Home of Compassion Creche

Charity for the urban poor

Sweated pay rates and dirty, dangerous workplaces were not the only problems faced by female Victorian and Edwardian shop and factory workers. Prevailing mores stigmatised those mainly widowed or deserted women whose work took them away from their children during the day. Childcare — where it could be found — was expensive, as Mother Mary Joseph Aubert knew. We remember her best for founding the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion and for working among Wanganui Maori but in 1899 she and three of her sisters moved to the capital, where they would devote the rest of their lives to caring for the urban poor.

Legend has it that they arrived with just 2s 6d between them. ‘Mother Orbit’, as some called her, settled in a cottage in Buckle Street and began begging to feed the poor, pushing prams laden with donated food through working class Te Aro. ‘I am always begging, ‘she buttered up the mayor, ‘but it is for the poor in who you take such a kind interest.’

In 1900–01 Aubert opened a home for incurables, (against bureaucratic opposition) and Saint Anthony’s soup kitchen in Buckle Street for ‘Wellington’s Workless, Wet and Weary Wandering Willies’, its unemployed and casual workers. In 1903 she added a crèche or day nursery in Buckle Street. During the day the sisters and volunteers cared for the children and patched their clothes, all for a contribution towards the milk. In 1914 John Swan designed this building, the first purpose-built crèche in the country.

You can still see the Sisters’ crest in the clumsy crenelated parapet above the Buckle Street porch. Inside, it is basically a simple domestic structure. A large playroom and sleeping room ran off one side of the central passageway, two smaller amenity rooms, pantry, bathroom and toilet off the other. Later the building became a classroom and library for the (now demolished) Saint Patrick’s College and in more recent times it has been an arts studio and a car-parts shop, marooned by the one-way street system. The Sisters, like the poor, are still with us, at a modern centre across the road.

© 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.

Further reading: Jessie Munro, The Story of Suzanne Aubert, Auckland University Press/Bridget Williams Books, Auckland, 1996.

The Creche Building was moved in 2014 to allow for road widening and refurbished. It is now is now the Pukeahu Memorial Park Education Centre and NZHistory has more on the story.