Portrait of Miss Bethell

Toss Woollaston and Ursula Bethell met in Christchurch in 1931. At the time Bethell was in her late fifties and had just published her first book of poetry. Woollaston was a young art student. Ursula Bethell lived with her companion Effie Pollen in the Cashmere Hills. She gave Woollaston a Saturday job working in her garden, and the two became close friends. Woollaston later wrote: ‘… her wit and range were athletic and tremendous, her erudition so broad and deep that I felt sunk in it most of the time.’ (Toss Woollaston, Sage tea, second edition, 2001, p. 216).

Bethell was born in Surrey, England in 1874. Both of her parents had spent time in New Zealand in the 1860s, and they moved their family to Christchurch in 1878. Bethell spent the rest of childhood and adolescence living between New Zealand and Europe. As a young woman she did various kinds of social work, before settling in Christchurch with Pollen in 1924.

Bethell was a keen gardener, and her first book of poems, From a garden in the antipodes, was published in 1929 under the pseudonym Evelyn Hayes. Two further volumes of poems were published by Christchurch’s Caxton Press in 1936 and 1939.