SAMUEL BUTLER RELICS

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27148, 18 September 1953, Page 8

SAMUEL BUTLER RELICS

GIFT TO MUSEUM BY MR H. T. REEVES

Relics of Samuel Butler have been gresented to the Canterbury Museum y Mr H. T. Reeves, of Hororata. Professor R. S. Allan’s recent article in “The Press” aroused Mr Reeves’s concern for the proper preservation in Canterbury of the province’s relics. “By this generous gift, he has given an excellent lead to others who have in their possession similar relics or documents which are part of our province’s history,” the librarian (Mr J. L. Wilson) reported to the Museum Trust Board yesterday. The relics presented by Mr Reeves include two water colours, a fork used by Butler, and a branding iron. The water colours were painted by Butler in England, one being of Langar Rectory, Nottinghamshire, where he was born in 1835, rfnd the other an unidentified seascape. The sheep-branding iron is in the form of a candlestick, and was bn Butler’s run at Mesopotamia. Butler held this rim in the Upper Rangitata for the first three years of the 1860’s. These relics were displayed in the museum’s early colonial exhibition of 1950-51. Mr A. C. Brassington reported to the board that he had presented two photographs of the Butler water colours to St John’s College, Cambridge, of which Butler was a student.