For years, Melrose House has stood unchallenged as Nelson’s grandest, stateliest public house; but the readily available information about its history could have been scribbled on the back of an envelope.
As Melrose Society secretary Ruth Bayley recalls, when she joined the committee back in 2007, “the same little historical blurb used to come up in newspaper articles and flyers and stuff – it had just been cut and pasted for the last 30 years”.
And even that was less-than-enlightening, referring vaguely to how surveyor Charles Watts, the man who would go on to build the palatial home on the corner of Brougham and Trafalgar streets, had arrived in Nelson on the Will Watch in 1841.
For the house’s live-in manager, Simone Henbrey, the lack of readily available information to share with the public was more tiresome. She inevitably found herself collared by curious passers-by wanting to know the story behind it, and had to recite once again the story of Watts’ short-lived association with the house, before it passed to his son-in-law, Percy Adams, then to the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers, and finally into public ownership under the Nelson City Council.
Today, at long last, all that has changed with the launch of a new book, Melrose House – A History. Published by the Melrose Society and written by Ms Bayley – a history graduate – it pieces together some of the key people and events behind the house, and features a mix of historic and contemporary photos to document its various roles.
Ms Bayley says that when she volunteered to document the history four years ago, she never envisaged a book resulting. She imagined it would lead to a new pamphlet, perhaps. When the Melrose Society received a city council grant to help pay for research, the decision was made to develop a more comprehensive and permanent portrait of the place.
Even though she found large gaps in the record – most frustratingly, a paucity of stories about life within the house – Ms Bayley had more luck in tracing the stories of the house’s various owners, particularly Percy Adams.
A prominent lawyer, businessman and benefactor in his day, Adams was both colourful and generous. The book recounts his exploits of both types in detail, in addition to outlining Charles Watts’ role in getting the place built shortly before his death in 1881; its decades serving as a rest and holiday home for rural women through the middle decades of last century; and the controversy over whether the city council would take it over when, in the 1970s, the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers had to walk away from the increasingly-expensive maintenance burden the house posed.
While the demands of maintaining such a large and ornate home haven’t exactly lessened with the years, Melrose House has moved to a more prominent place in the city’s attentions lately, with the opening of a popular cafe there last year.
The cafe is one of a series of major projects tackled by the society and Ms Henbrey; another is the imminent installation of a long-awaited central heating system. There is no shortage of other tasks to be tackled – Ms Henbrey muses about finding a Victorian-era clawfoot bath to replace the one that disappeared from the house years ago, as the society sets about upgrading the bathrooms.
The story about Melrose is far from over, in other words; but its story so far has at last been told.
Melrose House – A History, by Ruth Bayley, published by the Melrose Society (72 pages), is available only from the Melrose Cafe, for $25.
GEOFF COLLETT
http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/features/weekend/5445162/The-story-of-a-historic-house
