Preface
Bonnie was my mother. She was beautiful, kind and very smart and loved horses and picked up her
nickname after a Clydesdale on the family farm called Bonnie who she loved.
I write more fully about the woman she was in my book “KC, The Life and Times of Ken Eastwood.
Like all of us, Bonnie was shaped by her family and the environment she experienced growing up.
Both the McLarens and Caverhills came from the United Kingdom via quite different circumstances.
The McLarens were forced to leave Scotland due to the “clearances” around 1816 while Bon’s great
grandmother, Frances (nee King) came from Warwickshire, England in the ship “Cressy” landing in
Lyttleton in 1850 with a group known as the Canterbury Pilgrims.^1
Her family were sheep and beef farmers of long standing in early New Zealand. Horses too were an
important part of family life. Bon’s mother, Poppy was a nurse at Masterton Hospital, she was an
independent person who loved to travel. Her Aunt Lina loved clothes and fashion and was a kind,
nonjudgmental person who supported people from all walks of life. All these influences shone
through in Bonnie’s life.
Bonnie’s grandfather, Charles Caverhill worked on farms from North Canterbury, Taranaki, Hawkes
Bay and Wairarapa. Fortunately, he recorded a lot of his father’s (John Caverhill) and his own
farming experiences in an unpublished memoir typed up on foolscap pages in 1951. Through these
memoirs, together with the diaries of his mother Frances Caverhill, and Extracts from “Early Life in
New Zealand, 1841 to 1866” by Edward Jolly, we can learn a lot about the family history that shaped
Bonnie.
I came across Charles’s memoirs and Edward Jolly’s work when going through a box of old letters
and papers of Mum’s long stored in various family attics and sheds. I am publishing them so that our
family and others can also share the interesting history they record. This will add to Frances’s diaries
found in Christchurch by my brother Scott, to bring some family history to life.
(^1) Read more in the two volumes “A Year at Hawkswood, the diary of Francis Caverhill for 1865.” Nag’s Head
Press, Christchurch.