Maker: Carol Harris

Panel number: 189

Petition Sheet Number: 227

Person honouring: Mrs Elizabeth Nicklaus Yaldhurst

Relationship to makers: Step great-grandmother

Born Elizabeth Ann Pantland in London in 1836, Elizabeth married John Freidrich Nicklaus from Germany in London in 1863.  They sailed to New Zealand with their daughters Agnes, born 1863, and Sarah born in 1865.  They had two more children in Yaldhurst, Elizabeth Ann in 1867 and John Frederick in 1869.  

Sarah married Thomas Guy of Yaldhurst in 1887 and their sixth and youngest child Eustace Bardolph Guy was born in 1898. He married my grandmother Irene May Houghton (nee Behrens) from Rakaia.  

The first settlors in Yaldhurst were the Carpenter, Clark, Boon, Mason, Guy, Nicklaus, Johnston, Ryan, Franks and Delamain families. The Nicklaus and Guy families farmed sheep and crops. The women from Yaldhurst were the very first to sign the suffrage petition. Elizabeth’s daughter EA Nicklaus and her sister Agnes Nicklaus signed it.  Yaldhurst School opened in 1876 and was the first school in New Zealand to elect an all women school committee in 1904 soon after the Education Board gave a ruling woman were eligible to be elected.

Panel materials:  Off-white cotton flour bag like fabric, and part of an old wool sack fabric representing the family mixed crop/sheep farm in Yaldhurst and the need to recycle and reuse everything. Pure sheep’s wool. Our old family haberdashery items. A photocopy of the Yaldhurst School Committee being the first all-women’s school committee in New Zealand. Cotton patchwork fabric representing the mixed crop farms of Yaldhurst. Flowers, dried flowers from my mother’s garden (Elizabeth’s step-granddaughter) and flowers representing the flower and vegetable gardens around the family farm house.