AUCKLAND PIONEER.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 260, 2 November 1928, Page 8

AUCKLAND PIONEER.

MRS. FRANK ANDREW DEAD.

BORN HERE S2 YEARS AGO

SAW THE CITY GROW UP

One of the oldest Auckland- bora citizens, if not the oldest, Mrs. Frank Andrew, has just died at the £ge of 82. In spite of iier years she was active almost to the last, and passed peacefully away. In Kitchener Street, just near the top of Victoria Street East, there is a tiny Peter Pan sort of cottage new used as an antique shop. Hardly more than a packing case in size, alongside its big brick neighbour, the cottage is probably the oldest place in Auckland still lived in. It was to that cottage that Mr. John Watson, Auckland's iirst blacksmith, took his bride soon after Auckland was founded, and when Mrs. Andrew was born there in 1840, there were not above half a dozen houses in the infant town. Mrs. Andrew used to tell how she had heard her father say he had carried up every one of the bricks in the two little chimneys in two large Maori kits all the way up from the beach, which was then just about where the Victoria Arcade now stands.

Near the cottage, on the corner of Kitchener Street and Victoria Street, is a fruit shop, which is also one of the oldest buildings in Auckland. When Mrs. Andrew was a girl it used to be kept by a woman who had been cook for Governor Hobson. In lieu of wages this woman, through Lady Hobson, got a grant of a few acres of land up in Karangahape Road, then practically a wilderness, and Mrs. Andrew lived to see that property form part of a £40,000 bequest to one of the Auckland religious bodies. When a girl Mrs. Andrew used to go to the Church of England school in Emily Place, near Fort Britomart —and now not only the school has gone, but the whole of Britomart Point, which was cut down to fill in the reclamation upon which the freezing works were built. Mrs. Andrew used to say she had seen practically the whole of the Auckland of to-day grow up in her lifetime. As another instance of the primitive times she used to tell how dhe went for the milk to a little shop that stood aoout where the Bank of New Zealand now stands. Queen Street was then little more than a gully, and to reach the shop the little girl had to cross a hand bridge which spanned the creek flowing down the city's second most important street — for in" those days Shortland Street, or Crescent as it was called, was Auckland's principal thoroughfare.

After she was married to Mr. Frank Andrew she went to live at Otahuhu, where the family was very well known. Mr. Andrew was in business as a grain and produce merchant. Mrs. Andrew was closely identified with the Presbyterian Church, and the social life of the village, and she used to recall that she was the lirst chairwoman of the ladies' committee set up in Otahuhu to help Mr. W. F. Massey when he first stood for Parliament. Mrs. Andrew joined the Salvation Army when it first went to Otahuhu, and remained an adherent all her life, doing much good work in that capacity.

In latter years Mrs. Andrew lived with, her daughter, Mrs. G. Gladding, Maungawhau Road, Mount Eden. She leaves a large number of descendants. Six eons and three daughters mourn a good mother. The sons are Mr. H. Andrew (Te Awamutu), Mr. J. W. Andrew (Symonds Street, Auckland), Mr. Frank Andrew (Dominion Road), Mr. Fred Andrew (Otahuhu), Mr. W. Andrew (Remuera), Mr. Ben Andrew (Kohiniarama); and the daughters are, Mrs. Gladding and Mrs. J. Hunter (Otahuhu), and Mrs. J. Ferguson (Remuera).