Biography

James Kitto (1833-1914)

Betsy Ann Rowe Kitto (1838-1910)

Gold lured James and Betsy Kitto to Otago. James Kitto was born on 11 July 1833, at Hill, Redruth, Cornwell. He worked as a Cornish tin miner. Betsy Ann Rowe Manual was born on 8 July 1838, at Tresavean, Gwennap Moors, Cornwell, the daughter of a shopkeeper. Her older brother, Moses Edwin Manuel, and James Kitto were best friends.

James and Betsy were married on 21 February 1854, at Lanner, Gwennap, Cornwall. James was 20 and Betsy was just 15. Three weeks after the wedding, James and Betsy said goodbye for what turned into several years living half a world apart. James and Moses sailed from Liverpool on the ‘Saldanha’ on 11 March 1854, bound for Melbourne, and the Victorian gold fields. They mined at Forest Creek, Avoca, Maryborough, Blackmans Lead, Creswick Creek, and at Ballarat, where they arrived three days before the Eureka Stockade of 3 December 1854, and heard and saw the conflict from their tents pitched on a neighbouring hill.

In took more than three years for the brothers-in-law to save enough money to enable Moses to return to England to marry, and bring back to Australia his bride and his sister Betsy. The trio left England on 15 May 1857 on the ‘Royal Charter’ and joined James in Ballarat, where James and Betsy’s first child, also called James, was born on 30 August 1858. He died seven months later. Their second child, James Manuel Kitto (Jim), was born at Amherst on 10 August 1860.

On 12 February 1862, James and Betsy and their surviving son Jim, along with the recently widowed Moses and his daughter Elizabeth, sailed for the Otago gold fields on the barque ‘Seamans Bride’. They were among the first miners at Munroes Gully, where they helped establish the Wesleyan Church, and by 1864 were mining at Moa Flat (Ettrick), and living at the mouth of the Benger River. At first they lived in a sod cottage, then built a wooden house which still survives next to Joads Nursery at Ettrick. After four years, James had made enough from mining to paid for his widowed mother and some of his brothers and their families to emigrate from Cornwall to Central Otago.

When the gold ran out, James worked as a road overseer and a farmer. He and Betsy had nine more children. Richard Francis Manuel Kitto, Betsy Ann Kitto, Emma (Caroline) Kitto, Moses Edwin Kitto, John Henry Kitto, Susan Sophia Kitto, Samuel Harper Arthur Kitto, Mary Elizabeth Kitto and Helen Evaline Kitto.

James and Betsy retired to Dunedin in 1901, and lived at Given Street off Victoria Road, St Kilda until 1905, when they moved to 9 George Street (now called Dalmeny Street) in North East Valley. Betsy died there on 20 September 1910. She was 72. She was buried in the Northern Cemetery four days later. James continued to live in George Street until 1913, when he moved to Wellington to live with one of his children at 80 Tinakori Road. He died there on 15 November 1914, age 81 and was buried next to his wife on 3 December 1914. (His age is mistakenly recorded on the couple’s headstone as 82.)

Main ref. lan Dougherty, PO Box 90, Dunedin 9054
(the couple’s great-great grandson)