London, Ryan, Sullivan, Williams and Bines plus their own. Other surnames were Carroll, Patrick, Ferguson, Morrissey, Purcell and Scaese. Mrs Scaese boasted she’d once worked in Queen Victoria’s household. Jacob Scease was still in residence at Gillespie’s until his death at the Westland Hospital when 56 years of age as reported in the West Coast Times on 25.6.1909.
Many of the settlers who stayed behind at Gillespie’s produced large families. Visitors to the area often commented in written reports about the large number of children in such a small community.
Against this, the West Coast Times on 10.2.1902 mentioned a leaflet put out by the Registrar-General on the falling birth rate in New Zealand, lamenting “the pernicious influence of Malthusian doctrines which must be decisively countered. The wilful restriction of births is to be greatly regretted.” It is obvious this wasn’t something to which Gillespie’s Beach residents would plead guilty because large families were the norm.
It is understandable that the Gillespie’s Beach settlement passed through many stages over the decades from the 1860s onwards as the gold finds proved less rewarding and men moved on to seek their fortune elsewhere. In his book, Climbs in the New Zealand Alps, published in 1896, E.A.Fitzgerald said:
“Gillespie’s Beach was reached about one o’clock and we lodged at the so-called Gillespie’s Beach hotel. This establishment consisted of a one-storied wooden shanty with the title in large letters over the entrance facing the sea. The accommodation must be scanty at best but we found that its resources extended so far to supply us not only with a cabbage but with real beef. This excited some surprise as we had come to regard mutton as the sole article of diet available in these districts. The little town stands about 20 yards from the beach where the great surf rolls in night and day with a thundering noise. The majority of the population so far as I could gather, consists of
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