Biography

Margaret Elizabeth Cowie (1854-1942)

Margaret Cowie (née Curle) was the daughter of David Curle and Elizabeth Watson. She left Scotland and came to New Zealand with her family when she was eight years old. She lived in St Leonards on the Otago Peninsula, and went to the primary school that her father helped to establish in the area.

She was a devout Presbyterian, and a zealous teacher at the local Sunday School in St Leonards. Evidence of her efforts may still be seen in the St Leonards Presbyterian church. A fine pulpit bible, dated 24 October 1880, bears the inscription: ‘Presented to Miss Curle by the St Leonards School children and their friends as a token to mark their appreciation and recognition of her unwearied zeal and efforts to further their temporal and spiritual welfare’.

In 1880, when she was 26 years old, Margaret married William Cowie at the Ravensbourne Trinity Church. Margaret and her husband lived in a house in Leith Street for most of their married life, and had eight children. After her husband’s death, when she was a semi-invalid, she was looked after by her daughters in a house at 402 High Street. ‘Her eyesight was bad so the family read to her, and when we children visited, we had to go close so that she could finger our clothing, invariably pronouncing it not warm enough’.

The ritual family Sunday visits are remembered by Margaret’s granddaughter Daphne vividly. ‘All the family remember visits to that house, with its large, lofty, cold rooms. But the sitting room at the back, formerly the kitchen, faced north and west, and Grandma sat warm and comfortable at an open fireplace, converted from a coal range.’

Grandma Cowie is remembered also as having ‘a fine soft complexion, never exposed to the ravages of sun or wind. She wore long, dark dresses, appearing to be in perpetual mourning for the husband who predeceased her by thirty years’.

Margaret died in Prospect House, Dunedin, in 1942, and is buried in the family grave in the Northern Cemetery. Old letters preserved in local archives speak of her as ‘one who was much loved, and whose example and way of life did much to build the characters of the young…a first-decade pupil who, in later life, took a great interest in the people’.

Reference: Nothing like a dame: A biography of Dame Daphne Purves, by Molly Anderson.

— Other burials recorded at the same site:
Robert CURLE d. 1895,
David CURLE d. 1899,
Elizabeth Watson CURLE d. 1901,
William COWIE d. 1911,
James CURLE d. 1925,
James Arthur COWIE d. 1926,
Adeline COWIE d. 1952,
Irvine Watson COWIE d. 1956,
Elizabeth Curle KREFT d. 1963,
and Martin Albert KREFT d. 1965.