Equipped
A piece of the Wreys Bush Cemetery in Southland.
Wrey’s Bush at one time had a really giant Catholic inhabitants, most of them coming from Galway.
The primary Catholic Church opened in 1884 and in March 1899 a convent and college had been begun by 4 Sisters of Mercy.
The Wreys Bush Faculty pupils, bar one, had been Catholic and shifted their allegiances to the brand new faculty.
Wrey’s Bush Faculty needed to shut and 4 years later the constructing was shifted half a mile to be added to the Catholic faculty.
Wrey’s Bush then supposedly grew to become the one neighborhood within the nation the place the one faculty was a Catholic one.
Bishop Leonard Boyle and his brothers attended the college which later transferred to Nightcaps.
He mentioned that when he visited Galway, members of the family took him to the native cemetery the place his household had been buried, and he felt like he was standing at Wrey’s Bush Cemetery as many of the names within the Galway cemetery had been the identical names as within the Wrey’s Bush cemetery. Bishop Boyle is buried there.
Campaigning for justice
Southland’s most persistent campaigner for justice was John James Meikle, of Wyndham, who was accused of sheep stealing in 1887.
William Lambert had been employed to find the person who had been stealing sheep from a property adjoining Meikle’s and he summoned police when he claimed he had discovered stolen sheep at Meikle’s farm.
Meikle and his 13-year-old son Arthur had been charged.
Meikle was sentenced to seven years’ arduous labour with the choose commenting that he was “head of a hoop of plunderers who had skilled his son for perjury and his servants to plunder. There was no trustworthy farmer inside 11 miles (17km) of Meikle’s neighbourhood who wouldn’t sleep sounder due to his conviction. The sentence to be handed would relieve them from concern of his depredations for some years to come back and allow his son to be reformed.”
The case was an apparent miscarriage of justice and on his launch after 5 years’ arduous labour he fought doggedly and publicly to clear his title, finally successful some small compensation and seeing his accuser imprisoned for perjury.
The details of his public lectures had been that “he was prosecuted by a rich firm with whose representatives he had been on very dangerous phrases, the counsel engaged towards him had been solicitors for that firm, the sheriff who referred to as the jury was auditor for the corporate, the chief witness was a person who was promised £50 by the corporate upon a conviction being obtained, the proof was very weak and Decide Ward who presided on the trial was closely indebted to the corporate.”
Meikle made a profession of his victimhood, making vigorous assaults on the authorized system and lecturing on the injustice he had suffered.
The case for compensation and the clearing of his felony report labored its means via parliament with no passable decision, Lambert himself protesting his personal imprisonment for perjury.
Wyndham wearied of its most well-known citizen, and people concerned within the case regretted they’d ever heard the phrase Meikle.
