​ I attended Richmond School for the whole of my primary education, 1946–51, before proceeding to Shirley Intermediate. My twin brother, Colin, of course started the same day, which must have been comforting.
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These years coincided with the beginning of the post-war ‘Baby Boom’. In my time at Richmond, the roll came to exceed 400 children. A large state housing development around the eastern end of North Avon Road down to the river must have been a major factor in this increase. While I was at Richmond, a new ‘infant block’ (1951) was built to accommodate the growing numbers. As it was, I spent Standard 3 in a prefabricated classroom, apparently re-cycled from St Alban’s School and located away from the old main block. The Standard 4 class in my last year at Richmond comprised over 40 pupils, what in this era was a not untypical class size. 

 Already there when I began at Richmond was a small block of two ‘open air’ (folding doors on the north side) classrooms located by the Pavitt St entrance where I was taught in Primer 4 and Standard 1.
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A School Dental Clinic stood alongside this building while I was at the school. A trained dental nurse ran the ‘murder house’, as we called it, using a pedal-driven drill to deal with tooth cavities. In those days the main cause of tooth decay must have been the absence of regular cleaning. I have a vague memory in Standard 3 of ‘Nurse Silcock’ coming to class and urging us to eat apples or raw carrots. ‘Coke’ and ‘junk food’ were unknown, only ‘fizzy drinks’, locally manufactured by Quill Morris or Cowles.

The other health initiative to note was the daily provision of milk (pasteurized) to every child. A ‘milk crate’ was delivered to every classroom before school, collected from the Pavitt St gate by Standard 4 boys, specially appointed. The half-pint (300ml) cardboard-topped bottles were distributed in class just before the bell went for morning ‘playtime’. Drinking straws were handed out. I liked drinking the milk but more than a few didn’t, especially if it had been warmed by the morning sun or winter central heating.

Each school day began with a morning ‘assembly’ at the impressive colonnaded main building entrance when the Headmaster briefly addressed us from the steps before dismissing us to our classes. Some schools had a flag-raising ceremony. We didn’t. But we did march off to the stirring strains of the ‘Invercargill March’, ‘Colonel Bogey’s March’ or somesuch, played through a loudspeaker located in a downstairs classroom. My elder brother in Standard 4 was one of those given the responsibility of putting the needle, scatchlessly, on the record.

Standard 4, which occupied the end classroom on the upper storey by the timbered fire escape, were permitted to use this stairway in and out of the building.

I don’t have a distinct recollection of how our day was divided – Time was something parents and teachers controlled. Classes commenced about 9, there was a morning ‘playtime’ about 10.30 and a lunch hour, 12 to 1. There was a short, five-minute, afternoon ‘playtime’ at 2, before school ended at 3. The primer children left at 2. 
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I and my brothers went home to a cooked family dinner midday – our father worked in town and biked from there. I have no idea how typical this was, though certainly almost all mothers were ‘stay-at-home’ mums. When completed, the right-of-way through to Forth St from Eveleyn Couzins Ave slightly shortened all this daily trekking.

​The busiest road Richmond children had to cross was, and still is, Stanmore Rd. About opposite Bruce St, where there was a marked pedestrian crossing, a ‘School Patrol’ regulated the traffic flow to give pupils safe passage, much as happens today outside many schools. My brother and I were rostered on to this duty. Girls were excluded. Under a teacher’s supervision, we manhandled long poles to which was attached at one end a large red disc emblazoned ‘School Patrol’. The sign, uplifted on the chant ‘Stop Up’, halted approaching vehicles. ‘Stop Down’ and the return to the horizontal allowed them to proceed on their way. Wet or shine made no difference. On wet days we were garbed in a copious cape with hood.

Most of us walked to school, younger children without parents but in the company of older siblings. Today’s ‘drop off’ and ‘pick up’ by car was a world away. Pupils who cycled to school, relatively few though they were, had their bikes regularly inspected by City Council ‘traffic cops’ (traffic inspectors). A green ‘pass’ or yellow (repair needed) or red ‘fail’ (unsafe to ride) sticker was affixed to the frame, and a follow-up visit soon afterwards ascertained whether the necessary repairs had been made.

The two headmasters during my time were ‘Mr Parry’ and ‘Mr Dalley’. They remained remote figures, ensconced in an office I never remember entering. However, I do recall Mr Parry coming into our Primer 1 room and playing on the piano with admirable brio ‘Three Blind Mice’. 
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The ‘School Committee’ was an even more remote authority. There was no PTA (Parent Teacher Association). Nor were there teacher-parent consultations. The mid-year and end-of-year ‘school report’ taken home was parents’ sole source of reliable information, extremely sparse in their detail compared with today.

We were an exceptionally docile lot in class; we were instructed rather than learning things for ourselves. A teacher who wanted to get our attention might say ‘Hands on heads place’ and the whole class would immediately respond. I honestly can’t recall any impertinent or rebellious behaviour. New Zealand society generally was highly conformist, united around the same values and aspirations and showing ample respect for authority figures, teachers included. 

‘Mrs Thomas’ was the ‘infant mistress’ and my first teacher, but the name and the fact that she was kindly is the sum of my memory of her. Her successor, ‘Miss Burr’ (well-named?) was, apparently, a different proposition. To this day I can recite her sharp rebuke on one occasion to move us on – ‘Children, don’t dilly-dally in the alley’.

Primer 2 and 3 are lost on me, I suppose partly because my twin brother and I ‘skipped’ a year or part of a year. ‘Miss Milne’ and ‘Miss Davies’ were my teachers in Primer 4 and Standard 1, both kindly. Then followed a succession of male teachers, ‘Mr Silcock’, for a short time, and ‘Mr (Clifford) Bezar’ at Standard 2, ‘Mr (Gavin) Royfee’ at Standard 3, and ‘Mr (Rewi) Street’ at Standard 4. 

I later met up with Mr Bezar at Christchurch Boys’ High. He had served in the War. He was the only teacher at Richmond who gave me ‘the strap’ – for rushing off from some outside class activity when the bell went without waiting for his permission to leave. That said, there was very little corporal punishment administered, with the exception of ‘Johnny Bell’, of whom more later.

Mr Royfee was a talented cricketer, representing Canterbury in Plunket Shield and international matches. However, he never coached the school cricket team. We didn’t know it but he also sang in the Royal Christchurch Musical Society, and so was a man of many parts. Among the exercise books he required us to buy was included The Dominion Song Book; for some reason, ‘Shenandoah’ is the song that sticks in my mind. Thus we were introduced to group singing, if we had not already experienced it at Sunday School. 

The ‘prefab’ in which he taught us was freezing cold in winter, heated by a coal stove at the front of the classroom which inevitably favoured the teacher and a few of the pupils. We ought to have been more thankful of the caretaker who lit the fire earlier in the morning. Mr Clancy, the caretaker, lived in a house, presumably Education Board-owned, on the corner of Pavitt and London Sts.

Mr Street was an experienced teacher but possibly overstretched by the size of the Standard 4 class. At some stage during the year he requested that my brother and I help with the class arithmetic marking, furnishing us with his very own (red ink) ballpoint pen; ‘ballpoints’ were new to New Zealand. Doubtless he checked our work and informed us of any mistakes, but in no way would it happen today and should never have happened then. The greatest praise I can bestow on Mr Street is that he made school interesting and enjoyable. One example: a pile of soil had appeared in the playground on which he poured water to let us see the rivulets carrying material downhill; he then planted a sign labelled ‘EROSION’, and a new word was added to our lexicon of knowledge.

On another occasion, he sent me off to the Square with the bus fare to view the War Memorial by the Cathedral. His instructions were to hold it in my mind and provide a blackboard drawing when I returned. Next morning my rendition was compared - not altogether to my advantage – with actual photographs. I suppose Mr Street wanted to impress on the class the fallibility of memory, or perhaps that we should always rely on the best evidence available.

Mr Bell, ‘Johnny Bell’ as everyone familiarly called him, was the school character, not in the best sense of the word as he terrified his classes as much as taught them. He was notorious for his liberal use of the strap and much more serious misdemeanours.  I have it on good authority that in one class he sat at his desk ostentatiously sharpening a knife before hurling it across the bent heads to lodge in the back wall of the room. Such behaviour reduced children to numbed passivity.

I had only one encounter with Johnny Bell, in a drawing class. I think my grandfather had just been knighted after nine years as Mayor of Christchurch. He spotted that I had signed my picture ‘Sir John Cookson V.C.’ I was taken by the scruff of the neck and dumped in the large wickerwork wastepaper basket which was then placed tottering on the edge of his desk. He then stood back and taunted: ‘So this is the great Sir John Cookson’. Of course, I got what I deserved, especially if it was true, as many believed, that Bell had suffered grievously during the war.
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It is very difficult to recall what we were taught and when, probably because learning is incremental and children simply absorb, rather than analyse, their progress. Year by year, with arithmetic, we extended our capability at addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. We avoided decimalization because it was more important to know pounds, shillings and pence and other ‘imperial’ measurements. Reading instruction began with New Zealand-published Whitcombe and Tombs ‘readers’. We first learnt to print before embarking on cursive writing in Standard 2, eventually forsaking pencils for ink wells and ink-filled G-nib pens. I vaguely remember being taught how to set out a business letter with the formal ending, ‘Yours faithfully’. I have no memory at all of composing short pieces of original prose, though we must have done. No homework was rigorously required; Schonell spelling lists came later. After school, for the most part, we simply played with siblings and friends.

There was no systematic teaching of art or music. Sunday School was where a singing culture for children mainly existed. An innovation was radio ‘Broadcasts to Schools’ which were heard through a speaker in the classroom. This was one way pupils could extend the very limited repertoire of songs. We sang in parts: ‘Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily merrily, life is but a dream’.

These remarks don’t do justice to the standard of performance exhibited at the School Concert in my Standard 4 year. The boys, interestingly enough, presented a raucous haka in outfits and painted faces that nowadays would almost certainly be deemed offensive; there was only one boy in our class with a Maori family name – John Rikihana. Colin and I played a piano duet, me fumblingly. Many were similar individual items, since many children learnt the piano, dance, and so on. Carol Hampton of Standard 3, stole the show, prettily dressed up to sing with remarkable poise and confidence, ‘Mocking Bird Hill’.

Apropos children and music. On Saturday mornings ‘Miss Bell’ offered piano lessons at the school. At a guess, about 30 attended where they were given about five minutes of instruction in the Primer 1 classroom before being sent on to the Hall where a senior pupil heard them ‘do their practice’. Practice didn’t make me perfect, mainly because I did so little. But it must be acknowledged that doing the rounds of perhaps two or three schools over many years, Clarice Bell provided music-making opportunities for literally hundreds of Christchurch children. 

I remember the vacant ground at the Perth St entrance being developed into a ‘school garden’ for growing vegetables, most likely in response to some Department of Education edict. No real effort was made to bring things to harvest; indeed, the long summer holiday must have left any plants to fend for themselves. Yet we were encouraged to establish and tend vegetable plots of our own at home, with a certificate as the reward for our efforts.

At ‘playtime’ organized games hardly featured, certainly not under any kind of teacher supervision. Boys and girls amused themselves separately. Girls skipped or played knuckle bones or hopscotch or whatever activities boys were unaware of. Marbles were popular among boys. Strangely, I remember the two best players in my year – Ray Chinnery and Charlie Saxton – though perhaps that is because they relieved me of most of mine when ‘playing for keeps’. There was a vocabulary attached to the game; a ‘bum squasher’, for instance, was a marble the size of a large ball bearing that might send any number of others out of the ring.

There was little inter-school sport. Not everyone had bicycles to get to away matches. I suppose the few that did occur were specially arranged, and then usually cricket or rugby. I loved cricket but recall playing only one or two games, of course in Standard 4, and the same may have been true of rugby. Our rugby jersey was the closest we had to a school uniform; it consisted of a navy blue top with a reddish band around the middle. There were school baths outside the school grounds across Pavitt St but they remained rundown and unused until some enthusiastic locals cleaned them up and formed a swimming club about a year after I left Richmond.
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The school’s 75th anniversary celebrations took place while I was there, in 1950. Of course, most of the events were directed at ex-pupils. Even so, the teachers organized what they called ‘tabloid sports’ for us which included relays and three-legged and sack races for the different age groups. I seem to remember we competed under different houses to add to the excitement of the day.

​The final event each year was the School Prizegiving attended by parents, members of the School Committee and sometimes the local MP (Jock Mathieson). It was held in the School Hall. I don’t remember it as an exhilarating affair – plenty of speeches above our heads and the constant churn of pupils going up for their awards (‘Honours Certificates’) punctuated by applause. The real excitement was the final act in the classroom when desks were pushed to one side and stacked so that Mr Clancy could oil the floorboards during the long summer break. The emptiness was cathartic. What a joy it was to contemplate ‘no more school’ for six weeks! Didn’t every kid?

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.