was born in 1816, the eldest child of William and Mary Hebden of Dacre Banks. She was baptised in the December of that year, in Pateley Bridge N Yorkshire.

At the age of 23, describing herself as a governess, she applied to emigrate to New Zealand. Prior to leaving England she secured employment in Wellington, New Zealand as a domestic servant.

For a young woman of her age to emigrate alone is surprising so it is believed that she may well have been following her fiancé, a George White Bennett (a seed merchant) who had emigrated just a month or so earlier.
Mary Jane arrived at Wellington in February 1840 on the “Duke of Roxburgh” and on the 20th November of that year, she and George Bennett were married at St Paul’s Anglican Church.

Whilst described as a seed merchant, George and Mary Jane farmed at Lowry bay whilst George also worked as a clerk in nearby Wellington and here they raised their family. This lifestyle did not last though and, at the beginning of the 1950s, George Bennett was appointed as the first “keeper of the light” at Pencarrow Head, which lay at the entrance to Wellington Harbour. There was no lighthouse as we would know it today, the “light” simply being a beacon in George and Mary’s cottage..

Life as “keeper of the light” would appear to have been quite isolated and far from easy. There is a letter of complaint in existence which George wrote to the authorities, describing the conditions under which he and his family lived : “The House is neither wind or water proof. The stove is of very little use. I have been four days without been able to boil the kettle inside or out. Water is a full quarter mile off. Wood from one to three miles. Lamps and windows to clean every morning besides the former to trim every two hours at night.' The harsh conditions of life for the Bennett family at this time were also recorded in the works of a traveller, C. R. Carter, who wrote of his visit to Pencarrow in 1853: 'The light-house keeper…with his wife and three children (running about like wild goats), and the lighthouse apparatus, were all stored away in two little rooms, each about ten foot square, and without a fire place. The interior…was accessible to wind and rain on all sides, and in heavy gales it rocked and shook so much as to frighten the keeper and his family out of it, who in that case, took refuge in a sort of cave or cabin, which he had scooped out of the side of the hill'..

Within three years of taking up the appointment as “keeper of the light”, George Bennett drowned. It appears that he had been on a boat trip across the harbour of Pencarrow when he was washed overboard.

Despite being a widow and three months pregnant, (or perhaps because of her situation), Mary Jane Bennett took over the light-keeping duties and remained at Pencarrow with her surviving children. William Hebden Bennett, was born posthumously in December 1855.

Eventually, over 4 years after the death of George Bennett, a proper lighthouse was erected at Pencarrow in 1859 and Mary Jane Bennett was appointed the first keeper of a permanent lighthouse in New Zealand, and the only woman to hold the position of lighthouse keeper. Mary Jane’s salary was £125 per annum, inclusive of firewood.

Documents survive which illustrate Mary Jane’s capability and success in her role as the first lighthouse keeper of New Zealand.

Family sources say that Mary Jane Bennett returned to England for the sake of her children's education in 1865 and certainly, after that date, there is no further record of her as lighthouse keeper.

How she lived on her return to Dacre Banks is not known but there she died on 6 July 1885.

Her youngest son, the posthumously born William Hebden Barrett returned to New Zealand and in 1880 he became assistant keeper at Pencarrow where his mother had so capably run the lighthouse and where his father had been drowned 25 years before.