Frank Greenall: Ties are closer than we think

Frank Greenall

LAST Saturday's Chronicle article about the chair with the Battle of Trafalgar connections, now in the Whanganui Regional Museum, amply illustrates the few degrees of separation binding us all.

This particular chair was carved from the timbers of HMS Temeraire, which played a major part in the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar. In 1838 the ship was retired to John Beatson's breaking yard on the Thames. He used some of the oak timbers to render up a dozen fine chairs.

John's brother, William, acquired two of the chairs, later emigrating to New Zealand. A daughter subsequently married Samuel Drew, founder of our local museum, where one of the chairs finally came to rest.

A whiff of cannon smoke from one of the world's great sea battles now sits in our own backyard.

Queen Victoria had come to the throne in 1837, the year before the Temeraire was decommissioned. Her name, of course, graces our main street. But if you wander off the Avenue along Guyton St till you reach Heads Rd, and hang a right, you'll notice a double row of fine oaks bordering a broad walkway; once known as Queen's Drive.

Where Sarjeant St meets Heads Rd, a plaque notes that the oak saplings were planted in 1897 to commemorate the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria's reign.

The saplings were propagated from the acorns of an oak at the Putiki mission station. That particular oak had, in turn, been struck from one of four acorns sent to the minister, Reverend Richard Taylor, to mark the death in 1861 of Victoria's husband Albert, the Prince Consort. These were acorns from the great oaks in Windsor Park, apparently sent at the behest of Victoria herself.

It is unclear as to whether the Queen's gesture was extended to other parts of the empire. But Reverend Taylor's receipt of the acorns almost certainly resulted from an audience with Victoria he and Putiki rangatira, Hoani Wiremu Hipango, were granted during a trip to England in 1855. At this meeting, on behalf of Whanganui Maori, Chief Hoani presented to the queen, along with other articles, a resplendent kiwi-feather cloak and a pounamu mere.

On the pair's return trip to New Zealand, their vessel stopped at St Helena, where Reverend Taylor souvenired a twig from the weeping willow growing on Napoleon's grave.

Tenderly nurtured for the remainder of the voyage, it eventually grew to maturity in the Putiki mission grounds.

This was the parent tree for most Whanganui willows, as Reverend Taylor energetically planted cuttings from it wherever he travelled in the district on pastoral work. And if the roots of the original St Helena willow had penetrated deep enough, that meant a little bit of the French emperor went with them.

Who knows, perhaps the progenitor Windsor Park oaks were close cousins of the same oaks that provided the timbers for construction of HMS Temeraire.

If so, their respective DNAs now reside within grapeshot of one another on the other side of the world, close by the willows possibly holding the DNA signature of the opposing emperor in the battle in which Admiral Nelson famously put the telescope to his blind eye.

Our own Trafalgar Square iterates the connection further.

A century and a half after Queen Victoria's acorns arrived at Putiki, another of her descendant saplings -- Prince Harry -- was embarking from Putiki marae to waka down the Whanganui and disembark a stone's throw from her namesake avenue. Subsequently he met veterans at, where else, Majestic Square, traversing ground no doubt often trod by his Uncle Eddie during the latter's tenure as tutor at Whanganui Collegiate. A school with which none other than the Reverend Taylor was involved in its formative years.

From memory, Prince Edward taught, among other subjects, history.

I wonder if the story of his great-great-great grandmother's Putiki acorns made it into his lessons.