Odd Boy Out by Paul Ashford Harris

Author:Paul Ashford Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ventura Press

The Christmas card painted in 1952 by Uncle Nicholas for Bing Harris & Co Ltd

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BING HARRIS

One of the objects lost the night of the fire at Te Rama was the original seal of Bing Harris & Co Ltd, first used in 1858, and thereafter on all documents until its replacement late in the twentieth century by a seal using ink rather than wax.

The original seal had been a fine affair, carefully cast in bronze and with a delicately carved whalebone handle, kept reverently in an oak box with silk lining secured by a small brass key to deter unauthorised use, the latter a ‘hanging’ offence.

The seal would normally have been locked in the safe in the company secretary’s office in Dunedin but upon its replacement by the more utilitarian ink model my parents bought the original as a reminder of the business that had survived for more than one hundred years – through the bonus years of the original gold rush and import licensing and the despair of the Depression, until its decline and eventual sale in the 1960s in the face of a changing business world that rendered the old family business obsolete.

As a child, I used to wonder about the seal’s curious shape and why it weighed so much. It was not like any other object I had seen and my father’s explanation did not enlighten me, since I had no understanding of the need to authenticate documents.

It wasn’t till much later that I realised the need to authenticate ownership must have been one of the earliest requirements of city dwellers, for the use of seals can be traced back to Mesopotamia to the fourth century BC and to Egypt in the third century BC and was in widespread use among many civilisations.

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