If you wander through the older part of Timaru Cemetery, past the family plots with their Edwardian and Victorian headstones, you'll reach an area of lawn known as free ground. It is quieter there. No marble angels, hardly any headstones, if you didn't notice the humps and hollows in the lawn, then you wouldn't know who lay beneath the lawn. But somewhere there, is a unmarked grave for Dr Joseph Ashe Day.
Joseph was born in 1814, the son of a Somerset solicitor. He was baptised a few years later, in 1821, and trained as a surgeon. In the 1851 census he turns up in Yoxford, Suffolk, described rather awkwardly as a “non-practising surgeon”. You can almost imagine him trying to explain that to the census taker. Life never sits still, and his seems to have been in a bit of a shuffle at that point.
Before long he and his wife, Frances Blake, decided to take the leap that so many did in that era. They left England between 1851 and 1855 and made their way to Kaiapoi. By 1856 Joseph was back to practising medicine again, working as a surgeon and accoucheur, which meant he delivered babies in a very young and very raw settlement.
Then everything changed. Frances died in 1858, leaving Joseph widowed in a new colony. Just two years later he married again, this time to a young immigrant named Catherine Fergusson, barely into adulthood. Their early married life took them overseas for a while. Their daughter Ada was born in Tasmania in 1861, and by the following year the family was back in New Zealand.
Joseph’s final stop was Timaru. In 1863 the town was still rough around the edges, a place of shingle beaches, wooden buildings and people trying to get things going iun the new British colony town. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Joseph died at forty-nine. No headstone. Just a burial in the free ground, recorded in the Timaru District Councils data base as Row 0.
It feels sad, considering the life he led. A trained surgeon, a man who delivered children and patched up settlers in a frontier community, who crossed the world twice and survived more loss than most. If it hadn't been for a document on Medical Practitioners in New Zealand from 1840-1930 I may not have been able to learn about him. Other than this digital record there is nothing physical at the cemetery to say he is there.
Thankfully the records survive, and so does the story of who he was. A husband, twice. A father. A migrant. A doctor who did his best in the early years of Canterbury. A man who travelled far and ended up in Timaru, in a grave that never had a name attached.
If anything, telling his story now puts his name back into the world. And perhaps that is a small kindness for someone who gave his working life to a community that was only just beginning.
Side Quest: Tuberculosis in Joseph Day’s Time
It is hard to look at the 1850s and 60s without bumping into tuberculosis. Consumption, they called it then. It was the biggest killer. In some places it caused one in every four deaths. And after doing a bit of Googling it seems that early Canterbury was no exception.
No one knew what caused it. Germ theory was still a far-off idea and Robert Koch would not identify the TB bacterium until 1882, almost twenty years after Joseph died. People believed it came from damp houses, heartbreak, weak lungs, or simply bad luck. And in a way they were not completely wrong. TB thrived in crowded, cold, ill-ventilated homes, and the first cottages thrown up in Kaiapoi and Timaru were exactly that. Thin timber, smoky chimneys, and winter seeping straight through the walls.
The disease often began long before settlers reached New Zealand. A three-month sea voyage was the perfect breeding ground. Steerage passengers were packed into low, airless spaces. Coughs passed quickly from one bunk to another. Ship diaries talk about the “shipboard cough” in a matter-of-fact way. People arrived already weakened, making them more likely to fall sick once they started their new lives.
Women in their 20s were especially vulnerable. The newspapers of the day are full of young wives who faded over the course of a year. No one understood why, and of course the remedies were gentle rather than effective. Doctors like Joseph could offer rest, fresh air, cod liver oil and nourishing meals, and opium or laudanum if the coughing was unbearable. That was about it. There were no sanitariums in New Zealand until the 1880s and 90s, long after Joseph’s time.
TB also hit Māori communities terribly hard after contact. Overcrowded housing, loss of land, and introduced diseases created a wave of suffering that the colonial records only hint at.
When Joseph was practising in Kaiapoi, and later when he reached Timaru, he would have seen all this. He would have listened to the hollow chest sound and known exactly what it was, even if he lacked the language of bacteria and infection. He must have watched families rearrange themselves around someone who was fading. TB shaped a huge number of early colonial households, leaving orphans, widows and widowers, and many second marriages.
According to the University Document mentioned early, Joseph died of consumption too. The disease was everywhere he worked. Part of the hard reality of a young colony. I think remembering that, can give us a deeper sense of the world he moved through, the limits he worked under, and the fragility of life in those early Timaru years.
https://www.library.auckland.ac.nz/external/WrightSt-Clair-HistoriaNuncVivat.pdf
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Day-19286
- https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6D9D-LFHT : 25 February 2022), Joseph Ashe Day, 1821.
- https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:2DHT-789
- http://www.findmypast.com
- https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:SGRV-ZBP
- https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/LT18561224.2.24.2
- https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/166524939/joseph-day