Richard Randell

In 1867 William Randell, a bricklayer and mason from England, built a small wooden cottage in St Mary Street, Thorndon, for his wife Sarah and their growing family. Richard (Dick) was the seventh of their ten children, born in 1867. William died in 1880 but Sarah managed to keep the cottage and feed the family with financial help from her older, unmarried children. One by one the children grew up and moved away from home, but Sarah stayed in the cottage with daughter Harriet until 1912.

Richard trained as a plumber and worked in Wellington with his brother-in-law, George Remington, for some years. In the early 1890s he was sent to Gisborne to work on a large project, and it was around that time that he had this photograph taken. While in Gisborne he met Louisa (Louie) Harries. They married in 1895 and had four sons. Dick set up his own business, Judd and Randell, in about 1895 and in 1903 built a large new house in Karori. He was a keen gardener and spent a great deal of time tending to the three-quarter-acre section. Louie had a miscarriage and died at home of a haemorrhage in 1911. Her sister Dora moved in to help Dick with the children, and in 1913 Dick and Dora married.  Dora had no children of her own but, with Dick, supported various members of the family over the years.  One of Dick’s grandchildren was Beverley Randell.

William and Sarah’s great-granddaughter Beverley Randell and her husband Hugh Price purchased the cottage at 14 St Mary Street in 1994, 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 Dick’s childhood treasures, or discarded items from his 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 Unpublished research notes provided to curator.