Winifred Cannell

Daughter of Annie Cannell

Information adapted from content provided by Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision – see full version here.

As she recalls in her 1963 radio interview, Winifred Hills (nee Cannell) was born in Greymouth in 1869, ‘at the time when all the miners were there.’ She was one of the 16 children of Wesleyan (Methodist) minister Reverend William Cannell and his wife Annie.

The family moved often (as was the practice for Methodist ministers), living in seven other centres after Greymouth, until by the time the suffrage petition was circulating the country in 1893, they were in Hawera, where William was the local minister. Annie Cannell and three of her daughters, Winifred, Gertrude and Elsie signed the petition in Hawera, and the following year Winifred married farmer Jesse Hills. 

Jesse Hills died in 1941 at which time he was farming in Kawakawa. Winifred seems to have moved to Auckland by 1963 and died there in 1970.