some knew her as Christie Gordon. She lived in a small timber hut on the Main South Road in Timaru, a place that offered shelter but little comfort. For eight or nine years she made her life there. She was a widow, alone, often unwell. Neighbours remembered her sitting outside on cold evenings, wrapped in what she could find, trying her best to get through another day.

In July 1874, forty-year-old Eliza Catterick, also known as Eliza Shipley, died suddenly while travelling with her two sons aboard the Beautiful Star from Lyttelton to Dunedin. Witnesses described her as troubled in the days before the voyage, drinking heavily and still unsettled after a family quarrel six weeks earlier. She had suffered a seizure about five months prior, and her sons later confirmed she had been drinking more often since.

On board the steamer, Eliza appeared to be recovering from another fit when the second officer first saw her. Throughout the afternoon and evening she repeatedly asked for brandy, grew agitated when refused, and was helped to bed several times by the stewardesses. She became increasingly restless during the night, groaning, shaking, and calling out for drink. Around half past six the next morning she was found dead, already cold, in the steerage cabin where she slept beside her sons.

The medical examination found no signs of violence. Instead, her brain vessels were congested, her heart and lungs were filled with blood, and froth had gathered in the air passages, consistent with death during an epileptic fit. Her liver was diseased. The inquest jury concluded that Eliza died “in an epileptic fit, brought on by excessive drinking”.

 The Tragedy of Rueben Drake

Edward Drake and his heavily pregnant wife Catherine boarded the ship "Merope" from Plymouth England on July 1st 1875, destination Timaru New Zealand

Catherine was Edward's second wife, and with them on the journey were 2 of Edwards children from his previous marriage Edward jnr aged 17 and Sarah aged 15, along with his and Catherine's young son Rueben aged 2.

John William Speedy (d. 7 Feb 1876, aged 33) rests in the Free Ground of Timaru Cemetery, the un-marked early burial section for many of this town’s lesser-documented settlers. While his obituary in the Timaru Herald noted that he died at the Timaru Hospital after being admitted only the day before, the notice also emphasised his reputation as an accomplished pianist and organist — “a first-rate performer” who delighted audiences in Waimate and South Canterbury.

Rest in Peace  Nathaniel Chandler. He died, aged 38 Years 22 Oct 1870 at 22 Barnard Street, Aged 38 Years son of late Fredric Chandler Esq of Stratford on Avon, Warwickshire -https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/timaru-herald/1870/10/26/2

Well this blog is about how I went on a hunt to learn about Nathaniel Chandler, who is buried in Row 0, aged just 38. And what I learned... The cemetery record gave me little more than his name and a date, so I turned to the newspapers, expecting perhaps a single line. Instead, the Timaru Herald of 26 October 1870 offered me a death notice: “Chandler, Nathaniel, aged 38, at 22 Barnard Street. Son of the late Frederic Chandler, Esq., of Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire.” He had a father with a title. He had come from a place full of history and English theatre and centuries of life. And yet here he was, in Timaru, alone, in the public ground...

Timaru Cemetery, Row 0 — April 1877

I have walked over the Free Ground area at the Timaru Cemetery many times. It has only been recently that I have started to learn about who some of the people were who rest there. One of these graves belongs to Thomas Smith, a seaman from the barque Isabella Ridley, who drowned in the surf after one of Timaru’s most notable shipwrecks.

When the storm hit Timaru on Sunday 1 September 1878, the sea was already running dangerously high. According to the Lyttelton Times of 3 September, the anchorage was a scene of drifting vessels, parted cables and collisions as ship after ship struggled to hold position. The barque Melrose, the ship that young Irish seaman Arthur Connelly served on, dragged her anchors and collided with the ketch Palmerston. Both vessels were swept about in the heavy sea before the Melrose was driven ashore and broke apart in the surf.

The same report describes how the rescue unfolded. The first people into the water were not part of any organised service. They were local men on the beach who tied ropes around themselves and went straight into the surf to try to reach the sailors being washed from the wrecks. The newspaper describes “numerous volunteers” knocked back again and again by the force of the waves and the wreckage rolling through the breakers, though some did manage to pull survivors in.

Have you heard about the wreck of the Akbar brigantine ship that wrecked at Timaru in a vicious easterly gale? This is a story of five people who were lost at the sea, arrived as strangers and how the government stepped in to bury them at the Timaru Cemetery.

If you stand today at the Redruth side of the cemetery, there is a wide area of lawn that to many, it might look empty, but in actual fact there are over 700 people who rest there in Free Ground, and listed on the Tiaru District Councils cemetery database as Row 0. It hard to imagine the chaos and fear of the night that brought them here.

The inquest into the death of Maria Meades, held at the Timaru Courthouse on 12 July 1878, gives a stark and very human glimpse into the hardships of domestic life in early South Canterbury. The entire story comes from the detailed report published in the Timaru Herald on 13 July 1878.

By Roselyn Fauth

I’m so grateful to everyone who has supported the new monument for those who rest in Free Ground and unmarked graves. A few people have sent in information about people who rest there, and the story of Flora Mullin is really interesting... How did she come to rest in an unmarked grave? The answer led me from privilege to poverty, from printing presses to pauper’s ground — and from the marble glow of Timaru’s Basilica to a bare patch of earth with no name.

The six lower windows in the nave of this church were donated by the late Michael Mullin as a memorial to himself and his wife Mary Mullin. Pray for them. Michael Mullin was a land agent, a farmer and a hotelier. The six lower windows, made by James Watson & Son, Youghhal, Ireland c. 1939, in the nave of Sacred Heart Basilica, Timaru were donated by the late Michael Mullin as a memorial to himself and his wife Mary Mullin. Michael Mullin and his first wife Mary Sullivan are buried at the Timaru Cemetery and his second wife Flora in the free ground. There are 20 more stained glass windows that were donated. https://scant.scgenealogy.nz/sacred_heart.htm

If her husband could afford to give these windows, how did Flora end up not being able to afford her own grave?

Well, to work that out I had to do a bit of a history hunt, and make a timeline. So here is my deep dive into a woman who is listed in row 0, the pauper grave section — also known as Free Ground — at the Timaru Cemetery. An area for people who needed the assistance of the government to inter them to the ground, with the deal that they couldn’t erect a headstone.

It started with a comment on one of my Facebook posts. Someone kindly shared information about Flora as an example of a person who rests there. There was a fantastic link to research done by genealogists on the history of stained glass windows and the Roman Catholic Basilica on Craigie Avenue in Timaru.

But that wasn’t Flora’s world....