Maker: Caroline Strachan

Panel number: 202

Petition sheet number: 244

Person honouring: C. H. [Caroline Hannah] Bell

Relationship to maker: None

Caroline Hannah Jouning was born in 1848 at Larkhill Rise, London. [New Zealand records have her as Hannah.]

She arrived in New Zealand aged 22 in 1870, followed three years later by her sister, Agnes. Meanwhile, Hannah/Caroline had met Thomas Bell, an Irishman from Mountjoy, County Antrim (or Co Armagh, according to the family bible). 

They married at St Paul’s Church, Auckland in January 1871; daughter Edith was born at the end of that year. Florence arrived in 1873.

Both Caroline and Edith signed sheet 244 of the 1893 suffrage petition in Lyttelton, where Thomas was a warder. By 1911, Caroline was back in Auckland.

Caroline was a strong supporter of the Protestant Orange Society. When the family became more established, they bought a carriage and used it to take part in the celebration Orange marches. That is, Thomas and the family, except for Caroline, drove in the carriage in the procession. Despite her best efforts, Edith could not coax her mother to join them. She always refused, preferring to be on foot with the marchers. 

She was also a beautiful seamstress. Caroline made fine white cotton petticoats that my mother kept; when I was a teenager (in the 1950s) I starched and wore them under my dancing dresses.

Caroline must have believed in fairies: “Don’t let the fairies hear you say that,” my mother would say if my brother or I were bragging about something. It was a saying from way back, from her great-grandmother, Caroline.

Hannah Caroline Bell was buried at Waikaraka cemetery after she died in 1922, aged 74 years.

Panel materials: Lace on panel [c1890s] belonged to my grandmother, also a Caroline; cotton threads – colours relate to Caroline Bell’s Northern Ireland background.