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Richmond History Group

The Richmond History Group is based at Avebury House. The group maintains a collection of books, photographs and other memorabilia illustrating and recording the history of Avebury House and the development of the surrounding suburb of Richmond. We seek to expand the collection and have begun a project to digitise items from the collection and make them available online. This is a work-in-progress and we will be adding items to this site from now on.

If you have photographs or other material concerning Richmond’s past, we would love to hear from you. Perhaps you would like to donate items to the collection, or allow us to view the material and if suitable, borrow items for recording and adding to our digital archive. We would of course return the items to you in the same condition as we received them.

If you would like to learn more about the group, or become involved, please contact Andrea at 381-6615.

Two Richmond School Class Photos

17/11/2021

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These two photos have been supplied by Raymond Lew who is present in both. Ray won Dux for the school in 1954 — the last year the Dux was awarded at Richmond. Ray has done well to remember most of the names, but there are a few gaps. If anyone can provide any of the missing names, we would love to hear from you.
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Richmond School Standard 3, 1953
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.
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Richmond School Standard 4, 1954
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.
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Hand-drawn Map of Richmond in 1890

20/10/2021

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Don'tcha just love old maps? And this one's a beauty — a hand-drawn map of Richmond in 1890. The map was prepared to accompany a report on Richmond for the Christchurch City Council, after Richmond people had successfully petitioned to join the city. The map is included in the CCC minutes for 7 July 1890.

At this time Richmond included only the area south of North Avon Road. The street layout is quite recognisable today, although some of the names have changed. (A document explaining the names of Richmond streets is available elsewhere on this website: 
www.aveburyhouse.co.nz/richmond-history-group/richmond-street-names).
​On the map, the waterway that caused the curves in London St is clearly marked. A small part of this waterway is still visible above-ground on Gowerton Place, behind the New World supermarket. The rest of the creek has long since been piped underground.
​

Several other old maps of Richmond and surrounding areas are on display in the Richmond Room at Avebury House.
ccc_richmond_map-1890_a4.jpg
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A Snapshot of Richmond — 1890

19/10/2021

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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
​
snapshot_of_richmond-1890.pdf
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1890 — Richmond Joins the City

19/10/2021

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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. 
​
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.
richmond-petition-1889-90__1_.pdf
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Richmond School Roll of Honour — The Dead

11/3/2020

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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.
the_richmond_school_roll_of_honour-the_dead.pdf
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A Snapshot of Bingsland, 1879

20/2/2020

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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.
​
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.
snapshot_of_bingsland-1879.pdf
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George Walsh’s Book about Richmond

23/1/2020

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 Thanks are due to Don Hudson of Kiwi Publishers who recently donated several copies of the Kiwi Publishers 1998 reprint of George Walsh’s book “Richmond Christchurch – a Regional History” to the Richmond History Group. Don has also given us permission to copy the book and make it available online, so it is great to be able to make this scarce publication more readily available. The 48-page booklet, originally published in 1973, is hard to find nowadays; there are copies available in the New Zealand Collection at Tūranga, but these cannot be borrowed. The booklet is now available here as an 18MB PDF file; click the link at the end of this post.

George Walsh (1901–1975) was born in Richmond and his parents were long-time residents. His book is still the only publication that describes the development of Richmond from rural hinterland in the 1850s–60s to inner city suburb by 1890s and after.
​
The booklet is not without faults; the title is something of a misnomer — there is nothing regional about the book, and some of the history pages include errors and should be read with a grain of salt. The strongest sections are:
  • (pp 20–29) — about the school, much of which has been sourced from the school jubilee booklet of 1925. 
    ​Two Richmond School jubilee publications are available on this page.
  • (pp 30–48) — the author’s memories of Richmond and its inhabitants in the early 20th Century. In these pages he walks in memory through the Richmond of his youth and writes freely about individuals and families he knew as a boy growing up in the area.
Despite its shortcomings, the book is a valuable resource for people interested in our local history and we are indebted to Don Hudson for making it so readily available. 
richmond-walsh_g.pdf
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Richmond in The Star, September 1918

30/10/2019

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Papers Past (https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/) is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in our history. The website is a service of the National Library of New Zealand and houses scanned copies of many historical New Zealand publications. Items include more than 150 newspapers, as well as magazines & journals, letters & diaries and parliamentary papers.

The 2 September 1918 issue of The Star included an article about Richmond on page 6. The image above has been compiled to make the article easier to read on-screen — the article originally appeared as a single column running almost the whole length of the page. 

There are several errors in the article, but it gives a vivid impression of Richmond 100 years ago, especially the area beyond North Avon Road, which had not long become part of Christchurch City. In the document below I have transcribed the article and included a contemporary map of the area. I have also added some notes where appropriate, to provide context and correct the errors. It’s good to know we live in a ‘sturdy’ suburb.
Feel free to explore the riches of Papers Past.

PERMANENT LINK TO THIS ITEM: 
​
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS19180902.2.47
richmonds_expansion_thestar-1918-09-02.pdf
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  • Home
  • About
    • Board of Trustees
    • Vision and Mission
    • Richmond Community Garden
  • History
    • Avebury House History
    • Richmond History Group
  • Room Hire
    • Rooms
    • Rates
    • Booking
  • What's On
    • Classes and Groups
    • Past Avebury Events >
      • Matariki in the Zone 2021
      • Avebury Gala 2021
      • Matariki in the Zone 2020
      • Avebury Night Market 2019
      • Teddy Bears Picnic 2019
      • Matariki 2019
      • Avebury Gala 2019
      • Wedding Open Day 2018
      • Avebury Night Market 2018
      • Matariki in the Zone 2018
      • Dementia Walk 2018
      • Teddy Bears Picnic 2017
      • Avebury Gala 2017
  • Newsletter
  • Contact