COOK'S MEMORIAL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 129, 2 June 1934, Page 7 (Supplement)

COOK'S MEMORIAL.

HIS FATHER'S HOUSE. AUSTRALIA'S TRIBUTE. PROGRESS OF THE PROJECT. The house built by the father of Captain James Cook in 1755 in the village of Great Ayton has been taken down, packed into 1000 wooden boxes weighing altogether 150 tons, and is now in Australia. The house will be re-erected according to charts which accompanied it, in time for Prince Henry's visit to Melbourne during the forthcoming centenary celebrations in the autumn. When the property was advertised for sale, the idea was conceived in Australia that there was no better way of marking the hundredth anniversary of the State of Victoria and the city of Melbourne than by obtaining, for the new land "down under," this house in which the explorer visited his parents before he embarked upon his second voyage in the Resolution in 1772. Unfortunately, there were no funds for such a project. It was not possible in the time available for any Government appropriation to be made, and so a private citizen, Russell Grimwade, member of a pioneer family, undertook to provide the money. The next step was to advise the AgentGeneral for Victoria, Richard Linton. At this juncture two days only remained before the sale, and the outlook appeared hopeless when it was discovered that a condition of the sale was that the cottage must not be removed from its site. Diplomacy was used to reverse this condition to the less stern edict that the cottage should not be taken outside the British Empire. Within two days an architect examined the house and gave an opinion as to the feasibility of its removal. Through the co-operation of the owners, in whose family the cottage had been for sixty years, the purchase was completed—in the face of a larger offer from America, j

The land on which the cottage stood was made a gift to the Victorian Government by the vendors of the house and by a second transfer was handed over to the Middlesbrough Council as a people's park. There, to mark the centenary in Britain, a duplicate of the granite obelisk which has been built on Cape Everard on the coast of Victoria, the first Australian land sighted by Captain Cook, is to be erected by the Victorian Government. Two North Yorkshire villages are intimately associated with Captain Cook, whose father was an agricultural labourer of Scottish descent and whose mother was a Yorkshire woman. The explorer was born at Marton in Yorkshire in 1728, and went to live at Great Ayton in 1736, when only 8 years old. The house in which Cook was born was pulled down 140 years ago, and the present cottage was built by Cook's father when the explorer was 27 years of age.