Poneke,
an advertiser on the 1893 New Zealand Second Sideface Issue
Be Sure You Ask For Poneke Potted Meats
Poneke Beef Extract / The Best & Cheapest
Use Only Poneke Table Jelly
Introduction
Poneke has been the most mysterious advertiser on the 1893 New
Zealand Second Sideface issue, because we have had the brand (Poneke) but no known owner
of said brand. Thus the overarching goal of this review was to try to infer who that owner might
be. This task included investigating
many aspects: the nature of Poneke’s products, the geographic extent of their
advertising, the distribution and packaging of meat products as the turn of the
century approached, and the Poneke name itself. Along the way we discover a few
interesting tidbits. But one new discovery (the Woodville supplement) proved to be vital and led another researcher to rigorously solve this one hundred-year-old mystery (see the article by Robert Lyon in the June 2021 issue of the New Zealand Collector).
Caveat
Two sources were not available to this author: Otley’s unpublished
manuscript (reported by [Robb2006]) and a history of
the Gear Meat Pie [WarwickJohnton],
which would be sure to improve this review.
Advertisements
For their stamp advertisements, Poneke highlighted three
products, as follows.
·
Table jellies: soft, clear, gelatinous table deserts usually
prepared with fruit flavours and brightly coloured. Jellies, even in the most
modest households, were commonly produced in extraordinarily decorative moulds,
often with multi-coloured layers [FoodsOfEngTabJell].
The gelatin was obtained from animal bones, skin or feet boiled in water [MadeHowGel].
·
Meat extract: highly concentrated juices from cooked meat. Its
form was liquid in this era [WikiOxo].
Meat extract was used to add meat flavour in cooking, teas, and to make broth
for soups and other liquid-based foods. [WikiMeatExtract]
·
Potted meat: cooked meat and (originally) stored in large jars
with the fat from cooking poured onto and around the meat which cooled into a
hard shell. This hard shell (especially around the jar opening) tended to block
bacteria and keep the meat from decomposition. The meat was often puréed,
minced, or ground; and seasoned. [WikiPottedMeat] [DelightCookPotMeat]
In newspapers, just two Poneke advertisements may be
discerned:
·
From 19 August 1893 [AuckandStar1893Aug19P4]
to 25 November 1893 [AucklandStar1893Nov25P4],
Poneke ran the following single design in a single newspaper, the Auckland Star.
This advert conveys much the same information as the stamp adverts:
 |
Copyright Fairfax Media, protected by a Creative Commons New Zealand BY-NC-SA licence. |
·
A single advert in a supplement is included in the Woodville
Examiner [WoodvilleExa1893Sep04P1].
This supplement contains the most informative material available:
o
“.Poneke.” (inside a flattened diamond)
was reportedly trademarked
o
The advert provides testimonials from:
§
W.R. Boyd, Physician for Outpatients, Melbourne Hospital, Huddle
St, Richmond, written 24 May 1892
§
C.H. Molloy, Medical Superintendent, Melbourne Hospital, written
22 May 1892
§
D.E. Stewart, Campsey, Blyth St, Brunswick [Melbourne], written
27 April 1892
§
Each of these doctors did exist and held the indicated position:
Boyd [MelAge1891Aug20P6],
Malloy [MelHerald1894Jun02P1]
and Stewart [CoburgLead1891Feb11P1]
[CoburgLead1894Mar31P2]
o
Other potentially-useful information includes:
§
the Beef Extracts kept “good for many days after being opened”
§
“Sold by all Storekeepers and Chemists in three sizes, 1s 1d, 2s,
and 3s 6d”
§
““Poneke” brand potted meats / Ham and Chicken, Ham and Tongue /
Potted Meat, Potted Ham / To be had of all Grocers and Storekeepers”
o
It was printed by Bock & Co., which, at the time, was managed
purely by W.R. Bock, operating out of Lambton Quay, Wellington [CycloWell1897Bock]
§
Note: W.R. Bock “was responsible for the design and
preparation of the dies for the first fiscal and postage stamps to be produced
wholly within the colony” (such as the 2/- and 5/- designs of the First
Sidefaces) [TeAraBock].
o
In another case this author has seen an editorial article
referring to a supplement included in the same newspaper issue, but that
supplement apparently was not preserved and certainly is not part of the online
record. We can extrapolate from this observation and speculate that Poneke
might have advertised, via supplement, in other towns’ newspapers (perhaps
around Woodville such as Palmerston North or Napier), but the supplements are
long lost to history.
 |
Credit: National Library of New Zealand |
Geography
Finding a common denominator between Auckland, Woodville and
Melbourne in this era is non-trivial. The main trunk line was not yet complete [WikiMainTrunk]
so Auckland connected to the south via coastal steamer to New Plymouth (and
Wellington) [WikiMartonNewPly]
[CoastalTrade].
Woodville had been recently connected via railway to Longburn near Palmerston
North (and thence New Plymouth or Wellington after a change of trains) [WikiPalmNor].
Melbourne of course required a voyage from Wellington or Auckland; and getting
from Woodville to Melbourne required two train journeys and one voyage (if via
Wellington) or two voyages (if via New Plymouth and Auckland).
Meanwhile [Robb2006] reports that
Otley (in an unpublished manuscript) and Robertson [Robertson2000]
both identify that Poneke is a Maori phonetic transliteration of Port
Nick (Port Nicholson, now renamed Wellington Harbour), so a connection to
Wellington is most likely.
The argument for Wellington as the nexus of operations can
then be summarized as:
·
Wellington – uniquely – connects via a single voyage or a
two-train journey to each of the other locales
·
The name Poneke clearly points to Wellington
·
The printer Bock operates in Wellington only.
|
The Melbourne hypothesis
Before we commit to Wellington, it is noteworthy that all
the testimonials in the Woodville supplement are written a year earlier, and
hark from Melbourne. This suggests that the Poneke business could have
been started in Melbourne, or even had its base of operations there. However,
from the Australian papers of the era, it is hard to find any relevant usage
of Poneke since the entries are confined to:
·
News about the famous Poneke football club of Wellington
·
Poneke as a synonym for Port Nicholson
·
The pen-name of a Sydney columnist writing about yachting and
rowing, e.g. [AustralianStar1891Oct17P9].
Presumably the author is an ex-pat Wellingtonian.
·
The name of a house on Alma St in Melbourne. The resident Clark
family returned to New Zealand in 1895 and presumably they first heralded
from Wellington too. [MelArgus1895Jan09P2]
Further, there is no trademark for
Poneke issued in the state of Victoria (but there is one, for instance, for
Cadburys) [VictTrademarkGuide]
[VicGazettePonekeSearch].
Thus it seems highly unlikely that Poneke was used as a brand name in Melbourne.
|
The Raw Materials and Packaging
Here, and in the two following sections, we attempt to constrain
the company behind the Poneke brand according to the source of its ingredients
and how they were packed. It’s an uphill battle, but one discovery makes the
journey worthwhile.
In the meat trade [ButherSlaughtermanDiff],
animals are brought to a slaughterhouse/abattoir, killed, skinned and
eviscerated (and their feet/hooves removed). Slaughterhouses were typically located
at the edge of towns. The carcass, or primal cuts thereof, were distributed to
local butchers where they were cut down to steaks, chops and the like, and the
butcher made sausages and other small goods. [TeAraEarlyButchers]
Gelatin for table jellies comes primarily from the hooves
and skin and has a good shelf life, so gelatin operations were typically
adjacent to the slaughterhouse. In Wellington three huge and one small
slaughterhouses are recorded (Garrett & Co. in Ngahauranga, Wellington Meat
Export Company in Waterloo Quay and Ngahauranga, and Gear Meat Preserving and
Freezing Company of New Zealand in Petone) but this does not preclude the
existence of smaller operations since there were many other butchers with
various levels of description [CycloWell1897MeatTrade]
[CycloWell1897CommInd]:
i.e. the table jellies don’t lead to anything conclusive.
From Poneke’s Woodville supplement, we learnt that Poneke
was able to source ham, chicken, (beef) tongue, and beef. This seems to
preclude the Wellington Meat Export Company and Gear Meat Preserving and
Freezing Company of New Zealand, since the Cyclopedia only describes them as slaughtering
sheep and cattle. Other butchers of some size (such as E.W. Wilton, and Garrett
& Co.) are described as “General Butchers” where the “General” might
encompass chicken and ham. However the picture we obtain from the Cyclopedia is
apparently incomplete since the Gear Meat Company certainly raised pigs and
presumably slaughtered them too [NewZealandTime1893Nov15P3].
So: more inconclusiveness.
Meat extract involves significant reduction in volume [WikiMeatExtract], but the
main ingredient is beef so processing can occur either at abattoir or butcher’s
shop. Although this is unhelpful, we note that early meat extracts were stored
in jars or cans, so we need to look for glassworks/bottlers or canneries [LiebigChromo]
[Bovril].
Jars versus Cans
As we have seen, potted meat was meat protected by a
hardened shell of fat and typically stored in jars which “kept the meat safe to
eat for weeks or months in the right environment” [NoRefridNoProb]
[HistFoodiePotted].
In the wrong (unchilled) environment, we can expect the protection to be more
like weeks. Meanwhile the time to produce the potted meat jars, store it for
the next arriving coastal streamer, ship it from Wellington to Auckland,
distribute it around Auckland, sell it, then for it to be consumed at home also
seems like a period of some two weeks. Frozen meat shipments to Britain were
well underway, which were profitable, but these were of carcasses not
pre-processed small-goods, and it is hard to discern any records of coastal
(intra-New Zealand) distribution of chilled/frozen products before 1912 [CoastalTrade].
Related, refrigeration equipment at the time was expensive and large-scale, yet
the production and wholesaler sites could reasonably have cool rooms with ice acquired
from a local freezing works (or similar). Still, cooling at retailers was more
the domain of the butcher and even there their solution was oftentimes standing
orders and rapid distribution rather than cool storage [TeAraButcher1902].
For the grocers, storekeepers or chemists, it seems that they dealt with fresh
or dry goods (in chests, boxes, tins, jars, packets, etc) so expecting cold
storage for jarred potted meat at these shops sounds like a stretch. Thus a
distribution operation for jarred potted meat that depended on fast turnover seems
chancy but not impossible.
The other alternative is that Poneke canned their meat
products. If so, then speed of distribution becomes a non-issue.
Unfortunately none of the Poneke advertising, including the
Woodville supplement, provides any direct hints as to how the Poneke products were
packaged. On one hand, a meat extract in a can seems suboptimal given that a “meat
tea” or soup would require much less than a can’s-worth of meat extract (and
peer vendors seemed to only use jars for meat extract) [LiebigChomo]
[Bovril]. On the other hand, maybe
customers were expected to transfer the can’s contents to their own jar once
the can was opened?
There were multiple New Zealand meat canners at the end of
the nineteenth century but – at first – glance – they didn’t describe their
products as potted. For instance in the 1880s the Gear Meat Company
printed a list of all their canned meats on their can labels: beef, mutton,
brawn, Haricot mutton, curried chops, ox-cheek, stewed kidneys, potted head.
Stewed rabbit. Epping sausage, minced meat. Tripe, ox tongues, sheep’s tongues,
stewed steak, pig’s feet and soups of all descriptions. [GearSheepLabel1880s]
[GearLabels1890to1920]. The
only product identified as potted on the Gear label is Potted Head but
this most likely refers to Potted Heid, also named Potted Hough, a
traditional Scottish concoction made from a meaty, cracked shin bone from which
the gelatin in the bones and meat (plus spices) survive to the finished
delicacy, which is poured into moulds and chilled (or equivalently poured into
cans?) [ScottishPottedHough].
A dish produced in much the same way, except it is spelt “potted head” exactly,
is described in [TimesPottedHead]
and uses an actual sheep’s head, sans brains, but otherwise seems to be
identical to Potted Hough/Heid.
But hold on! At the Annual Meeting of the Gear Meat Company
of 5 January 1893, the chair, J. Gear, said “During the year no[t] very extensive
additions have been made to the buildings or plant, beyond some improvements in
the preserving department, and the addition of a plant for turning out
potted meat, which I have every reason to think will be highly successful.”
[NewZealandTim1893Jan05P4].
From a different article some two years later, we learn that “The exhibit of
the Gear Meat Company consists chiefly of potted meats; nicely canned and arranged;
and some specimens of bone manure.” [NewZealandTim1894Nov15P3].
Occam’s razor suggests that Gear’s potted meats were always canned.
By-the-by, January 1893 is a very significant date since the
first, second and third advert settings first appeared on stamps in
mid-February, mid-April and mid-August respectively. The Poneke adverts are
only present in the third setting, and presumably the engraving of the plate
for the third setting would have started some months beforehand; so one might
hypothesise a cause-and-effect here: a new product-line triggering new
advertising. However, in isolation this timing is just circumstantial.
Packagers – Jars
We must say up-front that New Zealand had a dismal history
of making glass jars and bottles.
|
In 1870 W. Wilthew set up a
glassworks in Auckland with the aim of starting with lamp chimneys and later
installing equipment to make bottles. The Auckland Glassworks struggled to
survive, hampered by competition from glass importers, the expense of moulds,
the need to import sand from Sydney and a failure to persuade any glassmakers
to emigrate from Europe. The first bottles manufactured in New Zealand were
made at the Auckland Glassworks in 1874 but the technical problems of bottle
manufacture led Wilthew to withdraw from making them after only one year. The
Auckland Glassworks had closed by 1880. Between 1881 and 1903 there were at
least seven glassworks in New Zealand which opened and failed. These included
the New Zealand Glass & Pottery Company that operated in Dunedin
(1881-1882); the Kaiapoi Glassworks built near Christchurch which never went
into production (1885); the New Zealand Glassware Company in Wellington that
made jars (1897-99); Chamberlain & Company in New North Road, Auckland
which aimed to make bottles mechanically (1900); a glassworks factory in
Christchurch that closed soon after set up (1902/3) and yet another Auckland
glassworks that was set up and closed down (1903). All of these failed
ventures faced the same pressures: very high set-up costs, very high costs of
imported sand, no local skilled glassworkers, and fierce competition from
importers. …
By 1902 there was a desperate
shortage of glass bottles in New Zealand and Parliament took action in 1903
by putting bottles on the free import list. No longer restricted to buying
from Britain, bottles and glassware poured into New Zealand from all over the
world. [HeriAshGlass]
|
The Cyclopedia volumes bear this out: they only mention
jars once (google.com / jar cyclopedia .site:nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly)
and it describes how Lawrence Brothers of Invercargill, a jam manufacturer with
an extensive orchard, imports all their jam jars [CycloOtag1905Lawr].
The Cyclopedia refers to many bottlers and bottling departments but does not
record the source of the bottles; rather we see that most vendors have bottle
washing departments [e.g. CycloTar1908Brew,
CycloTar1908Mast,
CycloWell1897Comm,
CycloTar1908Bull,
CycloAuck1902Camp]
and on occasion report that their bottles are imported [CycloWell1897Thom]
[CycloOtag1905Chem]
[CycloWell1897Prof].
The Cyclopedia only records a single bottle manufacturer, Lambert who “held
contracts for supplying acid bottles to the New Zealand Drug Company” [CycloOtag1905Lamb].
In short, bottles were imported and recycled many times (and sometimes with a
middleman involved [CycloCant1903Chem]).
Thus, if Poneke used jars for their meat extract or potted
meats then almost surely they – or a middleman – imported them from Britain. This
path doesn’t seem to constrain the Poneke owner at all.
Packagers – Cans
In 1893, canning of meat was becoming unfashionable (and we
infer that the frozen meat trade to Britain was more lucrative) [NzBurn1880s]
[CycloWell1897DailPap].
The Cyclopedia volumes (google.com / canning cyclopedia .site:nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly)
record the following canning operations throughout New Zealand:
·
Meat (etc)
o
Russel, Bay of Islands; Masefield Bros; fish (and also beef and
fruit) canning [Cyclo1902AuckMase]
o
Patea; Western Packing and Canning Company; “canned mutton and
beef … The preserved products are all exported to the old world” (and “By
general request, [unpreserved] meat is supplied to the public at retail prices”
[CycloTar1908Patea],
also listed as the West Coast Packing and Canning Co [CycloTar1908Pack].
§
The Cylcopedia also refers to the Patea Meat Canning Works, but
this is most likely another synonym for the Western Packing and Canning Company
of Patea [CycloTar1908Patea]
o
Wanganui; meat canning works, which had closed in 1891 [NzBurn1880s]
o
Petone, Wellington; Gear Meat Freezing and Preserving Co, “sheep
… for freezing, canning and boiling down” … “15,000 pounds per day are canned –
exclusive of fancy pastes, sheeps tongues etc, - and labelled with the popular
brand “Gear Company,” and packed for shipment.” Cattle are also slaughtered for
beef. [Cylo1897CommInd]
o
Greymouth; Foxcroft; canned whitebait [CycloNel1906Iron]
o
Dunback, between Oamaru and Dunedin; Dunback Rabbit Canning
Factory [CycloTar1908Musi]
[CycloOtag1905McGreg]
o
Otago; Green Island Meat Preserving Works [CycloWell1897DailPap]
o
Woodlands, Southland; New Zealand Meat Preserving Company /
Woodlands Packing and Canning Co.; rabbit and meat [CycloOtag1905Wood]
[CycloOtag1905]
·
Fruit
o
Birkenhead, Auckland; Thompson, but established 1899 [CycloAuck1902Birk]
o
Nelson; Kirkpatrick [CycloNel1906Nel]
o
Canned fruit was also imported from California [CycloWell1897Bann]
Further, Pickering of Pahiatua made cans of all descriptions
[CycloWell1897Prof].
The Cyclopedia volumes make no mention of canning of chicken
or pig; only the products from cattle, sheep, rabbit, fish and fruit. However,
from above, we suspect that this may not be a complete picture of 1893.
Usage of “Poneke”
Robertson writes “Since Poneke is the Maori word for Port
Nicholson (Wellington Harbour) it is likely that the products were manufactured
by Wellington Meat Export Co. Ltd at Ngauranga, or by the Gear Meat Preserving
and Freezing Co. of NZ Ltd at Petone, or by a Wellington-based smallgoods firm.”
[Robertson2000]. Furthermore, [Robb2006]
reports that Otley had the same opinion (in an unpublished manuscript). This makes
a lot of sense, and we flesh out some further details below.
Anyone living in Wellington or Petone, or living on the hills
above downtown Wellington, or taking a train to work from Petone or the Hutt to
Ngauranga or Wellington (or conversely from Wellington to Ngauranga, Petone or
the Hutt, or arriving at Wellington by ship would feel some connection to Port
Nicholson as a name, and would plausibly be familiar with the Poneke transliteration.
Meanwhile there is a celebrated Wellington rugby football
club founded in 1883 with its base Kilbirnie adjacent to Port Nicholson
[ToituPoneke]. The
club is the Poneke Football Club, and for many of its fans, players and
administrators of the era, no doubt the name Poneke had fond associations.
In short, it seems fair to say that Poneke points to the Wellington
waterfront, Kilbirnie, Ngauranga and/or Petone, but itself does not narrow down
the owner of the Poneke brand by much.
The Cyclopedia volumes are a suitable corpus to validate
this analysis of “Poneke” since they thoroughly captures the government and business
people of the day and are near-contemporaneous (1897-1908 versus 1893). When
searching for “Poneke” (i.e. google.com / poneke cyclopedia
.site:nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/), there are about 40 hits, in three
groups:
·
Poneke Football Club
o
There is a paragraph on page 427 describing the club
o
Various alumni and administrators of the club
·
Document titles in Maori, where “Wellington” is rendered as
“Poneke”
·
Poneke Lodge, of the Order of Druids (a single hit at [Cyclo1897CommInd])
 |
The Gear Works at Petone, in the early 1900s showing (top to bottom): Port Nicholson, Petone Wharf, the pale buildings of the Gear Works with receiving paddocks in front, Jackson St (the angled street in the middle), sundry small buildings, the Hutt Rd, and Petone Railway Station with a stopped train. Credit: National Library of New Zealand |
The hit in the last group leads to a very interesting
connection (or coincidence?), as follows. The aforementioned Gear Meat
Preserving and Freezing Company had a very close association with Port Nick.
Its main works were situated between Jackson St and the Port Nicholson, at the
western side of Petone. Cattle and sheet entered the works on Jackson St, they
were slaughtered and (many) were frozen. Given that the refrigerated export
ships arrived intermittently but the works ran continuously, there was a need
to store the carcasses. Initially the refrigeration plant was on a hulk (a floating
but unseaworthy ship), named Jubilee, anchored at the end of the Petone
wharf on the seaward side of the Gear works; and the fresh carcasses were
delivered to the ship for freezing. As volumes increased, additional
refrigeration plant was built on land and the frozen carcasses were taken to
the Jubilee. Whenever a refrigerated export ship arrived, the frozen meat was
trans-shipped directly from the Jubilee to the export ship. [CycloWell1897CommInd]
Now the manager of the Jubilee hulk, who surely spent almost
all his workdays on the hulk in the midst of Port Nicholson, was a man named
Captain John Teasdale King [CycloWell1897CommInd].
It was the same Captain King who was one of the founders of the Poneke
Lodge [FamCirPoLod],
and it might be presumed he had some influence over the choice of name for the
Lodge.
The United Ancient Order of Druids evolved as a social club
and to provide mutual assistance between members: dues were paid then, if a
member fell ill or died and the family needed his funeral expenses paid, then
the UAOD would take care of the bill. Such lodges played a vital role in the
days before the social welfare safety net [WikiUAOD].
The Poneke Lodge was one node of the organization, and was founded on 19 May
1886 and met on Victoria St, which runs right by the Gear Meat
Preserving and Freezing Company. [FamCirPoLod]
[EveningPost1909Apr06P2]
The job of a slaughterman is a dangerous one, with
frightened animals and sharp knives. Given the proximity and need, it seems
likely that the Poneke Lodge was especially created to attract and support workers
of the Gear Meat Preserving and Freezing Company.
The takeaway of this line of thinking is that “Poneke” would
be an obvious and natural choice for any new product-line of the Gear Meat
Preserving and Freezing Company.
Connection to Truebridge, Miller and Reich
In a superb research effort, [Lyon2012]
identifies two meat businesses with close ties to Truebridge, Miller and Reich,
the company with the contract for selling stamp advertising on the rear of
stamps. Although Lyon’s full article is required reading, a brief overview is
that the two businesses are:
·
Jacob Joseph Meat and Produce Co., a substantial enterprise, for
whom “A.H. Truebridge acted as secretary to the issuing of the share prospectus
in 1890”, and
·
Hansen Co., a meat-extract manufacturer, founded by Anton Hendrek
Hansen (amongst others), where “A.H. Truebridge was the secretary for the
company and was also a shareholder” and the registered address of the Hansen
Co. was the same as the address of Truebridge, Miller and Reich. [Lyon2012]
Bottom Up
We’ve now reviewed all the available evidence, and some suspects’
names have arisen already. Next, let’s look at all the suspects.
Many Wellington butchers are recorded in the Wellington
Provincial edition of the Cyclopedia [Cyclo1897MeatTrade].
The one-line entries may be presumed to be small operations retailing meat to
their local community, and none operate from Kilbirnie. For the companies
awarded a text description, many are still “family butchers”, have modestly
sized premises, cure bacon and ham, or specialise in sausages, oysters or fish,
and they also seem easy to dismiss. The remaining, larger businesses are:
·
E.W. Wilton, “General and Family Butcher”, whose “trade extends
over the city and suburbs”
o
Even so, E.W Wilton’s business seems to be on too small a scale
to support claims like “Sold by all Storekeepers and Chemists” around Woodville
or distribution to Auckland
o
Rated “unpromising”
·
The shipping butchers
o
Barber and Co. has “the largest [shop] in the city” and are
“contractors to the Admiralty and to the Shaw, Savill and Albion Shipping Company”
o
Garrett & Co. are described as “General and Shipping
Butchers” and have a slaughter-house and yards at Ngahauranga, employing in all
seven hands”
o
Shipping butchers prepared meat for long voyages, with an
emphasis on salted and cured meats (and perhaps potted meats too; meanwhile neither
company has a cannery). Their contacts with the shipping industry would make distribution
to Auckland easier than most.
o
Both rated “maybe”
·
Wellington Meat Export Company, Limited, founded “for the
shipment of frozen meat and dairy produce to England” who “export most of the
meat they freeze, a small quantity being sold to local butchers”
o
This massive operation has close ties to Port Nicholson (Poneke),
with works at Waterloo Quay and Ngahauranga. However, nothing else stands out
(no cannery, no preserving/jars, no New Zealand distribution network, and
reportedly sheep and beef only) and its frozen meat export focus makes it a
stretch that it would involve itself in the local potted meat trade.
o
Rated “possible”
·
Nelson Bros, “Meat Freezers and Exporter”
o
Despite being weakly connected to Port Nicholson (Poneke) though their
office in Wellington, their main, large-scale works in Hawkes Bay “do a large
trade in tinned meats, and also in freezing and storing fish, poultry, game,
etc” [Cyclo1908TarMeat].
The railway line makes Woodville very close; and Nelson Bros was always set up
to join the frozen meat trade with Britain [KnowledTomoana]
so coastal shipping to Auckland is not such a great stretch.
o
Rated “the wild-card”
·
Gear Meat Preserving and Freezing Company of New Zealand, “one of
the most successful colonial undertakings of the kind”
o
Another huge business with distribution nationally [NzHer1886Aug18P7]
and to Britain, this has the greatest connection to Port Nicholson (Poneke) since
their works were directly beside the harbor at Petone, they had a hulk at the
end of a wharf pointing directly out into the harbor and their works were
adjacent/nearby to an UAOD lodge named Poneke Lodge
o
Even more significantly, they added plant for (canned?) potted
meat early in 1893, some months before the Poneke advertisements for the potted
meat were engraved
o
It is not a stretch to imagine a connection to Melbourne, since Gear
Meats won a prize at the Melbourne Centennial Exhibition of 1888-1889 [WikiCentExh]
[GearLabels1890to1920],
and was likely an exhibitor there with employees in attendance for months. This
also applies to Nelson Bros but not the Wellington Meat Export Company [BayPlentyTim1889Jan17P2].
o The Gear Meat Preserving and Freezing Co. used Bock & Cousins Lithographers for their can labels; later W.R. Bock from that partnership printed the Woodville supplement [NatLibGearLabel]. However, this particular connection may have low significance since there were few other printers available.
o
Rated “most likely among the businesses named in the Cyclopedia”
There are two further two businesses identified in [Lyon2012]:
·
Jacob Joseph Meat and Produce Co. of which “little is known”
o
The business had employees in Wellington, Manawatu and
Christchurch
o
As above, there was a solid connection through A.H Truebridge to Truebridge,
Miller and Reich
o
Rated “insufficient data”
·
Hansen Co.
o
The business’ founding date lines up with the third setting of
the advert stamps
o
Their cessation of advertising in the Auckland Star correlates with
the business’ voluntary liquidation
o
They had about 10 products including “extract of beef”, “calf’s
foot jelly”, and “potted preserved meats”
o
They had the strongest connection to Truebridge, Miller and Reich
o
Rated by Lyon as the “most likely company”
Despite the circumstantial data that points to a) the Gear
Meat Preserving and Freezing Company of New Zealand or b) the Hansen Co., until recently we
didn’t have conclusive evidence either way.
Gear Meats’ potted meat was exported to Britain [BruceHer1894Jan09P2],
and it is possible to imagine that the <.Poneke.>
trademark was issued in Britain; but that does not seem to be the case
(e.g. nothing relevant is discerned after searching for each of Zealand”,
“meat”, “potted”, “Gear” or “Poneke” in the UK database of trademarks [NatArchUkTradeMark]
[NatArchUkBT82]).
A definitive answer would also come if the Poneke trademark application
were discovered in the New Zealand archives, but [Lyon2012]
reports that this avenue had been tried without success. Another remote
possibility is that a Poneke can label might yet be discovered, or the Bock
archives contain detailed customer information [TeAraBock],
or some other record or artefact might be found. And maybe a more definitive
answer for this century-old mystery is imminent, since a publication on this
exact topic is anticipated.
Instead, the definitive connection can be found in the 2021 New Zealand Stamp Collector, where it is confirmed that Hansen & Co. is the brand owner. Meanwhile, Hansen's recipe for meat extract was patented in Australia [NatArchAust: A13149, 9489] and is reported here:
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"Take forty five pounds of the best young ox Beef, eight drachms* of thyme, eight drachms of parsley, eight drachms of sage and two drachms of mint; chop all the before-mentioned articles as small as possible and add two ounces of salt and one ounce of pepper, and put the whole into an open Copper boiler, with sufficient water to just cover the ingredients and give the whole a quick and continuous boiling for twelve hours; and stir the ingredients during the whole twelve hours and skim the surface from time to time. After the twelve hours boiling take out any bones or gristle and any remaining fat and strain the remaining compound through an ordinary Milk Strainer, then return the Compound to the aforesaid copper boiler and boil again slowly for four hours, stirring and skimming as before.
Then strain again, through an ordinary milk Strainer, with a piece of muslin at the bottom of the strainer. Then add one pound of crystallized preserved sugar, and half a pound of corn flour and then return the Compound to the aforesaid Boiler, and boil again very slowly for three hours, stirring and skimming as before.
The Compound is then put into a stone Jar to settle for eight hours; it is then put back into the Boiler and just made warm and is then put through a fine muslin strainer, the result being about sixteen ounces of Nutritive Jelly which is then put into Jars of the required size and made Air tight."
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References
[Robb2006] J.A. Robb, The 1893 New
Zealand Advertisement Stamps, October 2006, Christchurch (N.Z.) Philatelic
Society, p7
[Robertson2000] G.I. Robertson, QV
Second SidefaceIssue: The Advertisers, The New Zealand Stamp Collector,
Vol. 80, No.1, March 2000, pp.5-8
[Lyon2012] R. Lyon, Who is the
Poneke Brand? New information about this Mysterious Company, New Zealand
Stamp Collector, vol. 92, no. 3, September 2012, pp.66-69
The Cyclopedia of New Zealand, http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scharly/tei-corpus-cyclopedia.html
PapersPast, https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/
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