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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 6 (September 1, 1938)

The Home in Kaikorai Valley

The Home in Kaikorai Valley.

His father was Job Mellor, a loom-tuner in the Yorkshire woollen mills. He was a model of tireless patience, and never was man more appropriately named. Not well-educated by our modern standards, he was a keen reader and adaptable in all things. In later years he built his own house in Dunedin and also used to make his own page 10 clothes. He was a man with strong Liberal and Labour leanings and preeminently fitted for a Colonial life. His wife Emma was also a Yorkshire woman, frugal, tidy, and a born home-maker.

Joseph William Mellor was born in Lindley, a suburb of Huddersfield, in 1869. The reproduced portrait of the family group—the children comprised four girls and two boys as may be seen—shows a handsome and dignified couple, who cannot fail to impress by their appearance of intelligence and sterling worth. The family arrived in Lyttelton in 1879 and spent two years in Kaiapoi, where the father worked in the woollen mills and the children went to school. In 1881 they all went south to Dunedin, the magnet being, of course, the woollen mills in the Kaikorai Valley. Here the father built the house referred to above and the family settled down. Joseph went to the Linden School (by the way, did you know that part of the Kaikorai Valley was then known as Linden and that

“On Linden when the sun was low
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,”

still raises familiar echoes in scholars of that school?) There he was looked on as an ordinary industrious schoolboy of no outstanding merit. Leaving school in December, 1882, he started work as a handy boy in the employ of H. S. Fish, the prominent citizen, mayor and Member of Parliament, whose vituperative speeches prompted the famous epigram of the 'nineties, “While in England we get our fish from Billingsgate, in the Antipodes we get our Billingsgate from Fish.”

Joseph then progressed through Simon Bros.'s boot shop to McKinley's boot factory, and finally to the boot factory of Sargood & Sons, where he worked for some years.

The wind of Learning bloweth where it listeth, but the forebears and early life of Mellor bear close resemblance to those of Rutherford, his peer. Young Rutherford was the more brilliant, but Mellor the keener after knowledge. Only a few months ago the only chord of memory evoked by the mention of Mellor's name in the breast of a certain Dunedinite who was Mellor's foreman in Sargood's factory was that of a quiet studious boot-clicker, pondering over mysterious books in lunch hours and every spare minute while the factry drone was still.

For, as Mellor himself confided recently to his old schoolmate, life-long friend and brother-in-law, Mr. Arthur Ellis of Dunedin, he was a youth in his early teens when he first conceived his life-long determination—impossible of fruition as it might then appear—to become the foremost chemist of his generation. This ambitio seems to owe nothing to any external influence, although it is remembered that his father was always very interested in anything pertaining to that science.

It was a long walk in those mornings over the Roslyn hill to Sargood's factory, and a longer walk back in the evening, but every night was spent at the beloved studies. A “laboratory” was built in the garden of the home, not a pretentious building, only a 6 ft. by 6 ft. shed of corrugated iron, fitted with such meagre apparatus and books as his modest savings could compass. While the evening meal was in progress it was his mother's task—nay, the word “task” ill describes the work of love, since the studies of young Joe were already the pride and hope of the parents—to heat a brick in the kitchen oven, and immediately the meal was over the indefatigable student withdrew to the “tin-shed” for the evening, where he experimented and read by the light of the small kerosene lamp of yore and comforted by the hot brick enclosed in flannel.

It is interesting to learn that the “tin-shed” was still in existence a few years ago and that much of Mellor's modest apparatus was still housed there.

A further proof of his industry is revealed by the fact that, as the young scientist was too poor to buy the books he needed, he obtained a loan of many of them from various sources and laboriously copied the contents out in longhand.

There was of course little time for sport or other relaxation for one who lived such laborious days and studious nights but, as the outcome of the joint suggestion and co-operation of Mr. Arthur Ellis, he was introduced to chess in 1885 and became an outstanding player. For some years he acted as chess Editor for the Dunedin “Evening Star,” and was once or twice in the final heat of the New Zealand Chess Championship. I apologise for the word “heat” in such context, but was delighted to learn that in his maturer years in Staffordshire and London the only sport that could delay the completion of his monumental “Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry” was a game of penny poker or the more erudite solo whist.