Ask to use material, get more information or tell us about an item
Dr Frank Birkinshaw talks about the ‘old identities’ he met while living on the Coromandel Peninsula for five years, in particular Charlie Hovell, a veteran of the 1864-1865 land wars, who he says, is now 95 years old. [See 1948 interview with Hovell ID 4948.]
Dr Birkinshaw talks about Charlie’s father who was a British Army surgeon and later became first superintendent of Coromandel Hospital. He tells how Charlie himself was shot in the leg by Māori when he was a boy during the war, as he was dressed in British Army uniform and accidentally wandered into the Māori front lines. Charlie married into the Māori community at Kennedy Bay and had a very large family with many grand-children.
He retells Charlie Hovell’s story about his son Dick Hovell, who he discovered a burial cave on an unnamed island off the Bay of Plenty coast. He eventually removed a large number of greenstone mere and other carved items from it. Dr Birkinshaw says he has seen some of the greenstone objects.
He tells another story about when Charlie Hovell was the local coroner and had to remove the head off a dead man in order to bury him in a small grave.
Dr Birkinshaw tells a story about two elderly former gold miners finding gold in a rock in the grounds of the Coromandel hospital, which was then claimed by the hospital authorities.
A story about another former miner named Tiger Jack who was the hospital gardener but also owned the Kapenga gold mine, and a scheme by the former mine manager. He says the mine which is now flooded, still contains about 250,000 pounds of gold.