Some Oriental Bay residents may remember the Te Aro saltwater baths which were replaced, on the same site, by the Freyberg Pool in 1963. But the Meech Baths – built where the Royal Port Nicholson Yacht Club is now – was actually Oriental Bay’s first swimming pool, built by Henry Meech in 1862.

It was a high-tide pool, cordoned off by a fence of totara piles, with changing rooms and refreshment facilites. Mixed bathing was strictly prohibited. A blue flag was hoisted during ladies’ hours (9am to 2pm) and a red flag during gentlemen’s hours (before or after the ladies). Sporty young men rowed over from the town or walked round the harbour to swim in these saltwater baths.

Henry Meech had sailed to Wellington on the Oriental with his wife, landing in January 1840. He set up a shipyard Oxenham & Meech, at the mouth of Hutt River but soon moved over the harbour to Pipitea. In 1862, he built the baths for owners T.W. Standwell and S.S. Downes. His wife, Mary Ann, died in 1866, the same year that his eldest son drowned in Palliser Bay.

In 1868 he married widow Matilda Sancto.

Matilda was baptised at Kent in England in 1825 – the daughter of James Fisher, fishmonger, and his wife Sarah. In 1846 she married bargeman, John Sancto. They had five children. John Sancto then emigrated to New Zealand in 1854 and soon afterwards Matilda set sail to join him. She landed at Lyttelton then caught a steamer to Wellington which was still shaking after the January earthquake. They lived on the beach at Lambton Quay until 1859 when Sancto was lost at sea while returning from Porangahau with a load of wool.

After her husband’s death, Matilda set up a fruit shop and general store in Lambton Quay and also at Clyde Quay opposite the saltwater baths where she later met Henry Meech who was then running the baths. Meech had been working as a shipwright with his boatbuilding yard at Te Aro pa. But at some stage he had taken charge of the saltwater baths.

Matilda gave up her own business and helped her husband run the baths. For a time the family lived in a house built on stilts partly over the water. It was a large family then as it included children from both their previous marriages as well as the daughter born later to Henry and Matilda. Subsequently they moved across the road to a house that backed onto the cliff at Clyde Quay.

Henry Meech died in 1885. Matilda Meech continued to operate the baths and became a well-known personality in Wellington. In 1891 she took Wellington City Council to court for polluting her baths with refuse from their destructor plant. She won the case and was awarded £200 – quite a sum in those days. On 10 August 1907, Matilda Meech died at Clyde Quay and is buried in Karori Cemetery.

Thanks to historian, Hilda McDonnell, for much of the above information.

— Judith Doyle, Bay View newsletter 73, April 2019