Biography contributed by Bernadette Siebert
Ann Peek was born about 1819 in Kings Lynn, Norfolk, England, one of the children of Christopher Peek, a grocer, and his first wife Mary nee Coe. By 1851 Ann’s parents were both dead and she was living with her married brother, as a ‘gentlewoman’. Later that year Ann married Frederic James Utting at Toxteth Park, Lancashire.
Frederic was also Norfolk born, a surveyor and architect. He was 37 years old and recently widowed. Previously he had married in 1842 at Kings Lynn, to Sarah Hephzibah Smith and they had six children, before she died in 1849:
Edwin Orris (1843–1870)
Walter Frederic (1844–1933)
Clifford Palmer (1845–1869)
Ernest Henry (1847–1849)
Edith Agnes (1848–1884)
Arthur (1849–1923)
Ann and Frederic quickly had five more children:
Jane (1852–1906)
Annie (1852–1928)
Emily (1854–1921)
Frederick Clement (1856–1950)
Charles Robert (1859–1927)
In 1860, Frederic took the four eldest boys and sailed on the Red Jacket arriving in NZ via Australia. And in 1861 Ann was working in Woolton, Lancashire, as a school teacher to support herself and the other six children. They arrived in Auckland on the Bombay in December 1863.
Frederic was a member of the first Unitarian Church in Auckland. Franklin Bradley was the Unitarian minister in Auckland 1863–5. During his tenure as the minister, the secretary was Frederic James Utting, a surveyor who then found the Bradley family land to buy at Arapahoue. He kept the congregation going for up to a year after Franklin left, started a church building fund and wrote to the British and Foreign Unitarian Association in the UK asking for help to recruit a replacement minister. Utting named the suburb of New Lynn in Auckland after his home place of Kings Lynn back in England.
In 1866 Frederic and Ann wife settled in Albertland, a non-conformist religious settlement north of Auckland. According to their son Frederic Clement,
my father came to Port Albert in the hopes of bettering his position financially. These hopes however were not realised because his efforts to make a living off the land were not very successful and consequently finances got down to a very low ebb. My father had to pawn some of his surveying instruments to keep things going.
Their son Clifford had qualified as a surveyor when he died of consumption in 1869. The following year, another son Edwin also died of consumption. In 1884, the eldest daughter Edith also died of consumption, aged 36, leaving a husband and two young children. From Frederic Clement’s memoirs,
My mother, who was a delicately nurtured lady, was not cut out for a farmer’s wife. However she did her best to help by opening a small school where she taught her own children and had a few other pupils, who however did not pay much to help the family exchequer.
Frederic died in January 1882 at Port Albert, aged 67 years. He was buried at Port Albert Cemetery. Ann thereupon went to live with her daughter Emily who had married a Mr P. Becroft and had a family of five boys. She died in 1894 at the age of 75 years. The cemetery record notes B. M. Gubb, her son in law, as making arrangements for the burial. She was buried with her husband at Port Albert Cemetery, where the inscription reads, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’.
Ann is the mother of #24 Jane GUBB.
Sources
GRO indexes
Eighty Three Years in NZ – Frederick Clement Utting
PAPERS PAST New Zealand Herald, Volume XIX, Issue 6303, 30 January 1882, Page 6
1861 census: Class: RG 9; Piece: 2740; Folio: 48; Page: 11; GSU roll: 543022