Tapuhi war memorial.
The First World War Memorial at Tapuhi is a square marble obelisk on a concrete base, surrounded by a chain supported by nine pillars that were originally topped by iron cannonballs from the nearby New Zealand War site at Ruapekapeka. The memorial is unusual in that the eleven names of the fallen are listed in order of their date of death, and give each man’s rank and his date and place of death. Two groups of deaths, three in June 1917 at Messines and four on one day in October 1917 at Passchendaele bear graphic witness to the impact these deaths must have had on such a small community.
As the iron cannonballs have been progressively stolen, they have been replaced by wooden replicas.
The memorial was unveiled at a ceremony on 10 March 1921, before a crowd of eighty or ninety local residents. See report in Northern Advocate, 11 March 1921, p2.
Community contributions