Peer pressure

Our local cemetery is a collection of monuments to people past, but also the society in which they lived. The crumbling gravestones bear testimony to the hardships of many of the ‘Pakeha’ (White European) settlers who came to New Zealand to find a better life in the 19th century.  They mainly came from Scotland and England, or sometimes moved to New Zealand after initial stays in Australia.  Many died comparatively young, and the number of infants buried there is particularly tragic.
 
The monuments are also testimony to the power structures of the time.  There are few Maori names.  The prestigious families built bigger graves and had higher and more elaborate tombstones than the blebs. There is just one tomb in the cemetery, which I feature in this Blip. It was built for William James Mudie Larnach CMG who died in 1898.  The tomb is a miniature replica of the First Church in central Dunedin, the city’s only Anglican cathedral.  The tomb is the only monument with spotlights and surveillance cameras to spoil the fun from Dunedin University students’ nighttime adventures.

Willaim Larnach arrived in Dunedin in September 1867 and soon became quite prosperous, gathering large amounts of money through land speculation, farming investments, and a timber business. He entered politics in 1875 and at the peak of his career was New Zealand’s Treasurer (the post is called the Minister of Finance these days).  Then things started to “go south”: In 1880, Eliza Jane Guise, his first wife died. Larnach then married Mary Cockburn Alleyne, her half-sister, in 1882. She died in 1887. And in 1891, he married his third wife, Constance de Bathe Brandon. It is rumoured that an affair between Larnach's third wife Constance and his youngest son Douglas (Dougie) contributed to his gathering depression and eventual demise.  Financial pressures were also mounting. Larnach's farming investments were turning sour due to the rabbit plagues, land prices fell and his timber company suffered.  In 1894, Larnach became a director of the Colonial Bank of New Zealand, having previously become a shareholder, but the Bank collapsed the following year leaving Larnach on the brink of financial ruin.  In an explanation to Parliament on 25 October 1895 he said that, being an interested party, he refrained from voting on banking legislation. But he should have been paying more attention to the details of the Parliamentary process on 12 October, 1898 - on that day he mistakenly voted for a third reading of the Banking Act Amendment Bill (which involved the Colonial Bank), thinking he was voting on the following bill, the Horowhenua Block Bill. Yeah, Right? But things had all got a bit much.

In 1898, Willaim Larnach locked himself in a committee room at Parliament and shot himself with a revolver.