The Life of Names

By John Summers

Achilles

Ships can have long lives. They can have many lives. The cruiser Achilles, built for the British navy in 1931, was later loaned to New Zealand and fought under our flag in the first naval battle of the Second World War, firing shell after shell at the Admiral Graf Spree and forcing its limping retreat to a port in neutral Uruguay. The fight was vicious. One officer, a Lieutenant Washbourn, described the control tower of the Achilles as looking like a slaughterhouse on a busy day. Following the battle, the Commander of the Graf Spree would scuttle his ship rather than risk further loss of his men’s lives, and days later shot himself with his service pistol in a Buenos Aires hotel room. Washbourn, however, survived the war, went on to become Chief of Staff of the New Zealand Navy before retiring to Golden Bay where one summer he would argue with two tourists from Christchurch, my own Nan and Granddad, about a part of the beach he believed belonged to him. 

But the Achilles is my subject, and I can report that she too made it through the war. Following victory, she was sold to the Indian Navy, beginning her second or third life depending on how you count it, and as INS Delhi, saw combat again in a battle with Portugal over the colony of Goa. It was in 1978 that, after all that fighting, she would finally be made nameless and scrapped. One of her turrets was kept as an ornament for the Indian Army’s School of Artillery, another remains at Devonport Naval Base. Achilles Point on Auckland’s Ladies Bay was named for this ship, and in Christchurch, a motel on Sherbourne Street also carries her name. 

Stanley

On the second day he killed two home guardsmen. He would kill seven people in total, but it was the manhunt, the chase that captured the public imagination. From his home in Kokatahi, he retreated to the bush, hiding in the rotted-out trunk of a dead tree. There, sheltered from the West Coast’s ever-present rain, he sat, his own gunshot wounds festering, drinking milk from a cow that wandered to him daily, mixing it with the eggs he had stolen, a rudimentary flip. The police found him eventually and shot him again. He died the next day.  

A mass-murderer. Our most recent, we have decided not to name, to take that from him. And, at the time, Graham’s family chose similar. His wife and children, it was reported, changed their surname. Few know what to. They lived on, adrift from him or maybe not. On the website westcoast.recollect.co.nz, a taxi driver recalled taking two people to visit the grave in Hokitika cemetery. Graham’s children, this man believed. That grave holds only the one name, etched into its concrete border, without dates or details, as if fewer identifiers might make it anonymous, make it anyone. And so it stands out, the lone ‘Stanley’. 

The Marquis of Normanby

The Marquis of Normanby is a pub in Carterton, the second building of its name on this site. The first was built in 1876, with old tree stumps for a foundation and pipes that ran down to these rough piles, emptying greywater directly beneath the hotel. In 1879, a man digging about in the yard behind it uncovered an old gin case in which he found the body of a baby, wrapped in a flannel. The discovery, the papers said, caused ‘some excitement.’ It was that same year that a county clerk tried to kill himself at the Marquis, cutting his throat with what was thought to be a bayonet. And in October, a barman was charged with refusing to hand over the change on a ten-pound note. 

That original Marquis of Normanby, the site of these terrible things, burnt down in the early 1920s and the current Marquis was built using concrete, to a design that allowed for a third floor to be added later. At the time of writing, this extra floor had yet to be added. Inside, the ceiling is panelled with gold painted mouldings. There are dark wood stairs up to the hotel rooms, and on the wall, a portrait of the Marquis himself: George Augustus Constantine Phipps, Governor of New Zealand for much of the 1870s, who, when serving as Governor of Victoria, gave approval for the hanging of Ned Kelly. In England, Marquis is generally spelt Marquess. In Carterton, the pub is referred to as ‘the Markie.’ 

Henry

My grandfather died a few months after Sir Edmund Hillary. Both men were the same age, but otherwise had little in common. My grandfather worked as a foreman in the freezing works and left New Zealand only once in his life. Even so, it felt to me at the time as if a particular type of Pākehā man disappeared that year: men modest, practical and kind. It was to hold his memory that, one hundred years after my grandfather’s birth, I gave his name to my son. In each knowing me, these two Henrys have known each other in some slight way, and I can reach back to a time before me and forward to a time well after. 

Except that Henry never really was my grandfather’s name. He had been given Herbert for an uncle killed in the First World War, and the family perhaps feeling uncomfortable using the name of the recently dead, called him Henry instead. Henry he would remain, albeit unofficially, and it was Henry I chose to use. That decision of theirs, their discomfort, has lingered in this way. The faint echo of that old trauma has crossed the boundary of one century, and will hopefully cross into another. Such is the life of names. 

John Summers appears in Verb Festival 2020 in the LitCrawl session ‘My Personal Library’ in which writers talk about the books they turned to in 2020.