Maker: Celia Southey

Panel number: 140

Petition Sheet Number: 161

Person honouring: Clyma Margaret

Relationship to makers: A soul sister

Margaret Millar Brown married John Richard Clyma in 1877. They lived in Dunedin and had sxi children: John Albert Cyril (1878), William James Nairn (1880), Mary Elizabeth Ellen (1881), Wilfred Low Mitchell (1884), Thomas Owen Sydney (1887), Margaret Teenie Millar (1890). 

In the 1890s Margaret was running a restaurant in Princes Street, Dunedin. She then became the manager of the Sussex Private Hotel in George St, Dunedin. Margaret and John divorced in 1908. 

Robert Kennard was another hotel manager and by 1911 Robert and Margaret had shifted to Wellington where Margaret was running a boarding house. Robert and Margaret were married at the Registry Office in Wellington on 4 December 1912. They later lived at Main Road, Paraparaumu where Margaret died on 25 March 1925. 

Margaret Millar Clyma is recorded in the Kennard family book “With Those Who Came First” (Beryl Maultby, second edition printed by Progress Print Dunedin, 1990).

Panel materials: Embroidery cottons from my mother’s stash, and Sharpie pens. I embroidered 6 Kohai flowers to represent her six children. I also embroidered 46 leaves on to the tree. Leaves grow and go - they spread out across their world, like the suffragette ladies did.