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  (admin@aveburyhouse.co.nz).

David Hollander
Richmond History Group

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. 

Who was the Reminiscence Man? In the 1920s, over 50 articles appeared in The Star newspaper under the byline, The Reminiscence Man. The items were all interviews with old residents who talked about their memories of life in Christchurch in the early days of European settlement. One of these pieces was an interview with Mrs Ellen Murphy, who had been one of the early residents of Richmond — before it was called Richmond!? The article was included in the 5 November, 1927 issue of The Star.
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In the document below I have included a transcript of the Star article, with some notes and maps to expand on some points and illustrate others. And I have included information about The Reminiscence Man.

David Hollander
Richmond History Group

I have been on the lookout for a copy of the Shirley School 50th Jubilee Booklet for some time, but they are hard to come by. Thanks are due to John Hickling, who has loaned us his copy of the booklet for scanning and adding to our website — a PDF version is available for reading/downloading below.
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The booklet was published to accompany the school’s jubilee celebrations held in early 1966, and includes a brief account of the school’s history since opening in 1916, on its site on the south side of Shirley Road, between Chancellor and Slater streets — opposite the site of today’s Shirley Primary School.

The opening of a new school on this site in 1916 is evidence of a growing population in north Richmond and surrounding areas; in that first year the school roll was over 700!? The school moved from the old site to a larger space on the north side of Shirley Road, probably in the 1970s — does anyone know the exact year? The old brick school building became a community centre and the grounds a local park, until the Canterbury earthquakes, which destroyed the old building. The park is still a local gem and includes several fine mature trees. The CCC has plans to build a new community centre on the site in the future.

It’s good to be able to make this publication readily available. If anyone has photos or other information about the old Shirley School, we would love to hear from you — please contact Avebury House.

David Hollander
July 2023

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

Names, left to right, from the back row.
Back Row: Ross Lloyd, Raymond Lew, Terry Corbett, Brent ?, Bevan Graham.
Second Row: Miss Anning, Teacher, Neil Purtle, Graham Leslie, Robert Craw, Ivor Jones, Peter Drewery, Robin Barnes, John Davis, Graeme Thomson.
Third Row: Larry Taylor, Robert McGregor, Peter Judkins, Bruce Finlay, John Hunter, Brian McLeary, Garry Taylor, Geof LeCren, Graeme Donaldson.
Front Row: Laurence O’Neil, Ann Colville, Lorraine MacDonald, Joan Shaw, ? Evans, Paula ?, Marie Castile, Shona MacDonald, John Ayres.

Names, left to right, from the back row.
Back Row: John Corbett, David Merritt, John Bryant, Trevor Lightfoot, Bill Hastie, David Watt, Neil Purtle, Ross Lloyd.
Second Row: Darryl Wilde Ivor Jones, John Keatley, Robert McGregor, John Hunter, Brian McLeary,Peter Drewery, Robert Craw, Geoff LeCren.
Third Row: Fred Markham, Teacher, Ann Colville, Janice Inwood, Judith Anderson, (?), Judith Carberry, Janice ?, (?), Shirley Welsh, Larraine Boyd, Student Teacher — name unknown.
Fourth Row: (?), ? Morgan, (?), Lorraine Macdonald, Marie Castell, Heather McLean, (?), (?), (?).
Front Row: (?), (?), John Davis, (?), Raymond Lew, John Ayres, (?), Bevan Graham.

About 18 months ago I prepared a document, "A Snapshot of Bingsland, 1879" (www.aveburyhouse.co.nz/uploads/4/7/2/0/47203855/snapshot_of_bingsland-1879.pdf). That document listed residents of the area that would soon become Richmond, taken from Alfred Buck's Suburban Dictionary, 1879.
 
To tie in with our display for the 2021 Beca Heritage festival, I have prepared a similar document "A Snapshot of Richmond, 1890". This document lists Richmond residents taken from Wise's Suburban Directory of that year — when Richmond people petitioned to leave the Avon Road Board and join Christchurch city. 

Comparing the two documents you can see how our little neck of the woods had moved from a rural outpost to a suburban community on the edge of Christchurch.

​As well as the list of names and addresses, I have included information on people's occupations, where available, and have also added some contemporary newspaper articles, which show some of the hot topics for Richmond people in the 1880s.

David Hollander
October 2021
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