Wairarapa Midweek, Tuesday, March 29, 2005
– Margaret Christiansen
The first house in Worksop Road, number 21, is to be converted for commercial use as offices. That was built as residence for an early last century mayor of Masterton, Mayor Hessey, who had a street just around the block named after him. Nobody seems to have commented, though, on the residence there, at a later date from around the 1920s or 30s, of one of Masterton’s most popular physiotherapists, Mrs Marian Bishop. Mrs Bishop must have been quite a rarity in her day. Her husband, Billy Bishop, was employed at Fagan’s garage just around the corner in Dixon Street.
Number 21 is truly a most impressive house, with enormous high studs, around 13 feet, pressed zinc ceilings in the principal rooms which are vast, the two halls in a L-shape, and impressive rimu joinery alcoves and pillars delineating the large sets of windows in some of those rooms. I’m quite familiar with the house because our daughter and her husband bought it in the 1980s from the estate after Mrs Bishop died.
Sadly, it was in a neglected state. The kitchen and service area was shockingly badly designed and maintained, cold because it faced the southeast. The old washhouse, (out the kitchen door and across an open porch) still had its wooden tubs and a copper whose chimney had been home to starlings and their families for years undisturbed. Upgrading the kitchen joinery and installing a wood burning stove in what was to become a breakfast room was first priority, just to get some warmth in the place. Our son-in-law knocked out the copper and used the bricks to make a real heat-sink of the expanded back porch area floor, soon glassed-in with French doors.
That part of the house at least faced the right way to the west, whereas all the vast reception rooms, there were two, faced either south or east, the southerly-facing one even having a big, but prettily iron laced veranda to cut out even more of the sun. Even when the family’s full concert-sized grand piano was placed in the reception room next to the kitchen – it had probably originally been the dining room – you could still have staged a concert or held a dance in there. The two lesser bedrooms and a small study/library were all on the west side, so at least got the afternoon sun, if any. The master bedroom, however, duly faced south to the street.
Those alignments were the proper way to do domestic arrangements in those days, regardless of the fact that fireplaces had to be installed in most rooms to keep out the cold. There couldn’t have been any shortage of firewood and coal in the early 1900s, that’s sure. Tucked away in a cupboard in one of the reception rooms, which I guess Mrs Bishop used as her clinic, we found old-fashioned physio equipment including the odd heat lamp with lethal-looking frayed red cotton cords and plugs which looked suspiciously badly earthed. The most difficult problem with the handsome old place, however, was the huge sagging of its piles. Fortunately a local tradesman nobly and successfully undertook the levelling job. He had to lift the front corner on the southwest side by a whole 13 inches.
Now number 21 is to become a commercial property. I hope the new tenants will keep their premises gracious and dignified still. The place almost got uplifted and taken to Palmerston North as a restaurant a few years back. Now that really would have been a shame.
