Joseph Harry SELLWOOD [26947]

  General Notes:

Name: Joseph Harry Sellwood
Registration Year: 1901
Registration Quarter: Oct-Nov-Dec
Registration district: Christchurch Hampshire
Volume: 2b
Page: 645

Joseph H Sellwood
Date of Registration: Apr-May-Jun 1924
Registration district: Christchurch
Inferred County: Hampshire
Spouse: Kathleen A Knapton
Volume Number: 2b
Page Number: 1525

Christchurch, is a small coastal resort town in Dorset (since 1974) which abuts Bournmouth to the West,

Joe Sellwood was born there, he left school at 12 and went to work for an Uncle, delivering milk in a horse-drawn cart through the streets of Bournemouth.
Seven days a week, fifty weeks a year, for the next 40yrs our father would leave home at 6:00am and walk a mile or more to work, where he would climb aboard a red Bedford flatbed truck and drive it to small dairy farms out in the countryside to pick up their milk and deliver it to the processing factory back in town.
His sole experience of the world outside of Bournemouth and the surrounding rural countryside had been driving the truck - just once - 150 kilometers to London and back again. His wife Kathleen, two years younger, had traveled even less - only 50 kilometers to Boumemouth from Shirley on the outskirts of Southampton, where she reputedly was born.
Yet, despite this lack of world experience, and having little education, even less money and already in their 50's, they decided to leave their friends, their few possessions and the government home they had rented for 35 years and take most of their children on a 12,000-mile, six-week trip across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and then arrange for the remaining family members to follow them. I don't know how or where they found the courage, but I'll be forever grateful.
Colin Sellwood (their son) 2018

Colin Sellwood remembers his childhood:
When we left Luckham Road Bournemouth in 1956, the homes had no electricity, but used gas for lighting and cooking. the homes had coin-operated meters to control the flow of gas; when the lights flickered, more coins needed to be put in the meter to make the gas flow again. Even in 1956, the lifestyle hadn't changed much from the 1920's; tradesmen still occasionally led horse-drawn carts up and down the street to ply their wares, and I can still remember the excitement of hearing the cry of
"Ra-a-gs and bo-o-ones," as the rag-and-bone man's horse clip-clopped by, and I would run out to exchange old newspapers (which he would later sell to fish-and-chip shops) for some small treasure - often little goldfish that he would scoop into my jam jar, and which would inevitably die within a few days.
Gypsies would occasionally ride by on bicycles, selling strings of onions hanging from their handlebars, and parents would warn children that the gypsies would steal us if they could. There were no TV's due to the lack of electricity, but our home did have one radio, powered by a liquid "accumulator" which needed refilling periodically at the local petrol/gas station. Children played games in the street after dark under the gas street lights, and fights were frequent. Only two or three of the 150 homes had cars, so everyone traveled by foot, bike or bus.
Our mother walked to the shops almost every day (no electricity, and therefore no refrigerator) to buy groceries and carry them home by hand - no doubt heavy work for a small woman with several children. Our home was spartan by today's standards; a ground floor with a small living room with a coal-fired fireplace, which was the home's only heating system. Above the fireplace was a bricked-in water tank, and a fire would be lit in the fireplace every Saturday so that we all could take our weekly bath - the same water normally would be used by two or three people in succession.
Quite often, various "foods-on-toast" would be our standard fare (e.g. baked beans on toast or scrambled eggs or meat drippings or even condensed milk) and because we had no electricity, we toasted bread with a special "toasting fork" - a two-pronged piece of twisted wire which was used to hold the bread in front of the coal fire until the bread turned brown.
Immediately behind the front room was a small concrete-floored kitchen which contained a metal sink, a gas cooking stove and a coal-fired laundry tub with an attached mangle for wringing water from the clothes before they were hung out to dry in the back yard. Winter temperatures often approached freezing, and our mothers hands frequently were red and chapped after hanging wet clothes on the line in cold weather.
At the rear of the house was a concrete-floored scullery (mud room) and finally the home's only toilet, which had a chain-pulled tank mounted on the wall just below the ceiling, and old newspapers were left tucked behind the water pipe for use as toilet paper. Upstairs were three bedrooms and our only bathroom, which had a bath but no sink or toilet. The house had very little insulation; the bedrooms were so cold in winter that our mother would heat the irons she normally used for ironing clothes on the gas stove, then wrap them in old towels and put them in the beds to warm the sheets. Mum and Dad slept in the larger front bedroom in which their eight children were born, and on those occasions the Salvation Army midwife in her navy dress, black stockings and straw hat with white ribbon would pedal over on her bicycle to help with the delivery.

Colin continues:
On January 6th, 1956 Joe and his family caught a train from Bournemouth to Liverpool, and boarded the "Tamaroa", a small (14,000 tons) old Shaw Saville line relic which had been a hospital ship during the Second World War. We were travelling as "immigrants," as the New Zealand had government paid for their passages in return for the adults agreeing to work for two years. The Tamaroa was a two-funneled steam ship, so small and low in the water that flying fish would often sail over the guard rails and flip, flap and flop on the deck. Immigrants cabins were down on the lowest level, but it was a wonderful experience for a boy of 12. The ship was creakingly slow and took almost six weeks to get to New Zealand. Our first port of call was Panama City, where we disembarked and were ferried through the canal and re-embarked at Cristobal. We then steamed on to Pitcairn Island, the home of Fletcher Christian and his "Mutiny on the Bounty" crew. The Tamaroa anchored off-shore, Pitcaim natives paddled out to us in homemade canoes and clambered up the side of the ship on rope ladders, bringing pineapples and dolphins carved out of a rich dark wood to barter with the passengers. I had never seen a pineapple, nor natives and canoes, so it was enthralling. We arrived in Auckland in February, and the family immediately split up. My parents and I moved in with Uncle George Knapton and his family, Madge and Jill went to stay separately with George's two daughters, Vi and Sheila and their husbands, while Joan and Jane rejoined Joan's husband John Rowlands.
2018

  Other Records

1. Census: England, 2 Apr 1911, 181 Windham Rd Bournemouth HAM. Joseph is recorded as a son aged 9 born Bournemouth HAM

Joseph married Kathleen Ada KNAPTON [26948] [MRIN: 9684], daughter of Sidney Herbert KNAPTON [26620] and Louisa SIMS [26633], on 21 Apr 1924 in St Clements Bournmouth HAM. (Kathleen Ada KNAPTON [26948] was born on 17 Apr 1903 in Southampton, died on 19 Mar 1968 and was buried in Atkinson Ave Cemetery Otahuhu NZ.)