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. ​

John Hickling, has recently loaned us a family photo album which includes pictures of the family’s tomato-growing business in Richmond, between River Road & Dudley Creek. Few of the photos have dates recorded, but seem to be taken mostly before 1950. 

About 1925, John’s grandfather, William Hickling (1886–1967) bought two acres of land in North Richmond, west of Dudley Creek near its confluence with the Avon River. The purchase must have seemed a good deal to him, because the previous year he had owned an acre of land in Papanui, which included a house and four glasshouses growing tomatoes, along with other horticultural infrastructure.
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The Hickling family would live at the Richmond property for the next 50 years. As these photos show, the business the family developed here became a considerable enterprise. When William retired in the 1950s, his son Arthur (1920–2000) took over the business, in partnership with his sisters and their husbands. Later, when North Island tomato growers began flooding South Island markets with cheaper tomatoes grown outdoors, the family switched to growing carnations. Arthur sold the property in the mid-1970s and went on to sell real estate with Drewery’s Estate Agency in Christchurch.

​William Hickling and his wife Agnes were married in Birmingham, England in March, 1909. They must have emigrated to New Zealand soon after, as their first child, Ivy Lillian, was born in New Zealand in 1910. The couple would have two more children: Elsie, b 1913 and Arthur, b 1920. From 1925, the family lived at 389 River Road. William established the property, building glasshouses for growing tomatoes. 

For the 2021 Beca Heritage Festival, the Richmond History group took our festival display theme as "1890 — Richmond Joins the City".

At the beginning of 1890, Richmond lay outside the Christchurch city boundaries. Since the very beginning of Christchurch, these boundaries were the four town belts — now the four avenues. 

In 1890, Richmond formed part of the Avon Road Board's area. Road boards had been established in Canterbury by the provincial government in 1864. Their name indicates their primary function, but most road boards soon became involved, willingly or not, in a wide range of local government activities. The Avon Road Board managed a large area, between the Avon and Waimakariri rivers. Most of this land was rural, but by the 1880s, a few areas close to the city, like Richmond, were becoming more suburban in nature. People living in these areas were becoming dissatisfied with the services (or lack of them) that the road board could provide.

In late 1889, three Richmond men: Joseph Broadley (a baker), David Cochrane (a painter & decorator) and Walter Langford (a carpenter & undertaker), organised a petition circulated amongst the residents of Richmond, asking for the suburb to become part of the city of Christchurch. The petition is now preserved in the collections of Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga. 
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In the document below you can read about the petition and the men who organised it, as well as see who signed it. When Richmond did become part of Christchurch city on 30 May 1890, it was the first extension of the city beyond the original town boundaries.

In 1879, George Alfred Buck published a Christchurch and Suburban Directory. The 379-page directory offers a snapshot of Christchurch only 29 years after its founding. At this time there was no suburb of Richmond; this area was known as Bingsland, after Morice Bing (1830–1877) who had owned land in the area. By 1879, Bingsland was becoming more closely settled; the area’s growing population meant Bingsland was included in the directory as one of Christchurch’s suburbs, outside the city area bounded by the four town belts (now the four avenues).

In 1868, a Methodist Church had been established on Stanmore Road, on land donated by Mr Bing. The Bingsland School had opened on its Stanmore Road site in 1875. These developments reflected an increasing local population and were beginning to set the area apart from much of the rest of the largely rural surrounding area.
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In the 14-page document below I have added some more information about the directory and Christchurch at the time. I have also transcribed the names of Bingsland residents from the directory, firstly in name order as they appear in the directory and then in order by street and lastly by occupation, where this has been given (about 10% of entries). Later in the document are some descriptions of the area around this time, followed by a series of newspaper articles transcribed from Papers Past, which illustrate some of the matters concerning Bingsland residents in 1879.

​In August David Grantham donated a set of nineteen Richmond School class photos, taken between 1956 and 1974, the period when David's father, Tom Grantham, was a teacher at the school. As well as ten formal class photos there are three staff groups and several other photos of sports and cultural groups, as well as a few informal photos taken on school outings. I have scanned these photos and combined them in a PDF document which is available below for viewing and/or downloading.

I have recorded pupils’ names underneath each scanned photo. I have transcribed these names as best I can; some of the handwriting is difficult to decipher. If people can help correct any spelling errors, add their own memories or other information about the photos, we would love to hear from you — please contact Avebury House: ([email protected]).
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Our thanks to David Grantham for his generous gift. The photos are now stored with the Richmond History Group collection in the Richmond Room at Avebury House, along with a wide range other material recording Richmond's history.

​​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.

Leo Shaw was a long-standing Richmond resident and well known among the community. In the 1990s, Leo made three audio tapes recording his memories of Richmond and surrounding districts over many years — Leo was born in 1914. These audio tapes are in the Richmond History Group collection at Avebury House, along with a number of recorded interviews with local residents carried out by Christine Thieme in 2008–9. It appears that so far, none of this material has been transcribed.
The document below includes a transcription of a talk Leo gave to the Shirley Probus club in 1997. It will be of interest to anyone who wishes to learn about Richmond’s past. The photo below is the only one we have of Leo, as a 15-year old with his mother and father. If anyone knew Leo, we would love to hear from you. Please contact us at Avebury House (email: [email protected], phone: (03) 381-6615).

This great piece of work, labelled “Richmond Village”, shows the layout of sections along the north end of Stanmore Road c.1940. North is at the right. The stretch of Stanmore Road runs from the corner of Draper St and Swanns Rd to its northern end at the intersection with North Avon Rd. The data was researched by Noeline Hansen and Shona Ward who were very active in the Richmond History Group based at Avebury House in the years before the earthquakes. The map was drawn by Ken Washington. The original document is large: 2500 x 460 mm and is on display in the Richmond Room, upstairs at Avebury House, 9 Eveleyn Couzins Ave.

On the map, residences are coloured pink and commercial properties are blue. Utilities are indicated in yellow. Where the residential occupiers (not necessarily the owners) of the properties have been identified, their names and occupation, if known, have been shown. Businesses show the name of the owner and the type of enterprise. The map makes for fascinating reading. As late as 1940 there are two blacksmiths in this one stretch of Stanmore Rd.

There is a post office marked at 323 Stanmore Rd. This building had previously been occupied by a fruiterer business — there are two photos of this shop dated 1927 in the history group collection at Avebury House. A section is shown as having been set aside for the construction of a post office on the eastern corner of Stanmore and North Avon Rds, but this was never built.

Bruce St used to connect Stanmore Rd and Pavitt St. The roadway still exists as a driveway immediately south of the St. Vincent de Paul building on Stanmore Rd, but sometime after 1954 (Bruce St appears in a Christchurch map of that date), the name was dropped and the road is not marked on modern maps. In 1940, the site of the St. Vincent de Paul shop was occupied by Morgan Davies, a cobbler, with Aldersley’s bakery immediately behind that to the west.

The butcher, Eric McPherson, moved from 321 Stanmore Rd, as shown on the map, to the shop at 75 North Avon Rd (at the north end of Stanmore Rd) in 1940.1

For many years there was a suburban police station at 245 Stanmore, known as Bingsland police station; the name was a carry-over from the earliest days of settlement in the area. The station, which was opened in 1879, retained that name until 1957, when it was changed to ‘North Avon’. The station moved to new premises at 45 North Parade in 1963, but the North Avon station closed altogether in 1968.2


Click on the picture above to see the map in detail.

Notes:
1  Interview with Noeline Hansen (née McPherson), Eric’s daughter.
2  Thomson, Barry, 1989. “Sharing the Challenge — A Social and Pictorial History of the Christchurch Police District”, pp146–7.

The handwritten caption for this photo simply states “Launching the Rondino”. A little more information might be useful!? It turns out that the Rondino was a boat built by Huia Beaumont, a well-known Richmond resident, in the late 1930s. In his autobiography, “Long Time Passing”,* Huia writes at some length about the Rondino, how he built it and the adventures he and his family enjoyed in the boat on the Avon River.

Huia started building the Rondino in 1939, from plans published in “Popular Mechanic” magazine. The boat was 17 feet long with a 6-foot beam and drew only 4 inches unloaded. Even with 16 adults and children on board, Huia says the boat drew only 8 inches and was very stable.

If the photo was taken at the launching, as the caption suggests, the date was 1 February 1940 and the location was just downstream of the Medway St weir. The photo was taken from the north bank looking upstream. The picture reveals more than its nominal subject matter. The old wooden Medway St bridge, built in 1938 and replaced in 1980, is visible, as is the weir, which was removed in the 1950s. The river banks appear to be sparsely planted and the willow trees on the south bank are a lot smaller than today.

The photo is a poor modern copy of an old colour print. Colour film was still unusual in New Zealand in 1940; most photos at this time were taken on B&W film. Large scale colour photography didn’t become commonplace in New Zealand for non-enthusiasts until the 1960’s.

* Beaumont, H.W., “Long Time Passing, the Life Story of ‘Down to Earth Beauie”
Richmond Village Bookshop, 1992.
pp163–173.