Dorothy Fletcher (r) with Bob Mckerrow going through her archives on Ebenezer Teichelmann. Dorothy, the daughter of the famous New Zealand mountain guide, Alex Graham, new Ebenezer Teichelmann well as a girl. She has many fond memories of the wee Doctor or Teichy, as she affectionately calls him ater all these years. To be precise, 68 years, 11 months 21 days after his death in 1938.
Here is an excerpt from Teichelmann's biography quoting Dorothy Fletcher.
Impressions as a child are often vivid and accurate, and Dorothy Fletcher recalls the atmosphere when visiting Dr Teichelmann’s home as a young girl every time she did a trip to Hokitika with her father, Alec Graham, and it was always the last stop. “He loved to see dad and it was always a warm welcome for him and me. Teichy did all his work in a large, darkish room with a distinctive smell of pipe tobacco,” she recalled, as her visits were usually late in the afternoon and the trees would block the sunlight. “He had a big chair, photos on the wall of mountains and people. Cameras, tripods, slide boxes, maps, photographs, books, magazines letters, papers and his pipes were scattered around. “My sister and I were fascinated by his pipes as some of them had little caps on them,” recalls Dorothy Fletcher. He wasn’t untidy or disorganized, rather a busy man and appeared to have systems for filing and storing.
Dorothy also mentioned that Teichy had copied photographs from Buller’s Book of Birds to enhance his photographic slide talks .
