The bizarre story of the Bezar plot.
‘I shall be pleased to have your explanation as to why your Council permitted an unauthorised person – my renegade brother – to commit the unparallel act of burying a complete stranger to us in my mother’s grave at Karori.’
So wrote Mr C. E. Bezar to the Town Clerk on 31st January 1923.
He continued:
‘We went to a very heavy expense to make our mother’s grave as substantial as possible, and today, I understand, the masonry is in a shocking state, having been broken away by these ghouls, and now left in that condition’.
On receipt of the letter, the Town Clerk consulted the City Solicitor’s Office. John O’Shea replied on behalf of the office:
‘The trouble in this case evidently arises from a family squabble. These people appear to go to no end of trouble to annoy one another’.
He suggested sending a non-committal letter to buy some time, while the funeral director was contacted.
The catalyst for this chain of correspondence occurred on 21st April 1921, when Eliza Ann Day was buried in Roman Catholic plot 127 in Row O, the plot in which Mary Ann Bezar was buried in 1907.
E. Morris Junior was the funeral director at Eliza’s interment. A letter in reply to the Town Clerk, dated 23rd February 1923, stated that E. Morris had carried out instructions to bury Eliza Day in plot 127, at the directions of the owner of the plot.
Subsequent to all of this, Mrs L.E. Bezar applied to the Department of Internal Affairs to remove Eliza Day (her sister) from plot 127 to another part of the cemetery. But this could not be approved without the owners of plot 127 consenting to her removal. In November 1923, not all members of the family were in agreement that Eliza should be moved.
The Town Clerk urged Mr C. E. Bezar to contact the Department himself, as the legal owner of the plot, enclosing his deed, and asking that the warrant be issued. In turn, the Department wrote to Mrs L. E. Bezar requesting her permission to remove the remains of Eliza Day from the plot. By December 1924, the warrant was issued. Mr C. E. Bezar wrote a note of thanks to the Town Clerk in April 1925 and the matter came to a close.
In 1936, Mary Ann Bezar’s husband, Edwin Bezar, died at the age of 97. He was cremated and his ashes interred in plot 127 with his wife, however he is not named on the headstone. You can read more about his interesting life here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Bezar
Plot: *ROM CATH/O/127
By Julia Kennedy
Reference: Wellington City Council Archives, 00233-1923/9
