Born in The 1880s – a Story of a Changing Society

Growing up in the 1950s I thought life couldn’t get better. The freedom of childhood was a wonderful thing.

Thinking back, I remember a special lady in my life at that time. Miss Squires was born in the early 1880s, when our town wasn’t much more than a decade old. Think of the changes she would have seen, growing from girlhood in a new settlement to old age in the 1950s.

(All images in this article are from the author’s postcard collection. Photos would have been taken in early 1900s. Centre white lines are a scanner problem.)

She would have seen the coming of cars, trains and aeroplanes, when initially she would have known only horses, carts and carriages, and the sailing boat that brought her family to New Zealand.

Her adult life would have been easier than her mothers, with telephones, fridges, washing machines and electric irons. And, of course, there was television. Miss Squires was the first in our street to get ‘the box’. I vividly remember sitting in her darkened room – that’s the way we did it then – watching the 1964 Tokyo Olympics on her brand new set.

I spent a lot of time with Miss Squires, such a gentle lady, kind, caring and tolerant of my childhood energy. I regret I wasn’t old enough to ask her about her childhood, her life. She would have had so many stories to tell. She lived through many changes to society as she lived through the end of one century to the middle of the next.

She wouldn’t have imagined the technological change we’ve seen – from telgrams to texts, letters to e-mails and certainly not instant money appearing from a hole in the wall after inserting a plastic card.

My memories of her are that she would have taken it all in her stride. She had already witnessed huge technological change. Society changed incredibly during her life time.

I think of Miss Squires today, this first day of 2010. I am thankful to have known such a wonderful woman, a woman who coped with the hardships of life in a new settlement in the 19th century.