Making Timaru’s port a more welcoming place
1862–1953
Sailors’ Rest and port welfare
Trinity Church
Margaret McCullough was born in Liverpool in 1862. Her family emigrated to New Zealand aboard the Westland in 1880. During the voyage she met William McKechnie Norrie, whom she married in Timaru in 1884. They had four children.
Margaret became part of Timaru’s Presbyterian and women’s organising networks. She belonged to Trinity Church for more than 70 years and worked through both the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
She and her mother, Sarah McCullough, attended some of the earliest meetings of the Timaru WCTU. Margaret later served as branch president from 1918 until 1933. The WCTU campaigned against alcohol, but its work extended into women’s political rights, welfare and social reform.
Margaret was also one of the South Canterbury women who signed the 1893 suffrage petition. She gave her address as Bank Street, Timaru, and her name appears on sheet 274.
Her most distinctive local contribution was connected with the Timaru Sailors’ Rest. Visiting seafarers could spend long periods away from their families, moving through ports where they knew few people. The Rest provided accommodation, companionship and an alternative to the hotels and drinking establishments surrounding many ports.
NZHistory credits Margaret with pioneering the Timaru Sailors’ Rest and records that she opened it with Governor-General Lord Jellicoe in 1924. She continued as superintendent of the WCTU’s Work Among Seamen until 1943, when she was 81.
This was practical community work. Margaret and the women around her created a place where visiting seamen could rest, read, write letters and receive hospitality. Their contribution was not confined to arguing about alcohol. They built and sustained an alternative.
Margaret died in January 1953, aged 91. Her work connects women’s suffrage with something less visible but equally important: the patient labour of keeping a service operating after the campaign speeches and opening ceremonies were over.
Read the WuHoo story: Temperance Women: A Swirl of Tea Instead of a Glass of Brew at the Seafarers’ Rest
Sources
NZHistory: Mrs Margaret Norrie
Supports her identity, family, suffrage signature, church and WCTU work, Sailors’ Rest leadership and death.
NZHistory: New Zealand Women’s Christian Temperance Union
Provides the wider context of temperance, political rights and social reform.
Delegates attending the W.C.T.U. convention at Timaru. March 1918. A group portrait of the delegates at the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) convention at Timaru in March 1918. Pictures about 80 or so women with WCTU banners posed in several rows on a grass lawn in front of trees obscuring a two-storied house. South Canterbury Museum Catalogue Number2013/080.06