Originally Hinemihi’s carvings were installed to a new structure created in Surrey, next to an ornamental lake, and accounts describe how she was moved to her present site during the First World War by soldiers from New Zealand, including Māori troops recovering at Clandon during its time as a military hospital.
The restoration of Hinemihi
During the middle of the 20th century Hinemihi underwent a significant change in her structure and by the end of the Second World War needed repair. Clandon Park was donated to us in 1956. Then, in the 1960s, we asked New Zealand’s High Commission for help with a restoration programme. Other partners from New Zealand made financial contributions, along with a supply of totara wood.
Further repairs were undertaken in 1979 by an English firm, specialists in restoring historic wooden buildings. Restorers had little visual material to copy apart from an old photograph of Hinemihi taken a few days after the eruption, her roof covered in volcanic debris. Innocently mistaking several tons of rooftop ash for traditional English thatch, they replaced the roof with a thick covering of Norfolk reeds.
A Māori visit to Clandon Park
In the summer of 1986 Hinemihi was visited by Emily Schuster, a great-granddaughter of the carver Tene Waitere. Emily recalled her experience of the visit, 'We could feel the presence of our ancestors, those who sheltered inside Hinemihi during the eruption, and those who didn’t make it to safety.'