Flock House: A Living Memorial
by Professor Andrew Leach, Professor of Architectural History at the Queensland University of Technology
and grandson of Jack Harvie, 1st Draft, 1924
Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. These lines were written on the Country of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and the Country where Yugambeh is spoken.
Thank you, Alasdair and the organising committee, for your work in putting this event together—the significant commitment of your time and energies is not lost on us who have gathered here today. Thank you, too, for entertaining my idea to share one or two thoughts about Flock House as a memorial among memorials. By my count is only the second time I have said anything much about the architecture of the Rangitikei, having a few years ago dedicated a page or two to Bill Alington’s design, for the Ministry of Works, of the Bulls Water Tower. I did grow up here, to a point; but that’s not why I am here, today. Let me start by explaining why that is.
On September 16, 1918, the SS Lavernock departed the northern Spanish port of Bilbao, en route to Glasgow, carrying a cargo of iron ore. At 2.30 the following morning, a few kilometres southwest of the lighthouse at Trevose Head on the Cornish coast (the view on the right), the u-boat Kapitäinleutnant Erwin Waßner gave the order to fire, and the Lavernock was fatally struck by the torpedo sent its way by UB-117. It was one of ninety vessels sunk by u-boats under his command, five of which sent to the sea floor in a three-day spree that week in September. The Lavernock was not a fighting vessel. Its sailors were not of the Royal Navy—as many of your forebears were. Nor were those of the Acadian, the Buffalo, the John O. Scott, or the Primo—all cargo ships, all sunk on Waßner’s order in those days. Casting a wider net to the days around this event, it takes no effort to name a dozen vessels carrying cargo of various kinds—each with 18, 22, 26 crew, all lost.
The 23 seamen of the Lavernock who were drowned that early morning belonged to the Mercantile Marine—only called a navy by George V a full decade after she settled on the ocean floor. I cannot speak to their discipline, but their task was nonetheless vital to the war effort: the iron ore stowed in the hold of the Lavernock was doubtless destined to more obviously military ends; but armies and navies needed food, medicines, blankets, and spare tyres. And Britain’s reliance on her empire’s mines, crops, livestock and wool had hardly abated for the sake of war. This was the work of the Mercantile Marine, to keep goods moving, and connect the United Kingdom to the world.
Back off the Cornish Coast: one of the nearly two dozen men who died on the SS Lavernock that September 17 morning (and one of hundreds of mariners who died that week) was my mother’s grandfather, Robert Harvie, aged 32. He was a Glaswegian with Irish-born parents. His wife—his widow—Margaret was carrying his fifth and youngest child, Roberta (named for her father), who would be born just over a week after the Armistice.
My own grandfather was his eldest son Johnson, or Jack; Jack’s younger brother James; and his sister Nancy—all three of whom would spend part of their youth at Flock House, or Shalimar.
By the end of what they then called the World War, more than 3,000 ships of the Mercantile Marine had been lost, and with them the lives of more than 17,000 from that service; to which we quickly add the nearly 45,000 casualties of the Royal Navy.
Each of whom has a story, many of whom left behind children, many of them with their own children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on—among whom many of us here today number.
As a living memorial, to quote the Viscount Jellicoe, Flock House was “conceived in gratitude; expressed in generosity; administered in wisdom”—it was established in honour of those casualties and wounded of the Royal Navy and the Mercantile Marine, not rendered in “mute stone,” as he put it, but in “the transformation of orphan seamen’s sons and daughters into practice, prosperous New Zealand farmers.” It served not just to mark their lives, but to turn the gratitude of New Zealand’s sheep-owners to those lost and wounded at sea into a future for their children in a new land. This meant, inevitably, that its most direct work was limited to a generation who had, in Britain, been left in need, and its gesture became folded into the fabric of everyday life over time, continuing well into those years that saw the orphans themselves begin to grow old—the farm training and agricultural research that extended well past the initial programme for which Flock House was acquired, but which contained echoes of its original purpose.
Flock House was, then, a monument of a certain kind, its buildings and grounds the embodiment of its purpose; its success in marking lives lost embodied, in turn, by the experiences of those who were transformed by passing through its doors.
When we stop before a monument, we accept its quiet invitation to step outside the regular run of time and to contemplate the lives of others; and the events through which they were shaped, or the sacrifices they made; and to acknowledge the way—sometimes subtle, sometimes profound—they shape our present. Not all memorials are as clearly signalled as an obelisk in a public square, or a panel of names on a public building—like the Cenotaph on Whitehall, erected to the design of Sir Edwin Lutyens first as a temporary structure in 1918, then in stone the following year, to mark Britain’s war dead. Perhaps the first memorial I encountered with any regularity and understood as such was the panel of names on the Bulls Public Library. They serve as a permanent record, albeit in mute stone, of a moment in history—and, by implication, its effects. Perhaps that already says something of the status of Flock House, as orphans gave way to cadets, and its role as a bridge from New Zealand’s agriculture industry to the World War and its casualties diminished in the popular imagination. But a bridge it was.
When my grandfather travelled to New Zealand as a fifteen-year-old on the Remuera (he always remembered this detail), he was (I believe) one of two Scots among this group, both from Glasgow. It was a British cohort—the Flock House boys were travelling with another two dozen boys making their way to new lives, work experience, education under other varied circumstances.
Curiously, when the Remuera next set sail out of Wellington, nearly a hundred years ago, it carried a cargo of rugby players who would that journey earn the name Invincibles. I like to think that there is something of this exchange that both sewed New Zealand more firmly into the fabric of the British Empire, but that insisted, as well, on these islands’ own identity.
As a living memorial, I consider Flock House since the 1920s—the original McKelvie homestead and its ancillary buildings, as well as Shalimar in Maxwells Line, Awapuni, now lost—which is to say the institution and its structures, as being in conversation with those formal, national monuments that have been more systematically protected from the effects of time—weathering, that is, and forgetting—as a permanent marker of the casualties of this World War and, in particular, those lost at sea. The names of the sailors, for instance, who died during the First World War while serving in the Mercantile Marine, or in the nation’s Fishing Fleets, cover the panels of the Tower Hill Memorial in London, designed by Britain’s most prolific war memorial architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens. Robert Harvie’s name is almost hidden in the shadows, the Lavernock casualties listed high up off the ground, in the south-east corner of the structure; a few names among thousands etched in the copper plates that line the structure.
Casualties of the Royal Navy are also marked by a trio of impressive open-air monuments designed by Sir Robert Lorimer over the same timespan—they are clearly conceived in the same terms, with the same classical art deco language and towering obelisk forms, all unveiled a decade after the war began—these located at the major naval ports of Portsmouth, Plymouth and Chatham. These were designed not to see through a generation’s worth of memory, but for a memory maintained in perpetuity.
In addition, for two of those Scottish boys who sailed to New Zealand on the Remuera, the names of their fathers were inscribed in the Scottish National War Memorial, also designed by Sir Robert Lorimer and embedded in the fabric of Edinburgh Castle. The enormity of the scale of this generational sacrifice of life is laid painfully bare in such spaces as this structure—extending across decades to recognise conflicts and casualties down to the very recent past. Lorimer’s memorial serves the Scottish nation as Sir Niniam Comper’s design for Cardiff serves the people of Wales, to these same ends, and Sir Edwin Lutyen’s Irish National War Memorial Gardens in Dublin serves to mark the Irish contribution to Britain’s imperial efforts—a monumental garden rather than a singular structure, and an especially complicated site, given the wartime history of that island.
To these we can add the thousands of local monuments, in cities and towns, from Glasgow to Bulls, each naming the names, and working against the inclination to forget.
What does a living memorial, added to this landscape of monuments—with all their mute soldiers, rolls of honour, and symbolic evocations of empire and eternity—what does it add to our recognition of the sacrifice of those individuals and our debt to it—and this, whatever we might think of war, or of this war.
Though not built as such by Arthur Bagnall for the McKelvie family, when dedicated to the purpose of training those British boys and girls whose father’s had been lost at sea, the Flock House homestead became a visible mark of respect and gratitude—a reflection of the value of those who fought on the water, protected paths of passage, and successfully delivered food, wool, coal and other goods during a time of global conflict. A living memorial, however, only earns the name for as long as we are prepared to keep it. Times change, of course, and while listed as a site of New Zealand’s national cultural and architectural heritage, Flock House is now in the private custodianship.
Perhaps, though, we can also understand the homestead itself, its lodgings, working buildings, equipment and fields as a means to an end. This, namely, being the chance seized by Jack, Jim, Nancy, and all those others whose names you can name, to start over, and build something here—even if their lives took them back to Britain, Australia, or elsewhere—and to leave their own kinds of legacy, such that we feel the need to return.
Delivered 20 July 2024