A History of New Zealand in 100 Objects by Jock Phillips

Author:Jock Phillips [Phillips, Jock]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781761047220
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

57.

Margaret Cruickshank’s gold watch

WAIMATE MUSEUM AND ARCHIVES

On 13 February 1913 Dr Margaret Cruickshank was presented with this beautiful gold watch and chain plus a purse containing 100 sovereigns at a public meeting in Waimate. She had been a doctor there for almost 16 years, and was given these expressions of admiration by ‘her many Waimate friends’, as the inscription on the back reads, before leaving for a trip to the old country. The gold watch, now held in the Waimate Museum, opens up several fascinating stories.

Let’s begin with the watch itself. Portable watches were made possible by the invention of a mainspring in the fifteenth century, and within a century they were fashionable items for European gentlemen. Gold watches were often given to mark special occasions, not necessarily retirement. Such was the case with Margaret Cruickshank’s watch.

Watches remained items of luxury in New Zealand until the end of the nineteenth century. For both Māori and Pākehā, time was measured by the rising and going down of the sun, or in towns by the firing of a cannon at midday. Then came a greater need for precision. When the telegraph system imposed Wellington time on the country in 1868 to enforce consistency in manning their offices, a national time was established by parliamentary resolution. New Zealand was the first country to do so. By the end of the century larger cities called for greater attention to exact time. Precise hours and minutes were important for train timetables and events like concerts or sports games. Hours of work and the opening and closing of pubs and shops were prescribed. Health too required exactitude — Truby King laid down ‘feeding by the clock’, while doctors and nurses measured heartbeats by a watch. Wristwatches did not come into general use until made popular by the physical conditions of trench warfare in the First World War. So this watch was both a mark of esteem, a precious heirloom which carried associations of gentility and popular regard, but also a reminder of the central place of the clock in modern life and medicine.

The second issue is what induced the citizens of Waimate to present a gold watch to Margaret Cruickshank? Margaret and her twin sister Christina were born at Palmerston (south) on New Year’s Day 1873, daughters of an engineer who had come out to the Otago goldfields. Ten years later their mother fell ill and died and the two girls alternated between attending school and looking after their five younger siblings. They both went to Otago Girls’ High School, sharing the prize as dux, and, perhaps inspired by that school’s pioneering commitment to female education, both proceeded to Otago University. While Christina studied the arts eventually becoming principal of Wanganui Girls’ College, Margaret followed her friend Emily Siedeberg to Otago Medical School. They were pioneers in a profession where women were not welcomed. There is one story, later downplayed by Emily Siedeberg, that in the dissecting room the young male students threw flesh at her.

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