Fanny Buttery Cole ( Holder; 20 June 1860 – 25 May 1913) was a prominent temperance leader and women's rights advocate in New Zealand. Cole was a founding member then president of the Christchurch chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union New Zealand (WCTU NZ) and national WCTU NZ superintendent of the Press from 1897 through 1903. In 1906 Cole was elected national president of the WCTU NZ, a position she held until her untimely death shortly before her fifty-third birthday.
Early life
Fanny B. Holder was born at St. George's, Shropshire on 20 June 1860, the sixth of eight children of Fanny Buttery (1822–1883) and Charles Holder (1821–1895). Buttery was a surname of Huguenot origin and pronounced Beautrais. According to the England Census, Fanny and her siblings grew up in Wrockwardine Wood where her father worked as a bootmaker and served as the local Methodist preacher. Some of the family immigrated to New Zealand in 1880; and the four sisters lived near their parents in Christchurch, marrying in quick succession as their mother grew ill and died. The eldest Sarah Elizabeth Holder (1854–1939) married in 1883 a Methodist minister, Rev. Daniel James Murray (1851–1928). Lydia Ann Holder (1856–1929) married a carpenter Andrew Harre (1859–1908) in 1884. Jane "Jennie" Holder (1864–1921) married in 1885 Thomas Oliver Johnson (1861–1932), a farmer.
Fanny B. Holder worked as a teacher in Brookside and East Oxford public schools before she married in 1884 Herbert Cole of Kaiapoi (1858–1917). Herbert Cole was a temperance worker for the "no-license" option and an agent for the Canterbury Farmers' Cooperative Association. On 1 October 1886, their elder daughter Marguerita Lilian "Daisy" Cole was born in Richmond, on their estate called Ellengowan situated near the River Avon. The wetlands in the area were once called "Daisy Meadows." Their second daughter, Eleanor Charlotte "Nellie" Cole (1888–1962) was also born there on 4 July 1888.
Her children were four and six years old in 1892, when Fanny Cole of Richmond, Christchurch signed the suffrage petition put forward by the Political Franchise Leagues and WCTU NZ. Cole had been part of the founding of the Christchurch Union when Mary C. Leavitt, the world organiser for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, visited in May 1885. There were forty-four founding members who they elected Emma E. Packe, president; Cecilia Wroughton, treasurer; and, Kate Sheppard, secretary. Cole also signed the 1893 petition, the largest ever presented in the New Zealand Parliament, and which led to the successful acquisition of women's right to vote at the national level. They were still living at Ellangowan in Richmond according to the electoral rolls of 1896, but by 1894 Herbert Cole had started up a land agency business partnership with temperance activist Thomas "Tommy" E. Taylor. By 1900, according to the electoral roll of Lyttelton, the Cole family had moved to the Port Hills area overlooking the Lyttelton Harbour.
Temperance and women's rights leader
Since 1897, Fanny B. Cole was elected vice president of the Christchurch Union. The many activities undertaken by the Union that year included the establishment of coffee rooms to compete with alcohol-centric restaurants and hotels, a luncheon booth at the Agricultural & Pastoral Association Show that held hundreds of patrons, cottage meetings with Bible study in Linwood, registering factory girls to be able to vote, rescue work for young girls on the streets, and petitioning Parliament to reform the Juvenile Depravity Bill to include boys and not just girls. That year she and Kate Sheppard signed, as representatives of the Christchurch WCTU along with other Christchurch leaders such as Ada Wells, a public letter to the Premier of New Zealand. They sought equal powers with male official visitors to gaols – to be granted powers of Justices of the Peace. "It is little use having women as official visitors to our jails, unless they have the same powers as men visitors."
That same year during the presidency of Annie Jane Schnackenberg of Auckland, Fanny B. Cole started working for the national WCTU NZ as superintendent for Press Work. By the next year, Cole was elected over incumbent Kate Sheppard as president of the Christchurch Union, a position she held until her ascendancy to the national presidency of the WCTU NZ. She was hailed for her leadership skills which included "conciliatory, tactful methods of procedure," and that meetings "were specially noticeable for the absence of anything approaching friction."