Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis.  Permission is given for 
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Coal Miners and Farmers: A Social History of the Te Akatea Rural 

Farming Settlement and its ‘Scots’ Mining Village of Glen Massey, 1900-

1945 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of 

Arts in History 

 

Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Douglas Stone 

 

2024  
 
 
 
 
 



[ii] 
 

 

 
 

Abstract 
This thesis examines the early 20th century development of Glen Massey within the late 19th 

century settlement of Te Akatea The more financially secure settlers in the isolated and 

topologically challenging settlement of Te Akatea, west of Ngāruawāhia were farmer-

entrepreneurs who viewed themselves as a leading ‘class’ by virtue of their imperial military 

service and the amount of land they had accrued and cleared. They not only sought to exploit 

the coal resources on their land, but were significant movers in the creation of commercial 

entities and infrastructure to do so. These efforts led to the opening of the Waipā mine and its 

private railway to Ngāruawāhia and the construction of the mining village of Glen Massey and 

an influx of mining immigrants, predominantly highly unionized Northern English in 1914. On 

the face of it, these immigrants represented a direct threat to the conservative social values that 

had hitherto obtained in Te Akatea, although in fact, miners shared the farmer ethos of ‘getting 

on’ by dint of hard work. The new village was effectively run by a loose cabal of company, 

union and church laymen. The coincidence of the start of the village and the outbreak of World 

War One induced issues around conscription and sedition which also incidentally flagged the 

ongoing issue of how media controlled the narrative of Glen Massey’s story at various stages. 

The construction of sport and leisure facilities and subsequent participation manifests both 

traditional mining, farming and gender cultures and some seminal indications of cultural shift. 

There were struggles for the provision of adequate housing, health and secondary education in 

the context of both a steadily declining mine output, shorter hours and lower wages towards 

the end of the 1920s. The Wilton Mine, which opened after the closure of the Waipā mine, did 

not really live up to employment and wage-paying expectations for the next decade. In the 

context of falling demand and reduced hours caused by the Depression, Glen Massey was torn 

by contending forces of the broader national agenda of the mining union agenda and local 

imperatives, particularly around home ownership. They finally opted for the latter, which 

entailed an enormous cost in terms of wider mining bonds. This had a complementary, if not 

causative disintegrating impact on the activity of the Church congregations, in particular the 

Methodist Church. Local economic hardship provided an opportunity for the farming 

community to reassert a degree of control after fifteen years of relative insularity through 

various, ostensibly unrelated events: a School Committee coup; discontinuance of the highly 

successful school Soccer team in favour of Rugby Union and a serious attempt to establish an 

adult Rugby Union team.  Strategic withdrawal into an ‘invented past’ with Glen Massey being 

retroactively constructed as a ‘Scots Village’ was one avenue explored to counter the perceived 

threat to traditional social patterns. The breaking of the traditional ‘ties that bind’ also 

stimulated a search for alternative agents of social change within the community as a whole. 

However, there is evidence that for at least a significant segment of the farming community, 

local society continued to be constructed around a ‘class’ mindset which posited themselves at 

the apex and miners at the base. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



[iii] 
 

 

Acknowledgements 

 

 
Acknowledgements and grateful thanks are due to Darley Paiva and Jean Mikkelsen for their 

encouragement and moral support. I also wish to thank Jean Hitchcock and Louise Veltman of 

Waikato District Council for their assistance in accessing land records and other details, and 

Michael and Penny Dawson for allowing me unfettered access to and use of the private papers 

of the late Colonel Charles Dawson and the late Mr Charlton Dawson. 

 

I have particularly appreciated the collegial suggestions of my supervisor, Associate Professor 

Geoff Watson in the course of writing this thesis.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



[iv] 
 

 

Table of Contents 

 
 

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………... ii 

 

 

Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………… iii 

 

 

List of Photographs, Tables and Graphs…………………………………………v  

 

 

Introduction …………………………………………………………………… 1 

 

 

Chapter 1    An Imperial Culture Meets a Mining Culture …………………... 12 

 

 

Chapter 2    Farmers and Miners: Parallel Cultures …………………………. 41   

 

 

Chapter 3    Identity and Cultural Contestation Within, Between 

                    and Across Communities and Cultures ………………………… 81 

 

 

Conclusion ………………………………………………………………….  121 

 

 

Bibliography………………………………………………………………… 125 

 

 

Appendix 1…………………………………………………………………...138 

 

 

Appendix 2…………………………………………………………………...144 

 

 

Appendix 3……………………………………………….…………………. 154 

 

 

 

 

 



[v] 
 

 

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS, TABLES AND GRAPHS 

 

 
Figure 1   Colonel Charlton Dawson ………………………………………………………. 14 

 

Figure 2   Statement of Liabilities of Colonel Charlton Dawson ………………………….  15 

 

Figure 3   Students by family on Te Akatea School Roll …………………………………   17 

 

Figure 4   One of a series of Invoices to Charlton Dawson around 1910-13 ……………… 23 

 

Figure 5   Miners and Associated Family Members in Te Akatea / Glen Massey, 

                based on 1914 Electoral Roll in Raglan Electorate, according to 

                Country of Birth…………………………………………………………………. 24 

 

Figure 6 The Rutter House seen from the road ……………………………………………  26 

 

Figure 7 Subdivisions in the creation of Glen Massey ……………………………………  30 

 

Figure 8 Boarding House on Wilton Collieries Road, Glen Massey ……………………...  31 

 

Figure 9 Advertisement in Maoriland Worker, 22 December 1915 ………………………. 36 

 

Figure 10 Advertisement in Maoriland Worker, 22 December 1915 ……………………... 36  

 

Figure 11 Part of C.S. Morris’s column in the Huntly Press and  

                District Gazette of 27 October, 1916 …………………………………………... 48 

 

Figure 12 Advertisement of Housing Sections for Sale in Glen  

                Massey, Waikato Times, 16 February, 1916 ……………………………………  59 

 

Figure 13 Number of Employees at Glen Massey Waipā Mine 1914-1930 ……………...  66 

 

Figure 14 Amount of Coal Mined Annually at Glen Massey Waipā Mine 1914-1930 …... 67 

 

Figure 15 Miners Listed as Being in Te Akatea / Glen Massey on 1925 

                Electoral Roll in Raglan Electorate, According to Country of Birth ……………70 

 

Figure 16 Typical ‘Glen Massey News’ Column in Waikato Times ……………………….73 

 

Figure 17 Activity of the Glen Massey Methodist Congregation 1914-1930 ……………. 76 

 

Figure 18 Amount of Coal Mined Annually at Glen Massey Wilton Mine 

                 1931-1945 and Kemp Mine 1944-1945 ………………………………………. 85 

Figure 19 Number of Employees at Glen Massey Wilton Mine 1931-1945 

                 and Kemp Mine 1944 – 1945 …………………………………………………  85 

 

Figure 20 Activity of the Glen Massey Methodist Congregation 1914-1945 ……………101 

 

Figure 21 Licensing Poll for the Glen Massey Voting Booth in the  



[vi] 
 

 

                Raglan Electorate according to Raw Vote Numbers 1914-1935 ……………… 105 

 

Figure 22 Licensing Poll for the Glen Massey Voting Booth in the  

                Raglan Electorate according to Percentage of Votes 1914-1935 ………………106 

 

Figure 23 Licensing Poll for the whole Raglan Electorate 1914-35  

                 according to Percentage of Votes ………………………………………………106 

 

Figure 24 Miners Listed as being in Te Akatea/ Glen Massey on 1935  

                Electoral Roll in Raglan Electorate, according to Country of Birth…………….113 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



1 
 

 

INTRODUCTION 

At the turn of the twentieth century, Te Akatea district was a sparsely settled district which, 

following the Land Wars and the Raupatu, had become the domain of a few relatively 

prosperous and established yeoman Pakeha farmers, at least several of whom had been 

allocated or sold land in return for their military service in that conflict. They were now 

economically benefitting from the shipping of frozen lamb as well as wool to Britain, and part 

of a shift towards what Belich terms “Recolonisation … (where) New Zealand became an 

ideological and economic semi-colony of Britain.”1 In their own eyes at least, they had also 

attained the privileged cultural and social gentrification benefits appropriate to their new station 

in life as ‘better Britons,’ albeit with smaller landholdings than the owners of the great estates 

of the nineteenth century.  

Those benefits included the ‘hatch, match and despatch’ rites of passage and social 

credentialling offered by the Churches. Lineham contends that an understanding of that 

religious culture is important for understanding of New Zealand society as a whole because of 

its impact on cultural memory and mores, class consciousness and family formation.2  

Stenhouse’s comments about the state of Christianity in New Zealand as a whole at the end of 

the nineteenth century is probably an accurate reflection of these established Te Akatea farmers 

in particular (except that Anglicans probably constituted more than eight out of ten): 

Around 95% of all settlers identified as adherents of a Christian denomination at the 

end of the nineteenth century. Most -slightly over four out of ten – were Anglican, 

mostly of English extraction; about one in four were Presbyterian, mostly Scottish … 

and about one in ten Methodists, mostly English.3

Alongside these established farmers were a smaller number of settlers on smaller holdings, 

scraping a living from subsistence agriculture, casual labour for their more gentrified and 

prosperous neighbours and even small-scale coal mining. That area of the district which was 

to became the village of Glen Massey was an undistinguished and particularly hilly area where 

 
1 James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880’s to the Year 2000. Allen 

Lane. Penguin Press, Auckland, 2001, 11.  
2 Peter Lineham, Sunday Best: How the Church Shaped New Zealand and New Zealand Shaped the Church. 

Massey University Press, Albany, 2017, 22. 
3 John Stenhouse, ‘Religion and Society’ in Giselle Byrnes, (Ed.), The New Oxford History of New Zealand. 

Oxford University Press. South Melbourne, 2009, 343 

 



2 
 

 

the road (in reality, no more than a dangerous and muddy horse track) turned north-west 

heading towards Waingaro and the main Te Akatea ‘village’  

By the outbreak of World War One (WWI) in 1914, the Waipā coal mine had been opened, a 

private railway had been constructed to take the coal to the main trunk line at Ngāruawāhia, 

the road link to Ngāruawāhia was being improved substantially and the infrastructure of the 

original Te Akatea rural farming hamlet - its post office, store and school - was in the process 

of relocation to the mining village of Glen Massey which was under construction to house the 

miners. Those new miners included a significant number of United Kingdom (UK) immigrants 

as well as West Coast miners who almost certainly represented a tangible, cultural threat to the 

kind of ‘better Britons’ and ‘better Britain’ ideologies to which the pre-mining Te Akatea 

community subscribed. 

Although Glen Massey came to be known as a ‘Scots mining village’, aligning Electoral Roll 

data with genealogical evidence actually suggests that Northern English community was the 

most significant component of the population at the time of the establishment of the village. 

The centrality of Methodism and the Methodist Church in this new community confirms a 

strong English Dissenter influence. Conversely, the same data also suggests that by the mid- 

1930s, the demographic proportion of Scots immigrants had increased to approximately the 

same level as English immigrants, but each group was outnumbered by the New Zealand-born. 

As this thesis will demonstrate, Glen Massey was a complex locality which resists simplistic 

definition. As such, it is highly relevant to at least two of the four big ideas of the Aotearoa 

New Zealand Histories Curriculum – that Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories have been shaped 

by the use of power and that relationships and connections between peoples and across borders 

have shaped our histories.4 This thesis has the potential to inform the local history approach 

through which Aotea New Zealand’s histories are being taught in schools.  

Structure 

This thesis investigates the dynamics of social class and community. It will be argued firstly, 

in Chapter One, that the more financially secure settlers in the isolated and topologically 

challenging settlement of Te Akatea, west of Ngāruawāhia were farmer-entrepreneurs who 

 
4 Te Kawanatanga o Aotearoa, New Zealand Government Ministry of Education. Aotearoa New Zealand’s 

histories in the New Zealand Curriculum Draft. Te Kawanatanga o Aotearoa, New Zealand Government 

Ministry of Education, Aotearoa 2022. Accessed 16 March, 2024, 2.  



3 
 

 

viewed themselves as a leading ‘class’ by virtue of their imperial military service and the 

amount of land they had accrued and cleared.   Chapter Two examines, how, after they had 

secured the opening of the mine and supporting transport infrastructure that also benefitted 

them, they ‘withdrew,’ remaining relatively aloof within their own social silo from the 

immigrant miners who they generally regarded with considerable suspicion. They were happy 

to use the new church and hall when it suited them and a very few individual farmers 

participated at times in the informal cabal which ran village affairs. Only a few more joined in 

the sports clubs. As the 1920s progressed and the economic disparity between miners and 

farmers increased, especially with the onset of the Depression and the disintegration of the 

traditional mining loyalties and bonds, the farming community seized the initiative and ‘took 

back control ‘in various ways, which are discussed in Chapter Three. These included control 

of the School Committee, encouragement of adult Rugby, discontinuance of the School Soccer 

team, a wresting back of the media narrative around Glen Massey and use of church leadership 

to reinvigorate a ‘tiered’ society which privileged their own sense of ‘class’.    

Studies of Coal, Social Class and Community 

In the light of the abovementioned demographic and genealogical evidence, it would be 

misleading to discuss Glen Massey’s social history solely within the parameters of Scots 

mining histories and the histories of the Scots in New Zealand, although they can provide 

valuable insights. Rebecca Lenihan’s two studies of the national occupational profile of 

Scottish immigrants to New Zealand between 1840-1929 flag the possibility of at least some 

identifiable aspects of the mining culture of the Scottish Eastern or Western Lowlands 

impacting on the mindset, social fabric and dynamics of Glen Massey for the period in 

question.5 The sharp differentiation in gender relations between the Scottish mines as “the 

domains of the 'public', masculine world of waged labour and trade union activity, and the 

'private', feminine territory of household and the family,” noted by Allan Campbell, also 

resonates, as does the company paternalism which manifested itself in company housing in 

Mid and East Lothian, for example.6  Gildart’s point that Campbell “puts to rest the much-

maligned notion of the inherently militant miner and the exaggerated view of the intense 

 
5 Rebecca Lenihan, ‘Jocks’-of-all-trades: Genealogical Methods, Occupational Profiles and New Zealand’s 

Scots, 1840–1920, New Zealand Journal of History 46, (2) (2012), 157-185 and Rebecca Lenihan, From Alba to 

Aotearoa: Profiling New Zealand’s Scots migrants 1840-1920. Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2015, 139 and 

171.  
6  Alan Campbell, The Scottish Miners, 1874–1939: Volume 1: Industry, Work and Community, Routledge. 2017, 

213. 



4 
 

 

solidarity of the mining villages”, may or may not be related to that ‘soft pressure’7 Brad 

Patterson et. al. also recognised the wider cultural contributions of Scots in New Zealand, 

although their coverage of the Scots in the West Huntly coalfields is minimal.8 

Melvyn Jones ‘s study of South Yorkshire, notes that coal companies often also provided and/or 

actively financially supported the construction of churches, community spaces and other 

amenities which is also echoed in Glen Massey (e.g. the Golf Pavilion, The Hall).9 The 

provision of community facilities and the facilitation of home ownership by the mining 

companies in Glen Massey, clearly impacted on industrial relations and social attitudes. The 

encouragement of self-help and self-improvement segued neatly with both Methodist doctrine 

and the interests of the mining companies. 

By way of wider international comparison, Shifflett’s analysis of the Appalachian coalfields 

emphasises the ‘maleness’ of sports, drinking, religion, visiting and other leisure activities as 

intrinsic elements of coal-town life.10 He also notes the vegetable gardening and arduous and 

time-consuming housekeeping chores that were done by women without the benefits of labour-

saving appliances, particularly refrigeration.  Shifflett’s Appalachian coalfields in some ways 

parallel both Glen Massey and Meredith Fletcher’s Australian mining town of Yallourn.11  

Fletcher notes that paid employment for women in that town was almost non-existent and that 

“women had to find their own place and establish their own relationship with the SEC (the 

employer) that owned their domestic space, employed their husbands and some of their sons 

but denied their daughters a role in the town once they left school…Women, like their 

husbands, were divided into staff and wages.”12 

 

Migration to Australia from coal mining regions in the United Kingdom also involved the 

importation of union organisation and class solidarity, often supported by Methodism and its 

 
7 Keith Gildart, Review of The Scottish Miners, 1874-1939, Volume1: Industry, Work and Community. British 

Journal of Industrial Relations. (40), 1, (2002), 171-173. 
8 Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking, and Jim McAloon with Rebecca Lenihan and Tanja Bueltman, Unpacking the 

Kists: The Scots in New Zealand, Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2013. 
9 Melvyn Jones, South Yorkshire Mining Villages: A History of the Region’s Former Coal Mining Communities. 

Pen & Sword History, 2017. 
10 Crandall A. Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-

1960, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1991. 
11 Meredith Fletcher, Digging People up for Coal: A History of Yallourn. Melbourne University Press, 

Melbourne, 2002. 
12 Fletcher, Digging People, 66. 



5 
 

 

radical offshoot of Primitive Methodism, which was studied by Eklund.13  Given the unification 

of Primitive Methodism and Methodism in 1913 in New Zealand and the construction of the 

Glen Massey Methodist Church hard on the heels of the opening of the first major mining 

operation and its associated immigrants from the UK, the nature and social role of religious 

practice and culture in the village and farming hinterland likewise becomes a logical focus of 

enquiry for this study.   

The Australian experience, according to Eklund, was that “Coal miners were strongly pro-

union but not always politically radical.”14  That suggests that any religious and industrial 

radicalism that may have characterised British Methodism speedily dissipated on both sides of 

the Tasman Sea. The moderate stances in politics and culture that often characterised the 

Australian coal miners’ unions, particularly at the local level also appear to have been a factor 

in the general ‘quietism’ of both the Glen Massey Miners’ Union and the Glen Massey 

community culture. In Glen Massey, that was notably manifested during the Depression with 

the creation of a new local union in order to preserve miner homes and livelihoods. 

 

In this context, wider debates about the application of social class in New Zealand are apposite 

in providing a framework to understand the Glen Massey mining community. As Wright points 

out, according to the cultural tropes of early twentieth-century New Zealand, miners were the 

‘undeserving poor’ with all the supposed laziness, vices of drinking and swearing associated 

therewith; the ubiquitous coal dust with which they were covered, an outward, visible sign of 

an inward spiritual gracelessness, if not downright moral depravity.15 They spoke a patois 

mining jargon in lower class Northern English and Scots accents; were perceived to collectively 

hold religious and politically dangerous, radical and subversive views (Methodism, even 

Primitive Methodism, and/or Marxism), and were associated with the radical unionists against 

which some of their neighbouring farming military Volunteers had ridden as ‘Massey’s 

Cossacks’ in Auckland during the 1913 General Strike.16  

The construction of Glen Massey coincided with the peak of a growing class consciousness, 

particularly amongst blue-collar workers:   

 
13 Eklund, ‘Mining in Australia: An historical survey of industry-community relationships’, The Extractive 

Industries and Society 2 (2015), 177-188.  
14 Eklund, ‘Mining in Australia’, 183 
15 Matthew Wright, Coal: The Rise and Fall of King Coal in New Zealand, David Bateman, Auckland, 2014, 

99-100. 
16 Belich, Paradise Reforged, 92-93. 



6 
 

 

Men and even women … suddenly gained a sense of their power and dignity … They 

began to know themselves as important people, doing important work, learned they 

could be the cutting edge of historical change, heirs to the world and its wealth. Their 

traditional sufferings – low and irregular wages, poor housing, high unemployment, 

high risks of injury and even death – which had once pressed them down towards 

destitution and apathy now fired their rage and gave focus to their vision.17 

However, in New Zealand such class consciousness was more an awareness of barriers to social 

advancement that were seen as susceptible to amelioration over time, than prescriptive and 

insuperable barriers to life chances. McAloon underlines the inaccuracy of “static portrayals 

which assume or imply a neat and fully-formed class structure that in turn gives rise to a tidy 

and coherent expressions of consciousness.”18 Class consciousness, such as it existed, was 

more likely to find expression in the hegemony of everyday, ‘common-sense reality’ than to 

feature in political discourse. Thus, for the comparatively ‘rich’ Te Akatea farmers, as for 

McAloon’s wealthy classes of Otago and Canterbury, “… the ‘first up best dressed’ model by 

which most of them had prospered [metamorphized] into a bootstraps myth which asserted that 

anyone who worked hard enough could attain success in New Zealand.”19 And for the miners 

who had been parachuted into the Te Akatea idyll, Wright’s broad observations on coal-based 

communities seemed to apply. “Coal-driven unionists wanted a fair deal – but they wanted it 

in the context of the status quo [that]… had little to do with overthrowing the system.”20   

While they maintained bonds with, and a degree of outward and inward flow to other mining 

sites and regions, Glen Massey quickly developed a strong community with a collective and 

mutually supportive group ethic. At the same time, it was also relatively quietist and 

conciliatory at the industrial level. Menghetti’s study of a similar kind of quietism evident in 

the Blair Athol township and mine in Queensland also opens up the possibility that Glen 

Massey’s new residents may have been driven by a need for social cohesion in order to cope 

with what was a new, relatively wild and potentially threatening non-European environment.21 

 
17 Erik Olssen, The Red Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labour 

1908-1913, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1988, 86-104. 
18Jim McAloon, "Class in Colonial New Zealand: Towards a Historiographical Rehabilitation." New Zealand 
Journal of History 38, 1 (2004), 1. 
19 Jim McAloon, No Idle Rich: The Wealthy in Canterbury and Otago 1840-1914. University of Otago Press, 

Dunedin, 2002, 182. 
20 Wright, Coal, 105. 
21  D. Menghetti, Blair Athol. The Life and Death of a Town, Townsville, 1995, cited in Ian Phimister, ‘Coal 

Mining and its Recent Pasts in Comparative Perspective.’ Journal of Australasian Mining History, 2, (2004), 

122. 



7 
 

 

In any event, owning one’s own home and enjoying the fruits of employment in terms of regular 

hours and leisure time and activities were of the utmost importance.  

Accordingly, Glen Massey, from its inception in 1914, was at the forefront of community - 

forging rather than replicating the transient, rootless and highly individualistic ‘atomised’ 

community’ proposed by Fairburn as a description of New Zealand society up to 1930.22 Its 

history accordingly takes its place alongside Caroline Daley’s community studies of Taradale, 

which also introduces the dimension of the role of gender in the construction of community.23 

In coming to Glen Massey, miners were attracted by a lure which was strikingly similar in 

essence to that to which their rural gentry neighbours had succumbed - an “ethos of 

Arcadianism – the belief in a land of natural abundance – where immigrants (provided they 

worked hard) could pursue their individual self-fulfilment without the barriers of entrenched 

social hierarchy or class division.”24  If achieving that ethos for the miners involved their 

buying in to what Belich terms a “Great Tightening … (where) the bacilli of tight class … were 

pasteurised out,” then so be it.25 Whether the surrounding ‘gentry’ were willing to readily allow 

such a rapid pace of pasteurisation, however, was another matter. 

This thesis argues secondly that the immigrant Glen Massey miners, while conscious – even 

proud - of their ‘lower class’ status, shared the same ethos of ‘self-improvement’ through hard 

work as their farming neighbours. While they sought the same material ‘good things in life’, 

however, that did not mean they necessarily sought to be move higher on the ‘class scale’. 

When the ethos of self-improvement touted by unionization and Methodism proved elusive, 

even with that concession, both the Unions and the Methodist congregation were seriously 

impacted. 

The different lenses of Fairburn’s atomised working class, Campbell and Gildhart’s capitalist 

instrumentalism, Menghetti’s pioneering solidarity, Belich’s ‘Great Tightening’, or Wright’s 

particular adaptation of Belich’s perspective are not necessarily mutually exclusive 

frameworks for understanding Glen Massey and Te Akatea’s social history.  For both farmers 

 
22 Alan Ward, Review of The Ideal Society and its Enemies; the Foundations of Modern New Zealand Society 

1850–1900, by Miles Fairburn. New Zealand Journal of History 24, 1 (1990), 74-76.  
23 Caroline Daley, Girls & Women, Men & Boys: Gender in Taradale 1886-1930, Auckland University Press, 

Auckland, 1999, and Caroline Daley, Gender in the Community: A Study of the Women and Men of the Taradale 

Area, 1886-1930. 1992. 
24 Ward, Review of The Ideal Society and its Enemies, 75. 
25 Belich, Paradise Reforged, 121.  



8 
 

 

and miners, the geographic isolation only slowly diminished over the first years with 

improvements in transport (first the railway, then the road). The social and cultural separation 

between each group lessened even more glacially, over decades. The lived reality of that 

enduring ‘split’ defies explanations by neat categorisation. 

As the Glen Massey miners staked a claim to their particular version of ‘Arcadianism,’ 

important manifestations of cultural delineation became evident in their chosen sporting 

activities, similarly to the Kaitangata mining community studied by Little.26 Association 

Football (Soccer), Rugby League and Bowling were almost exclusively the domain of the male 

miners. Golf and especially Tennis, had some farmer participation from the outset and were 

thus potential catalysts for community building between the two groups, alongside the three 

church congregations (Methodist, Presbyterian and Anglican) and the school.  

However, for the most part, the Te Akatea farming community ‘jury’ having retired to consider 

its verdict on the alien newcomers, without availing itself of much first-hand evidence, appears 

to have remained ‘out’, holding itself aloof from any but the most cursory interactions, for 

almost two decades. Apart from their highly restricted participation in local sports, neither their 

membership of church congregations nor their role in the school appear to have realised the 

potential of these institutions to catalyse the building of an integrated community to any 

significant degree. And unlike Little’s Kaitangata, there is no evidence of younger men from 

the Te Akatea farming stock doing any labour for a year or two in the mines. While farmers 

were quick to take advantage of the improved transport links and clearly relished the economic 

benefits thereof, socially they largely remained in their own silo.  

Literature on Community in New Zealand 

Much has been written on community in New Zealand at a generalised level and many specific 

case studies have been done.27  Besides Daley’s work mentioned above, the Caversham Project 

of Olssen et al. is an iconic New Zealand example of such a micro-level study.28  However, 

there are obvious differences between a relatively sizeable working-class suburb in the South 

 
26 Charles Little, ‘Football, Place, and Community in a New Zealand Mining Town, 1877–1939’, International 

Journal of the History of Sport 34, (10), (2017), 915-934.  
27  See, for example, W.J. Gardner, Where They Lived: Studies in Local, Regional and Social History. Regional 

Press, Christchurch, 1999.  
28 Erik Olssen, Tom Brooking, Brian Heenan, Hamish James, Bruce McLennan and Clyde Griffen, ‘Urban 

Society and the Opportunity Structure in New Zealand, 1902-22: The Caversham Project.’ Social History, 24, 

(1), (1999), 39-54. 



9 
 

 

Island city of Dunedin and a very small rural working-class mining North Island village and its 

rural hinterlands.  Evelyn Stokes’s series of historical papers, especially Paper 7, prepared for 

the Huntly Social and Economic Impact Monitoring Project related to the later Huntly Power 

Station go some way in making limited quantitative data available to establish some 

demographic and industrial context for the local mining which occurred.29 However, Glen 

Massey village has yet to be studied in a way which drills down beyond the surface level of 

‘village myth and legend’ to interrogate its first thirty years of history on the basis of qualitative 

as well as quantitative data over time. Nor has there been any study of the social history of the 

rural farming hinterland of Te Akatea in the same vein, much less any accounting for the lack 

of any cohesion, or at least the snail-like pace of development of such cohesion between these 

two groups which a shared geography and at least some social institutions (the re-located 

school and the church congregations), might logically suggest.  

Glen Massey local historian, Pam Bovill focussed on Glen Massey local history as a necessary 

context and adjunct to the beginnings and development of its school for its 75th Jubilee 

celebrations.30  Such ‘occasional’ histories serve an important purpose for the specific audience 

of jubilee attendees for whom they are written. There is some limited use of primary sources 

(fortunately, in view of the subsequent loss of these records), but deeper interrogation or 

analysis of historical patterns or trends forms no part of that purpose.  Lauren Retter’s short 

history of the school, written in 2013, was unencumbered by such expectations.31  Nevertheless, 

she uncritically accepts the popular understanding of Glen Massey as a ‘Scots’ mining 

settlement, silencing the imperial military connections of the original European settlers of Te 

Akatea as much as the actual origins of most of the mining settlers.32 In so doing, she 

promulgated the same myth of Glen Massey’s ‘Scots’ origins that this author was taught as a 

pupil at Glen Massey School in the 1960’s.  Gwyneth Jones’ more wide-ranging study of the 

Glen Massey community and farming districts displays an obvious use of primary sources.33 

 
29 Evelyn Stokes, Coal Mining in the Waikato Region. Working Paper 7: Huntly Social and Economic Impact 

Monitoring Project. School of Social Sciences. University of Waikato, Hamilton, October 1978 
30 Pam Bovill, Glen Massey School 75th Jubilee, 1915-1990: Including Te Akatea School, 1892-1914: 

Incorporating a Brief History of the District, Glen Massey School, Ngāruawāhia, 1989. 
31 Lauren Retter, ‘Glen Massey School: A History from 1887.’ The New Zealand Journal of Public History, (2), 

1, (2013), 16-18. 
32 Retter, ‘Glen Massey School’, 16-17 
33 Gwyneth Jones, The End of an Era: The History of the Coalmines and Village of Glen Massey and the 

Surrounding Districts. Gwyneth Jones Private Publication, Printing Publicity Printing Limited, 2010. 

 



10 
 

 

However, there is a serious lack of chronological coherence, much less any attempt to relate 

the history of the village to wider district, regional or national trends or movements. 

A more in-depth study is important for two reasons. Firstly, the broad ‘national’ sweep of New 

Zealand history can be imagined as the product of the growth and development of a rich mosaic 

of communities. There are some smaller, sometimes quirkily-shaped pieces of that mosaic 

whose gestation and conditions of growth do not fit the general mould and inevitably appear 

different in their final form. Drilling down into the detailed history of such communities gives 

authenticity, anchoring the broad hermeneutics of national historical inquiry to particular socio-

political contexts and legitimating variation and localised nuance in the overall story, rather 

than imposing a straightjacket of uniformity.   The view of national history through the 

telescope needs to be informed by the view of local history through the microscope. Glen 

Massey, is probably somewhat unique in the Huntly coalfields as a ‘created’ coal-mining 

community interpolated into the middle of an already established ‘gentry’ agricultural 

community, and a relatively rare phenomenon nationally.   

Secondly, while local studies to date include both individual coal-mining and individual 

farming communities, studies of communities that include both of these industries and their 

attendant disparate social groups are much thinner on the ground. The two groups at either end 

of the socio-economic spectrum who lived their relatively separate lives alongside each other 

in and around Glen Massey offer a cross-section micro-study of the changes in the dynamics 

of their ‘lived reality’ over almost fifty years, along with the world views which sustained them 

and the degree of social cohesion attained. 

Source Material 

The Dawson personal papers and land ownership details supplied by the Waikato District 

Council which were made available for this study were much appreciated. However, there were 

some challenges with other source material. While historical newspaper accounts furnish much 

detailed material, there are some issues where the reader gets a distinct sense of being fed only 

the tip of the iceberg where there appears to be much more going on out of sight underneath.  

One example is the concatenation of events and trends evident around the replacement of 

Soccer by Rugby Union as ‘the’ Glen Massey School sport, the introduction of adult Rugby 

Union, the replacement of the School Committee and the disintegration of Church activities 

around 1931-1932.  Church activity records provide valuable insights into what was going on. 



11 
 

 

While the records of no Glen Massey religious congregation have been immune to loss by fire, 

flood and general decay, there is sufficient extant material remaining in various archives to 

make considerable headway. In particular, Church baptismal records and especially, marriage 

certificates provided some ‘first hand’ information to complement other genealogical 

investigative avenues such as Ancestry.com. to discover the national origins of the mining 

villagers of Glen Massey identified in the electoral rolls. Historians have increasingly been 

using both archival and digital resources to inform their research on communities.34 

Many Glen Massey School records prior to 1945 have also been lost in a fire. Fortunately, 

some had been preserved in the National Archives, particularly those documenting the rolls 

during the period of transition from Te Akatea School to Glen Massey. Actual records of the 

Miners and Settlers Health Society within the National Archives are almost non-existent. The 

same archives, however, offer useful material around the use of the Hall and sport and leisure 

activities. 

Some interviews from the Huntly coalfields Oral History Project provided some generic details 

arguably relevant to Glen Massey. Likewise, other oral histories held in the Hamilton Library 

give some insight into farming life in the early 20th century. 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 
34 See for instance, David Hood, ‘Matching multiple data sources from New Zealand: the experience of the 

Caversham project’, History and Computing 12 (2), (2000), 227-243; David Hood, ‘Imaginary Knitting, 

Historical record linkage in the Caversham project’, Computing Arts 2001: Digital Resources for Research in 

the Humanities, University of Sydney, Sydney, 2001; Sue McLiskie, ‘Dangerous Ground or Rich New Research 

Methods? Using Digital Genealogy to Trace Colonial Mobility’, Britain and the World, 13, 2, (2020), 105-25; 

Rebecca Lenihan, ‘The Public Good of Digital (Academic) History’, Public History Review, 29, (2022), 185-94; 

Charlotte Macdonald, ‘Woolwich to Wellington: From Settler Colony to Garrisoned Sovereignty’, New Zealand 

Journal of History, 53, 1 (2019), 50-76. 

 



12 
 

 

 

Chapter 1 

An Imperial Culture Meets a Mining Culture 

 

Introduction 

 

This chapter will firstly briefly consider the intertwined topological, infrastructural (including 

transport), demographic and economic determinants of the Te Akatea settlement up to 1900 

and into the first decade of the twentieth century.  It will then summarise the nature of the 

isolated ‘frontier’ community that had emerged by the beginning of the century: its changing 

physical landscape; its cultural practices. ethos and political leanings which were direct or 

indirect products of these determinants and its demographics.  The impact of exploitation of 

the coal seams on some of the farmlands and the construction of the new mining township of 

Glen Massey, as an apparent catalyst for change, will then be examined from two perspectives: 

firstly, its foreseeable and expected infrastructural and economic benefits and secondly, the 

apparently unforeseen, but enduring sea-change it wrought on the dynamics of Te Akatea 

society. It will be argued that the ‘parachuting in’ of immigrant miners from both overseas and 

the West Coast of the South Island, with their ability to channel and focus well-established 

bonds and networks, functioned as a Trojan horse for deliberate and conscious community-

building.  Activities such as the purchase of sections for the building of houses, a public 

meeting’s decision to build a hall, the establishment of a medical centre and the building of a 

church evidence the new Glen Massey village as an early prototype, a silo of community-

building by local initiative, which would eventually prevail over the ‘social atomisation’ which 

had generally characterised New Zealand up to the 1920s, according to Fairburn.  Miners 

actually shared their rural neighbours’ aspirations for reward by dint of hard work, but those 

rewards were found as much in such tangible expressions of community as they were in 

individual prosperity.  In 1914-15, the first year of the Glen Massey mining community and the 

Great War, the latter appears to have been of less concern to the immigrant villagers than to the 

farming families of established residence.  

 

Settlement of Te Akatea up to 1900: an “atomized” community? 

Land in the Te Akatea area up to 1900, the beginning point of this study, had been the focus of 

three separate and consecutive government settlement schemes prior to the advent of relatively 

large-scale mining: the Akatea Village Settlement, the Firewood Creek Village Settlement, and 

grants made under the Naval & Military Settlers and Volunteers Land Act 1891. The topology 

of the district had made the establishment of transport links to other major settlements very 



13 
 

 

difficult for all three schemes. From the outset, there was a sense of social isolation and 

economic precariousness for all but a prosperous few. Settlers were often trying to clear land 

not well suited to dairy-farming and only marginally more amenable to sheep-farming. 

Economic support to establish their farms by way of roadbuilding which had been promised, 

was not always available to the extent which had been promised, much less the extent to which 

it was needed. 

 

The first Akatea Village Settlement was a bundle of land parcels of approximately 50-acres, 

intended to be developed as farms, extending northwest from near the junction of Wilton 

Collieries Road with Waingaro Road. While the nature of the geography was compounded by 

a road unsuitable for wheeled vehicles and a lack of available supplementary work, the Waikato 

Times sheeted home such difficulties to the lack of the “right sort” of farmer.35 Settlers of the 

more prosperous kinds of settler farms at Te Akatea who presumably epitomized such “right 

sorts” included Mr Richard Burt (who also kept the Post Office at Te Akatea), and Mr J.B. 

Grey, Mr George Mathias and Mr Joshua Foster (the latter being the Sergeant Foster of the 

Armed Constabulary and previously the 4th Waikato regiment who founded Hamilton) and Mr 

J. Duncan.     

 

A second Firewood Creek Village settlement, comprised an area of nine 50-acre parcels 

between Glen Massey and Ngāruawāhia. By 1892, the New Zealand Herald was claiming that: 

 

…A few, through indomitable courage and perseverance worthy of the early days of 

settlement in the colony have succeeded. But as a whole the Akatea settlement has not 

been a success. Want of easy access to the settled country and of set tiers with capital 

employing labour about them, were the chief causes of failure.36 

 

The same article goes on to note that what was known as the Firewood Creek settlement around 

Te Akatea was also bounded to the north by a large area under perpetual lease. One Colonel 

Dawson of Auckland, had taken up several thousand acres immediately adjoining the Firewood 

Creek settlement and extending to Waingaro Springs under the perpetual lease system, and had 

already cleared several hundred acres of bush.  

 
35 ‘Absenteeism and Settlement’, Waikato Times, 18 December, 1888, 2.  
36 ‘Our Back Country’, New Zealand Herald, 24 March, 1892, 6. 



14 
 

 

Descendants of Colonel Dawson believe that these several thousand acres were granted to the 

Colonel for his services to the British at the Battle of Rangiriri during the New Zealand Wars.  

 

 

Figure 1 Colonel Charlton Dawson.  Used by permission of Micheal and Penny Dawson. 

 

There is neither reason to dispute this, nor documentary evidence to support it, although clearly, 

he was sufficiently well-placed financially, to make the most of any opportunities that came his 

way by dint of his military service:   

 

Charlton [Dawson] was a major in the 18th Royal Irish Regiment. He fought in the 

Maori War [sic.] in New Zealand, and married Louisa Greenway. When he retired from 

the army with the rank of Lt. Colonel in 1880, he went to live in New Zealand, where 

his wife had considerable property. He died in 1904 and his wife in 1910. (The son) 

Charlton was born in 1879.37 

 
37 P.H. Ditchfield, The History of the Dawson Family of Farlington and North Ferriby, York. Of Ackworth Park 

and Osgodby Hall, in the County of York, Of Greystock, Cumberland. Of Arborfield House, Berkshire and of 

Philadelphia, United States of America. Printed for Private Circulation by George Allen & Co. Ltd., London 

(Date of Publication unknown- probably pre-WWI) 52.  



15 
 

 

It should be noted that both Colonel Dawson, and his son, also named Charlton, to whom the 

Te Akatea property passed upon the former’s death, were actually absentee owners based in 

Auckland, with the Te Akatea farm property managed by Mr Arthur Brockett, a situation which 

continued well into the twentieth century, until the Colonel’s grandson came to live on the 

property around the late 1940s. 

 

 
 

Figure 2 Statement of Liabilities showing farm properties in Te Akatea (and Waipā Colliery preference shares) as well as 
Auckland properties and other business assets owned by Charlton Dawson in 1911 38 

 

In 1893 the land to the west of Firewood Creek settlement, including what is now Glen Massey, 

was surveyed as grants to former British and colonial military and naval personnel who had 

served in New Zealand and passed the criteria laid down under the Naval & Military Settlers 

and Volunteers Land Act 1891.39  This third project involved grants of parcels of land of varying 

 
38 Statement of Liabilities, Private Papers of Colonel Charlton Dawson and Mr Charlton Dawson, son of 

Colonel Charlton Dawson, 1911.  
39 The major provisions of this Act allowed for Commissioners to assess land claims based on service in the 

armed forces. The Act allowed for both land grants or remission of money for land already purchased. 



16 
 

 

size, with some people owning up to 400 acres comprising several adjacent parcels (including 

Dawson who already had several thousand acres under perpetual lease) Dawson remained at 

the northern end of Te Akatea, presumably having added his grant to the land he already held 

under perpetual lease, and remaining an absentee owner. The complete absence of his fellow 

grantees on any electoral rolls or other documents is a plausible indication that they simply 

sold the land they had been granted and moved on.  

 

Those settlers from the farming community for whom there is newspaper evidence of having 

lived in the Te Akatea district on a permanent basis prior to 1900 and subsequently, were mostly 

from the first Akatea Village Settlement.40 They included Mr Richard Burt, Mr J.B. Grey, Mr 

George Mathias, Mr Joshua Foster, Mr G. Bull and Mr J. Duncan and William Horne (the latter 

with four children, two of whom were later named as Frederick C.R. Horne and Miss Annie 

Florence Horne).41  Electoral rolls also identify Joshua Foster, George Mathias, John Duncan, 

Mrs Rebecca Burt, (presumably the wife of Richard Burt), Frank Champtaloup, Elizabeth 

Emma Mallandine, Charles William Penny, John Edwin Rutter, Eleanor Mercedes Mutis 

Rutter, (the sister of John Edwin Rutter), Mercedes Mutis Rutter (the daughter of John Edwin 

Rutter). There was also one bushman (John Piggott) and one labourer (John James Rollinson).  

 

Population of Te Akatea from 1900 to the building of the Waipā Mine, 1914 

 

The Te Akatea School Rolls (Figure 3) provide another contemporary source to complement 

electoral roll and newspaper information.42 Their limitations are that they, of course, only list 

families who have children of primary school age. Those families with children under the age 

of five or with older children will not feature.  

 

In summary, there were a number of ‘core’ farming families that populated Te Akatea from 

1900 onwards, although spouses were rarely named on the electoral rolls: the Burts (farming 

for at least the first decade of the 20th century), the Rutters, the Brocketts (managing the 

Dawson farm), the Fosters and the Hornes. Charles Penny up to 1902 and Frank Champtaloup 

up to 1908 were also farmers, although there is no evidence of the marital status of either. Mr 

 
40 ‘Our Back Country’, New Zealand Herald, 24 March, 1892, 6. 
41  ‘Local and General News’, New Zealand Herald, 20 March, 1926, 10.  
42 Te Rua Mahara o te Kawanatanga/ Archives New Zealand, ‘Te Akatea School’, Files R22140780 for 1900; 

R22140781 for 1901; R22140768 for 1902; R22140769 for 1903; R22140770 for 1904; R22140771 for 1905; 

R22140772 for 1906; R22140773 for 1908; R22140775 for 1909; R22140776 for 1911; R22140777 for 1912 

and R23660383 for 1913, accessed online 09/07/202. 

 



17 
 

 

G. Bull arrived sometime during that first decade either already married or marrying shortly 

after his arrival. The Fowlers arrived around the same time. In addition to that ‘core’ were a 

number of farmers who did not stay long and itinerants who came and went during the period: 

teachers, farm workers, bushmen involved in clear-felling, agricultural contractors. (Around  

 

Students by family on Te Akatea School Roll 1900 – 1913  
(* represents one child) 

 
Extrapolated from Te Rua Mahara o te Kawanatanga/ Archives New Zealand. Te Akatea School, Files R22140780 for 1900; R22140781 

for 1901; R22140768 for 1902; R22140769 for 1903; R22140770 for 1904; R22140771 for 1905; R22140772 for 1906; R22140773 for 

1908; R22140775 for 1909; R22140776 for 1911; R22140777 for 1912 and R23660383 for 1913. Accessed online 09/07/2024. 

  
N.B. There are no archived records for 1907 or 1910. 

 

Families 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1908 1909 1911 1912 1913 

Allen * *           

Bell   * *         

Burgess * *           

Burt *** *** *** ** ** ** *** ** * ** *** *** 

Coate *** **           

Coulter     *        

Davis   * * * ** **      

Downes            * 

Duffell        * * * ** ** 

Edkins           * * 

Fisher      * * * *    

Foster *** **** **** ** ** * *      

Fowler            ** 

Kemp          ** ** * 

Lynch   *** ***         

Lyon        * ** ** ** ** 

Manning        ** **    

McDonald ** *           

Neilson *            

Owen          **   

Pretty    *         

Runciman            ** 

Rutter ** ** ** ** ** * *      

Smith      * * * * * * * 

Trew ** **           

Wilson * *           

Total 

Students 

19 17 14 12 8 8 9 8 8 10 11 15 

KEY 
 
           Families with children at Te Akatea school for 7 years or over  

 
Families with children at Te Akatea school for 4-6 years  
 
Families with children at Te Akatea school for between 1 and 3 years  
 

 

Figure 3 Students by family on Te Akatea School Roll. 

nine or ten of the families in Figure 3 who stayed for between one and three years are not heard 

of again after their departure.) Overall, the lack of obviously adult sons or daughters of voting 

 

 

 



18 
 

 

age from the ‘core families’ (apart from the two Rutter women) suggests single men, or men 

with young families made up the balance. The status quo by 1913 was that “the bulk of the 

holdings are in the hands of single men.”43 On the surface, the general picture that emerges of 

Te Akatea at the opening of the twentieth century is that of an isolated, frontier farming 

community of predominantly single males and a few single women and perhaps a very few 

couples with young families who were engaged in large-scale clear-felling and conversion to 

pasture of land, much of which was marginal. 

 

Geographic, Economic and Infrastructural Issues from 1900 to the building of the 

Waipā Mine, 1914 

The Te Akatea topology with its preponderance of steep, almost cliff-like hills was challenging. 

“Progress’ was clearly viewed in terms of the ability to execute clear-felling or burning and 

convert the land so cleared to pasture. That was easier said than done, given the terrain. The 

Waikato Argus noted, however, that by 1900:  

 

PROGRESS – In spite of every drawback, about £5000 worth of fat cattle and sheep 

have gone out of the district during the last six months. Twelve years ago, there was not 

an acre of it in grass, and all the value it now has been given to it by the capital and 

labour the lion-hearted pioneers expended on it.44 

 

New Zealand’s primary role to supply frozen lamb and wool to the UK market was 

unquestioned. On 7 April, 1909, it was reported that Messrs. Dalgety and Co. Ltd. had sold to 

Mr Charlton Dawson of Te Akatea, “41 especially selected Corriedale sheep, from the well-

known flock of Mr C.H. Ensor, Canterbury, consisting of one stud two-tooth ram, 20 two-tooth 

flock rams, and 20 2-tooth flock-ewes.”45  Corriedales were known for their ability to produce 

high quality meat especially for the prime lamb trade, as well as wool. It was later reported that 

this was, at the time, the only stud flock of Corriedale sheep in the Auckland province.46  Mr 

Dawson’s investment appears to have paid off. By 1912, the Auckland Star was clearly 

impressed by the prices he was receiving at auction for his Corriedale wool.47 

 
43 ‘Among Auckland’s Hill Farms’, Greymouth Evening Star, 22 September, 1913, 8.   
44 ‘Waingaro’, Waikato Argus, 25 May, 1900, 2. 
45 ‘Commercial’, Auckland Star, 7 April, 1909, 7.    
46 General News Column, Waikato Argus, 8 April, 1909, 2.   
47 ‘The Wool Sales’, Auckland Star, 18 November, 1912, 7 and ‘The Rise in Wool’, Auckland Star, 10 January, 

1912, 3.    



19 
 

 

 

Where the relative wealth of Messrs. Dawson and a very few others may have enabled them to 

make such progress with the labour for which they advertised on a fairly regular basis, most 

farmers lacked that kind of financial resourcing.48  Details of the rigours of farm life specific 

to Te Akatea are scarce. However, oral histories from the same period in comparable locations 

suggest that a lot of farm work was done by families, including mothers and daughters (where 

there were any), especially milking by hand, butter-making, poultry and pig-raising and stock 

work, as well as assisting in land clearance by grubbing gorse etc.49 Domestic chores, in the 

absence of electricity were particularly burdensome. Mercedes (‘Mercie’) Rutter for instance, 

worked as cook and housekeeper for her family, and was also the local postmistress. 

 

Isolation was a condition of life. While access to and from Ngāruawāhia had been much 

improved by the construction of a bridge over the Waipā River in 1898, the state of what passed 

as the road from Te Akatea to Ngāruawāhia remained a constant problem, stymieing the 

development of farming, let alone any exploitation of coal reserves. For instance, a seam of 

coal on Mr J. Duncan’s farm had been identified as early as 1892:  

 

But the thickness or quality had not been ascertained at the time of your correspondent’s 

visit about a month ago, as on account of the want of roads the proprietor had not felt 

warranted in incurring any expense in opening up a coal mine, when all his means are 

required for cultivation of his land, but the indications show that, some day, it will be a 

valuable property.50 

 

Tenders were regularly sought by the Raglan County Council for metaling Te Akatea Road.51 

Contracts for regular mail deliveries once, twice or three times per week were regularly 

advertised.52 There was a telegraph service available at least between Hamilton and 

Ngāruawāhia by 1902, although W.M. Horne of Te Akatea complained in a letter to the Editor:  

 
48 ‘Advertisements’, Waikato Argus, 1 June 1899, 4; ‘Advertisements’, Waikato Argus, 17 December, 1903, 4; 

‘Advertisements’, Waikato Argus, 18 December, 1903, 4.   
49 Ada Terry. ‘Memories of farm life in Kaipara, North Auckland and the Waikato: an interview with Ada Terry’, 
Interviews 1, 2 and 3. (HCLOH_0068), 2021; Florence McGovern– ‘A hard life - reminiscences from 1902-

1919: an interview with Florence McGovern’, (HCLOH_0039), 2021; Sophie Johnson-Smith. ‘Early Memories 

of Maungapiko, Raglan 1896-1910's: an interview with Sophie Johnstone-Smith (HCLOH_0043), 2021, 

Recorded Oral Histories, Te Ohomauri o Kirikiriroa / Hamilton City Libraries.   
50 ‘Our Back Country’, New Zealand Herald, 24 March, 1892, 6. 
51 E.g. ‘Advertisements’, Waikato Argus, 28 February, 1899, 4.  
52 E.g. ‘Advertisements’, Waikato Times, 6 September, 1894, 10.   



20 
 

 

 

You will observe it requires three hours to wire between Hamilton and Ngaruawahia, a 

distance of twelve miles. I could have ridden on horseback the same distance in half the 

time.53  

 

Telephone services were equally erratic. The Hamilton Borough Council was requested in 1907 

to support an application to have the telephone stations on a number of stations on the 

Hamilton-Raglan line, including Ngāruawāhia, Te Akatea and Waingaro, constituted bureaux 

and connected with the Hamilton exchange.54 

 

Schooling was precarious. A school had been built in Te Akatea in 1892 and shared its teacher 

with the Waingaro School, for three days each. Both schools however, were closed for six 

weeks on the removal of the teacher, Mr Lourie who had been promoted to the school at 

Hukerenui South. They opened again on Monday 3rd July, 1900, when the Board of Education 

appointed Mr Godwin to the position.55 

 

Entrepreneurial Farmers: Coal as a Catalyst of Change 

Coal offered a tantalizing business supplement to farming incomes. It was reported in April, 

1902 that a seam of bituminous coal, which had been known to exist at Te Akatea, six miles 

from Ngāruawāhia, was about to be opened up, with the Waihi Gold Mining Company on the 

ground extracting trial samples.56 A Herald article around the same time on the same subject 

indicated the seam was on Mr Bell’s property at Te Akatea.57 By July 1907, a Mr Runciman 

was requesting the Raglan County Council for permission “to run a motor wagon on the road 

from Te Akatea to Ngaruawahia for the purpose of bringing out coal.”58 On 7 July, 1908, the 

Waikato Argus reported “great interest is being taken in the development of a new coalfield 

near Ngaruawahia on the properties of Messrs. Runciman, Coad and Dawson.  Considerable 

time and money have been quietly expended in development work.”59 Small amounts were 

taken by horse and cart for use at Ngāruawāhia dairy factory. 

 
53 Telegraph Delays. Waikato Argus, 18 November 1902, 2. 
54 ‘Borough Council’, Waikato Times, 1 June, 1907, 2. 
55 ‘Waingaro’, Waikato Argus, 4 July, 1900, 3. While several newspapers reported the re-opening of the school 

and the closing of the school, the actual date of closure is uncertain, but was probably around mid-May. 
56 ‘Waikato Coal”, Auckland Star, 23 April, 1902, 5.    
57 ‘News From Country Districts’, New Zealand Herald, 24 April, 1902, 6.   
58  ‘Raglan County Council’, Waikato Argus, 26 July, 1907, 2.  
59 ‘Te Akatea Coal Mines’, Waikato Argus, 7 July, 1908, 2. 



21 
 

 

 

 By 24 August, 1908, the Gisborne Times was advertising an abridged prospectus for the 

Ngāruawāhia Coal Company Ltd., with two of the directors listed as T. Runciman of 

Ngāruawāhia, Farmer and C.G. Dawson of Te Akatea, Farmer.60 These directors at the apex of 

the mining company were clearly not averse to the property speculation their mining venture 

might encourage:  

 

There appears to be every indication of a land boom on a moderate scale in the 

neighborhood of Ngaruawahia and Te Akatea as a result of the opening of this mine. … 

In some cases, we are informed, options to purchase [properties in the vicinity of the 

mine] have been secured. Other speculators are bound to follow this lead as the 

establishment of a large township at Te Akatea in the near future is imminent.61 

 

Conservative Politics and the Naming of the Mining Village 

Politically, Te Akatea’s voting patterns were unsurprisingly, decidedly conservative. Results 

for the Franklin electorate in 1902 election, included 8 votes for Harris and 16 votes for Massey 

at the Te Akatea polling station, the total results for the whole electorate being 1,159 for Harris 

and 2,270 for Massey, with a majority of 1,111 for Massey.62  By 1911, Te Akatea was in the 

Raglan electorate, but where the New Zealand Herald reported the results of six polls and a 

solid government defeat, in Te Akatea, 26 voted for Bollard (from Massey’s Reform Party) and 

24 voted for the only opposing candidate, who was an unofficial Reformist, with Bollard 

winning the electorate overall.63 Local political sympathies prior to the 1913 General Strike, 

and the opening of the Waipā Mine in 1914 were quite clear. Strong support for Bollard and 

the Reform Party continued throughout this period and beyond, up to 1927.  

 

That included early indications of anti-union sentiment. In August, 1908, ‘Hawk-Eye’ of Te 

Akatea enclosed 1s towards the subscription list for the two tram/bus drivers who were strike 

breakers.64 In February, 1909, it was reported that the Te Akatea coal mine had a busy time 

 
60 ‘Advertisements’’, Gisborne Times, 24 August, 1908, 1. 
61 ‘Te Akatea Coal Mines’, Waikato Argus, 7 July, 1908, 2.  
62  ‘Franklin’, Auckland Star, 26 November, 1902, 5.   
63 ‘Auckland Province’, New Zealand Herald, 15 December, 1911, 8.  
64 ‘The Tramways Decision’, New Zealand Herald, 6 August, 1908, 6.  



22 
 

 

during the recent trouble at Huntly, having supplied the Dairy Association’s factory and other 

customers at Ngaruawahia and along the line.65  

 

It seems highly likely that the decision to name the mine, ‘Glen Massey’ was made by Charlton 

Dawson in collusion with Runciman, if not unilaterally. There is no serious dispute that the 

second part of the name is a tribute to the Reform Prime Minister, William Massey. The prefix 

of ‘Glen’ is more problematic and led to considerable subsequent confusion and local village 

myth-making. At the time, it was internationally commonplace for mining operators to name 

the mine, “often before the residents arrived [and there was a] rather widespread use of the 

word “glen” followed by another personal or family name.” 66  Runciman was the owner of the 

land containing the mine. Dawson was a significant shareholder in the Waipā Collieries and 

Railway company, and had supplied investment monies on a regular basis before the mine 

opened (Figs. 2 and 4). It is highly plausible that he would have suggested, if not chosen the 

name of the local M.P. for Franklin who had become Prime Minister in 1912, for the mine in 

which he had invested.  

 

In any event, the village was named before the mine opened in May 1914 and miners had 

arrived to work it. The Waikato Times could pronounce on 11 May, 1914, that “The first trucks 

of coal were sent from the mine last Wednesday, and it is expected that everything will be 

sufficiently advanced to allow of the opening of the mine today … the name of the station 

connected with the mine is Glen Massey.” 67  On 15 May, 1914, the Pahiatua Herald stated 

that “at the mine a new township has sprung up, which has been called Glen Massey.”68  By 1 

October, 1914, the Waikato Argus was reporting that “the name of the Te Akatea school was 

changed to “Glen Massey.”69   

 

 
65 ‘Country News’, New Zealand Herald, 12 February, 1909, 8.   
66 Shifflett. Coal Towns, 34.  
67 ‘Te Akatea Notes’, Waikato Times, 11 May, 1914, 8.  
68 ‘Waipa Railways and Collieries’, Pahiatua Herald, 15 May, 1914, 3.   
69 ‘Advertisements’, Waikato Argus, 2 December, 1914, 3.   



23 
 

 

 
 

Figure 4 One of a series of invoices around 1910-13 for further injections of capital by shareholders for the development of 
the Waipā mine. 70 

 

The story that subsequently developed that the name was a tribute to Scots miners who arrived 

en masse to the exclusion of all other nationalities, does not fit with the facts. Firstly, use of the 

Scottish prefix ‘Glen’ does not necessarily imply even Scots ownership, let alone a Scots 

workforce – it was an international verbal convention used by coal mine owners. Secondly, it 

is difficult to imagine any group of red-blooded, highly unionized Scots miners either being 

offered or accepting a place-name link with the eponymous author of ‘Massey’s Cossacks’ 

during the general strike only a year before, in 1913. In an interview recorded in 1992, Tom 

 
70 Invoice for 1911. Private Papers of Colonel Charlton Dawson and Mr Charlton Dawson, son of Colonel 

Charlton Dawson.  



24 
 

 

Burke, Rhys Jones and Jack Pitkin, miners of Rotowaro, Huntly and Renown mines, vividly 

recalled how in 1913 “farmers charged ‘em with a horse and killed one of ‘em miners,” 

reflecting the lingering bitterness throughout the coalfields.71  Thirdly, and most importantly, 

such a claim is at significant variance with an objective breakdown of the national origins of 

the miners (mostly Northern English and New Zealand-born) who were the original village 

settlers. 

 

 
 

Figure 5 – See Appendix 1 for details of supporting evidence 
 

Some of the reasons that this myth might have gained such currency in the face of all objective 

evidence to the contrary, will be examined in Chapter 3.  

 

Te Akatea Farmer Culture 1900-1915: Leisure Activities, Housing, Religion and Self-

Awareness as a ‘Class’ 

In keeping with the original land-holdings granted for imperial military service and the imperial 

imprint of the business of exploitation of resources both above and below ground, the 

imperialist military nature of the interests and leisure activities of the Te Akatea single male-

dominated social elite is unsurprising. Frederick C. R. Horne, son of William Horne had been 

a volunteer during the South African War.72 The Waikato Argus reported on 8 December, 1908 

that No. 1 Squadron of the A.M.R. (Auckland Mounted Rifles) had their annual squadron 

 
71 Tom Burke, Rhys Jones and Jack Pitkin ‘An interview with Tom Burke, Rhys Jones and Jack Pitkin’, Huntly 

Coalfields Oral History Project, Te Koopuu Maania o Kirikiriroa, Hamilton Library, HCLOH_0181 a and b, 06 

April, 1992. 
72 ‘Family Protection Act’, Auckland Star, 18 March, 1926, 16.   

23, 28%

6, 8%

27, 33%

25, 31%

Miners and Associated Family Members in Te Akatea/Glen Massey,  
based on 1914 Electoral Roll in Reglan Electorate, according to 

Country of Birth

English

Scots

NZ Born

Untraceable



25 
 

 

shooting competition, where No. 3 Troop was named as having its headquarters in Te Akatea. 

(Lieutenant Rutter, Private Burt and Private Runciman named as winners of various sections).73 

Lt Rutter was also named as being present at the annual inspection of A. Squadron 2nd Regiment 

Auckland Mounted Rifles at Hamilton, 30 Sep., 1908, with the inspecting Colonel noting that 

the Karamu and Te Akatea troops had ridden a distance of over twenty-five miles to attend.74  

This local militia also paraded at a firing range at Te Akatea in February, 1909 to compete for 

Lieut. Rutter’s medal.75  There were similar reports in August, September and October of 

1909.76 The Rutters (Privates C and E), Burts (Privates T and A), Kemps (Private S and another 

unidentified), Fosters (Corporal and Private), Petries (Privates F and L.) Corporal Runciman, 

and Farrier-Sergeant Fowler all appear to have been regular attenders at drill.  On 30 July, 1910, 

a parade of Ngāruawāhia and Te Akatea troops of the No 1 Squadron, Waikato Mounted Rifles 

was held at Ngāruawāhia, with the ‘Bushmen’ organising chopping events, an interesting 

coalescence of the pioneering and military wings of the imperialist enterprise.77 

 

Constructed around 1900, the house belonging to the Rutters, a late Victorian square plan villa 

with its timber framing and weatherboards was probably fairly representative of the better type 

of farmhouse at Te Akatea. The house is also reputed to have served as the Te Akatea Post 

Office at the turn of the century and before the relocation of such business and social 

infrastructure as existed, to the new village of Glen Massey.  

 

 
73 ‘No. I Squadron, A.M.R’, Waikato Argus, 8 December, 1908, 2.   
74 ‘Defence Notes’, Waikato Argus, 30 September, 1908, 2 
75 ‘Scouting Competition’, Waikato Argus, 27 February, 1909, 2.   
76 ‘Volunteering’, Waikato Argus, 16 August, 1909, 2; ‘Ngaruawahia’, Waikato Argus, 7 September, 1909, 2; 

‘Volunteering News’, Waikato Argus, 21 October, 1909, 4.     
77 ‘Our Territorials’, Waikato Argus, 30 July, 1910, 2.   



26 
 

 

 
 

Figure 6 The Rutter House, seen from the road. 78 

Accounts of the spiritual sustenance available to the Te Akatea community before WWI are 

scarce. A Wesleyan (Methodist) Service was advertised for January 14, 1900 for 3.00pm at Te 

Akatea, although the lack of further advertisements suggests such observances were fairly 

spasmodic.79 An account of the planned building of Glen Massey Methodist Church in 1914 

indicates that before that date “both the services and (Sunday) school are at present being held 

at Mr Fawsett’s house.”80 There were also notices in the Huntly Press of four Anglican Services 

being held at Te Akatea in 1913.81  Similarly, the frequency and venues of these Anglican 

services prior to that year are also unknown. However, there were a number of baptisms in the 

period before the construction of Glen Massey, and in the first two years of the mining village’s 

existence (before the building of the Methodist Church late towards the end of 1915, which 

fairly quickly thereafter was also used by Anglicans as well as Presbyterians).82 It can fairly be 

assumed that most of these baptisms, and perhaps a number of services taken by lay-readers, 

took place in private homes, with the occasional service being held in the Te Akatea School. 

More rarely, such christenings may have involved a major journey on a horse track to either 

Ngāruawāhia or Huntly.   

 
78 Photo reproduced with permission from Waikato District Council Historic Heritage Item Record Form, 25 

November 2016. 
79 ‘Church Services’, Waikato Argus, 13 January, 1900, 2.   
80 ‘Glen Massey Notes’, Waikato Times, 15 May, 1914, 4. The surname “Fawsett” has various spellings in 
church records, newspaper accounts and electoral rolls, although all appear to refer to the same man, Mr Arthur 

Fausett. The latter spelling derives from the 1914 electoral roll spelling. 
81 ‘Church Services’, Huntly Press and District Gazette, 6 February, 1913, 2; 6 June, 1913, 2; 8 August, 1913, 2; 

12 December, 1913, 2. 
82 Putake, John Kinder Theological Library – Te Puna Atuatanga. Huntly Baptism Register 1895-1928 

spreadsheet and Ngaruawahia Baptism Register 1872-1922. 

 



27 
 

 

 

An article in the Greymouth Evening Star dated 27 September, 1913, just before the railway 

line was completed, gives a good description of the topology and state of “development” of Te 

Akatea, just prior to the establishment of Glen Massey. After some poetic rhapsodizing over 

the natural beauty of the native forest and creek, the writer attempted a realistic appraisal of 

the physical and human geography of the district, which undermined many of the contemporary 

assumptions around New Zealand as ‘Britain’s Family Farm’, in this locality at least: 

 

This is one of the few districts in the Waikato where dairying has not thriven. The 

physical conformation of the country largely prevents this, and the chief farming 

income is derived from cattle and sheep… the district as a whole is too scattered to 

support a creamery; and, what is more, there is not the population of milkers required 

for this, as the bulk of the holdings are in the hands of single men. A difficulty also 

exists in the shape of getting permanent hired milkers.83 

 

The article then goes on to chart the effects of the unwitting ignorance which often undermined 

the efforts of  hard-working pioneers driving to push back the frontier and  ‘tame’  the 

wilderness, even if, ironically, the writer of the above article appears unable to ‘join the dots’ 

and recognise it as such:  the impact of caterpillars on winter feed; the necessity of ploughing 

up pastures every two years because of ti-tree regrowth; young grass providing a nurturing 

culture for lamb worms; plagues of caterpillars and crickets; fruit blight and noxious weeds 

(Gorse and California Thistle). Later generations might categorize these as symptomatic of the 

ecological disruption inherent in the clearing of native bush, and the sudden imposition of an 

inappropriate land use.  

 

The preponderance of single men who were landholders in the district had been evident a 

decade earlier with the Bachelor’s Ball held in the Te Akatea schoolroom in 1902, (although 

their exact numbers are unknown, and even in a small schoolroom, there was evidently 

sufficient room for guests from other districts).84 Equally evident, was at least an incipient 

awareness by the more prosperous farmers at least, that they constituted a rural gentry ‘class’. 

Given the relative isolation and probably, largely single marital status of the Te Akatea 

population during this period, this ‘class’ derived from their social influence because of either 

 
83 ‘Among Auckland’s Hill Farms’, Greymouth Evening Star, 22 September, 1913, 8.    
84 ‘Te Akatea’, Waikato Argus, 30 April, 1902, 2.    



28 
 

 

imperial military connections (from the Land Wars in the case of Col. Dawson and Mr Jos. 

Forster, or the contemporary militia as with the Rutter, Burt and Runciman families), size of 

landholding and evident wealth relative to others in the district. The financial means to employ 

casual labour and / or the assistance of a marital partner (and possibly children of working age) 

would have also been significant determinants and ‘markers.’  

 

The activities, fortunes and misfortunes of this ‘gentry-class’ group, even at this point, were 

deemed to be of sufficient interest and importance to be published in the New Zealand Herald, 

the Waikato Times, the Waikato Argus and other papers for the benefit of their peers, as well as 

those in the ranks of the literate but less socially exalted. The tone of the report of W. Goodwin’s 

inadvertent swallowing of a fence staple in 1904 is almost obsequious.85  Mr Elgood’s departure 

for the Old Country and its adverse impact on the fortunes of the football team earlier in the 

same year, was in similar vein.86 William Horne’s accident where he broke two ribs and got a 

“touch of pleurisy” in 1905, was likewise sympathetically treated.87 These examples contrast 

with the jocular, even condescending tones in which the trials and tribulations of the lower 

orders were much more rarely reported. For instance, an unnamed swagman loafer at Te Akatea 

became an unflattering representative stereotype of all of the “bushman” class.88  The flavour 

of the Herald’s report on 31 March, 1914, concerning bushman, Thomas Hedley’s dislocated 

shoulder in a wrestling match, which was only fixed after a long and painful ride of 18 miles, 

strongly suggests the primary purpose was entertainment at Hedley’s expense, rather than 

evoking sympathy.89 

 

‘All Chang’d, Chang’d Utterly’: The Opening of the Mine and the Construction of Glen 

Massey in Te Akatea  

The Waipā Railway and Collieries Company, “with a nominal capital of £80,000 was registered 

in Wellington and shares allocated for the purpose of working the coal deposits at Te Akatea in 

the Waikato district”, in 1910.90 In the interim, the ever-assiduous Mr T. Runciman had been 

engaged in negotiations with the Raglan County Council to construct a railway to Te Akatea 

alongside the surveyed road, level crossings along the road and the Waipā Bridge (at 

 
85  Untitled. New Zealand Mail, 21 September, 1904, 33. 
86 ‘Ngaruawahia’, Waikato Times, 7 May, 1904, 3. 
87 ‘Waingaro’, Waikato Times, 26 April, 1905, 3.  
88 ‘The Fretful Porcupine’, Observer, 14 August, 1909, 16.   
89 ‘A Wrestler Injured’, New Zealand Herald, 31 March, 1914, 7.   
90 ‘New Coal Mining Company’, Hawera & Normanby Star, 14 January, 1910, 5.   



29 
 

 

Ngāruawāhia) to carry the line. Significantly, in terms of community and social development, 

it had been clarified as early as 1908 that the company would run “at least one train daily and 

carry passengers and freight which were to be carried at the Government Rates ruling except 

when prevented by strikes, flood or fire.” 91 

 

The Wairarapa Age noted on 25 October 1913, that Mr Thomas Thomson, MIME, Inspector of 

Mines for the Southern District of the Dominion, had been appointed manager of the 

Waipā Collieries Ltd at Te Akatea.92  The Auckland Star on 31 October, 1913 added that Mr 

Thomson had been assistant engineer at the Westport Coal Company in 1907.93 The Waikato 

Argus also noted that Mr Thomson had been manager of the Ironbridge Colliery (near 

Denniston), for three years, thus foreshadowing the establishment of industrial as well as social 

and familial links between the Glen Massey and West Coast coalfields.94   

 

The speculative investment potential involving the subdivision into residential lots for the 

construction of houses for the miners was quickly recognised and acted upon in a series of 

surveys and subdivisions by farmers who had land bordering Waingaro Road and particularly 

around the junction of what became Wilton Collieries Road and Dawson’s Road which was 

close to the mine site. The first of these in February 1912 was for the Fowler brothers (WR 

Fowler and George Fowler) who sliced off a nearly three-acre strip of land on the east side of 

what is now Wilton Collieries Road from their farm and immediately sold off the same parcel 

to HH Gould and Arthur Fausett (sawmillers of Ngāruawāhia). The interest of the latter can be 

assumed to be purely speculative, as in February 1913 they undertook a subdivision of the same 

parcel into eleven sections of just over ¼ acre each, south from the junction of Waingaro Road 

and Wilton Collieries Road.  

 

Further subdivisions of 30 ¼ acre sections and 10 sections of slightly less than ¼ acre and three 

larger parcels followed in the first quarter of 1914 for Messrs Runciman and Coad, along 

Kereru Road (then known as Dawson Road). Access to some of the sections was provided by 

a right of way road, now Edgecombe Drive. The Fowler brothers had a further survey done on 

the north side of Waingaro Road before it turns north to Waingaro and then again in 1915 for 

 
91 ‘Te Akatea – Ngaruawahia Tram’, Waikato Argus, 29 September, 1908, 3.  
92 ‘Personal’, Wairarapa Age, 25 October, 1913, 5.  
93 ‘Personal’, Auckland Star, 31 October, 1913, 5.   
94 ‘Waipa Railways & Collieries’, Waikato Argus, 20 May, 1913, 2. 



30 
 

 

the south side of the main road, which with its 67 allotments of approximately ¼ acre and two 

of one acre was the largest of all of the subdivisions.  

 
 

Figure 7: Subdivisions in the creation of Glen Masey. The highlighted area indicates recent subsequent alterations to original 
subdivisions. 95 

 

Construction of quite modest homes proceeded apace, hard on the heels of the subdivisions. In 

the expectation of large numbers of single men arriving to work in the mine, as well as families, 

a boarding house was also opened in January 1915. With its simple, bungalow style of timber 

framing, weatherboards and corrugated iron roofing, the building is one of the better examples 

of the flurry of building done in the construction of the village, which is still extant. 

 

 
95 Map reproduced with permission of Louise Veltman, Waikato District Council. 

 



31 
 

 

 
 

Figure 8 Boarding House on Wilton Collieries Road, Glen Massey, constructed in 1914 and operated by John and Sarah 
Robinson from January 1915. 96 

Significantly, demographically speaking, the incoming miners included families as well as 

single men, who did not model themselves on British ‘gentry’, nor aspire to mimic that social 

group, and came from working-class backgrounds with hard-line unionist sympathies, not only 

from varying localities in the UK, but also the West Coast coalfields of New Zealand. Their 

sudden arrival en masse within the Te Akatea community was likely significantly confronting 

to the ‘gentry farmers’ of Te Akatea, particularly in the context of the 1913 General Strike a 

year beforehand, where it is at least possible, if not probable that some Te Akatea gentleman 

farmers and Militia Volunteers would have ridden as ‘Massey’s Cossacks’ against strikers who 

were also hard-line unionists. However, as will be subsequently explored, Glen Massey miners’ 

adherence to the ethos of hard-line unionism was always conditional, even transactional and 

instrumental, nuanced and negotiated.   

 

In other developments, a site for a school was chosen and by 1914 classes were held in a 

marquee on the site, while the building was being erected, the Board of Education having taken 

land from the Fowler farm under the Public Works Act for that purpose. On 3 September, 1914, 

it was reported that arrangements had been made for Te Akatea school to be taught full-time, 

and for the Waingaro school to be taught half-time with the Waimai school from the beginning 

 
96 Photo from Waikato District Council Historic Heritage Item Record Form, completed 25 November, 2016, 

reproduced with permission of Louise Veltman, Waikato District Council.  

 



32 
 

 

of October.97  By 1 October, 1914, the name of the Te Akatea school had been changed to “Glen 

Massey.”98  The building, when completed, shared the timber-framing, weatherboard cladding 

and corrugated iron roofing of virtually all other structures in the village and its rural hinterland.  

 

The completion of the new railway line to transport the coal finally signaled an end to the 

relative isolation of the district.  As earlier foreshadowed and planned for, the railway also 

operated a passenger service as well as carrying freight, which rapidly became a popular way 

to travel to Ngāruawāhia.  The concern of the Ngāruawāhia Town Council and the Ngāruawāhia 

Chamber of Commerce that the passenger carriage timetable did not give the miners an 

opportunity to take a train to and from Ngāruawāhia who might reside there rather than at Glen 

Massey, however, underlines the shortage of completed housing for families, especially in the 

first years of the village’s existence and the mining operations.99  There was almost certainly 

some reliance on commuting from Ngāruawāhia or even further afield, probably mostly by rail, 

for at least a portion of the required labour force.  Stokes suggests that by 1916, Glen Massey’s 

total population was 346, so in 1915 it was probably about the same as, if not a little below that 

figure.100  It was claimed that 150 men were employed in the mine at the 1915 AGM of the 

Waipā Coal Mine and Railway Company, and it can probably be assumed that the major 

proportion of that workforce, plus teachers and store workers lived at Glen Massey, with the 

combined numbers of their wives and children and the residents of the single men’s hostel 

making a population of 300, more or less.101 

 

The opening of the railway line also ironically occasioned the entire Ngāruawāhia-Waingaro 

Road being opened to motor traffic.  The Waikato Times reported on 11 May, 1914 that, “the 

name of the (railway) station connected with the mine is Glen Massey…. There are, however, 

no station buildings erected as yet. Building is brisk. In addition to the manager’s house and 

several houses for miners, a billiard room has been erected. A comfortable boardinghouse is 

nearly completed close to the mine. Mr D.W. Harvey, of Hamilton, has erected and opened a 

commodious store as a branch.” 102 Telephone contact between Glen Massey and the Te Akatea 

district with the wider world also became possible with the installation of a Post Office 

 
97 ‘Board of Education’, Waikato Argus, 3 September, 1914, 2.   
98 ‘Board of Education’, Waikato Argus, 1 October, 1914, 2. 
99  ‘Country News’, New Zealand Herald, 19 January, 1915, 3, and ‘Country News’, New Zealand Herald, 23 

January, 1915, 5.  
100 Evelyn Stokes, Coal Mining in the Waikato Region, 15.  
101 ‘The Waipa Coal Mines’, Evening Post, 23 April, 1915, 4.   
102 ‘Te Akatea Notes’, Waikato Times, 11 May, 1914, 8.   



33 
 

 

telephone bureau.  In June, 1914, it reported that “it is understood that six settlers on the road 

between Ngaruawahia and Glen Massey are taking steps to form a party-line connecting with 

the Ngaruawahia exchange.”103 

 

A public meeting in January 1915 decided to erect a town hall which was to be built on the 

west side of the junction of what would later become Wilton Collieries Road and Waingaro 

Road.  By July of the same year, an advertisement in the Waikato Times was calling for tenders 

for its erection.104 The Certificate of Incorporation of the Glen Masey Public Hall Association 

was sent to the Registrar of Incorporated Societies on 17th August 1915. An extant list of the 

members of the Association, although undated, contains the names of A. Faussett, Vera J. 

Faussett, the Fowler Brothers, and T. Runciman (farmers), most of the miners identified in 

Appendix 1 as being present in 1915 (see Fig. 5) and the Waipā Colliery, as well as some fifty 

others who probably joined later.105 A letter requesting the building of a new miner’s hall in 

1945 in another file, clarifies that membership of the Public Hall Association involved the 

purchase of one or more shares, few of which ever seem to have changed hands, and were, to 

all practical purposes, donations.106  

 

A small medical centre was also built at the south end of the village on Wilton Collieries Road 

around this time and is still in existence, although the exact date of construction and the 

beginning of medical services is unknown. A doctor came from Ngāruawāhia once a week a 

Plunket nurse once a fortnight, and two local women were trained as midwives.  

 

The relatively early construction of the boarding house discussed above also strongly implies 

a reasonably substantial proportion of itinerant single men within the workforce. Such men are 

the very stuff of New Zealand cultural, especially literary tradition and the epitome of 

Fairburn’s concept of ‘atomisation’.107 Socially, they were highly marginalised, if not silenced: 

historically they were clearly numerous, but often undocumented and thus, equally silenced. 

Their numbers, use and necessary function in the colonial economy went without saying. Only 

 
103 ‘Day by Day’, Waikato Times, 29 June, 1914, 4. 
104 ‘Advertisements’, Waikato Times, 12 July, 1915, 1. 
105 ‘Glen Massey Public Hall Association 1915-1977’. Archives New Zealand, Te Rua Mahara o te 

Kawanatanga, Auckland Repository. File No. R4986894. See Footnote 80 re spelling of Arthur Fauset’s name. 
106 ‘Glen Massey Social Amenities, 20 October 1936 – 03 April, 1951’, Archives New Zealand, Te Rua Mahara 

o te Kawanatanga, Wellington Repository. File No R17869469, Box 1265. 
107 Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies: the foundations of modern New Zealand society, 1850-

1900. Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1989.  
 



34 
 

 

rarely, however, did they ‘pop up’ in newspaper accounts (often anonymously) when they could 

be constructed as the maverick ‘other’, a ‘threat’ to the majority’s notion of common-sense and 

everyday reality, and thus a socially permissible butt of jokes and derision. The Te Akatea 

casual farm-labourer version of the stereotyped ‘unemployed loafer’ whose unemployed status 

was clearly his own fault, is one example. 108 The following reprinted story from the 

Ngaruawahia Advocate about a Māori trucker (a mineworker) at Glen Massey is another:  

 

It appears that a Maori, employed as a trucker, in the Waipa mine, whilst homeward 

bound on Sunday evening through the mile bush, found himself in close proximity to a 

“Taipo”. The monstrosity made a decided attempt to capture the horse ridden by the 

Maori, and he, terror-stricken, and it must be confessed, swearing plenty, never drew 

rein until he arrived at the boardinghouse where he stays at Glen Massey. He dashed 

inside, locked the door, and left the horse free with both saddle and bridle on. Dame 

Rumour says he turned white and has not got back his original colour since. He has 

certainly not recovered from the fright he received, up to date. Accounts differ as to the 

appearance of the monstrosity. The Maori gives a very lucid description, and 

embellishes him with all the attachments of tail and horns and whatnot. 

 

 “Te Taipo,” in the mines, he says, is a totally different personage; he is like the wise 

virgins – keeps his lamp trimmed and burning brightly. It is said (on not very reliable 

authority) that when the unfortunate affrighted walks abroad he is followed by urchins 

singing a doggerel rhyme in reference to the occasion.109 

 

This is the only account of Māori in or around Glen Massey evident in newspapers of the 

period. There are also no identifiably ‘Māori’ surnames evident on the school roll up to 1915 

or even a few years beyond that. One draws a similar blank for evidence of Māori in the 

baptismal and marriage records (of the Pakeha churches of the district, at least) of the period.  

 

Clearly, this man was employed in the Glen Massey mine, probably single and itinerant as he 

was living in a hostel.  Possibly, he was from the Waahi Pa near Huntly, a few members of 

whom were employed in other coalfields of the Huntly seam (e.g. Pukemiro). Ironically, the 

 
108 The Fretful Porcupine’, Observer, 14 August, 1909, 16.  
109 ‘A Maori Taipo’, Ohinemuri Gazette, 1 February, 1915, 3. 

 



35 
 

 

publication of such a tale (including the amused acceptance of the behaviour of the “urchins”), 

recounted on “not very reliable authority”, but with an evident public ‘license’ for publication 

anyway, probably suggests more about the racial stereotypes of Māori within the immigrant 

pakeha Glen Massey mining community and New Zealand as a whole, than it does about the 

man himself, or the contemporary cultural beliefs of Māori.  

 

Whether Māori were largely absent from the Glen Massey / Te Akatea communities or their 

presence was highly marginalized to the point of being silenced and unable to be recovered, it 

is possible to reconstruct a picture of the other national / ethnic – and religious - communities 

who constituted the mining immigrants who had arrived in 1914, although there are some gaps 

(evidenced most obviously, in the ‘Untraceable’ category of Fig. 5 and Appendix 1). The 1914 

Electoral Roll, school enrolment records, together with data gleaned from Methodist, Anglican 

and Presbyterian Church baptismal and marriage records, contemporary newspaper accounts 

and genealogical research all contribute to such a reconstruction. 

 

 New Zealand-born ‘Internal Migrants’ were the largest group, followed closely by those from 

Northern England. The religious adherence of both groups was overwhelmingly Wesleyan / 

Methodist, which accounts for the building of Glen Massey’s one and only church by that 

denomination. There were already two or three farming families of the same persuasion in 

place, to which the addition of the immigrants in 1914-15 made for an initially thriving 

religious community. Scots-born were a small minority. Scotch immigration into Glen Massey 

appears to have only become significant in the 1920s and 1930s. At least up to 1915, 

Presbyterians were predominantly a small, but significant group of farmers, with only a few 

immigrant miners, and the numbers of adherents did not appear to substantially increase even 

with the later Scots migration noted above. Religiously, Anglicans accounted for a number of 

the Te Akatea farming community, although there were a few miners and associated workers 

who arrived to supplement them. 

 

The first mention of the intention to build a Methodist Church at Te Akatea was in 1914 when 

Hamilton readers of the Waikato Argus were enjoined to attend: 

 



36 
 

 

…a lecture by the Rev. W.A. Porter “on ‘Love, Courtship and Marriage among the 

South African Natives,’ to be given in the London Street Methodist Church… The 

proceeds are to be devoted to the Te Akatea Church Building Fund.”110 

 

On September 11, 1915, the Glen Massey church was built, a strictly utilitarian box-like 

structure, with a small vestibule and raised pulpit. It was completed in one day by farmers and 

miners working together. Accounts of the construction of the church do not give any details of 

exactly which farmers or miners were involved. A list of the religious communities within Glen 

Massey at the time, generated from cross-referencing church baptismal and marriage records 

as well as other data suggests that the farmers almost certainly included the Fowlers (George, 

William, Arthur and Stephen) who were a strongly Methodist family, originally from 

Bunnythorpe, Arthur Faussett and possibly William Foster.111 There were any number of 

Methodist adherents among the newly arrived miners, who may have been part of the working-

bee. Given the social, recreational – and to an extent, even religious - divisions which 

subsequently characterised miner and farmer relationships for the ensuing decades, the early 

cooperation of these disparate occupational groupings in church building can be easily 

overstated.  (Although, in this context, it is apposite to foreshadow that the Fowlers also stood 

out as glaring exceptions to the general ‘rule’ that the farming community had little or nothing 

to do with most sporting and recreational activities enjoyed by miners for the next two decades).   

 

Also, by 1915, some shops had been established. Fowler Brothers were butchers at Glen Massey 

and Ngāruawāhia, the success of Messrs. G. and W.R. Fowler’s application for a slaughter 

license at Te Akatea having been granted, being noted in the Waikato Argus in June,  

 
110 ‘Hamilton’s Jubilee’, Waikato Argus, 24 August, 1914, 2.  
111 See Footnote 80 re spelling of Mr Arthur Fauset’s name. 

Figure 9 Advertisement in the’ Maoriland Worker’, 22 
December, 1915. P.3 

Figure10 Advertisement in the’ Maoriland Worker’, 22 
December, 1915. P.3 



37 
 

 

 

1914.112  More interesting perhaps is the decision of both Hamblin and the Fowler brothers to 

advertise in the Maoriland Worker (as above) on a regular basis, thus identifying with and 

supporting the strong union loyalties of their customers.113 The Fowler farm’s geographical 

contiguity to the Glen Massey village (many of the new mining houses were being built on 

land originally belonging to the Fowlers) and the customer base for their new butchery business 

made such an advertising medium prudent. The strong Methodist roots of the Fowler family in 

particular, and the popular identification of that church in its British homeland with working-

class consciousness and the growth of the same working-class consciousness in New Zealand 

may well, have been an additional compelling factor in their choice of advertising medium.114 

 

Economically, the opening of the mine and its concomitant transport infrastructure transitioned 

the solely farming-based Te Akatea economy towards a village / township economy 

undergirded by the twin pillars of farming and coal, and supporting a few small-scale 

‘servicing’ businesses.  Land values were amongst the first reflections of a new economic 

confidence. On 10 Nov. 1911, a major selling point of a ½ acre section on O’Connor’s 

subdivision in Ngāruawāhia was that it was on the route of the new Te Akatea Coal Railway. 

115 In addition to the speculation already evidenced in the sale of housing sections within the 

village, by January 1915, the existence of access to 405 acres with a small whare, 5 miles from 

Ngāruawāhia “by good metalled road” was touted as a major attraction for the purchase of a 

farm.116 

 

Initial Impact of WWI 

Within both the Glen Massey village and the Te Akatea farming district, the outbreak of war in 

1914 generated a local flurry of patriotic collections and donations, characteristic of the country 

as a whole.117  On 2 September 1914, the Committee of the Hamilton Centre for the Mayoress’ 

Patriotic Fund noted the contribution of 50 cholera belts by the ladies of Te Akatea to the 

 
112 ‘Raglan County Council’, Waikato Argus, 11 June, 1914, 2.  
113 ‘Advertisements’, Maoriland Worker, 22 December, 1915, 3.  
114 Peter Lineham, Sunday Best, 122. The Fowler family was originally from Bunnythorpe (in the Manawatu) 
and Dannevirke districts and was noted for its strong lay leadership of the Church as well as producing one full-

time Methodist minister. 
115 ‘Advertisements’, New Zealand Herald, 10 November, 1911, 10. 
116 ‘Advertisements’, New Zealand Herald, 22 January, 1915, 2. 
117 See for instance, ‘Tonight’s Patriotic Social’, Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette, 

30 September, 1914, 5; ‘Waitara’s Method of Raising Money’, Ashburton Guardian, 12 August, 1914, 5, and 

‘Philharmonic Society’, Grey River Argus, 10 August 1914, 3. 



38 
 

 

Ngāruawāhia Hon. Territorial Association.118 On 28 December, 1914, the New Zealand Herald 

recorded that Glen Massey School had donated £3-12-00 to the Belgian Relief Fund.119  On 13 

November, George and Hector Cumming from Glen Massey donated £0-6-6 to the Herald Sick 

and Wounded Soldiers’ Fund.120 And on 30 November, 1915:  

 

The promoters of a patriotic carnival at Glen Massey, on Friday night, showed some 

originality, holding a king, instead of the usual queen, carnival. After being crowned, 

in all due formality, “His Majesty,” Mr H. Smith, knighted five other aspirants to the 

throne. The ceremonies and the vocal and instrumental items were highly 

entertaining.121 

 

For the Glen Massey miners, the fighting in Europe must have seemed of distant concern for 

most of the first eighteen months of WWI up to the end of 1915: an elephant in the room, but 

not