Irma Miriam O'CONNOR [1894]

  General Notes:

WAKEFIELD MEMORIAL
(To the Editor.)
Sir,— On behalf of my family may I beg a little space in your columns in order to thank Mr. Robert Pope most sincerely for the high tribute which he paid to my great grandfather, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, in his letter last week? My aunt, Miss Wakefield, and I have greatly valued the opportunity given us by the Government to be present at the opening of the Wellington Provincial Council memorial and the subsequent celebrations. We appreciate, too, the many tributes paid by the various speakers on that and other occasions to our forebears, especially to the founder of the country, Edward Gibbon Wakefield. But perhaps more than anything else we appreciated the letter read out by Mr. Nash from Lord Bledisloe, whose gift of L100 towards the upkeep and maintenance of Wakefield's long-neglected grave offers such generous, practical, and convincing proof of his own warmly-expressed admiration of Wake*field's w.ork and his own high regard for his memory.
The lack of recognition of the services to Npw Zealand of the five Wakefield brothers Edward Gibbon and his son Jerningham, William, Arthur, Daniel, and Felix, is a very longstanding one. In particular, the constant efforts to belittle the work of Edward Gibbon and the extraordinary opposition on the part of a certain section of the community to all proposals to erect a memorial to him can only be described as unjust and ungenerous. Hence it is all the more encouraging to find anyone of the standing of Lord Bledisloe, himself not even a New Zealander, pointing the way to the men and women of this country, who now reap the fruits of Wakefield's toil. Thanks largely to the efforts of the Early Settlers Association (an organisation of which Wellington should be justly proud) and of its energetic vicepresident, Mrs. C. E. Carter, the Wakefield graves in Bolton Street Cemetery have now been set in order and Lord Bledisloe's gift will serve to keep them so. Mr. Pope may also be interested to hear that, the Early Settlers now earnestly desire to have a suitable inscription placed on the empty marble slab over Wakefield's grave, and it is hoped to have this work set on foot as soon as the usual official permission has been given.— l am, etc.,
IRMA O'CONNOR.
Ref: Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 24, 29 January 1940, Page 9