If you won’t take all four, you can’t have any.’! Sir William’s relations were not quite so stingy, and they eventually adopted a couple of kids from his side of the family, digging out another Antipodean, a nephew, in Hokitika, and transporting him back to England. William’s own fortune was largely given away. He and his wife founded a hospital in Northampton for crippled children. Its purpose and function changed over the years, but it continues to this present day still bearing his name. An American branch of the Treloar family have an internet website. William features prominently as possibly their best-known connection. They provide a link to a UK archive of historic audio recordings from the early twentieth-century. William can be heard as he talks about his charitable ambitions. He was also a bit of a writer. His account of his thoughts and feelings while being knighted by Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle makes good reading. Edward VII later made him a baronet, possibly at the insistence of Queen Alexandra who lent significant support to William’s charities.

I have a small photo of Lady Treloar. She bears a remarkable resemblance to Mrs Minnie Dean, the notorious and luckless Winton baby-farmer. I don’t think they were related.

None of all this meant very much at all to my grandmother. I will never know the impulses that sent her off to Melbourne in the 1890s to train as a Salvation Army officer. Was there a Salvationist corps in Kempsey, New South Wales? Had she attended services there? Did she know someone who did and had persuaded her to come along and worship? There must have been some influences in order to winkle out a presumably good Anglican from a remote corner of New South Wales and send her off to Melbourne—which, then, was in not so much a different state as a different colony. There must certainly have been some zeal to do good on her part. I have a beautiful studio photograph of her, taken around 1896, in Army uniform, bonnet and all. She looks serene and quite lovely…and not at all prepared for service to the Lord in Kalgoorlie and then in Kumara, serving the needs, or saving the souls, of the miners down on the West Coast of New Zealand. I guess if there had been zeal, there must also have been strong will.

She must have saved Alexander Taylor, my grandfather, a nice young Scots Presbyterian some four years her junior. Clearly competing with his thirteen almost-all-older siblings down in Winton had proved a bit much, and he was likely doing a bit of digging in the mines in order to earn his living. It was definitely a falling in love on his side—enough, at least, to have him follow her to her next posting, back in Kalgoorlie. Persistence must have worn her down, because they married in 1903, in Fremantle, Western Australia. Marrying someone who was not an officer in the Salvation Army meant that Annie gave up her vocation, but she remained a very loyal Salvationist. In the course of time, two of her granddaughters—Frances and Laurel Cresswell—would become Salvation Army officers. Alex was devoted to her for the rest of their lives together, and then to her memory during his last handful of years without her. A lovely and loving couple in every respect.

They lived modestly and simply in the house they built in Victoria Street, Petone, next door to the kindergarten and diagonally across from the Workingmen’s Club. Grandad was a foreman in the Post and Telegraph Service until his retirement.

Whenever we stayed with Grandma and Grandad we were loyally Salvationist as well, and trekked off to the old Citadel in Petone to sing the choruses, enjoy the music of the very good band and, of course, go to Sunday School.

Grandma was a quiet woman. I never heard her raise her voice. For all that, I always sensed a strength within her. After some fit of fur-and-feathers-flying temperament on my part, I remember her taking me aside, quietly calming me down and telling me how that when she had been younger she had possessed a dreadful temper but had learnt to control it.