Mrs L Spencer

Biographical information provided for by Fiona Oliver for the He Tohu exhibition:

Louisa Bromwich was born about 1858 at St Pancras, London, the youngest of six sisters. She came from a working-class family – her father was a labourer and brick-maker, her mother (who also signed the petition) a laundress. When she was 15-years-old she came to New Zealand with her parents and two of her sisters on the Duke of Edinburgh in 1873, arriving in Wellington. Three years later she married William Spencer, 19, who was a brick-maker like her father, at St Peter’s Church in Wellington. She had eight children, one of whom was born premature and did not survive. A daughter died at age 12, but the rest grew up and outlived her. She died in 1910, aged 52.