Charles Augustus Wake

Although she moved with her mother Ella, journalist father Charles, and five siblings to Sydney when she was just 2 years old, she always kept a Kiwi passport. Source: http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11572231

“Young Nancy’s father, Charles, however, was of solid English stock…an extremely good-looking, tall man of easy, extroverted charisma and enormous warmth. He was a journalist/editor by trade, then working on a Wellington newspaper. He was a dapper dresser who never seemed to have a worry in the world.”

Wake was raised without affection by her embittered mother after her father had walked out on them. “I adored my father,” Wake recently told the Sunday Times, sitting on her bar stool with a walking stick in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. “He was very good-looking. But he was a bastard. He went to New Zealand to make a movie about the Maoris, and he never came back. He sold our house from under us and we were kicked out.” Source: http://www.nzedge.com/legends/warriors/nancy-wake/

WAKE, CHARLES AUGUSTUS, Gum Buyer and General Storekeeper, Mongonui. Branch at Terairi. Mr. Wake purchased this business in 1897 from Mr. A. S. Holmes, by whom it was first established in 1886. There are several buildings occupying many hundreds of square feet of floor space with a street frontage of thirty feet. Mr. Wake has by hard work and perseverance succeeded in greatly extending his business, especially the kauri gum trade, of which he has had considerable experience. Several pack-horses are kept continually on the road delivering goods on the gumfields and returning laden with gum. Mr. Wake is a son of Mr. W. H. Wake, formerly schoolmaster at Timaru. He finished his studies at the Normal School, Christchurch, then went to sea for eight years, trading between Australia and New Zealand, and for a like term to foreign ports. In 1894 he went to Rorua and assisted his brother in his store there till 1896, when he moved northwards and established himself at Whangaroa as a gum-buyer and afterwards bought his present business. Mr. Wake is married to a daughter of the late Mr. Henry Rosleur, a well-known old identity of Mongonul. Source: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Cyc02Cycl-t1-body1-d2-...