Maker: Jennifer Mayne

Panel number: 270

Petition sheet number: 324

Person honouring: Marie Beath

Relationship to maker: None

Marie Beath was Kate Sheppard’s older sister. She was born in September 1846, to Jemima Crawford Malcolm and Andrew Wilson in Islay, the southernmost island of Scotland’s Inner Hebrides.

In 1866, aged 20, Marie set off from Scotland, on her own, to marry George Low Beath, a man 19 years older than her – she met him several years previously in Dunfermline, Fifeshire. How they sustained their relationship for two to three years while George travelled to Melbourne, Victoria, then to Christchurch, is unknown. By the time Marie left Scotland George had set up a small drapery shop in Christchurch in partnership with Oscar Kirby, which had quickly prospered.

Marie arrived in Lyttelton in January 1867, one of nine first-class cabin passengers on the clipper Mermaid. The journey had taken 81 days.  

One month later, in February 1867, she married George at St John’s Anglican Church, Latimer Square. By the end of 1867 their first child was born; four more were born during the next 15 years. Their only son, George Malcolm (9 years), and their oldest daughter, Laura Christian (14 years), died two weeks apart in mid-1881 – during an epidemic caused by poor drainage. These plagued Christchurch during its earlier years.

Marie’s mother Jemima and siblings Kate, Frank, Isabella, and Robert joined her in Christchurch two years later, arriving as first-class cabin passengers on the Matoaka in February 1869.

George Beath had purchased a freehold property on Riccarton Road and had a large and comfortable house built – he called it Leslieville, after his birthplace in Scotland. As the wife of a successful businessman, Marie had servants to tend to the work a large household required, and a gardener to develop and maintain their large garden and orchard.

The Beath family were musical and artistic, and active participants in the Congregational Church, the YMCA, and the YWCA. Marie seems to have been supportive of her sisters’ work in the temperance and suffrage movements, but she played no active part in the associated organisations.

Marie’s daughter Margaret and her sister-in-law Alice also signed sheet 324.

Marie was 83 when she died in January 1930. She was interred in the family grave in Addington cemetery, with her two children Laura and George, and her husband [died 1914]. Close by is the grave of her sister Kate [died 1934], in the same plot as their mother Jemima [died 1881].

Panel materials: Embroidered runner decorated in cross stitch by my husband’s grandmother, Margaret Ellen Jenkins, probably around 1900. Margaret’s father, John Jenkins, was a gold miner who worked alongside Gabriel Read in Otago in 1863. I extended her design with a chevron of chain stitch, with four cross stitches inserted to represent women getting together to strive for a goal, in this case Votes for Women.