Over the years of 1848 to 1851, the poor old Canterbury Plains and the Harbour of Lyttelton seemed to hop from one foot to the other as the Chief Surveyor Captain Joseph Thomas amongst others scratched their heads over a few name options. When Captain Thomas arrived on our shores, Lyttelton was known as Port …
John Robert Godley was a man who everyone seemed to have an opinion about. One man would say “he was a King amongst men’ where another called him ‘a whale in a duck pond’. Both descriptions paint an image of the man who founded Christchurch. Born in Dublin in 1814, he grew up in the …
William Deans, Samuel Manson and Jimmy Robinson Clough had quite a journey to complete from the Sumner bar, down the Otakaro (the Avon River) and then on on to Putaringamotu (Riccarton) in 1841. When the party reached what is now the Barbadoes Street Bridge, by Oxford Terrace, they continued in a canoe as the Port …
