This biography has been re-published in full with permission. Licensed by Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence. This biography, written by Hilda McDonnell, was first published in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography in 1990. It was updated in July, 2020.
Born: 1825, United Kingdom
Died: 10 August 1907
Country most active: New Zealand
Also known as: Matilda Fisher
Matilda Fisher was baptised at Rochester, Kent, England, on 12 June 1825. She was the daughter of James Fisher, a fishmonger, and his wife, Sarah. On 3 May 1846 she married bargeman John James Sancto; they had six children, two of whom died in infancy. In the summer of 1852 John Sancto was retailing beer, and by June 1854 he was victualler at the Crown Tap in the High Street, Rochester. Soon after, he emigrated to New Zealand.
Matilda set off on the Grasmere on 7 January 1855, to join her husband in Wellington. A paying passenger, she landed on 4 May at Port Cooper (Lyttelton). She then caught the steamer Zingari on 19 May, bound for a Wellington still shaking after the January earthquake. She was accompanied by her two surviving children, and the couple had two more children in Wellington. They lived on Lambton Quay.
In February 1859 John Sancto was on the Young Greek, captained by Nicholas Carey, which was lost at sea while returning from Pōrangahau with a load of wool. In late 1859, shortly after giving birth to her sixth child, Matilda opened a fruit shop and general store on Lambton Quay. On 29 February 1868, at the house of Francis Buck in Tory Street, Matilda Sancto married shipwright Henry Meech.
Henry Meech had learnt his trade at Portsmouth docks. He was carpenter’s mate on the Buffalo, which, after bringing colonists to Adelaide, came to the Bay of Islands in 1837 for kauri spars. On his return to Portsmouth he married and emigrated to Port Nicholson (Wellington) on the Oriental in January 1840. His first wife died in 1866.
After his second marriage Henry Meech continued to work as a shipwright, and by 1870 his boatbuilding yard was at Te Aro pā. In 1871 he also purchased the tidal salt-water baths at Clyde Quay, on the foreshore near Oriental Bay, and Matilda gave up her Lambton Quay shop to help her husband run the business. Sporty young men rowed over from the town if it was not too choppy, or walked round to bathe in Meech’s baths. A red flag was hoisted during gentlemen’s hours and a blue flag during ladies’ hours.
For a time the family, including children from previous marriages and a daughter born to Henry and Matilda in 1869, lived adjacent to the baths, in a house built on stilts partly over the water. Matilda appears to have retained control of her own financial affairs: in 1882 she owned £550 in property, her husband £480.
Henry Meech died in 1885. Matilda Meech continued to operate the baths and became a well-known personality in Wellington. In 1891 she made news by taking Wellington City Council to court for compensation over loss of earnings, after the Council polluted her baths with refuse from their destructor plant. She won the case and was awarded £200. On 10 August 1907 she died at Clyde Quay, Wellington. She is buried in Karori cemetery.