After the spotlight of fraudster Amy Bock’s attentions, Nessie Ottaway simply moved on, writes Toitu curator Sean Brosnahan.
Tucked away in a drawer full of wedding invitations in the ‘‘The Big Day’’ exhibition at Toitu is a modest printed card that would be easy to overlook. It is, however, a memento of perhaps the most notorious wedding in Otago history.
On April 21, 1909 Amy Bock, a compulsive fantasist and fraudster posing as a well-to-do young bachelor, Percy Leonard Carol Redwood, married the second daughter of George and Martha Ottaway, of Port Molyneux.
The Ottaways gave their daughter a fitting wedding celebration. The ceremony itself was held in their home, a boarding house at the Nuggets popular with holiday makers from Dunedin.
Guests were treated to a ‘‘sumptuous repast’’ in a giant marquee erected on the grounds and large enough to hold more than 100 invited guests.
All the traditional toasts were offered and there was singing and dancing into the night. An impressive pile of wedding gifts was on display and there was ‘‘a handsome wedding carriage brought down from Dunedin specially for the occasion’’. So it must have been an enormous shock when detectives arrived from Dunedin and exposed ‘‘Percy’’ as Amy, a well-known con artist.
In fact, Agnes (Nessie) Ottaway was a mature woman, nearly 32 years old when ‘‘Percy’’ walked her down the aisle. Perhaps that’s what made the Ottaways an easy ‘‘mark’’ for Amy. In Edwardian society to be unmarried at 32 made you a hardened ‘‘spinster’’ and probably ‘‘on the shelf’’ for life.
George was undoubtedly relieved when their charming boarding house guest ‘‘Mr Redwood’’ formally asked for permission to court and marry the last of his three daughters.
Poor Nessie. How did she cope with the public humiliation of being headline news in every newspaper in New Zealand and many overseas? By quickly marrying someone else, for a start.
In May 1910 she quietly became the second wife of a middle-aged Balclutha widower, Thomas Gilmour. She also became step-mother to his grown children, including an eldest daughter only a few years younger than Agnes herself.
Was there any romance involved? Impossible to say now but there is a definite sense of ‘‘making the best of it’’ to a union like this. The marriage was to be short-lived in any case. Thomas Gilmour died of heart disease in 1918.
Agnes married again in 1927, this time to Alexander (Kenny) Campbell, a farmer and decorated World War 1 veteran of her own age (now 50), from Kaka Point.
This seems a much better match; Nessie and Kenny would have known each other most of their lives, since their mothers had operated rival accommodation houses at the Nuggets for years.
Sadly, this marriage was to be brief as well; Kenny Campbell died from cancer in January 1930.
When she died in 1936 she owned a house, shop and land in Mornington as well as a house and land at Kaka Point.
Though thrice married, Agnes is buried alone in a grave at Andersons Bay cemetery. Her headstone bears the simple inscription ‘‘At Rest’’.
