suffrage_petition
Surname: 
Chung
Given names: 
Jane Leung
Given address: 
Dunedin
Sheet No: 116
Town/Suburb: 
No suburb given
City/Region: 
Dunedin
Notes: 

Biography contributed by Melanie Kung

Jane Leung Chung (nee Whitman) born c. 1833 lived in Dunedin when she signed the petition in 1893. She was approximately 60 years old, and had also signed the previous year’s suffrage petition. 

In 1873 she was married to Leung Chung, also known as Albert Leung Chung. [1] 

She died on the 19th October 1900, aged 69, and is buried in the Southern Cemetery, Main Road South, Dunedin. According to the cemetery record, she was a native of London, England. [2]  

In the Evening Star, 20 October 1881, [3] Chung is mentioned in the Dunedin School Committee column under the subheading A complaint. The Chairman of the committee is said to have received a letter from Mrs Chung, who formerly conducted the Bath Street School, "stating that she felt keenly the remarks which had been reported in the papers as having been passed upon her at a recent meeting of the committee, those remarks having hinted that she had shown incompetency." [4]

She was registered in the 1896 electoral rolls [5] as living on Forbury Road in Caversham, Otago, with her occupation down as domestic duties.

She raised money for St Peter’s Church, Cargill Road, as reported in the Otago Daily Times in January 1892. [6] She is also recorded as donating 5 shilling to the Queensland Relief Fund, which was in aid of the 1893 Brisbane flood. [7] In 1899 she was given thanks for her donation of 2 cases of apples to St. Mary’s Orphan Home in a report published in the Otago Witness. [8]

In 1900, Mrs Leung Chung placed an advertisement in the Otago Daily Times looking for a General Servant for a family of two, for their Upper Forbury Road home in Caversham. [9]

Albert Leung Chung (who according to New Zealand Naturalisation records was born about 1836 in Nam Hoy, Canton) also lived in Caversham on the date of his naturalisation 21 May 1875, and could be assumed to be Jane's husband. [10]

There is an entry in the 1880-1881 Wises’s New Zealand Post Office Directory [11] for Leung Chung, at Caversham, South Ward.

In 1880 Leung Chung was interpreter for convicted prisoner Ah Lee, who asserted his innocence of the charge of murder. [12] In another newspaper article, the sentence of Ah Lee’s execution was reported along with a comment about the interference of Bishop Neville with the sentence in garnering sympathy for the prisoner. Bishop Neville is also said to be training Leung Chung as a missionary, at that time. [13]

In Stone’s 1886 Dunedin and Invercargill Directory, as the proprietor of a Spanish restaurant, Albert Leung Chung’s address is given as 179 Police Street, Dunedin. (Also at that address is Arthur Shilling, journalist, John Griffin, mechanical engineer, Alexander Simpson, baker, George Douglas, Baker and Falconer, carpenter.)

His home address is given as South Ward of Forbury Road (from Main South road).

In the Evening Star in 1901 a Trusts of Deed Settlement between Jane Whitman, Leung Chung and David Gardiner is recorded as having gone before Mr. Justice Williams. [14]

Sources

Ancestry.com

Paperspast

Historical BDM index

Dunedin City Council Cemeteries Search

Click on sheet number to see the 1893 petition sheet this signature appeared on. Digital copies of the sheets supplied by Archives New Zealand.

Community contributions

1 comment has been posted about Jane Leung Chung

What do you know?

Helen Edwards

Posted: 17 Nov 2018

Very little is known of Jane Leung Chung’s early life. The only clue is the statement in her burial record that she was born in London. This would have been about 1832. She married William Whitman, a Scottish clerk born about 1829, and the couple arrived in Otago by way of the Victorian goldfields.

Late in 1864, Jane became the teacher at the Bath Street Free School, in Dunedin, under the supervision of Mrs O’Rafferty, a determined Irish woman, who set up the school in 1862 in response to an obvious community need. Described as a ‘free school for poor or neglected children’ (at a time when all schools charged fees), it became government-funded from 1864, after Mrs O’Rafferty was overwhelmed by its success. Jane had up to 100 children in her classroom, aged from two to twelve, including toddlers in the care of elder sisters and brothers.

On 11 March 1867 William died suddenly at their home in Great King Street. He was 38 years old. Jane buried him in Dunedin’s Southern Cemetery (where he is listed as William Whiteman). She continued to teach, on an annual salary of £100, and moved to Walker Avenue, between Walker and Stafford Streets. At the start of 1870 she requested an assistant from the Otago Education Board, and was granted £20 per annum for a pupil teacher, Jane Dow. The school roll at this time contained 92 boys and 90 girls; 41 of them were under five.

In 1872, now living in Stafford Street, she was close to shops belonging to Dunedin’s leading Chinese merchants, including newly-established Kwong Shing Wing, whose partners included Leung Chung, from Nanhai county in Canton. This proximity provides a possible explanation as to how they became acquainted. Leung Chung was born about 1836, sailed to Melbourne about 1863 and then on to Otago some time after 1865.

In October 1872, Jane purchased two adjacent sections in the new subdivision of Calderville in Caversham, and built a house (which appears to be still standing) on Surrey Street, close to Thorn Street. In 1872, Surrey Street was part of Forbury Road, and Thorn Street was then called Marion Street, after the wife of the subdivider, Hugh Calder. Calder had bought 50 acres of Caversham land in the 1850s. In March 1873 he leased seven acres to three Chinese market gardeners, who established the first known market garden in the Forbury area. Leung Chung probably knew these men.

Jane was financially secure in her own right. The Calderville property cost £25 and Jane had £400 from a recent mortgage repayment. ‘A Return of the Freeholders of New Zealand, 1882’, which described her as a teacher, gave the value of her freehold property as £1,100.

On 1 May 1873 Jane Whitman married Leung Chung at the Registry Office in Dunedin. To the Education Board she remained Mrs Whitman, until the Bath Street School closed in 1881, though the Board referred to her as ‘Mrs Chong’ at an 1879 committee meeting. By 1881 the Board had changed its views on the value of the school and questioned the quality of its education. Jane ‘felt keenly the remarks’ which hinted at her lack of competency and wrote to tell them so. The Evening Star reported her name as ‘Mrs Jane Leung Chung’, in a rare instance of the use of a woman’s Christian name in its reporting. Jane may have been quite a talking point in town.

Leung Chung also stood out. In 1875, as Albert Leung Chung, of Nam-hoy, Canton, he became a naturalised British citizen. He described himself as a ‘Settler’, setting himself apart from his countrymen, who regarded themselves as sojourners, desiring ultimately to return to China as wealthy men. In 1878-79, and for the next decade, Albert was the only Chinese listed in the Wises Directory for Caversham.

From 1886 the Leung Chungs had two entries in the directories. In the early 1880s they took over the Spanish Restaurant at 179 Princes Street, between Police and Jervois Streets. This establishment, a hotel and boarding house, featured a restaurant providing three affordable meals per day. It ran from the early 1860s until 1899, when it became the Federal Coffee Palace. Other New Zealand Spanish Restaurants opened in the 1860s and 1870s: in Invercargill, Nelson, Wanganui, Picton, Auckland and Westport. They were mostly short-lived.

The Leung Chungs occupied the second Spanish Restaurant on the Princes Street site. The earlier three-storied wooden building had been destroyed in the fire at Guthrie and Larnach’s saw mill in 1874. A new brick building, with three storeys and an iron roof, opened in 1875, with 45 bedrooms. The hotel was again threatened by fire in 1887, when Guthrie and Larnach’s rebuilt factory and warehouse was destroyed in a spectacular blaze.

From 1894 the Spanish Restaurant appears in directories under the name of ‘Leung Chung, Albert (Mrs)’. The property had long been leased to Robert Haworth by the Dunedin City Corporation, and in 1893 Jane was described as the occupant, paying £2 per week in rent. The business was put up for sale in 1895, and the Leung Chungs’ directory listing ceased after 1896.

Albert Leung Chung was a merchant, clerk, hotel keeper, a leader in the Chinese community and a generous benefactor to many causes. He was also a well-known and trusted court interpreter in the courthouses in Dunedin and Central Otago. At the courthouse in Naseby in 1880 he was an interpreter for the defence in the trial of Ah Lee and Lee Guy for the murder of Mary Young, a miner’s wife. Ah Lee was found guilty and hanged, despite lasting doubts of his guilt. He was the only Chinese to be executed for the murder of a European. Leung Chung refused to attend the execution.

Jane died on the 19th of October, 1900, at her Forbury Road home, the ‘beloved wife of Albert Leung Chung’. The funeral was held at nearby St Peter’s Anglican Church, where she had been a parishioner. ‘Albert Leung Chung, A Gentleman, of Caversham’ purchased the plot in the Anglican section of the Southern Cemetery. Her will left everything to ‘my dear husband Albert Leung Chung’.

Albert the settler had lost the anchor attaching him to his adopted country. He stayed another year in their Forbury home, and on 10 October 1902 he departed for China.

Sources:
Births, Deaths and Marriages Online. www.bdmhistoricalrecords.dia.govt.nz
Deeds registers. Otago Land District. Dunedin Office of Archives New Zealand
Ng, James. Windows on a Chinese Past : how the Cantonese goldseekers and their heirs settled in New Zealand. Dunedin : Otago Heritage Books, 1993-1999. 4 v.
Dunedin City Council Archives
OASES. Toitu Otago Settlers Museum
Reports. Otago Education Board Archives. Hocken Collections
A Return of the freeholders of New Zealand : giving the names, addresses and occupations of owners of land, together with the area and value in counties, and the value in boroughs and town districts, October 1882 / Property-Tax Department. Wellington : Govt. Printer, 1884.
Southern Cemetery burial registers
Stone’s Otago and Southland Directory
Wise’s Dunedin & Suburbs & Districts Directory