In 2022 we were very fortunate to have a set of Flesher family material donated to our collection at Avebury House. The material, documents and photographs, was donated by Geoff Taggart of Pleasant Point, South Canterbury and we are grateful to Michael Williams who helped bring the donation about.

The material consists of several boxes of items, including an 11-page album of photos of the garden at Avebury, probably taken in the 1920s. I have made copies of the album pages and these are posted below.

Some of the photos have been included in the Nottingham Report (see previous post), which has helped us date the images to around 1920. The photos have been glued into the album and are showing some discolouration. The eleven pages could well be a fragment of a larger album — the pages are bound together but there is no cover. Nor are there any captions or other information accompanying the photos.
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Still the photos are well worth a look and show us a glimpse of garden design fashion in 1920s Christchurch. Our thanks to Mr Taggart for his wonderful donation.

David Hollander
Richmond History Group

Click on an image to see a larger version. ​

In the Richmond History Group collection at Avebury House is a poor-quality photocopy of a detailed horticultural assessment of the grounds at Avebury. The undated report was compiled by Bede Nottingham of the Christchurch City Council and identifies individual garden borders and lists the plants in them. Unfortunately, the City Council have been unable to supply a better copy of the report, or indeed, any other information about the document — not even the year it was produced!?

The 26-page report includes 11 pages of photographs; some apparently taken at the time the report was prepared, and some being historical images of the garden — mostly taken around 1920 — when the house was still the Flesher family home. But sadly, the images have not come through the photocopy process at all well.

In the document below I have tidied up the photocopied text as best I can, but many of the images are in their photocopied state: just a batch of black blobs on white paper…a shame. However, I have been able to find better photographic copies of fourteen of the historical images in our collection, and I have super-imposed these images in the report, replacing the photocopy versions.

The report may be from the late 1990s when the City Council assumed management of Avebury House after the Youth Hostel Association ended their occupancy of the property. Or, perhaps some time earlier — who knows? Nevertheless, the document is a fascinating read for anyone interested either in the history of Avebury, or indeed in garden history in general. The historical images show how much the garden has changed over the years, and the exact identification of the planting makes the report a real snapshot of the garden at one point in its development…we just don’t know when that point was!?

If anyone can shed any more light on the report, or indeed, offer any more information about Avebury House or its garden, we would love to hear from you. Please contact Avebury House  ([email protected]).

David Hollander
Richmond History Group

When Richmond School closed at the end of 2013, several of the school’s taonga were moved to Avebury House for safe-keeping. These items included the school’s honour board, along with the WW1 Roll of Honour and WW2 memorial plaque.

The document below tells the story of the Richmond School honour board and records the names of more than 100 of the school’s pupils who won scholarships or achieved other academic distinction at the school. My original idea was to include biographical information about these people, but this has turned out to be a longer-term project, so I have decided to post this document as a first step in telling the honour board’s story.
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David Hollander
Richmond History Group
October 2022

For some time, members of the Richmond History group have been researching the people whose names appear on the Richmond School Roll of Honour, which is now housed at Avebury House. We have recently completed a document that tells the stories of Richmond men who perished during the First World War.

The 60-page document, available via the link below, includes some background about the honour roll as well as detailed information about 46 people we have identified as having died in the conflict. Of these, only two are buried in Christchurch, all the rest are buried or memorialised overseas, many thousands of miles from home.

This may help explain why there are so many memorials commemorating the war throughout New Zealand; apart from the many official war memorials around the country, there are hundreds of these honour rolls that record the names of service men and women connected with schools, workplaces, churches and a wide range of other groups and organisations. These local memorials may have served as a focus, particularly for people who had lost friends and relatives, when there was little or no hope of ever visiting their graves.

Some years ago, it was proposed to have Avebury House registered as a historic place. The Canterbury earthquakes and their aftermath caused some delay, but the process has now been completed and Avebury House has recently been classed as a Category 2 historic place (#9075) by Heritage New Zealand. 

The report below was prepared by Robyn Burgess of Heritage New Zealand as part of their investigations. While there are some overlaps with the two CCC Avebury House documents posted on this site recently, this report offers a different perspective and brings the official record of Avebury up-to-date.
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List Entry Type: Historic Place Category 2
List Number: 9075
Date Entered: 16th May 2019
Date of Effect: 5th June 2019

​​This 21-page document was prepared by Louise Beaumont in 2010 for the Christchurch City Council, and outlines the history and development of the what were once the grounds of Avebury House, now Avebury Park. The report nicely complements the 2000 report on the house itself (available below on this site) and includes several new historical photos of the house and grounds, as well as a detailed look at the landscape elements of the park.
The report’s date, August 2010, makes it a poignant reminder of how much things can change in a short time. Some of the photos show nearby buildings that are now gone. This is another precious document for anyone interested in the story of Avebury House & Park.

When Richmond School closed in 2013, three honours boards were donated to Avebury House for safe-keeping. The school had been a central part of the Richmond community for over 100 years. Originally the school was located in Stanmore Road, on the site that is now Richmond Green. The school outgrew that site and in 1925 moved to a new location on what was then Cumberland St (now Pavitt St).

Like many communities around the world, Richmond saw many of its young men leave to fight in WW1. The names of those servicemen (and one woman) who had a connection with Richmond School are recorded on this honours board, which is now housed in the Gordon Prince Room at Avebury House. The story of the sole woman, Jessie Maddison, is told briefly in Andrea Grieve’s article for the April 2018 Richmond Community News: (www.aveburyhouse.co.nz/uploads/4/7/2/0/47203855/rcn_118-april-2018.pdf).
         
The wooden board measures 1560 mm wide & 1955 mm high. There are 325 names recorded in five columns. Forty-seven names have a silver star beside them, which indicates the person died while on service. A small metal plaque (116 x 71 mm), attached at the top centre, reads "Presented by Pupils and Friends, 16-2-1918".

It's interesting that the board was presented in Feb 1918, when the war was still far from over. Perhaps it was the empty board itself that was donated at that date, and the names were added later.

The board itself is terse; it doesn’t state specifically that these are WW1 servicemen. Was there another element to the memorial in its previous location? And the names appear to be in no particular order; there are several people sharing a surname, but they aren't grouped together.

There are not many other WW1 memorials in Richmond; there is a memorial stone in the grounds of the Richmond Working Men’s Club, commemorating club members who were killed in the world wars. The nearest conventional memorial is the obelisk outside the Burwood School site on the corner of New Brighton Rd and Lake Terrace Rd along with the memorial gates to Wilding Park in Woodham Rd.

The Richmond Community News was first published in later 2002. One of the features of the newsletter in the years before the earthquakes was the high number of local history articles, especially a series of items about older houses in the area.

Richmond is unusual amongst older Christchurch suburbs in that very little has been written, and even less published about the history of the area, so these articles represent a treasure trove for people interested in the development of the area.

The back catalogue of the Richmond Community News is now available online (www.aveburyhouse.co.nz/newsletter.html). The link below leads to an index of the history-related articles in the issues between 2003–2011. This 9-page document may help people find a particular article more quickly than reading through all the back issues. The index is simply a chronological list starting with issue #2 (February 2003), giving the title and page number of any history-related articles, up until issue #86 (February 2011).