DATE OF ARRIVAL OF PIONEERS

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26174, 26 July 1950, Page 6

DATE OF ARRIVAL OF PIONEERS

MR C. R. STRAUBEL’S REPLY TO LETTER “I shall be delighted if ‘A Member of the Le Cren Family’ can let me have contemporary evidence that J. Longden and H. J. Le Cren established themselves at Lyttelton before December 15, 1850,” said Mr C. R. Straubel in a statement yesterday. Mr Straubel was replying to a letter in “The Press” in which “A Member of the Le Cren Family” claimed that the two men mentioned arrived at Lyttelton in the Barbara Gordon on January 1, 1850, and not. as Mr Straubel had - earlier stated, on the day before the arrival of the First Four Ships. Mr Straubel says that the evidence suggesting that Le Cren did not arrive before that date is:— “(1) Le Cren, then aged 22. was in London in May. 1850. The minute books of the Canterbury Association record that he waited m person on the management committee m London on May 7. 1850. “(2) There is no record of the Barbara Gordon calling at Lyttelton .before December. 1850. The Canterbury Association dispatch of June, 1850, to Mr Godley, listing land purchasers who had gone out to New Zealand ahead of the First Four Ships, gives ‘Longden and Le Cren, Barbara Gordon.’ “(3) The ‘New Zealand Spectator*. (Wellington) listed Longden and Le Cren as passengers from Wellington to Lyttelton by the Barbara Gorddn on December 13, 1850. “(4) The only reference by Mrs Godley is in a letter of July 29, 1851, about a ball held that month ‘in Longden and Le Creu’s store.’ with nothing about date of arrival or existence of the store before 1851. “The:, spelling I have adopted is that used by Longden and Le Cren in their own advertisements in the ‘Lyttelton Times,’ 1851-1852,*’ Mr Straubel concludes.