The photo is a rough scan from an Alexander Turnbull Library image, via the Avondale History Groups collection now with the Avondale-Waterview Historical Society. The ad comes from the NZ Herald 31 July 1920. The following is an article Im piecing together for the Avondale Spiders Web. On the land bounded today by Patiki and Rosebank Roads, with State Highway 16 cutting along the Waitemata foreshore – there was once a farm associated with bells for twenty years at the beginning of the 20th century: a family named Bell, and a horse named Gold Bell, completely not connected. Henry James Bell, born in London in 1845, came to settle in Avondale with his family in the late 1860s. From 1878, he and a chap named R Gemmell operated the Riversdale Tannery in conjunction with local landowner and Presbyterian Church elder John Buchanan just upriver from the Whau Bridge, until around 1885. He may have taken up work with the Ireland Brothers tannery at Panmure for a time, then moved down country to Mangapiko near Pirongia. His first wife died, and Henry returned to Auckland in 1905, remarried, and came back to Avondale, buying part of Daniel Pollen’s estate in 1907. There he farmed until he died in 1915. His Avondale farm, there at the end of Rosebank, was bought by a farmer from the Hawkes Bay named Thomas Roe in 1918. Roe however was not just a farmer. Since the 1880s, he had been involved with training and breeding trotting horses in the Poverty Bay and Gisborne areas, and from 1907 became associated with a horse in particular – Gold Bell. Up to 1913, Roe raced Gold Bell, with considerable success, and in 1914 stood the horse for stud at Sylvia Park. By 1920, Roe had established “Bell Farm” at his Rosebank Peninsula land in Avondale, standing Gold Bell there and establishing a lineage that extended through the rest of the century among Standardbreds. He subdivided and sold the farm in 1927, moving to Mangere to train and breed horses, and become part of Auckland trotting history. The photograph shows what appears to have been a driveway off Rosebank Road to the left, rather than Patiki Road, so this would have been from the centre of Roe’s Bell Farm, c.1920. By 1940, the house still existed, but the open fields to the right had been converted to market gardens, the aerial showing the lines of the furrows where once horses galloped and nibbled grass. Today, the view is covered by industrial and commercial buildings.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 03:21:09 +0000
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