HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 

 

 During the early years of European settlement in Matakana, the local clay was used for brick making. One such small brickworks was located on a site very close to where Morris & James now stands, revealed by the presence of broken bricks and pieces of coal embedded in the riverbank. A contemporary letter from a neighbouring settler reveals the proprietor to have been George Manners and pinpoints the date as 1864. A good impression of the probable appearance of this brick works can be gained from the photograph shown below, provided by Val Gunson of Whangarei who was a participant in one of our daily factory tours. It shows the brick works owned by her grandfather Frederick Chell in the village of Apiti in the Manawatu. The horse gin that provided the motive power can be clearly seen. This drove a machine called a “pug mill” which is concealed behind wooden shuttering. The pug mill chopped, mixed and compressed the clay downwards until it emerged from a hole at the bottom. The man standing in the trench would take the pugged clay and force it into a wooden mould to form the brick. The “hack barrows” in the foreground were used to take the bricks to the drying “hacks”, probably under the shingle roofs to the right of the picture. The photograph shows stacks of firewood to be burned in the kiln, but not the kiln itself. This is a pity, because very little is known for certain about how early brick makers in New Zealand fired their products. Descendants of the Manners family discovered that George’s father John, who had a brick works in nearby Brick Bay, used a “beehive shaped” kiln of Cornish design, and it is likely that the kiln at Matakana would have been similar. The Cornish connection is understandable, since the copper mines on Kawau Island employed a large number of Cornishmen. Incidentally, the former Medical Officer for the mining company, Dr. Daniel Pollen, also owned a brick works – in Avondale, Auckland. The beehive shape of the kiln is surprising, since most simple brick kilns were rectangular in shape. One explanation could be that the kiln was built of rammed earth instead of bricks. Historian Jack Diamond thought this was the case, since he believed he had found indications of a kiln of this type at Cowan’s Bay on the Mahurangi River. An engineering drawing of such a kiln built in Kent in the 1840’s, is still in existence. George Manners’ brick works was not a commercial success and soon closed down. It is probably significant that the more successful Frederick Chell was primarily a bricklayer and his brickworks allowed him to cut out the middleman. George would have had to sell his bricks to builders merchants in Auckland, where he would have been in competition with larger manufacturers who were already using steam powered machinery. 

 

Brick chimney on Kawau Island	Old bricks found near the Morris & James Pottery	Frederick Chell's Brickworks  in Apiti, Manawatu.