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Overview
In 1867 William Randell, a bricklayer and mason from England, built a small wooden cottage in St Mary Street, in Thorndon, for his wife Sarah and their growing family. Helen (Nell) was the ninth of their ten children, born in 1871. William died in 1880 but Sarah managed to keep the cottage and feed the family with financial help from her older, unmarried children.
Helen married Thomas Charles Morris, a signwriter, in July 1889, and the couple moved into the Thorndon cottage with Sarah. Their first child was born there in September 1889. Nell and Tom soon moved to Te Aro and later to Brooklyn, Wellington, where they built a house. They had to alter it several times to accommodate their growing family – they had seven sons and three daughters.
In 1994 William and Sarah’s great-granddaughter Beverley Randell and her husband Hugh Price purchased the cottage at 14 St Mary Street, and with their daughter Susan Price they set about restoring it. Over the course of the restoration, with their architect Martin Hill, they discovered a number of everyday objects such as clothing, ceramic fragments, discarded tools, children's toys, buttons and bottles, hidden in the walls, under the floorboards or in the attic. They donated these items to Te Papa in 2008. Some of Nell’s childhood treasures, or discarded items from her youth, are no doubt among them.
References
Randell, Beverley. 1992. A Crowded Thorndon Cottage: The story of William and Sarah Randell and their ten children. Wellington: Gondwanaland Press.
Randell, Beverley, and Susan Price. 2022. Unpublished research notes provided to curator.