| Biographical Display |
Thomas Arthur DEWSON
Carver and teacher of carving. Operated from Harrison Street in Whanganui. Originally worked for the Wanganui Sash and Door Company. In the early 1930s tenders were called for by the Wanganui Museum Board of Trustees to carve the rauawa (side strakes) of the great war canoe Te-Mata-o-Hoturoa. Thomas Dewson was selected. Historian T W Downes selected the carving design, and together with George Shepherd, the Museum curator, fitted the carvings, completed by Dewson, to the waka and repainted the hull with kōkōwai (red ochre pigment). Libby Sharpe 2012.
Thomas Arthur DEWSON 1869-1950
Woodcarver, responsible for the Homestead dining room mantelpiece and other woodwork in the house at Bushy Park. Dewson was a joiner, woodcarver, boat builder and even inventor and builder of racecourse totalisator machines, which would no doubt have endeared him to Frank Moore. He was born in Birmingham into a family of wood carvers and came out to New Zealand on the Hindustan in 1875. His childhood years were not always happy as it appears his parents, Arthur and Harriet Dewson, were partial to drink. In late 1879, Thomas and his brother Arthur and sisters Annie and Hindalena were found to be neglected in their Wellington home and were all sent to the Industrial School at Burnham. By 1884, the family were living in Auckland where Arthur Dewson and his son Thomas were both working as wood carvers for the NZ Timber Co. An Auckland Star report of Arthur beating up young Thomas confirms yet again the fact that both parents were regular drinkers. Arthur Dewson himself met an untimely death when he was fatally assaulted in a Auckland police cell in 1887; his widow Harriet became a petty thief and died in 1895. Young Thomas Dewson managed to survive by moving to Wanganui where his uncle William Dewson was a respected cabinetmaker working with Donald Ross until his death in 1892. Thomas Dewson worked for Wanganui Sash & Door Co in the 1890s and in 1898 decided to branch out on his own, providing instruction in wood carving from his home in Harrison Street. By 1899, Dewson was working with Russell & Bignell and designed and carved the Oamaru stone fountain that graced the garden at Te Mawai, A D Willis’s new home in Wanganui East. Wood carving work done by Dewson graced a number of Russell & Bignell’s buildings, including the 1901 Foster’s Hotel (burnt down 1918), the Notman house at the corner of Plymouth Street and Somme Parade (now Moore Law offices) and the kauri staircase at Mt Desert, which Bignell altered for his family after he purchased it in 1921. In the early 1930s Thomas Dewson carved the rauawa (side strakes) of the war canoe Te-Mata-o-Hoturoa for the Whanganui Regional Museum. The carving design was selected by local historian T W Downes. Dewson was married twice. His first wife, Catherine died in 1910 and he later remarried Alice Butters in 1916. His own life was not without incident as he was declared bankrupt twice, in 1894 and 1911. In his youth he was a keen rower and later took to building sailing boats; by 1904 there were three boats built by him on the Whanganui River. In 1913 he invented a totalisator machine which was installed at Avondale racecourse. This machine was built by Dewson with his son Raymond who later moved to Hastings. The Dewson relationship with Frank Moore stayed beyond the Bushy Park mantelpiece; Frank Moore employed Dewson's son-in-law, Albert Wiggins, as a labourer on the property in the 1920s after the Great War. Wendy Pettigrew 2014.
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