Olivia Street (Stratford)

Regular readers of this column may recall that Norman Street in Vogeltown was named after the son of John and Henrietta Buckman. As it happens, Olivia Street was indirectly named after another of their children, but curiously not their well-known daughter, the opera singer Rosina Buckman.

The short-lived Taranaki Central Press reported on 23 December 1936, in an article about the history of Stratford street names, that in 1910 “the father of Rosina Buckman, the famous singer, opened up for building an area of land in Hamlet Street north”. While Buckman had suggested naming the new street after the mayor of Stratford at the time, Mr Jonas Masters, it was decided to stick with Stratford’s Shakespearean theme. One of his daughters was called Olive and so the street was named Olivia, after a character from Twelfth Night.

Olivia is a central character in the popular play, a beautiful woman of high standing mourning the death of her father and brother. Spurning the advances of several suitors she eventually falls in love with Cesario, who is actually a woman posing as a man. The play ends happily, but it’s not Cesario that she finally marries. The first film version of the play was made in 1910.

That same year in Stratford, Mr Buckman’s street was being surveyed and Olive Buckman was playing the lead role in Dorothy, a production put on by the New Plymouth Operatic Society. Proving that musical genes ran in the family, Olive’s sister Ethel played the part of Lady Betty in the same production. Another sister, Clarice, joined J.C. Williamson’s Opera Company in Australia.

We don’t know much about Olive’s life, other than it seems likely she trained as a nurse at the old Barrett Street Hospital before moving to Wellington. She never married and died in Masterton in 1975 aged 92.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.