Mrs Lloyd & children, about 1860

This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024).
This extract was authored by Rebecca Rice.

Few clues are offered to account for the inclusion of Mrs Lloyd and her children in William Francis Gordon’s collection of photographs relating to the New Zealand Wars held in the Te Papa collection. The reason lies in who is not in the picture – the absent husband and father, Captain TWJ Lloyd of the 57th Regiment. The Lloyds had arrived in New Zealand in January 1864; by April, Captain Lloyd was dead, and Mrs Lloyd was left a widow. . . Lloyd was killed by Hauhau warriors during an ambush in April 1864 at Te Ahuahu, near Ōakura in Taranaki. He was decapitated, and his head preserved and taken around the North Island to aid Pai Mārire recruitment.

His family is photographed in mourning dress, and Mrs Lloyd wears a Victorian widow’s cap. She appears at peace, contradicting a gossipy excerpt published in the Nelson Examiner which suggested she had ‘gone raving mad, [and] the doctors do not think she will recover’.1 Rather, as this portrait suggests, she showed a ‘huge amount of Christian fortitude under the heavy calamity’ she and her family had suffered.2 In October, just eight months after their arrival, she and her children began their journey back to England.

The British typically understated fatalities and exaggerated victories in battles. But the opposite was true of deaths resulting from ambushes and surprise attacks, accounts of which dwelled on gruesome details, emphasising ‘cold-bloodedness’ and shocking ‘fanaticism’, and often embellishing stories of incidents with salacious and often incorrect information. In the case of Lloyd, for example, it was suggested that his skull was used as a drinking vessel.3

Moreover, to maintain the myth that the British were fighting an ethically and morally superior battle, murdering and pillaging of Māori by Pākehā was not reported in equivalent detail. For every ‘Mrs Lloyd and children’, there are equally important stories of Māori experiences that remain untold.

1 ‘The recovery of the head of Captain Lloyd’, New Zealander, 16 July 1864, p. 2.
2 ‘Capt. Lloyd’s death’, Wanganui Chronicle, 11 May 1864, p. 3.
3 ‘Taranaki’, Nelson Examiner, 12 April 1864, p. 6.