Food for thought

So Jock the voyage out wasn’t always pleasant. What sort of conditions did they find when they arrived in New Zealand?

Well it depended a little bit when they arrived. I mean, if they arrived in the 1850s or the 1860s there was normally a shortage of labour, and wages on the whole were pretty high. And you get these letters when they write… back from… when immigrants write back from New Zealand, and they talk about how they can’t believe how much meat there is in New Zealand. If you were sort of Irish potato farmer, or you came from a small croft in Scotland, meat was pretty unusual. They might have had a pig, which was sort of ‘owned’, and it would be a great moment of excitement when they killed the pig and they had a bit of bacon. But normally meat wasn’t very common. They got to New Zealand and suddenly found they were eating lamb chops for breakfast, and lamb chops for lunch, and lamb chops for dinner, and they couldn’t believe how much of that kind of food they were getting.

And one of the effects of that was that by 1900 or thereabouts, because the people who came to New Zealand had had a much better diet, they were much physically bigger. And when the New Zealand soldiers went off to the South African War, they found that they were about 6 inches taller than people in England, and that is largely because they had a much better diet.