Part of the lottery wallpaper at Caccia Birch House in Palmerston North. This section is predominately Golden Kiwi tickets. Photo / Judith Lacy
Were they worried about throwing out a winning ticket?
Did they want a splash of colour on their lounge walls?
Or did they not want their family to know about their spending habits?
Eagle-eyed visitors to the coach house at Caccia Birch House in Palmerston North will have noticed two of the four walls of one of the rooms are covered in lottery and raffle tickets.
Who put them there? And why? Was it just one person?
Caccia Birch staff are keen to learn more about the unusual wallpaper.
In 1905, the house’s second owner John Henderson Pollock Strang added stables to the coach house for his horses.
An October 27, 2000 Dominion article talks about the coach house featuring lottery tickets from the 1940s to 1970s, which were used to wallpaper the coachman’s lounge.
Some of the lottery wallpaper has been preserved with a layer of polyurethane. One of the current staff believes when scrim was pulled off the walls in the late 1980s, many of the tickets were either removed entirely or partially.
Some of the tickets are upside down.
There are Mammoth Casket Art Union and Golden Kiwi tickets. One of the latter is from 1961 - the year the national lottery was established.
There are also Tattersall’s lottery tickets. One has been written on. This reporter could only make out “New Ar...”
This reporter could see very few dates on the lottery tickets. They may be on the back or have been ripped off.
There is a range of raffle tickets:
The latter raffle, from 1966, had the same first and second prize of ham. A ticket cost 6d with proceeds going to improvements to the clubrooms.
Most intriguing are what were known as tote tickets. Former racing journalists have told this reporter they were fundraisers with the top prize going to the ticket with the last three numbers of the TAB’s turnover that weekend on the named course.
The turnover was published in newspapers such as the Dominion and the Press, and the “right or wrong” wording guarded against skullduggery resulting in different figures in different papers.
The tickets are marked with the names of racing and jockey clubs - Wanganui, Foxton, Rangitikei, and Otaki Maori.
Someone has written “Royal Frolic” on one of these tickets from 1960 - perhaps the name of a horse.
As well as being home to the Nannestad, Strang and Caccia Birch families, the house has been army accommodation barracks and a veteran nurses’ convalescent home.
In 1960, the house was transferred to the University of New Zealand. It was used by Victoria and Massey universities, then Palmerston North Teachers’ College until the late 1960s.
Doug Whitaker probably knew the history of the lottery wallpaper. He spent 35 years tending the gardens before he retired in 1981.
An information board in the coach house says Whitaker had seen the house transform from a tranquil convalescent home to a busy university and finally a forlorn and neglected empty shell.
Andy Stewart pushed on with his motorbike trek despite his growing pain.