BEFORE THE PILGRIMS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 141, 17 June 1935, Page 11

BEFORE THE PILGRIMS.

EARLY PIONEER'S STORY. A small white figure stood on the hillside at Lyttelton waving to the newcomers as the first of the First Four Ships, bringing the Canterbury pilgrims, sailed up the harbour on the memorable morning of December 10, 1850. She was already past her fourth' birthday and had begun to learn how to drive bullocks, milk cows, and ride horses; she was about to live one of the simplest yet probably the most interesting lives lived by the earliest of Canterbury's settlers. Her family's little home at the Head of the Bay was troubled with a tidal wave,

before it became a church on at least two occasions and a school on two others. She was Annie Manson. Her father, Mr. Samuel Manson, had landed at Nelson in 1842, and had come down to Canterbury and taken up land at the Head of the Bay, Lytteltog, in company with the Gebbies, the McQucens, the Prices, and other now widely-known families. Annie Manson was born in 1840, and she is now Mrs. Annie Taylor, celebrating this month in Christehurch the 89th anniversary of her birthday. She is still young in spirit, although she suffers some infirmities, arid she has thoroughly enjoyed the presence of visitors who have to offer their congratulations this months, says the Christehurch "Press."

Mrs. Taylor's memory takes her back over her eventful life—she calls it a long walk—to the time when she and 15 or more other Mansons, Gebbies, McQucens, and Prices were christened and went to school on her father's property at the Head of the Bay, when she drove bullocks like a man, wielded an axe like a man, yet reserved much of her time for making butter and cheese, attending to housework, and eagerly preparing for the great events of the year, the ploughing matches and the jumping and riding, at which she could display her fine clothes and her skill on horseback. "Father and I stood on the kill and watched the first two ships come in," Mrs. Taylor said: "There was not a good deal of Lyttelton then, but tents and barracks. Father used to take butter and eggs there on a bullock until the ship arrived, and then he took them over in a boat." Tidal Wave. Mrs. Taylor remembers how a tidal wave swept up Lyttelton harbour in the earliest years and greatly alarmed the inhabitants of the little settlement at the Head of the Bay. The water first receded, leaving the bottom of the harbour bare for a considerable distance out, and then it rushed back and up the channel where the boats ..were moored in the settlement, sweeping into the paddocks and drowning sheep. It was only about three feet high, but it was sufficient to alarm the settlers and do considerable damage. Mrs. Taylor married Mr. Ewen Taylor, who had come to New Zealand in the Ivanhoe. They were married by the Rev. Charles Fraser at Mr. Hanson's home, where Mrs. Taylor had been christened, and they went to live at Leeston, where Mrs. Taylor remained until five years ago. For the last five years she has lived with Mrs. G. Hamilton, in Barbadoes Street, Christehurch.