Sue Scott at the Sarjeant Gallery with the family items she brought to share regarding her great-great-aunt Ellen Neame (Sarjeant, nee Stewart).
Sue Scott at the Sarjeant Gallery with the family items she brought to share regarding her great-great-aunt Ellen Neame (Sarjeant, nee Stewart).
A treasure trove of memorabilia about Henry Sarjeant’s wife, Ellen Agnes Neame (formerly Sarjeant, nee Stewart), has fascinated staff at the Sarjeant Gallery.
Sue Scott, whose great-grandmother Jane was a younger sister of Ellen, recently brought a selection of historic material to Whanganui from her home in Waikouaiti.
The memorabilia includes photographs, personalised postcards from abroad, diaries and notebooks, paintings and books, and even pressed flowers more than 100 years old.
Born in Foxton in 1868, Ellen was the eldest daughter of John Tiffin Stewart, a leading civil engineer, and his wife Frances Ann (nee Carkeek). In 1889, the family moved from Foxton to a 17 acre (6.8ha) property at Aramoho in Whanganui.
They raised 10 children, five girls and five boys. Their two-storey house, now known as Stewart House, on the corner of Plymouth and Campbell streets was built in the early 1890s and later used as a Karitane Hospital.
Ellen, 22, married Henry Sarjeant, 63, in 1893 at Christ Church, Whanganui. After Henry died in 1912, she married John Armstong Neame in April 1913.
Jane and Ellen were close and much of their written exchanges were passed down through the generations. Sue started to look further into her great-great-aunt’s musings, letters and artworks when she took a sepia portrait of Ellen to a picture framer in Dunedin to have the glass replaced.
There are two paintings of marigolds and a hydrangea by Ellen, who was quite an accomplished artist, as well as an unsigned watercolour of alpine scenery which Sue believed had been done by John Neame because he drew and painted plants and scenery for his book Alpine Flowers of Northern Italy. This has since been verified.
“Plants and flowers were one of his passions. He’ll have a close-up of the flower and then, in the background, he will have detail of the countryside of where it was - quite beautiful.”
Jane was Sue’s grandfather’s mother. She made several trips overseas to see Ellen and they travelled around, Jane making notes in a “lady’s diary” about what they did then embellishing their travels in a big diary.
Jane’s 1926 diary records the marriage of Ellen’s niece Molly, daughter of her sister Mary, to Arthur Porritt who later became Governor-General of New Zealand and received a knighthood.
“He was a Whanganui guy and these were Whanganui people. They all met up because they were in the same circles over in London. Ellen took Molly under her wing when she was quite young, taking her overseas and putting her through finishing school. Molly and Arthur lived the high life but divorced amicably many years later.”
In an earlier diary, around 1901, when Henry Sarjeant was still alive, Jane noted that “Henry was obviously rather distracted and very busy, always off doing what Henry does, and so Ellen and Jane would go off and do what sisters do. They went to churches, art galleries, teas and gardens, and for walks,” Sue said.
Walking was a favourite pastime that has been passed down through the family.
Sue’s mother was a world-class orienteer and Sue admits to being “a crazy walker person as well”.
Ellen and John were among the first to marry in the Whanganui Collegiate chapel. John was a master at the college. They lived in Whanganui for several years then in Europe, based in Alassio, Italy, where they looked for artworks to purchase for the Sarjeant Gallery collection and lived a fine life.
Molly took photos of the couple and on one she wrote: “In Capri, March 1924. Aunt Ellen and Uncle John, he does look a bit drunk, don’t you think?” Another is of Ellen and John standing on the footpath beside a car they called their “Rolls” and another personalised postcard with the Alps in the background.
John and Ellen Neame in the late 1920s or early 1930s in the Italian Alps.
The sisters’ correspondence reveals something of their personalities. Jane’s letters are “newsy and observational” whereas Ellen’s letters are “forthright and opinionated”, Sue said, giving her views on Hitler and the Japanese, and also imploring, if not commanding, Jane to come over to Europe just as war was breaking out.
As daughters of Frances Stewart, a women’s rights activist, they were, she surmises, very strong, independent kind of women.
“They would not be out of place living now. Some of the language and thinking in the letters and postcards was quite modern.”
Sarjeant Gallery curator of collections Jennifer Taylor Moore said the gallery team was “delighted to have the opportunity to see these deeply personal items and learn so much more about Ellen and John and Ellen’s family”.
“The gallery is very thankful to Sue for her generosity in making this access possible.
“It’s the first time I have seen a copy of John Armstrong Neame’s book Among the Meadow and Alpine Flowers of Northern Italy (1937) and it is just wonderful to be able to see all of his flower watercolours in the book alongside a family snapshot of him and Ellen relaxing in the Italian Alps on one of his research trips.”
