Richard (Dick) John Cardigan Mann was born on 13 July 1890, at 435 Cardigan Street, Carlton, Melbourne, the youngest son of Harriet Maxted (1859-1922) and Claude Mann (1853-1897). In 1904 he emigrated with his mother and half-brother Walter Brockman (1896-1968) to Capetown, South Africa, where Harriet met and married her third husband George Watson (1879-c1932). In Capetown Dick was a telegram boy.
The family emigrated to Christchurch, New Zealand in 1906, where Dick was employed as a grocer’s assistant. It was as a grocer’s assistant that Dick met his future wife Alma Marie Shaw (1899-1987), around 1913. Dick was a committed athlete active in running, rowing, lawn bowls and coaching (women’s hockey).
ANZAC
Richard John Cardigan Mann enrolled with Sydenham Rifles on 13 August 1906, and transferred to the Territorial Reserve 27 July 1911. He attested for the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) on 23 August 1915, for WW1, becoming Sapper Richard John Cardigan Mann DSC (4/1179), 8th Reinforcement, Divisional Signallers, NZ Engineers. He embarked from New Zealand on 13 November 1915, and had active service on the Western Front, including in the Armentières, Somme, Ploegsteert, Neuve Eglise, Messines, and Ypres campaigns.
Dick returned to New Zealand on 9 May 1919, and was discharged from the NZEF on 6 June 1919. He was awarded the New Zealand Service Medal. Dick kept a diary of his wartime experience.
Richards’s War Record is recorded on Auckland Museum’s Online Cenotaph.
On 14 February 1921 Dick married Alma, and they purchased 128 Ensors Road, Woolston, next door to his family home at 126 Ensors Road. Alma gave birth to two daughters Joan Marie Harriet (1922- 2022) and Beverley Dawn (1930-2017).
Dick worked as a grocer/grocer’s assistant and built a market garden on his large plot of land at 128 Ensors Road, including 2 commercial glasshouses, selling tomatoes and vegetables.
He was employed by NZ Farmers Cooperative Association of Canterbury, 214 Cashel Street, in their department store as a grocery assistant, from 1906 until retirement. When Ensors Road was taken for arterial road development in the early 1960s, Dick and Alma moved to a new home at 9 Ardmore Place in Papanui, where he won awards for his garden.
Dick died on the 22 July 1977 at the age of 87.
Information supplied by his granddaughter Jan Bierman