The Town and Country Women’s Club (Former) is located at 25b Fitzherbert Street, Gisborne, in a prosperous suburb of the city. Close to the Waimata River, the land on which the building stands has been subdivided, so the property no longer has access to the riverbank. While the surrounding landscape has changed since the house was built circa 1901, it is still possible to get a sense of the grand scale of this gentleman’s home, and the handsome face it presented to the world.
According to Dr John William Williams, the house was built for Mr Henry Mason, from Hawke’s Bay. Mason lived in the house for about two years when Williams purchased the house and land in 1903. This general area of Whataupoko had been acquired by the New Zealand Native Land Settlement Company Ltd in 1883. While they quickly moved to survey and section parts of the land, including the land on which the nearby Wyllie Cottage (Record no. 814) stands, Williams says that it wasn’t until 1900 that the land between Fitzherbert Street and the junction of the Taruheru, Waimata and Turanganui Rivers was sectioned and sold, after being offered to the Borough Council for a botanical gardens at a sum of £2000. As Williams writes, ‘Ours was the best section in the block. It would have been an ideal place for ornamental gardens. It was lucky for us that the Council turned it down.’ From Williams’s unpublished autobiography, it is clear that Mason’s house was only one storey and in the same basic location as the existing building.
Dr John William Williams was a general practitioner who first settled in Gisborne in December 1892. Son of John William Williams, who was brother of Archdeacon Leonard William Williams, Williams married Jessie Mackie Williamson in 1899 at Holy Trinity Church in Gisborne. He purchased the medical practice of Dr Laing, who moved to Auckland, with the financial assistance of his uncle, Samuel Williams, the wealthy Hawke’s Bay pastoralist. As well as assisting the community in his capacity as a doctor, Williams was active in local body politics, sitting on the local council and running for mayor against W.D. Lysnar in 1908, for example. He was also a company director for Adair Bros. Williams and his wife initially lived in Peel Street, Gisborne, and in 1903 they began looking for another house, purchasing the property and house from Henry Mason for £400 (£200 for the land and £200 for the house).
As Williams writes in his autobiography, ‘We thought the house not big enough and decided to put on an upper storey. Uncle Sam again came to my aid and lent me the necessary money. A contract was let to Walter Clayton, the builder, for £600. He was also to add two rooms on the ground floor and built over them too.’ The builder was Walter Henry Clayton and the contract was let before September 1903, when Williams and his wife travelled to Dunedin for a hernia operation. The trip was also useful in terms of the new home. As Williams writes, ‘We spent a day or two in Napier with my people and chose mantelpieces for our new house. Also in Wellington we chose wallpapers.’ The house was ready by December 1903, and it included a surgery for Williams’s medical practice. The drawing room was upstairs, and the adult Williams’s had a bedroom with their children sharing another. In 1904 Williams recalls spending the Winter laying out the garden, which involved planting trees, and converting the previous owner’s vegetable garden into lawn. He mentions that part of the section was a yard for the family’s two horses, located on the bank of the Waimata River and flooded when the tide rose, but at the time of writing (in the 1940s) silted up and planted in lawn.
Williams writes that due to the generosity of his uncle Samuel Williams, who suggested that he stop paying interest on the loan for the Fitzherbert Street property, he was able to transfer the property to his wife, Jessie Williams, and take out a life insurance policy for £1500. This is confirmed by a LINZ report. Williams’s autobiography mentions a number of other events that affected life in the Fitzherbert Street house, such as the big flood of 1910 and an earthquake in 1914. But these don’t seem to have had any significant effect on the house itself. There is a document in the archives of the Gisborne District Council that purports to be notes made from Williams’s autobiography, which offers a more detailed description of the house. Some of this can be independently verified by reading Williams’s text, but other details do not seem to be as clearly spelled out by Williams as this summary would suggest.
In December 1947 the house was sold to Dr Cedric Walter Isaac and his wife Kathleen Mary Isaac. Dr Isaac was also a medical practitioner, and it seems likely that he used the house in a similar way to Dr Williams, having his surgery downstairs while his family lived in the rest of the building. This connection proved to be critical for the building, since it was Kathleen Isaac who was responsible for offering her house to the Town and Country Women’s Club as their clubrooms after her husband passed away.
The Town and Country Women’s Club officially opened on Friday 26 February 1954. According to one member, there was no social club for women in Gisborne in the early 1950s. Men could join the Poverty Bay Club, which provided them with a place to relax and refresh, in a time when the roads were not very good, and country people would often have to stay overnight in town, either at the Masonic Hotel or in cottages at Wainui Beach. A number of Station owners’ wives when meeting at social occasions in Gisborne talked of a need for women to have a social club of their own. As Dorothy Clark said to a reporter in 1954, 'There seemed to be nowhere in Gisborne where one could have a quiet cup of tea or a chat to a friend. The only place for women to go were the busy milk-bars and tearooms, nowhere that countrywomen could perhaps change a frock and freshen up when they came to Gisborne before going on to a party, or visiting. Another member stated that ‘We all felt a club of this type would be of enormous benefit - something of our own.’
According to club archives, a group of women gathered on 29 October 1953 to discuss the idea of the social club. These women included Mrs Victor Savage Mrs Percy Barker, Mrs Dick Parker, Mrs Alex White, Mrs John Clark, and Mrs Doug Hain.’ An acting committee was formed, and the women were responsible for ringing other women in their area and canvassing the level of interest. Another meeting was called on 27 November 1953. Norma Morice writes, ‘From this meeting of 50 it was decided to form the club to be called The Town & Country Womens Club, and to lease for 8 years, rooms in Craig’s building in Gladstone Road adjacent to the old Kings Theatre.’ The club had 265 members, who each paid four guineas membership fee. There was a hostess, called Jean Bird, who was paid £6 10 shillings a week, and a ‘char lady’ who cleaned the whole building. The club was open from 9.30am to 5.30pm Monday to Friday, and 9.30 am to 6.30pm on Fridays.
Kathleen Isaac was a member of the inaugural committee of the Town and Country Women’s Club, and when her husband passed away she offered the house in Fitzherbert Street to the organisation for their clubrooms. The price was £4150, and it was paid for by club members taking debentures, many of which were never redeemed, along with different fund raising activities. Isaac converted the first storey of the house into a self contained flat, which she leased from the club for £7 a week. After Isaac passed away, the flat was occupied by her niece, Dorothy Rouse, who started a hairdressing business called Dorothy Rose in the apartment. Conveniently located, club members could simply walk upstairs to have their hair done. The apartment was let to various tenants by the Town and Country Women’s Club, who used the income to fund their activities. The flat is entered through an external staircase. It has a kitchen, toilet, laundry and bathroom, two bedrooms, a large room with a bay window and French door leading to a balcony and fire escape, and another large room facing Fitzherbert Street. The large room with French doors was used for the hairdressing salon. The downstairs of the building features a large kitchen, a library and a lounge, originally one room, a smaller lounge, called the Committee Room, which faces Fitzherbert Street, two toilets and a shower, plus the staircase. The main entrance is in the middle of the north (front) façade, and the smaller entrance to the right is used as a storeroom.
The purchase of the house included land running down to the Waimata River. Very valuable because of its proximity to town and scenic potential, the land was subdivided and sold in 1961, with the new section’s right of way on the club land.
In 1976 Alan Kilpatrick, builder and joiner, was contracted to alter the building, principally by enclosing the verandah on the lower level and thus increasing the size of the library and main lounge. Kilpatrick also altered the egress to the flat upstairs, and built the ramp and porch at the front of the house. In 2003 the building received a number of general repairs and new spouting to celebrate the club’s fiftieth jubilee, and was repainted with an appropriate heritage colour scheme.
The Town and Country Women’s Club occupied the building until 2011 when the building was sold to new owners.
