Maker: Rachel Harris

Panel number: 155

Petition Sheet Number: 186

Person honouring: Costina Harris

Relationship to makers: Great-great-grandmother

Born Castina Rickard (also spelt Castaina and Costina) at St Austell, Cornwall, England. One of ten children. She married Thomas Harris, a farm labourer, in 1878 in Cornwall and immediately afterwards they sailed on the ship ‘Marlborough’ as assisted immigrants to Canterbury.  He was 30 and she was 20. Her parents and siblings all remained in England.  

They lived in Sheffield, Canterbury where he worked as a plate layer on the railway line to the West Coast.  He was killed in a rail accident in 1989 when their two daughters and two sons were aged 9, 8, 4 and 2. Four months after his death a third son was born.

In 1896 Costina was employed to do domestic duties in Sheffield.  She later moved with the five children to Sydenham and then to Victoria Street, Christchurch Central where she ran a haberdashery shop and a grocery shop between approximately 1903 and 1911. She spent 31 years in Sunnyside Hospital where she died in 1942 and is buried in an unmarked grave in Addington Cemetery.

Panel materials: Off-white cotton flour bag like fabric, and part of an old wool sack fabric representing the sheep farms in the Springfield/Sheffield foothills and the need to recycle and reuse everything. Our old family haberdashery items reflect Costina’s  haberdashery shop. The train and railway line which provided them a living when Thomas and Costina arrived from Cornwall to Canterbury. A photocopy of her signature from the petition. A crocheted woollen piece by Rachel Harris.  Cotton patchwork fabric representing the Southern Alps and the mixed crop farms of Sheffield, Springfield and Waddington.