Up the Country: A Saga of Pioneering Days

When Major-General Sir Oswald Raymond Mazere-Poole, K.C.B., M.P., the grandson of old "Boko" Pool, became desirous of a genealogical tree, he laid stress on the Mazere part of his cognomen. It was, by rights, one of his Christian names, but after the war, gaining his title and being elected to Parliament on the strength of his uniform, some conservative platitudes and the reverence in which the diggers' exploits on the battlefields were held, a hyphen, which no one dared dispute, crept into his name.

In accentuating the Mazere relationship and minimising the Pool, he was clearly a snob. Further, he was ignorant, but that was not his fault. The real founder of his fortunes was his grandmother, old Boko Pool's second wife, née Harriet Mayborn, and it was her name which should have held highest honour in the Major-General's family chart and which should have been repeated in family christenings. But, since one of the reasons for Harriet Mayborn's amazing marriage with old Boko Pool had been to consign that dishonoured name to oblivion, he was never to know of that branch of his lineage. His very existence, ultimately to climb to a position of importance in public life, originated in a miracle of which Harriet Pool was the author.