from hunting forays in the nearby hills. Grandfather Fred Williams, of Welsh descent, may have started with nothing but he was, in his more mature years, a man of style.
Household schools were the norm in isolated areas in the early days until the population in an area grew sufficiently to warrant a school being built. It was 1929 before the school at Weheka was established. In the interim a household school existed in both the Williams and later the Sullivan households with the teacher, usually a local girl, staying with the family.
As the only married couple at Weheka, Julia and Fred Williams had become well-known as the place to stay. Of her five daughters, not all were available to assist her as they were sent off, one by one, in their teens to boarding school at St Columbkille’s Convent in Hokitika, “to be finished off.” Three of the five Williams girls would later enter the Mercy Order as teaching nuns. The day and boarding schools of this Convent, staffed by nuns from Ireland, had first opened in 1879.
In the early 1920s, only five rivers on the 90 mile journey from Hokitika were bridged which left seven major river crossings to present a challenge for the first motorcars to come south. Mick Sullivan had the honour of owning the first car, an Overland Ford, to make it as far as Weheka in May, 1921. At this time, the road beween Waiho (Franz Josef) and Weheka (Fox Glacier) was little better than a track. When Fred Williams returned from a trip to England in 1924, he brought back a Crossley motorcar, replaced by a stately Morris Isis 6 in 1929.
My mother, Julia’s daughter, related that when the weather was wet for weeks on end it was impossible to get the washing dry. When this occurred, the only remedy was to remove the bed linen after use by guests, sprinkle the sheets with lavender water, iron them with hot irons heated on top of the wood-burning stove, and recycle them
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