A COB COTTAGE

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21198, 23 June 1934, Page 5

A COB COTTAGE

HOUSE FROM THE PAST HISTORIC CANTERBURY (specially written i-oa the pbess.) [By J. E. STEVENSON] Just off the Christchurch-Springs-ton road at Broadfield, 12 miles from the centre of the city, is a quaint link with early Canterbury and the pioneers. It is a cob cottage built by laborious hand processes in the days before mechanical devices and the conveniences of transport made stone-building and wood-building available to all owners of building sites. The house is, at a moderate estimate, 70 years of age; and it is possible that it is nearing its eightieth birthday. It is not, however, weather-beaten and stained or scarred by the passage of the years; its outer walls are snowywhite from the annual whitewash brush and its inner walls are gay with wallpapers applied by the hand of the owner; smoke-black-ened rafters or cobwebbed corners are unknown to its three low-ceiled rooms. Even the store set above the rafters and under the sloping, tentshaped roof shows the same orderliness and neatness that are characteristic of the place, from the flagged path and the round cobblestones near the door, to the cool apple house and the pantry with

the sweet smell of milk set in pans for skimming. The whole history of the house is

not now known; but it has been for 25 years in the possession of the present owner, Mr Arthur Charles Dyer, the youngest son of the original John Dyer, of Governor's Bay, whose name was given to Dyer's Pass road, chielly because those who went over the track had to pass through the property of John Dyer at the foot of the road on the Governor's Bay side, but partly because John Dyer himself was one of the first to make use of that route to the town of Christchurch. When the present Mr Dyer took; possession of the old cob house he found it in a dilapidated condition; it had been built in the late 'fifties or the vex\y early 'sixties of last century and had for some years been neglected. Mr Dyer saw its possibilities and set to work to make of it a cottage that might well be the envy of the many wealthy literary and non-literary persons in England, who make it their chief aim in life to be /the possessors of country cottages that are genuinely rustic and old-fashioned. The fact that this cob cottage was not built under the eye of Queen Elizabeth would be of little importance, in the view of such cottage fanciers; its genuine rusticity would make up for its lack of extreme age In the old days, and indeed for . many years after Mr and Mrs Dyer took possession, the cooking had to be done in the long, old-fashioned colonial oven and in the camp oven that is so familiar !o New Zealand musterers and backblocks contractors. The cooking of food in large, iron camp ovens with heavy lids is I an art that is still practised by the Maoris and by those who worfe in i parts of the country that can be reached only by men, pack horses | and dogs; but it is unlikely that there were many such ovens within 12 miles of the city 10 years or even 20 years ago. Mrs Dyer declares that she was well pleased with the cooking done in the colonial oven or the camp oven, but was nevertheless glad to have a wood and coal range installed. She appears to be more proud than otherwise of the fact that this is the only modern convenience in the house. She herself attends to the repapering of the rooms when they require it, and her husband paints the rafters, which are cut from the hard, durable wood of the totara tree. When he was a boy Mr Dyer helped his father to build a cob house at Governor's Bay and is therefore able to describe the method used. The soil is taken from clay pits and is mixed with water and brown tussock to the consistency of very thick cement. The tussock serves to bind the material, which would otherwise tend to crumble. The walls grow evenly at the rate of 18 inches a day; each application must be quite dry before the next is added. Cob houses are said to be more durable than sod houses, which are built brick-wise from blocks of earth cut from the ground to the required shape. Stories are told of the pioneers of the First Four Ships to Canterbury, who built sod houses in haste and repented at leisure in wet weather that they had not undertaken the longer process of cob house building. The cob cottage at Broadfield is satisfactory from all points of view; it is warm in winter and cool in summer, and appears to be permanently watertight. The walls of the cottage are 13 inches thick, the windows being set in the middle so that ledges of nine inches are available both outside and inside for pot plants and ferns, which add to the attractiveness of ! the building. The cottage is of a : long and somewhat narrow shape, j with divisions to form three rooms i —a living room, with a bedroom on either side of it. The living-room is papered and fitted in tones of soft grey, and the bedrooms in pink and mauve. The sun streaming through the deep-set windows in the gleaming white walls lights up a picturesque interior. At night the rooms ) are softly lit by oil lamps with wide mushroom-shaped shades. ' Outside the garden is the pride 'of the owners' hearts. The flagged j path is set about with beds full of I sprouting plants that promise a luazo of colour in iha spring, A,

weeping elm throws spider-like shadows on the sunny wall of the long house and the evergreen native shrubs accentuate the brilliance of the white, which is broken only by the dark window places and the door. Across the distant road, beyond the long apple orchard with the dark earth showing between the rows, the cob cottage gleams through the trees, youthfully old, as sure of its long future as of its long, placid past, the past of Canterbury.