Maker: Jill Sjaarda

Panel number: 360

Petition sheet number: 431

Person honouring: Jessie Bower

Relationship to maker: None

Jessie was on the ground during New Zealand’s deadliest natural disaster – the 1931 Napier earthquake. 

Jessie Alexander was born in 1850 at Holborn, Middlesex, the youngest of 14 children born to Elizabeth Vincent and Isaac Alexander, a baker.

In 1872, Jessie married John Bower, a wheelwright from Lincolnshire. In 1874, Jessie, John, and three-month-old Alice boarded the Cathcart bound for Lyttelton. There was a mutiny two weeks out of England and the culprits were put in irons until they docked in New Zealand. Two weeks before the ship arrived in New Zealand, baby Alice died. 

John worked for the Canterbury Provincial Railway at Addington, as a carpenter, living in Christchurch until moving with Jessie to Napier in 1886. She and John had 12 more children, all of them living to adulthood.

They lived in a rented house when Jessie signed the petition in 1893; later they bought a house in Havelock Road. John died while visiting family in Greytown in 1926.

In 1931, Jessie was 80 years old and still living in Napier when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck, destroying their home. Jessie was evacuated to her daughter’s home in Wellington, but died 13 days later of cardiac failure. Jessie was buried at Karori Cemetery.

A much-loved mother and grandmother, Jessie’s indomitable spirit, work ethic, and ability to continue in the face of adversity, make her descendants proud. And like many 19th century immigrants looking for a better life, her ordinariness made her exceptional.

Panel materials: Used materials and embroidery thread; printed my photos.