Makers: Elizabeth Bargh, Helena Hawke, Elizabeth Hinkley, Lindsay McWha [Karori Arts and Crafts Inc]

Panel number: 250

Petition sheet number: 306

Person honouring: Eleanor P. Smith

Relationship to makers: None

Eleanor Phoebe Smith was a formidable woman, and mother to Eleanor and Lucy Smith – who also signed sheet 306 on the petition [although the writing seems to be from one hand].

Phoebe was born in Bristol in 1828 and married James Thomas Smith in 1849. The family emigrated to New Zealand in 1860, arriving at Lyttelton with four children, a baby having died during the voyage. They settled in St Albans, where they attended St Albans Methodist church and the children attended the Wesleyan Day School. Two further children were born in Christchurch.

Phoebe was dominating and matriarchal, referred to in the family as our ‘Head Clansman’. She edited The New Zealand Titbits magazine, published in the 1880s by her husband’s printing firm, JT Smith and Co. 

Mother and daughter Lucy were present at the first meeting of the National Council of Women in 1896. Phoebe was also president of the church’s Ladies’ Guild, had joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union at its beginning, and belonged to the Canterbury Women’s Institute (CWI).

She was still an active member of St Albans Methodist Church and vice-president of CWI when she died in 1913. Phoebe was 84 and a widow when buried at Linwood cemetery.

Tributes described her as ‘a woman of unusual mental endowments and remarkable for the breadth of her sympathies and interests’. She was ‘one of the pioneers of the women’s suffrage movement in the Dominion rendering it much assistance in its early stages and was deeply interested in all social reform, especially in the cause of temperance’.

Panel materials: Fabrics sourced from Vinnies Re-Sew resources and from two makers’ own collections.