Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 521
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friends in the various towns in the course of my work, and in the hotels in the evenings. Hotels in country towns were much more comfortable than corresponding ones in New South Wales. There were free services, such as having one's shoes polished; morning tea with a biscuit ; the early morning newspaper ; and a hot-water bottle placed in the bed sheets on cold nights. Such favours had faded away in N.S.W. hotels a decade previously.
During my time at the University of Sydney I contracted a marriage which was not a success, and despite two reconciliations, it was finally dissolved, the decree of divorce being made absolute almost a year afterwards. Subsequently, I remarried with an old family friend Eleanor Margaret Gibson, who came over to join me at Wellington, in March of 1932, for the event. Soon after this I was based in the large inland town of Palmerston North, a convenient centre from which to travel around the southern half of the North Island. It was a pleasant inland town with a population of about thirty thousand people, with a ring of satellite townships, all situated in a verdant, undulating, attractive countryside rather reminiscent of the South East of England, except that there were no very old buildings with thatched or shingled roofs, or half-timbered walls. Madge and I started our married life in a small modern flat, part of a new block fronting the well-kept gardens of the big central square : the rent was 28/6d a week, unfurnished.
I had, of necessity, to be away from home for weeks at a time visiting the Company's Representatives located in other towns, which meant, unfortunately, that Madge had rather a quiet lonely time until we made some very good friends in the town, both joined the excellent local Art Club, and I became a member of the influential and very social Rotary Club.
After I had been a few months on the Shell staff, I was called into the Head Office and questioned closely as to my intention of staying permanently. Apparently I was suspected of using the Company just to make an extensive tour of New Zealand