16/08/2026
During a recent tour of some heritage cemeteries throughout the Marlborough District one or two connections were made to Bolton Street Cemetery. Picton Cemetery is connected through Katherine Mansfield's Beauchamp (paternal) grandparents who are buried there. Katherine of course is buried in Fontainebleau, France, where she died in 1923, aged only 34. However, her baby sister was buried in Bolton Street Cemetery aged 3 months in January 1891 (when Katherine was only 3 years old), and her parents Harold and Annie (DYER) purchased a standard 3-ft wide plot for the infant, presumably providing for later burials if needed. Katherine's maternal grandmother, Margaret Isabella DYER, her husband Joseph, and one of her brothers, Henry Worthington Dyer, were all buried in a separate family plot in Bolton Street, starting with Joseph in 1877. Their plot was excavated for the motorway and the remains of their plaques were reinstated on a wall in almost inaccessible part of the cemetery.
Margaret Isabella lived with the Beauchamps in Tinakori Road and is said to have provided the motherly warmth and affection that Katherine didn't get from her mother, particularly when Katherine was sick as a small child, and when her parents went to England for extended periods, leaving the children with their grandmother. According to AI, Margaret Isabella Dyer is immortalized as the wise, comforting, and gentle grandmother "Mrs. Fairfield" in Mansfield's semi-autobiographical New Zealand fiction, most notably in the stories "Prelude" and "At the Bay"
Harold Beauchamp was amongst those who provided financial and lobbying support for the establishment of cremation facilities at Karori Cemetery, resulting in the crematorium and it's chapel opening in 1909. Accordingly Harold and Annie Beauchamp were both eventually cremated at Karori Cemetery, and their ashes are in a niche in the Small Crematorium Chapel.
