Margaret Steel Hill
The woman who named Roseneath
Margaret and Andrew Hill were likely one of many married couples who used emigration rather than an expensive divorce in order to separate and start new lives.
Margaret Steel was born in 1833 in Riccarton, Ayr, Scotland. She worked as a hatmaker prior to her marriage to Andrew Hill in Glasgow in 1859. Andrew was a brass finisher. Their children Margaret, William, George and Gilbert were all born near the Clyde over the following years.
In March 1870, whether by design or scheming, Andrew sailed alone on the ‘Dunfilan’ for Dunedin. His youngest son Andrew junior was born in August the same year back in Glasgow. In June 1871, Margaret arrived on the ‘Wild Deer’ in Dunedin with her children. Andrew worked in Dunedin as a brass finisher until 1875 at which point he returned to Glasgow and Margaret moved with her children to Wellington.
To support herself, Margaret returned to her hat making skills, advertising heavily throughout 1876-77 that straw hats ‘were cleaned and altered to the newest styles on the shortest notice’. She then ran a modest registry office (an employment exchange). The family lived in Taranaki Street, then Stafford Street before moving in the early 1880s to what was then a very sleepy Oriental Bay. She named her home ‘Kelburne House’ and was located just along from the Hay Street corner.
Margaret was reported to have been the person to name the suburb of Roseneath (Evening Post 1913). Baring Street behind her house was originally named Hill Street until 1924 when duplicated street names across the city were renamed.
Margaret seems to have been a hospitable lady. Her sons’ friends of the Oriental Bay boating club would call at her house for ‘a capital tea’. And the family had a boat shed opposite her house (now the location of the band rotunda).
In 1884 she adopted a baby girl named Ivy, and the three women of the family continued living at Kelburne House. Ivy recalled climbing over the rocks to attend Clyde Quay School.
Margaret died in 1903. In 1930, her son Gilbert demolished the house and replaced it with the three-storey block of flats that remain today known as Coburn House.
Karori Cemetery Plot Public/O/63
References:
City Water Supply. (1913, February 24). Evening Post, p8.
Notice to Warehousemen and the General Public. (1876, November 21). Evening Post, p3.
Opening of the Yachting Season. (1887, November 14). Evening Post, p3.
Street Names. (1924, September 5). Evening Post, p3.
Wanted. (1876, December 12). Evening Post, p3.
From left to right: Margaret Brown Hill, Ivy Florence Hill, Margaret Steel Hill, unknown boy. Photo supplied by family.
Oriental Bay, Wellington. James George Lamb; circa 1900; Wellington Registration Number O.026746. Purchased 1999 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds. Courtesy of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa.
Detail of above image. Margaret Hill’s house is the single storey dwelling with verandah behind the cart.