From Heritage New Zealand Autumn 2007

by Shelly Howells

Among many competing views of history is the often overlooked notion that we are what we are what we ate at, sat on and slept in.

Colonial-made furniture was very trying to the temper in those days,” said Sarah Amelia Courage in 1896. “I bought a chest of drawers but the vile things would neither open nor shut unless one used the force of a battering ram.

”It’s quotes like that which make Furniture of the New Zealand Colonial Era: An Illustrated History 1830-1900, by William Cottrell (Reed), much more than a record of New Zealand’s early furniture. It’s a very readable, human story about the people who built and used the sometimes beautiful, sometimes plain ugly and annoying pieces that our colonial predecessors ate at, sat on and slept in. It’s a story that reflects the growth of New Zealand since the arrival of the first European settlers, and reveals a country that, in the early days, was technologically, economically and socially way ahead of its time.

Author William Cottrell took around seven years to complete the book. When he started, he was living in Remuera and running a furniture restoration business in Newmarket. By the time the book was complete, he was living in Gunyah, an Edwardian homestead near Darfield, filled to the brim with his vast and remarkable collection (despite a third of it being sold to Te Papa) of early New Zealand furniture, collected over many years. And his ideas about the country in those times had changed as dramatically as his lifestyle.

 “My preconceptions about early New Zealand were totally wrong,” he says. “I thought of things being out of date and old fashioned and slow. Quite the opposite. We were a fantastically modern country. One of the most modern countries in the world by about the 1860s-1870s.“

Working class people came here to better themselves because the system wouldn’t allow that to happen in Europe. Cabinetmakers came out here with a trunk of tools, set up in a shed and started making stuff.”

Demand for furniture was huge, with hundreds of people arriving on ships daily from the late 1830s, many needing to make or buy everything from beds to kitchen stools.“

Factories got bigger and bigger and bigger. Banks had to introduce hire purchase and credit and to lend to people they wouldn’t have in Europe.

”Some who started out as working-class cabinetmakers ended up with huge businesses, became mayors of towns, members of Parliament; ends unattainable at home.

“The social structure was tipped upside-down. Women who had had servants in England had to do the work themselves. Servants could come here, work for a little while, get married to a home owner, and suddenly be middle class. People who came out as carpenters ended up as fine cabinetmakers. Farm labourers ended up as shopkeepers. Those opportunities didn’t exist in Europe.

”Factories that started from scratch were full of the latest imported technology, using modern techniques. Brand-new towns and cities grew fast, and had all the latest additions as soon as they were available – electricity, gas lighting in the streets, trams, elevators in the buildings, telex communication. “We were very progressive,” says Cottrell. “It was an edgy, dynamic, progressive country.”

Cottrell started collecting old New Zealand furniture back in the 1980s when, as a TVNZ film editor, he bought a colonial villa in Ponsonby. “I had no furniture at all and thought it would be nice to fill it with antique New Zealand-made furniture.”

What started as a possibly whimsical way of meeting a practical need has become his life’s work. It didn’t take long to fill the house, so he then began upgrading his collection, all the time learning more about the pieces, until it got to the point where he couldn’t upgrade much more.

“So I made it harder for myself,” says the inveterate collector, who’s been gathering sets of things since he was a child. He started to look for very poor people’s furniture. Settlers who had no money made these “very primitive pieces”. They made their own furniture from what was available, like a packing case or the forked branch of a tree. As soon as they got some money, they would throw out the old and buy new. “Just about none survives. Maybe a dozen pieces in the whole country. It is so rare to find,” says Cottrell, whose five or six such pieces now belong to Te Papa.

Along the way, he became quite the dab hand at restoring furniture, a hobby that became a profession during a late-1980s stint in London under an apprenticeship with master furniture-restorer David Hordern.

The book, a giant, 591-page, 300,000-word, heavily illustrated tome (hand-written – computers aren’t his thing), started life as a commission from Reed to update a short book on the history of colonial furniture that was published about 30 years ago. “I thought it would take two to three weeks, not a big chunk of my life,” says Cottrell, laughing.

There was very little reference material immediately to hand. “Because furniture’s such mundane stuff in people’s lives, it’s not recorded. Settlers had better things to write about than their kitchen tables or chest of drawers,” he says.

But he got on to libraries across the country, and soon manila folders started to arrive full of photocopies of old advertisements, photographs and records.

“When the envelopes started coming, it gave me the confidence to continue, knowing that there was information out there.

“I was determined not to editorialise or put my own personality in it. If I couldn’t prove it and it wasn’t a fact, it couldn’t go in. That is the point of a reference book: lining up the facts, putting them in order and making it read well and make sense.

”In addition, so we can date our pieces of colonial furniture, Cottrell has put together an exhaustive, first-of-its-kind analysis of screws, nails, locks, hinges and machinery used at the time. So, for example, if your precious piece has a type-A screw and a type-C lock, it must have been made in 1840.

“But, I thought furniture on its own a rather boring subject, really! For a grown man to write about bits of wood is not the most dynamic thing, is it?”

So he decided to put as many people as possible in the book, using photographs of them with their furniture, and quotes from their journals.

“Because,” says Cottrell, “the book is about the mundane clutter in people’s lives, the utensils. We look at the stuff now and think, ‘Gosh that’s a fantastic chair.’ For this guy,” he says, pointing in the book at a grainy black-and-colonial man sitting in a fantastic-looking chair, “it was just a chair. I wanted to connect the furniture with the people whose lives it belonged to.”

The book records the “Kiwification” of furniture at the time, too. For example, they used a lot of wood in solid form; because timber was so plentiful, they didn’t have to use the veneers that were standard trade practice.

And, because we had such a wonderful colour range of timbers, they took to creating splendid specimen tables, featuring all the varieties of wood.“

The other thing that happened was we tended to get a kind of softening of styles,” says Cottrell. “Most cabinet-makers that turned up here weren’t A-grade, and they tended to pull back on the detail because it’s the detail that takes the time and costs the extra money. And the client-base wasn’t very wealthy. They just wanted a chest of drawers and, if they could leave a bit of a frill off it, they would. So, our styles tended to narrow down a bit.

“Furniture speaks volumes about the whole colonial experience. A painting is a painting – in colonial New Zealand, they tended to be landscapes, portraits, pleasant things. But furniture tells you how poor somebody was or how wealthy, whether they wanted to make a work of art, whether they just needed a utilitarian thing to make life better for themselves. There’s a lot of history attached to these things and they are often discarded because people just don’t notice them.

”Cottrell’s chat is peppered with stories of unique, historically valuable pieces he has rescued from sheds, junk shops and dip-strippers, horror stories of unscrupulous dealers who will chop pieces off antiques to up the sale price, and sad tales of beautiful sets being sold off in bits.“

I can go into a junk shop and point out a chair and say that chair was made by a craftsman who came from the Thames Valley region of England. He came to New Zealand and carried on making the same style of furniture. Here it is, covered in white paint and they want $25 for it. Nobody recognises its value. In 50 years’ time, all the pieces made by that craftsman might be gone. We still have the furniture – we just need to appreciate it a bit more.”