Beez Neez now Chy Whella - Stillwater Cemetery

Stillwater Cemetery

Beez Neez now Chy Whella

Big Bear and Pepe Millard

Wed 3 Sep 2014 22:57

Stillwater Cemetery

We had just turned right off the main road and saw the very place we wanted to find. We had planned to go to the Information Centre in Greymouth on our way through tomorrow, to find out where Stillwater was. We wanted to visit as we had been to the Brunner site and read so much about the people and the events that happened on that tragic day at the mine.

We walked straight to the mass grave of the Brunner Mine disaster victims.

The grave has a cenotaph with a list of names and ages carved on it, and written there is a simple yet haunting inscription. It reads: "Dedicated to the memory of 65 miners who lost their lives by an explosion in the Brunner Mine, March 26, 1896. "Thirty-three are buried here. Erected by the affectionate relatives and friends." The ages range from just fifteen to the oldest at seventy two.

The funeral began with the first coffin being carried out.

Round the clock rescue parties took several days to unearth the bodies of the men, some being so badly mutilated that only clothing or a distinguishing mark could make for identification. The mine had been idle for four or five days and it was presumed that gas had accumulated to a dangerous level. Fifty bodies are interred here at the Stillwater Cemetery, one mass grave containing thirty three. The remainder were buried in the Greymouth Cemetery.

The names, ages and grave position of the victims.

Mass_grave_at_Stillwater_for_Brunner_Mine_disaster_victimes

The burial. Numbers are etched over each victim in the concrete cover.

“The funeral was a momentous occasion......that’s the best way to describe it. Attending were six thousand persons – they came in hundreds and thousands from different districts.” A funeral like no other. Amid the grief and sorrow carpenters had rallied to prepare the coffins, while forty seamstresses worked around the clock sewing yards of black cloth to suitably clothe the mourners in time for the funeral. By the Sunday, just three days after the disaster a large funeral was in progress. Most of the widows and children were transported with the coffins the two and a half kilometres from Brunner to Stillwater by a special slow train. Following on foot was a solemn procession of many hundreds of people accompanied by Handel’s ‘Dead March from Saul’, performed by numerous local bands. Other than the mass grave are several victims in private or family plots, the rest in Greymouth.

The funeral procession as it passes through Stillwater township.

Widows take a moment beside the grave. The Wanganui Herald dated the 30th of March 1896.

The orphaned Hunter children.

7. William Hunter was born at Crosshouse in Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1855 and married Allison in her home town of Sanquhar, Dumfriesshire. The couple had emigrated to New Zealand where their fourth child, William John was born. They were residents in Brunnerton – at Wallsend, from where William senior went to work as a hewer. For the twelve children of William and Allison Hunter the mid-1890’s was a disastrous time. Their thirty six year old mother died in October 1894 from a uterine haemorrhage when the eldest child Jean, was just fifteen years old and baby Charlotte only one. When their forty one year old father was killed in the mine disaster two years later, the children became orphans. The two eldest girls were employed in Christchurch as domestic servants, they joined the younger children and went with them to an aunt, Elizabeth Thomson, in Oamaru who brought them up. The Hunters were the largest family to be affected by the Brunner Mine disaster.

10. John Maunder Langdon was a yeoman from Newbury, Berkshire. He, his wife Harriet and son John immigrated to New Zealand in 1864. John senior was running a hotel at Māori Gully on the West Coast from 1866. When Harriet, his new daughter Mary and John junior reached Māori Gully, they were the only ‘white’ children living there. In 1870 the family settled on five hundred acres near the junction of the Arnold and Grey Rivers, just up river from Brunner. Here, John Langdon senior ran a ferry service across the Grey River, known as Langdon’s Ferry. John Langdon junior – a hewer, lost his life in the Brunner Mine disaster of 1896. John’s sister, Mary, recalls how she and her mother were left to deal with the grief.

12. Peter McMahon – hewer aged thirty five, was born in Belfast, Ireland in about 1861 and came to New Zealand when he was fifteen years of age. Details about his early working life are unknown. In about 1887 he became the partner of Hannah Fishwick of Hokitika, and by 1893 he was a coal miner at Brunner. Hannah’s life had been hard, her family was poor and she entered the world of domestic service early. She had already had a daughter when she started life with Peter and by the time of Peter’s death the couple had three daughters and an eleven month old son. In 1900, Hannah married bushman – timber worker, George Mark, with whom she had a further five children. She died in Palmeston North in 1951 and was survived by nine children.

Elizabeth Willyams and four of her children with a friend outside their Wallsend home, 1897.

20. Alfred Ernest Willyams was born in Roche, Cornwall in 1857 and arrived with his parents and four other siblings in New Zealand in 1875. He married Elizabeth Mason in Christchurch in 1879. Alfred was a gold miner near Hokitika before working on the Midland Railway line. The family moved to Brunnerton in 1890 when Alfred found employment as a hewer in the Brunner Mine. When thirty nine year old Alfred was killed in the mine disaster he left behind Elizabeth, his wife and six children; a fifteen year old daughter and sons from fourteen to five years.

The Willyams’ were not wealthy. Alfred ‘s estate was worth less than one hundred pounds and the family’s future would have appeared grim. Elizabeth was one of the thirteen widows involved in disaster litigation against the Brunner Mine owners. She was awarded seven hundred and fifty pounds – three hundred and fifty six thousand, two hundred and fifty today, for her family and moved back to Christchurch in 1898 where she died in 1927. About one third of the widows remarried after the disaster but Elizabeth was not one of them.

24 and 25. Mary McIvor, centre front, with some members of her family, circa 1913. Her second son James had to take responsibility for his mother and remaining family after the deaths of his father and two brothers. Of Scottish ancestry, two of the McIvor lads had immigrated to New Zealand in 1875 as farm labourers. They soon picked up coal mining work in Otago. Four years later their parents migrated with five other children. They eventually moved to Brunnerton. In 1890 Mary was widowed with nine children at her side, then just six years later she lost two of her sons in the Brunner Mine disaster. Mary was at the forefront of the compensation claims directed at the mine owners.