Russell Poole

The Donor

The name of the person who donated the puzzle to Te Manawa is Lenora Elsie Coldstream. Sometimes her first name is written as Leonora instead.

Lenora was born in 1915 and died in 2005 at the ripe old age of 90. Some of the time I’m going to call her Miss Coldstream, as a reminder of what was customary and polite when she was a young woman. I’ll also refer to her as Sister Coldstream, since she rose to a senior nursing position that carried with it the title of ‘Sister’.

One thing we can tell about her by simply looking at the puzzle. The pieces that spell out the name ‘Dick Shore’ are very small. They could easily go up the vacuum cleaner. Yet the puzzle survives with all its pieces. Sherlock Holmes would say that Lenora must have been a person who took good care – of things and people alike.

The puzzle was probably a present to her on her ninth or tenth birthday, at the time of the British Empire Exhibition. Her younger brother and sister would probably have been too young to solve it.

Lenora also gave Te Manawa a canasta card deck, two cribbage boards, and a boxed set of 28 dominoes. Like the puzzle, they were donated in 1975, the year after her surviving parent’s death.

These games, like the puzzle, must have been old friends to the family, providing entertainment on wet days and long evenings. Evidently Miss Coldstream, now on her own, had no further use for them.

Assembling the pieces of Lenora’s life

What do we know about Lenora’s life?

Her parents, Victor Coldstream (b. 1886) and Olive Elizabeth Coldstream (née Freeman, b. 1891), had a Palmerston North background but moved to Wellington, where many of the Freeman clan lived. They married on 15 May 1915 at St Paul’s Pro-Cathedral, Wellington.

For most of their time in Wellington they lived at 99 Tinakori Road, up the road from Premier House.

Victor had a job as storeman with the Wellington Harbour Board. His mother, Ida Louisa Coldstream, had been a district nurse, ending her career at Raetihi. She would have had many a story to tell of Raetihi, Horopito, and other rough timber and railway towns in the central North Island.

Olive Coldstream’s mother, Emmarah Freeman, had also been a nurse. She became the founder of Northcote, for many years Palmerston North’s leading private hospital.¹

Maybe Ida Louisa Coldstream and Emmarah Freeman inspired their granddaughter Lenora to become a nurse.

We know from the Dominion that Emmarah Freeman was in England in late 1924 and it’s a plausible guess that she bought the puzzle for her daughter Olive’s family.²

Olive Freeman attended Campbell Street School and then the Palmerston North Technical School. She was good at music and the most popular hockey player in her year.

Lenora herself attended Thorndon Associated Normal School, graduating with proficiency (the highest grade). She went on in 1928 to Wellington Girls’ College. Her mother supported both these schools by serving on the parents’ association.³ Olive was also active in the Mothers’ Union.

During Lenora’s first year at high school her ten-year-old brother Victor Page Coldstream died.

I’ll say more about Lenora’s high school years in a moment but for now let’s move straight to 1934. In that year, aged 19, she started training as a nurse at Stratford Hospital. This was a three-year course, combining work and study. Lectures were given at the hospital by doctors and senior nurses.

As elsewhere in Aotearoa, trainees lived in the nurses’ home attached to the hospital. The furniture in a nurse’s room was minimal: a single bed, a set of drawers and a cupboard.

Trainee nurses like Lenora were on probation for their first year.

Along with the other nurses, she would have had to put up with curfews and room checks. A bed without neatly tucked hospital corners would mean all the bedding being tossed on to the floor and the nurse told to make the bed again.

Having qualified as a registered nurse, probably at the end of 1936, Lenora stayed on at Stratford for a few more years. The year 1939 was a big one for her: she qualified first as a maternity nurse and then as a midwife, one of the few who passed with honours in the State Midwifery Examination.⁴

Then to top off these qualifications she went south to Dunedin to undertake Plunket training at the Karitane Harris Hospital.

Palmy comes back into the story in 1941 when Lenora was appointed as sister at the Palmerston North Hospital maternity annexe.⁵ Soon she was senior sister. But she didn’t stay long, moving to a similar position at Kaitaia in 1943.⁶

At Kaitaia we catch a few glimpses of her. William Johnson, hospital porter, thanks Sister Coldstream and the nurses of the Kaitaia Annex for their kindness and attention to his wife.

Lenora also appears in navy sheer satin and blue coat and hat at a fellow-nurse’s wedding.⁷

By 1945 she had moved on again to Timaru Hospital. During her stay there dreadful news came. Her younger sister Elizabeth Olive had died suddenly at the age of 25. Elizabeth had only recently completed her BA at Victoria University College.⁸

Perhaps to be within easier reach of her parents, who had now lost their other two children, Lenora took up a position at the Public Hospital in Blenheim (today’s Wairau Hospital), living in the nurses’ home at Holmdale.  

By 1957 she was back in Wellington, living with her parents at 99 Tinakori Road. These three surviving members of the family made their return to Pamutana around 1969. Their address was 207 Vogel Street in Roslyn.

Victor’s stay was brief, as he died in 1970. Lenora stayed on in the house to look after Olive, who by now was an invalid, dying in 1974. And then she stayed on in the house on her own.

So these are the pieces of Lenora’s life that Cindy Lilburn and I have been able to track down so far. We’ve used mostly Papers Past and the Ancestry website, which you can access through the Palmerston North Public Library.

My daughter Susannah helped me find a couple of the pieces. Could you do your own research and add other pieces?

Looking at the picture I’ve pieced together so far, clearly Miss Coldstream experienced much sadness in her life. Her brother and sister died while she was still young. She nursed two invalided parents and was the sole survivor in her family.

Let’s conclude this investigation with what must have been a happy memory for Lenora.

The Lady Luke Silver Salver

At age 14, Lenora was one of a team of six that entered a Home Nursing competition run by the Red Cross. Eligible were teams of girls from secondary schools who had been attending lectures in Home Nursing given by Sister Lewis of the Red Cross in Wellington.

The award was to take the form of a gorgeous silver salver presented by Lady Jacobina Luke, the Mayoress of Wellington.

Any girl would have been proud to receive an award from Lady Jacobina Luke (née McGregor). She was one of the signatories of the Women’s Suffrage petition and an early supporter of the Red Cross in Aotearoa.

From the outbreak of the First World War she joined with other leading women in Wellington to organise volunteers to provide extra supplies and ‘home comforts’ for the departing soldiers.⁹ Knitwear such as socks and scarves for the cold winters in Belgium and France were a staple item.¹⁰ Shortbread was a staple food item, as it kept well.

Lady Jacobina worked so hard that she risked her own health.¹¹

My father, who embarked in Wellington on the troopship Remuera in June 1918, was among the grateful recipients of Red Cross good cheer. He writes in his war diary, ‘The Red Cross ladies kindly provided hot tea and cakes and plenty of it so after that we began to feel a little bit more cheerful.’¹²

On the day of the Home Nursing competition, the Red Cross rooms were filled with girls, Lenora among them. They wore fresh white uniforms and nurses’ veils. The symbol of the Red Cross was embroidered on their sleeves. The reporter for the Evening Post of 28 November 1929 thought they all looked ‘very trim and businesslike’.

Three teams came from Wellington Girls’ College, two from Wellington Girls’ College House, two from Wellington East Girls’ College, and one from Sacred Heart College, Lower Hutt. Meaning that even just within Wellington Girls’ College the competition was intense.

Each team demonstrated a whole range of skills. The idea behind Home Nursing was to teach future wives and mothers, possibly living deep in the backblocks, how to look after unwell or injured family members until such time as a doctor could make the journey.

Two hospital beds were placed in the lecture room. First the girls worked in pairs to make a bed, complete with the regulation ‘hospital corners’.

Having made the bed, they then had to unmake it again in the proper tidy fashion, not strewing sheets and pillow cases all over the floor.

Next step was showing how to bath a patient. A mannikin stood in for a real patient, the same as in Red Cross first aid courses nowadays.

Most demanding was the final stage, involving different kinds of dressings: ‘poulticing, applying fomentations, iodine treatment, and bandaging’, amongst much else. A mannikin was used for this stage as well. Iodine is tricky to apply, as it has a habit of staining anything it touches.

Observing the demonstrations with an eagle eye were four judges: ‘Miss Lambie and Miss Moore, of the Health Department, and Nurses Whitelaw and Allen.’¹³  

When the four judges announced their verdict it was wonderful news for Lenora and her team-mates. With their care and attention to detail, they had scored well ahead of their rivals and the silver salver was theirs.

I like to think that Lenora and her family had the salver on show on their mantelpiece for a good long while.

About Me

When I was about age 5, a relative in Edinburgh sent us a jigsaw puzzle of Edinburgh Castle. It wasn’t particularly easy, as most of the pieces were either green (the lawns and shrubbery around the Castle) or grey (the stonework of the Castle plus adjacent buildings plus the Edinburgh sky above). All the same, we loved this puzzle and solved it many times.

Nowadays my wife and I help the Red Cross with the pre-loved puzzles that are donated to them. Somebody has to solve these puzzles so as to check that none of the pieces are missing and that’s what we do, along with lots of other volunteers.

If all the pieces are present then the Red Cross can sell the puzzle in their shop. Puzzles have a ready sale. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, people were especially eager to buy them so as to while away the long hours spent at home.¹⁴

Both Te Manawa and the Red Cross appreciate donors as kind and as careful as Lenora Elsie Coldstream!

First published by Te Manawa Museum on 20 February 2023; updated and republished with the author’s permission.

Footnotes

1. Poole, ‘Nurse Emmarah Freeman’, pp. 4–14. ↩︎
2. Dominion, 4 December 1924, p. 2. ↩︎
3. ‘Girls’ Colleges’, Evening Post (EP), 15 March 1938, p. 15. ↩︎
4. ‘Maternity Nurses’, EP, 9 January 1939, p. 11; ‘Nurses & Midwives’, EP, 30 December 1939, p. 11. ↩︎
5. ‘Women’s World’, Manawatu Standard (MS), 22 April 1941, p. 9. ↩︎
6. ‘Personal’, Manawatu Times (MT), 22 April 1941, p. 3; ‘Women’s World’, MS, 18 May 1943, p. 3; ‘Personal’, MT, 18 May 1943, p. 2. ↩︎
7. ‘Thanks Notice’, Northland Age (NA), 19 October 1944, p. 1; ‘Wedding of Widespread Interest’, NA, 25 May 1944, p. 4. ↩︎
8. ‘Deaths’, EP, 21 November 1945, p. 1. ↩︎
9. Barry, ‘Jacobina Luke’; Tolerton, ‘A shirty job’. ↩︎
10. Hunter and Ross, Holding on to Home, pp. 94–95. ↩︎
11. Tennant, ‘Enduring Charity’, p. 31.  ↩︎
12. See Tennant, Across the Street, Across the World, for further information on the history of the Red Cross in New Zealand. ↩︎
13. ‘Red Cross Work’, EP, 28 November 1929, p. 7. ↩︎
14. Bodenheimer, ‘What’s behind the pandemic puzzle craze?’. ↩︎

Bibliography

Barry, Briar, ‘Jacobina Luke’, URL: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/suffragist/jacobina-luke, accessed 15 March 2022.

Bodenheimer, Rebecca, ‘What’s behind the pandemic puzzle craze?’, JSTOR Daily, 16 December 2020, URL: https://daily.jstor.org/whats-behind-the-pandemic-puzzle-craze/, accessed 27 August 2024.

Hunter, Kate, and Kirstie Ross, Holding on to Home: New Zealand Stories and Objects of the First World War, Te Papa Press, 2014.

Poole, Russell, ‘Nurse Emmarah Freeman, Founder of Northcote Hospital’, Manawatū Journal of History, no. 19, 2023, pp. 4–14.

Tennant, Margaret, Across the Street, Across the World: A History of the Red Cross in New Zealand, 1915-2015, New Zealand Red Cross, 2015.

Tennant, Margaret, ‘Enduring Charity: The Red Cross and War Charity Beyond the Great War’, in Endurance and the First World War: Experiences and Legacies in New Zealand and Australia, ed. David Monger, Katie Pickles, and Sarah Murray, Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars, 2014, pp. 31–48. 

Tolerton, Jane, ‘A shirty job but someone had to do it, Stuff, 16 October 2014, URL: https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital-life/capital-day/10622848, accessed 27 August 2024.