FROM SMALL BEGINNINGS

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31988, 15 May 1969, Page 10

FROM SMALL BEGINNINGS

Although originally intended as a stop-over point for immigrants heading for Canterbury, Lyttelton had the beginnings of its business community in its first buildings.

W. H. Scotter’s “A History of Port Lyttelton” records that: “In July (1849) too, the town secured a more substantial form than surveyors’ pegs gave it: the men moved round from Cass Bay and five houses and a smithy, all presumably prefabricated in Wellington, were erected along the foreshore.” So it would seem that the first actual business in Lyttelton was a blacksmiths. There is, however, more definite information on the first store. In John Johnson’s “The Story of Lyttelton” the following passages state: “Before long other people besides Captain Thomas’s party arrived, among them William Pratt, a grocer from Nelson, who, in December, 1849, opened the first general store and bakehouse, in Canterbury Street.” And later: “As might be expected there quickly arose two hotels, the ‘Lyttelton Arms’ and the ‘Mitre,’ so named to fit in with the streets on the corner of Norwich Quay and Canterbury Street. This was run as a combined public house, restaurant and general store as a speculation by a Major Hornbrook, whose name survives today in a track running over the top of the hill and ending in an excellent road in Mount Pleasant.”

Business apparently boomed for the thriving hotels and store, even if it was conducted in a somewhat unorthodox manner. Small change was almost, entirely lacking in the young community and this inconvenience created a barter system with matches and tobacco being the currency for exchange.

The old-fashioned, round wooden boxes of matches and sticks of tobacco, at threepence a stick, could be used to buy a glass of beer and similarly the landlord had a pile of timber at his store, paid him by a Banks Peninsula sawyer and Maori customers in return for drinks.

There was however, good reason for the brisk trade at the hotels, and this was the shortage of water in the early town. There was only one well, one that had been sunk near the barracks, and a trickle of a spring in front of the “Mitre” on the beach. There is a local belief that

' in fact a fire was once put > out with beer to save the! water. : Living costs at that time • were not dear, for meat cost, ; not more than sjd a pound; I fresh butter was Is a pound; potatoes sold at 4s 6d a ‘ hundred-weight; and “native” , cheese was even then coming from the Peninsula and Head 5 of the Bay and was declared ’ by Bishop Selwyn to be the 1 5 best in the world “next toi . Stilton.”