‘Cousin Kate’

Summary

Introduction

In 1900, Kathleen Beauchamp, aged twelve, posted off a letter to the children’s page of the New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, earning herself a red satin badge for publication, and membership of the ‘cousinhood’. She was henceforth called ‘Cousin Kathleen’. In 2016, this writer discovered the letter – and another from 1901 – in the azurecoloured bound volumes of the Graphic, held at Wellington Central Library. The children’s page editor, a mysterious eminence known as ‘Cousin Kate’, is now distinguished as the first known recipient of KM’s letters. At twelve, Kathleen was on the cusp of adolescence, immersed in family and school, her centre of gravity the fine-pillared, two-storey wooden mansion she would later immortalise as ‘75’ (Tinakori Road, Thorndon), with its lily lawn, tennis court and sweeping views out to sea. She was keeping notebooks, scratching out poems, helping on a magazine at her school a few streets away. She was a great reader, poring through the pages of the Graphic, the Auckland broadsheet she found in the spacious drawing room at 75, aimed at the elites of colonial society, including her own extended family’s privileged world. When her Uncle Frank married the Premier’s daughter, for example, the paper splashed photographs of the event, even calling it ‘THE society wedding of 1897’. Annie Beauchamp’s glittering parties, too, routinely graced the Graphic’s society pages; at one, the handsome hostess was caught in ‘a pretty gown of soft cream voile, tucked, and the bodice softened with lace and pale blue silk’. Daughter Kathleen’s interest, however, was the inside back pages, to which Cousin Kate invited her community of young and literate ‘cousins’ to contribute stories, poems, letters and drawings.

The first of these two letters (17 November 1900) is chatty and effusive, the handiwork of a twelve-year-old gushing with news. Cousin Kate praised it as ‘splendidly long and interesting’. She was right. We learn that Father (Harold Beauchamp) has just had the tennis court at 75 built. There is more: postcard collecting, school activities (she is playing Tweedledum in ‘Alice in Wonderland’). We hear of a family visit to the South Island, plagued by spring gales. She has just finished The Lady of the Forest by L. T. Meade, author of rollicking stories for Victorian girls.