Early history of the site
The northern shores of the Waitemata Harbour are of significance to several iwi, having been explored and occupied since early human arrival in New Zealand. According to oral tradition, the Arawa canoe under Tama Te Kapua investigated the Waitemata. The Tainui canoe also landed at Te Hau Kapua (Torpedo Bay) in present-day Devonport before travelling to its eventual heartland in the Waikato. Recorded archaeological sites at Ngataringa Bay, Stanley Bay and the west Devonport foreshore include middens and oven stones. Following Ngapuhi incursions in the 1820s, much of the North Shore was depopulated, assisting its purchase by the British Crown after formal colonisation in 1840. A small Maori settlement at Te Hau Kapua remained inhabited until 1863.
In the 1840s, a British naval station was established at the foot of Victoria Road. Crown land was subdivided into suburban farms in 1850 and went on sale in 1853. Although settlement intensified around nuclei in Church Street and subsequently Victoria Road, large-scale development emerged primarily during the economic boom of the 1870s and 1880s. With the establishment of good quality ferry services to and from Auckland, Devonport became a well-established residential suburb and a significant seaside resort in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The site on which the house at 14 Glen Road was constructed lay on the Stanley Bay peninsula, to the west of the main centre of colonial settlement in Devonport. Located to the north of Calliope Road, the site formed part of Allotment 31, one of two adjoining allotments for which Crown Grants were issued in 1854 to Thomas Outhwaite, Registrar of the Supreme Court. In 1882, sections were offered for sale in the Sunnyside estate. Three adjoining sites were bought in 1885 by miner Moses Moralee (c.1856-87) who died in Western Australia’s Kimberly goldfields shortly after.
The three-lot holding was jointly purchased in August 1899 by sisters Harriet Pegler (c.1865-1939) and Eliza Laybourn (c.1863-1943), possibly financed by an inheritance from their late father Atkinson Tiplady (c.1827-1893) a Hillsborough farmer. Harriet was the wife of salesman and saddle maker Llewellyn James Pegler (c.1858-1926). The son of an Onehunga boot-maker, Pegler worked for many years for the Auckland firm J. Wiseman and Son wholesale saddlers and leather merchants, later going into business on his own account as a saddle manufacturer (circa 1913). A deeply religious man, Pegler was active in the temperance movement and in later life sat on the Police Court Bench as a Justice of the Peace.
In 1899 there were few houses in the Stanley Bay area - other than those along Calliope Road, one of the main residential streets in Devonport collectively said to be occupied chiefly by the families of city men whose homes were entirely removed and differing in aspect from the scene of their labours across the harbour. In late 1899 the Council resolved to proceed with formation of Glen Road, conditional on Messrs Pegler and Laybourn contributing £10 towards the cost.
Construction of house (circa 1901-2)
In August 1901, Harriet and Eliza divided their joint holding into two prior to building adjoining family homes, each occupying one-and-a-half lots. Construction of the single-storey Pegler villa may have signified a change in the family’s social status. The 1902 electoral roll gives Llewellyn’s occupation as ‘accountant’, rather than ‘saddler’ as appears in street directory listings of 1903 and 1904.
In 1901, Harriet extended her holding with the purchase of adjoining Lot 32 fronting Russell Street. Promotion of the Stanley Point / Sunnyside area was to make the locality a major centre of residential growth in Devonport Borough by 1903. Properties advertised as ‘nicely situated’ were five minutes’ walk from the ferry service at Stanley Bay wharf, and had access to electric tram services.
In 1902, the Pegler and Laybourn homes were two of only four houses in Glen Road. The villa occupied by Harriet and Llewellyn Pegler and their two infant sons incorporated a corner turret, a Queen Anne-style element. Verandah columns incorporating Corinthian capitals reflected a popular late-Victorian taste for Classical Italianate detailing and conveyed the growing status and material achievement of a rising urban middle-class. Internally, dressed beaded boards of kauri timber were placed horizontally - fair face to the wall cavity - to form a draught-proof sarking.
The Pegler house contained a drawing room, a dining room, a kitchen, a bathroom and three bedrooms off a central hall. The third bedroom occupied a substantial rectangular lean-to at the rear of the house. The kitchen was linked by a porch to a side entrance. Across the yard was a washhouse with a copper; a separate building containing the water closet; and a larger outbuilding.
The bay villa style is said to have reached the peak of its popularity between 1895 and 1910. Many structures were of ornate design, employing mass-produced joinery manufactured in local mills such as that of the Kauri Timber Company in central Auckland.
The identity of the building contractor for the Pegler residence is not known. James Logan of the well-known Devonport-based boat-building company, a local builder operating in a small speculative way, undertook a number of residential projects in the street in 1904. Houses of the era were predominantly erected from stock plans supplied by the timber companies or taken from plan books, and were principally built by small building firms employing two or three men.
Subsequent use
Harriet Pegler sold the property to Margaret Eliza Bramley (1876-1914) in 1903. The absence of a recorded mortgage suggests that Margaret may have had financial resources of her own.
Margaret, her husband William Harry Bramley (1875-1948) and their two young sons became the new occupiers. By this time, the number of households in Glen Road had doubled to eight, the breadwinners predominantly in blue-collar occupations - mariner, shipwright, coach fitter, line-engineer. Although the Bramley family occupied the property for two decades, little is known of their life in Auckland. Harry, who gave his occupation as ‘gentleman’ or ‘settler’, became a member of the Auckland Kennel Club, and was elected to the executive of the Stanley Bay Ratepayers’ Association in 1921.
From New Plymouth, the family were part of Taranaki’s Pakeha-settler social network. The couple had married in 1897 at Margaret’s parents’ farm at Tikorangi, an outlying rural settlement founded in 1865 by militia families led by Margaret’s father Captain John Henry Armstrong (c.1834-1915). Armstrong was the son of a Church of Ireland minister and from a family with a long military tradition. A number of Margaret’s uncles were captains in the Taranaki Militia.
Harry Bramley had moved to Taranaki in the 1880s after the 1876 death of his father, a Rangiora farmer. Harry’s two sisters had married into prosperous families. Annie (1867?-1956) was a daughter-in-law of a late Superintendent of the Taranaki Province, Henry Robert Richmond (1829-90) of the influential Richmond-Atkinson family. Amy (1869-1947) was a daughter-in-law of a late Australian Premier and Colonial Secretary, Sir Charles Cowper (1807-75).
Retaining the Glen Road home on one-and-a-half lots, Margaret Bramley sold Lot 132 fronting Russell Street in 1906. Margaret died prematurely, in 1914 three years after the birth of the couple’s third child.
Staying on at Glen Road, Harry married Grace Eveline Sallabank (1874-1976) in 1917. Margaret and Harry’s three sons, including the eldest - Maurice (1898-1975), still lived at the house in 1918. Moving to Australia in the mid-1920s Maurice became a respected commercial artist and illustrator, working principally for what became Sun Newspapers and magazines including The World’s News. His poster ‘Join Us in a Victory Job,’ published in 1943 by the Department of National Service during the Second World War (1939-45), was reproduced as an Australian postage stamp in 1991. Cover illustrations produced from the early 1950s until the early 1970s for war, western and superhero comics are keenly collected today. A meticulous draughtsman, Bramley excelled with pen portraits of prominent war personalities, and took over illustration of Horwitz’s The Phantom Commando series shortly after commencement of the title in 1959.
In 1923, Harry Bramley sold 14 Glen Road having taken out mortgages in 1919 and 1921. For the next three decades, the address was the family home of John William Dance (d.1952) and his wife Edith. Dance was involved in the establishment of Bricks Limited (1926), a Ngaruawahia-based brick-and-tile-making venture liquidated in 1930 during the Great Depression.
Changing hands in 1953, the house was later rented out. A garage was erected at the front in 1967, by which time the two neighbouring houses had been demolished to expand Stanley Bay Primary School. The residence at 14 Glen Road avoided a similar fate in the 1970s when a planned residential development of Ngataringa Bay did not proceed. By this time the original kitchen and bathroom had been converted to a dining room and a store room respectively. A kitchen and a pantry occupied a rear verandah; and the bathroom and toilet, the lean-to bedroom.
Reflecting a movement towards the gentrification of Auckland’s older suburbs and an emerging awareness of Devonport’s heritage in the 1970s, 14 Glen Road was one of 64 residences identified as representing the character and diversity of earlier Devonport.
The property was purchased in 1974 by architect Jeremy Salmond and anthropologist Dr Anne Salmond. The house was blessed by Ngati Porou elder Eruera Stirling; Dr Salmond had worked with Eruera Stirling and his wife Amiria of the iwi Te Whanau-a-Apanui in the 1970s, producing three important anthropological works. These were Amiria: The Life Story of a Maori Woman, (1976); Hui: A Study of Maori Ceremonial Gatherings, (1976); and, Eruera: The Teachings of a Maori Elder, (c, 1980). Conservation of the villa commenced in 1974-5. French doors were added from the living, dining (original kitchen) and rear bedroom to new verandahs. The run-down state of the makeshift kitchen and bathroom resulted in remodelling undertaken in 1980. A modest dining room extension provided for family living; and an en suite bedroom was developed within an expanded roof space. Two outbuildings were demolished, although the privy was retained. The 1994 construction of a garage with loft enabled the eventual removal of the 1960s garage.
By Jeremy Salmond’s own account, the need to understand the house, the dimensions of timber, proportions of windows and doors, and the classical language of mouldings, substantially contributed to his knowledge as a professional heritage architect. During this period Jeremy’s book, Old New Zealand Houses 1800-1940 (1986) was published. The first in-depth study of development of the New Zealand house, the book became the recognised authority on matters of style, form and materials in vernacular domestic architecture. It was published at a time when the New Zealand Historic Places Trust (NZHPT) was consciously classifying examples of typical houses as well as those considered special because of historical association or unusual architectural skill in design.
The villa at 14 Glen Road subsequently featured in several photographs illustrating Di Stewart’s history, The New Zealand Bay Villa: Past and Present (1992); and was captured by noted architectural photographer Patrick Reynolds in Villa: From Heritage to Contemporary (2009) to which Jeremy Salmond also contributed.
Through their professional lives, writing, and representation on various bodies, including the NZHPT, the Salmonds were to make a major contribution to development and understanding of the nation’s cultural and historic heritage. Anne, a Distinguished Professor in Maori Studies at the University of Auckland whose further written works include Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans 1642-1772, (1991); and, Between Worlds: Early Exchanges Between Maori and Europeans 1773-1815 (1996), was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire for Services to New Zealand History in 1995. In 2007 Jeremy Salmond, a Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Architects, was made a member of the Queen’s Service Order for services to conservation of historic heritage.
The property remains in private ownership.
