From castle to cottage - memories of Havelock North identity Dorothy Dyson

Dorothy Dyson of Havelock North on her horse Gay.

Along Havelock Rd in the late 1960s you’d likely be met with the sight of a diminutive, bespectacled, elderly lady dressed in jodhpurs, felt hat - and sometimes wearing a very long coat - slowly pedalling a bike weighed down with a haybale on the carrier and saddle bags stuffed with grass.

Miss Dorothy (Dot) Dyson would be heading to Eastlea, the Tucker & Palmer’s orchard opposite St Andrew’s Rd, to feed three of her beloved horses.

I didn’t see her astride any of them but I’m assured she rode them in her earlier days. She had six or seven horses paddocked in odd corners on the outskirts of Havelock.

Jenny Gambrezziani says, “I remember her biking along with sacks of hay towering over her,” and Gillian Receveur remembers, “She had saddle bags on her bike and she used to cut long grass and take it to feed her horses.”

Miss Dyson was born at Abbots Royd, Barkisland, Yorkshire West Riding, England, on February 29, 1896, the daughter of Charles Jessop Dyson and Mary Annie Kathleen Browne. The Dysons were a dynasty of tea merchants.

Abbots Royd had been built by the Dyson family in the early 1800s. By the age of 4, Dot’s family were living at another of her father’s houses, Augill Castle in the Eden Valley in Cumbria.

Painting by William Boyd Reid of Dot Dyson leading her horse Gay. The painting belonged to Dot and was left to her friend Lynne Warren and later donated to the Havelock North Library by Lynne’s daughter Anne Slade. Photo / Hastings Libraries

Dot had been born premature and very small. Her mother was 19 when she married and from what Dot told trusted friend Lynne Warren, she wasn’t interested in her children.

Dot was sent to boarding school from an early age and she emphasised to Lynne how wrong she felt that was – for parents to absent themselves so totally from their growing children. Lastly there was a finishing school in France and by then Dot had determined to sever her ties with the Dyson family. Their wealth and property had no beneficial purpose for her - she spurned it all.

Dot would talk about their “nonsense life” – she’d no time for money and moneyed people.

Dot told Lynne that they didn’t love her and she didn’t love them – and she stood in front of a map and pointed to where she wanted to go, and she went – New Zealand.

How Dot ended up in Havelock North we don’t know, but there’s a vague awareness she did land-girl-type work early on. She didn’t spend on herself – her income, wherever it came from and however much it was, was reserved for her horses.

Physically Dot was a tiny lady who appeared to be frail – she wasn’t.

Early in life she contracted tuberculosis which left her with one damaged lung. Yet she manhandled hay bales, balanced her bike with a haybale on the back, either walking the laden bike up the hills or riding along the flat. And she had mental fortitude - friend Anne Slade says she was determined to prove to the world that she was tough, that she could manage by herself.

Another memory from Anne was that Dot went out in all weathers to attend to her horses – rain, wind and cold didn’t keep her inside.

When her mother died in 1940 a couple of lawyers made contact and visited Dot with the news she was due an inheritance. She told them “they’ve had nothing to do with me all these years and I’ll not have anything to do with them now.”

Over 45 years Dot occupied several cottages about Havelock.

In the 1930s she was on the corner of Lower Te Mata Rd and Davidson Rd.

Dot leased from Robert Clegg and after a time the Cleggs proposed that she continue to rent the cottage on its 10 acres, and they would use what she had already paid in rent and all forthcoming payments so that Dot would be purchasing the property.

Dot was furious. Not only did she refuse the offer but she vacated the property.

Lynne Warren said Dot refused to accept charity. She had determined that she would make it on her own - even to her own detriment.

In 1901 Dorothy Dyson’s father purchased Augill Castle in Cumbria as their family home.

In the early 1940s she lived in a cottage on the grounds of Mowbray Lodge, the home built by Frederick Villebois Lysaght and Francis Henry Moore for their widowed daughter and daughter-in-law.

From 1941 until just after 1960, Dot doggedly rode her bike up the hill every day – her home being in the trees on the southerly slope facing the top end of Muritai Cres.

In the early 1960s home was a small cottage at the back of Charles and Violet Watson’s home in Guthrie Rd. Joy Hanna recalls the regular and lengthy talks Dot and Joy’s father, Nobby Clarke, had over the fence.

Joy also recalls the stacks of chocolate Dot had – Cadbury’s Dairy Milk was the core part of her diet.

By 1963 Dot was in the cottage on a three-acre paddock on Iona Rd.

Don Clapperton remembers her veranda piled high with hay bales. A Woodford girl of the time recalls looking across to see Dot riding from Iona Rd into Margaret Ave on a large dark horse.

About then Dot made friends with the younger generation, which extended to her trusting the younger horse-mad local girls with her beloved horses. They helped in the paddock and rode the ponies.

One of the girls remembers, “Her old horse, Gay, was the piebald, the younger one was a skewbald. We used to canter past Gay sometimes to try to liven her up. Dorothy didn’t believe in doing more than a slow trot.”

Subdivision of the Iona Rd paddock meant Dot had to move and for the interim she was ensconced in a cottage at Russell Chambers’ Kopanga Station, and by 1969 she was in a council pensioner cottage on Anderson Park.

She was still out there feeding her horses though; she had bales of hay stacked inside at the kitchen door. Her friend, blacksmith Bob Given taught Dot to cook, but when Dr Brown found that Dot’s diet consisted of corned beef, boiled potatoes and copious amounts of chocolate he said to her “Miss Dyson, you need to include some greens”.

I was at Dot’s flat when, with a twinkle in her eye and a wry smile, she told me she now included a sprig of parsley.

Dot’s final move was to Waiapu House and she died in the Hastings War Memorial Hospital on August 8, 1980. Dot didn’t leave a will and it was left to her friend Lynne to sort out her very few possessions. One item was a painting done for her by Bill Reid that was later gifted to the Havelock North Library.

Dot’s life consisted of her commitment to her horses. We knew her by sight, and only by sight - for how many of us ever spoke with Dot? She had few friends but to those she trusted she had meaningful engagement. However, a kind word ventured out to Dot was met with a gentle, cheerful response and several remember their chats with her.

Her focus was the wellbeing of her horses and it must have been a hard moment for her that she wrote that upon her death her beloved horses were to be shot and buried with her.