A beacon for sailors and a magnet for mystery, with a whiff of scandal, Pencarrow is our oldest lighthouse

Several sources will tell you that Mary Jane Bennett, first keeper of Pencarrow Lighthouse, was the only woman in our history to hold such a position. But the achievement is wasted on at least one of her English kin.

“One old relative who has now passed on listened to what I said,” relates family historian, retired journalist and Bennett’s great-grandson Paul Bennett, “and said I got it wrong. Mary Jane would never have been a lighthouse keeper. The English relations couldn’t accept it.”

That relative knew of Mary Jane in later life, after she had returned to England and settled into a life of decorum. Her story up to that point had been one of varying fortunes – and levels of respectability.

“She was a bit of a mystery woman,” says Paul. “She appears to have been very secretive. She never had a photo taken. There is not a personal letter or diary or journal in existence, here or in England.  But then, Mary Jane had something to be secretive about."

The guts of the story is that she eloped to New Zealand with George Bennett. She was the daughter of the squire of a big estate called Braisty Woods in the Yorkshire Dales. George Bennett was a sort of stock and station agent who arrived, made overtures and got told to bugger off.”Which he did but not, it appears, before arranging for Mary Jane to do likewise. They travelled across the world decorously in separate ships, she under the auspices of the New Zealand Company. Both arrived in 1840.

On the voyage, Mary Jane had met the man who would become Wellington’s first mayor, George Hunter, his wife and their 10 children. By the end of the trip, she had been engaged as the latters’ governess. She thus arrived cloaked in a mantle of respectable employment.

Mary Jane and George Bennett married the following year, when he is recorded as being licensee of the Durham Arms in Wellington. He later farmed at Lowry Bay and the family home was made to function as an ad hoc lighthouse when a light was placed in its bay window. This was near the site of the present Pencarrow. It was decided in 1854 that it was necessary to build a more substantial structure there.

New Zealand’s first permanent light-house, Pencarrow, registered as a Category I historic place, was the culmination of many efforts to provide a beacon to protect shipping coming into Wellington from foundering on its rocks. Its construction was approved only under the aegis of Governor Sir George Grey.

The extraordinary shenanigans that went on between provincial and central government over building – and payingfor – the lighthouse are well told in Helen Beaglehole’s national lighthouse history, Lighting the Coast.

It was designed by colonial engineer Edward Roberts, and cast in England in sections by the Woodside Ironworks, Dudley. Like many colonial structures, it was shipped in pieces, which arrived in June 1858 and were assembled on the site.

By Paul Little

read more in Heritage New Zealand, Summer 2008