Tool box containing tools

This well-provenanced chest of cabinet makers’ tools connects a personal story to several significant social and historical processes that have shaped New Zealand. Primarily, it is an expression of British immigration to New Zealand, specifically Irish Protestant immigration. It is also connected to patterns of work and domestic architecture, as well as the skills and materials used for housing construction, and the cross-generational transfer of specialist skills.

Irish immigrant Isaac Moorhead Cleland brought the chest with him to New Zealand in the 1920s. Protestant Cleland completed his apprenticeship at the Belfast shipyards where he made this tool box and some of the tools it contains. The reasons for Cleland's migration are unknown.

It brings visibility to an over-looked group in the history of peopling New Zealand. Of the migrants from Britain and Ireland who came to New Zealand, those of Irish descent were outnumbered by those from England and Scotland. Of the Irish who did come here, Protestants like Cleland from Ulster (Northern Ireland) were the dominant group. A notable example is the 19th century organised settlement of Katikati in the western Bay of Plenty. Yet, as Phillips and Hearn observe, ‘New Zealanders tend to think of their Irish heritage in terms of republicanism, St Patrick’s Day, yet almost as important is the heritage from the Protestant community of the north….In some ways these are New Zealand’s least visible immigrants’ (p. 126). A broader political dimension (Irish nationalism, sectarianism and the partition of Ireland) underpins the production of this object. Cleland's apprenticeship was at the Belfast shipyards which employed tens of thousands of workers, were infamous for their sectarianism and overt favouritism towards Protestants. Catholic workers there were concentrated in unskilled jobs. In July 1920, for example, the largest shipyards in the city (if not the world), Harland and Wolff, expelled over 7,000 Catholic (and left-wing Protestant) workers were expelled from their jobs. Further research is required to determine how or whether Cleland was directly affected by this key event in the political history of Northern Ireland.

Cleland migrated on the SS Hororata to New Zealand in 1926 aged 24. He set up a workshop in the Wellington suburb of Northland, married, and built his own family home there with his own tools, making all the windows, doors and cupboards himself. His local ‘jobbing’, that is making and repairing windows for example, was interrupted by WWII. In 1942, Cleland was manpowered, using these tools to build army huts in Kaiwharawhara Wellington.

Cleland also specialised in more bespoke ecclesiastical and scholastic joinery. According to his son, Martin, Cleland was skilled at making church furniture, pulpits, lecterns, pews etc. One octagonal pulpit, originally installed in the Kelburn Presbyterian Church was made entirely without nails. Cleland did work for the Wellington Cathedral, including the baptismal font and a memorial cross. He also crafted the chancel furniture for the Knox Church in Masterton, after the 1942 earthquake. Martin Cleland, who inherited the tools in the 1970s, worked in alongside his father Isaac as a young boy and picked up the skills required to become an adept sculptor in wood.

Cleland's hand wood working tools also derive their significance from and owe their existence to two very common styles of domestic architecture in New Zealand: the wooden villa and bungalow. The recent rise and use of more durable materials such as aluminium for 'joinery', means that Cleland's tools also illustrate an important period in the history of materials and specialist skills used for housing construction that are now on the wane.