Makers: Cheryl Comfort and Joycelyn Mallinson

Panel number: 536

Petition sheet number: 1892 petition

Person honouring: Phillipa Jane Terrill and Elizabeth Cantrill

Relationship to makers: Great-great-grandmother and great-grandmother, respectively

John Terrill and Phillipa Austin were married in a registry office in Cornwall, England in July 1862. In August of that year they sailed to Lyttelton with John’s mother Jane Terrill. The couple’s first child, Thomas, was born on the ship.

Between 20 and 40 years, Phillipa gave birth to 12 children, three of whom died in infancy.

John deserted Phillipa when she still had young children. The family moved to Napier about 1884 where Phillipa kept a boarding house with her eldest daughter Elizabeth. At that time it appears that divorce was rare, only really available to wealthy folk, so desertion remained just that, with the couple still legally married.

Phillipa sought the right to keep her own money and possessions from her husband and also from his creditors. He had stopped supporting her and she wanted to ensure that he could not claim anything she earned or acquired in the future – any money or property owned by a wife could be claimed if her husband fell into debt. She must have been a mentally strong woman, with records showing that in 1890 an order from the Napier magistrate’s court granted Phillipa Terrill control over her own earnings and any property she had or might acquire.

It is not surprising that Phillipa Terrill and Elizabeth Cantrill were true supporters of women’s rights, and in 1892 they were keen to put their signatures to the Women’s Franchise petition in Napier.

Phillipa died of peritonitis in January 1893, age 50, and so would not live to celebrate New Zealand becoming the first country to give women the vote that same year.

Panel materials:  All fabric already owned. The main part is an old Obi sash material. It has wonderful rust marks in it and looks very much like the paper in the article about her at https://teara.govt.nz/en/zoomify/37016/protecting-married-womens-property that we printed to included on the panel.