By C W Malcolm
During my eight years as headmaster of the Netherton School, I searched the history of the district. It is interesting that Captain James Cook with pinnace and longboat explored the river to that point before returning down stream to the ENDEAVOUR lying in the Firth which he named THAMES.
Captain Cook would not have known it as NETHERTON for that name was unknown in 1769. Its name was TE KOPURU and the first European settler changed it to NETHERTON, the place in England he had emigrated from. His reason for so doing was the confusion, particularly concerning the mails, with another Te Kopuru, north of Auckland.
Readers of the NZ HERALD of 3 October 1995 might have been surprised by a photograph and its accompanying caption: "Mystery from the seabed - a 5.6 metre long ship anchor pulled from Wellington Harbour has marine experts puzzling . . . its long chain has the words `HINGLEY' and `NETHERTON' etched on it."
For me there is no mystery at least as to where that anchor chain was made. In 1978 while on a visit to England, I "explored" the town of NETHERTON in the industrial Midlands, not more than six miles from Wolverhampton or nine from Birmingham, and spent some time in HINGLEY'S FOUNDRY where the anchor chain for the TITANIC was made and its anchor was assembled.
Indeed, Netherton is historically notable for even more than that: the late Lord Cobham when Governor-General of New Zealand, in one of his speeches stated that "from Netherton came the anchor chains which were used in Drake's ships which defeated the Armada."
The management at HINGLEY'S informed me (1978) that they had not manufactured anchor chains or anchors for eight years past, having diverted production to meet other demands.
Is this the NETHERTON from which Samuel Chalton came? For I have discovered another Netherton in England. It lies about six miles almost due north of Liverpool on the A5207.
Our Editor supplies the answer. I am grateful to him for obtaining information from Wise’s Directory whose entry on Netherton states that Samuel Chalton came from "the industrial village of Netherton in the ‘Black Country’." This establishes the fact that the Netherton I explored in 1978 is the one from which our Netherton is named.
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