ANNIVERSARY DAY

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27224, 16 December 1953, Page 8

ANNIVERSARY DAY

Canterbury Founded i 103 Years Ago GARDEN PARTY TO MARK OCCASION Canterbury today celebrates its 103rd anniversary. To the regret of many of the descendants of early settlers of! the province and Christchurch, the. occasion is usually allowed to pass' with scant observance. Because ot the closeness of the date to Christmas.’ a public holiday is not observed, and ! the only function to mark the day is a. gathering of the Canterbury Pilgrims' and Early Settlers’ Association. The Mayor (Mr R. M. Macfarlane) i has asked businesses to mark the occasion by flying flags for the day. Members of the Pilgrims’ and Early Settlers’ Association will hold a garden party this afternoon in the grounds of Mr Heathcote Helmore's home in Fendalton, and have been granted permission by the Fendalton Domains Board to use the grounds of Millbrook Reserve, which adjoin Mr Helmore’s home, and which were given by Mr Helmore’s grandfather.

Photographs of the reserve as it was many years ago will be on display, and some of the big old trees under which the members will meet are shown as mere saplings.

Today is not the anniversary of the first settlement, by any means, nor even of the first planned colonisation: for Canterbury’s pastoral industry had its beginnings in Captain W. B. Rhodes’s cattle station at Akaroa in 1839, and there, too. in the next year, the first organised group of immigrants arrived—French and Germans from a French sloop.

But the formal history of Canterbury dates from the arrival of the Canterbury Pilgrims in four ships—the Charlotte Jane. Cressy, Randolph, and Sir George Seymour. They were the ships chartered by the Canterbury Association in England, and it was after their arrival that the development of the province began to take shape in accordance with a planned and ordered pattern, the product of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an original thinker on the theory of colonisation.

At 10 ajn. on December 16, 1850. the: Charlotte Jane, with 151 settlers aboard, arrived at Lyttelton. Five hours and a half later the Randolph arrived with 212 passengers; on December 17 the Sir George Seymour brought a further 213; and the last of the ships, the Cressy, with 216 settlers aboard, entered port on December 27.