Biography

SARAH CARRODUS 1864 – 1946

Sarah was born in Australia and came to New Zealand as a seven-year-old. She worked for Peter and Jeannie Duncan as a domestic when they lived at Ross Street, Roslyn, with the young family of two boys, and from 1899 at Tolcarne. She will have been with the Duncan Family, latterly with Fred and Violet and their two children, Pat and Fred Jnr, for over fifty years when she died at Tolcarne in on May the sixteenth 1946, aged eighty-two.

The young Fred Duncan had clear memories of Sarah in his youth when she was the cook and housekeeper at Tolcarne. She was “a genteel and loving woman with a benign but firm hand; woe betide the children if they were caught in the pantry without her permission.”

And the four children of Peter Duncan’s nephew, Ross. Duncan, remember well the big pikelets she produced for them when they visited her in her Tolcarne kitchen, and the presents she sent for each of them every Christmas, without fail, during the 1920s and 1930s.

It is so appropriate, and indicative of the affection felt for Sarah, that her ashes were placed in the Peter Duncan Family Plot with the caption Lifelong friend Sarah Carrodus.