The grog shops of early Canterbury and their colourful proprietors

Press, 30 August 1980, Page 15

The grog shops of early Canterbury and their colourful proprietors

By

GORDON OGILVIE

Among rhe unsung heroes of our pioneer days must certainly be numbered the publicans and accommodation house proprietors. There were rascals among them; to be sure, especially in the unlicensed “grog shanty” trade. But, all told, a vital service was provided for travellers and casuals in an era not noted for comfortable living. Lodging houses and pubs were set up swiftly in both Lyttelton and Christchurch after the arrival late in 1850 of the first Canterbury Settlement immigrants, and all the business they attracted. However, the Mitre and the Lyttelton Arms were operated at Lyttelton before the First Four Ships turned up. Edward Ward described them in his journal as “no more than small grog shops with a loft and an outhouse.”

Major Alfred Hornbrook had come south from Wellington late in 1849 and established the Mitre Hotel near the foot of the Bridle 'ath. Though Godley also thought it little better than a “glorified grog shop”, Hornbrook made a handsome profit out of the new arrivals and sold out in 1851. His pub was claimed to be the first licensed in Canterbury and it was probably the new settlement’s first legitimate business enterprise.

Samuel Butler dined there a decade later, fresh off The Roman Emperor. He remarked that the Mitre was “so foreign and yet so English — the windows open to the ground,

looking upon a lovely harbour”. His newly acquired colonial companions were ‘‘shaggy, clear-com-plexioned, brow and heal-thy-looking, and wore exceedingly rowdy hats”. The only thing that did not impress Butler was the cost of beer — sixpence a glas.Meanwhile, Akaroa had for some years been robustly fending for itself. In the liquor trade, as in nearly all other respects, Canterbury’s pioneer township had a head’s start. Akaroa had four or five pubs doing business before Lyttelton or Christchurch were even on the map.

If Hornbrook’s Mitre was the first legitimate hotel in the new settlement, the first of the illegitimates was undoubtedly William Green’s Victoria Inn at Akaroa. On November 10, 1839, Green had been put ashore at Takapuneke Bay by Captain W. B. Rhodes to take care of between 30 and 40 shorthorn cattle brought from Sydney aboard the Eleanor.

This was nine months before the French and German colonists arrived and Rhodes had the first cattle or sheep station established in the South Island. Green was accompanied by his wife Mary and two-year-old son William; his brother, Thomas Green, and Thomas Creed assisted him as stockman. One wonders if any of them knew of Te Rauparaha’s grisly slaughter of the Ngai Tahu at this seemingly idyllic bay, almost exactly nine years earlier.

William Green built a two-storeyed, red-painted house near the beach at Takapuneke, so the spot soon came to be called Red House Bay. He also helped to establish a whaling station at Island Bay, just west of the Akaroa Heads, in 1840. Green was present on August 11, 1840, when the British flag was first run up on the nearby point, named after him. His next son, Peter, born in September, 1840, was the first white boy to be born in Canterbury. Green and Creed did not get on. Each wrote to Rhodes complaining about the other. Creed said there were always drunks about the place. This is likely enough for Green used to buy any grog he could from the whaling ships visiting Akaroa and re-sell it to the settlers and sailors.

Captain Charles Lavaud, helping the British magistrate, C. B. Robinson, to keep law and order in the town, once had Green arrested for acquiring three casks of brandy from a French whaler, in defiance of orders. He could not make the charge stick for Green had. emptied the casks by the time of his arrest and substituted stagnant water. Green soon saw better advancement in the liquor trade than in cattle minding or whaling, so he left Rhodes’s employ and had a hotel built for him on the Akaroa side of Green’s Point. This was the Victoria Inn, a single-storey weatherboard building, 40ft' by 30ft. Though Green, a Surrev-born Eng-

lishman, may have named the pub after his queen, 'he might also have been honouring the brig Victoria which brought Governor Hobson on his visit to Akaroa in September, 1841.

It is uncertain whether his trail-blazing ' tavern ever had a licence’.. He would not have been granted one in Lavaud’s time.

One of Captain Lavaud’s worst anxieties throughout his brief term at Akaroa was coping with drunkenness in this frontier settlement. In March, 1841, he had prohibited the selling of seamen’s liquor rations; a few weeks later he cut off the issue of wine and brandy to French sailors altogether..

His constant fear was that the smuggling and selling of spirits and wines would result in brawling between English and French sailors, so creating an international incident. Residents were meant to confine themselves to the more discreet entertainments available at the cosy little coffee house of the limonadier, John Adolphe Francois. But whalers kept bringing liquor ashore despite the prohibition. Lavaud wrote a despairing letter to the French Minister of Marine in 1841 describing the drunkenness and debauchery among the whalers; and how the Akaroa womenfolk, even in their homes, were not safe. In 1842, Akaroa was declared a customs port of entry and William Cooper was appointed its first sub-collector of H.M.

Customs. All rum, brandy, wine, or other liquors were to be taxed on arrival at the port. Yet drunkenness remained a problem. Captain Lavaud now tried to solve the difficulty by prohibition rather than by regulation. He wrote to Governor Hobson arguing this view, noting that most people getting drunk at Akaroa were succumbing to rum brought ashore from British ships. Robin= son, his British counterpart, was doing little to

help and Lavaud was having to cope with the dilemma on his own.

Hobson, weakened by recurring bouts of yellow fever and a paralytic stroke, was too ill to deal with the matter; he died in • September, 1842, without being able to assist Lavaud. Lavaud himself was recalled to France four months later; and with his departure little restraint remained. Both Francois and Green now expanded their activities. By 1843, Francois was giving his address as Jolie Street and operating the French Hotel there. Jacobson’s “Tales of Banks Peninsula” states that this hotel was situated between the War Memorial and Daly’s Wharf, or where the children’s playground now stands. However, Samuel Hewlings’ 1851 survey map of Akaroa clearly shows a French Hotel to be located in French Bay, overlooking the road and beach on the north side of the Smith

Street intersection. So a change of site seems to have occurred at some stage.

By the 1860 s the licensee of the French Hotel was Jacob Waeckerle, one of the most industrious of the German settlers. He

had already tried his hand at a variety of jobs including locksmith, timber cutter, butcher, flour miller, and mail contractor. Ultimately, his pub was r e-n am e d Waeckerle’s Hotel and survived until set alight by an arsonist in 1882. William Green soon found that the Victoria Inn was too far south of the centre of population; so he built another, and larger, hotel on a much more promising site at the corner of Beach Road and Church Street. It was to become known as the Commercial Hotel. T. E. Taylor’s Furnishing Warehouse later occupied the property, and nowadays a variety of shops. George Tribe, a merchant at Lyttelton between 1851 - 1854, bought the old inn, transferred it to Lyttelton in pieces, and re-erected it as a hardware store on Dampiers Bay Road. It was burnt down in a fierce nor’wester in October, 1854 — uninsured.

The third and most celebrated of Akaroa’s pioneer proprietors was Captain James. Bruce,- a bachelor from near Dundee. Having spent eight years as a whaler in Arctic waters and commanded a number of trading vessels on the New Zealand coast, he was well fitted to play an enterprising part in Akaroa affairs.

After his 44-ton cutter, the Brothers, capsized and sank in a squall on November 10, 1842, inside the Akaroa Heads, Bruce decided to stay on. He had Jost everything he possessed in the wreck, but a whaling master he knew offered to put up the money for Bruce to build his handsome, three-gabled, shingle-roofed hotel atthe corner of Beach Road and Bruce Terrace. Bruce’s hotel soon eclipsed in popularity his competitors’ establishments. He kept his hotel beautifully clean, washing it down every morning as it if were a ship. -It is said to have been the first hotel in Canterbury worthy of the name and able to provide accommodation suitable for women and children. Green and Francois were running grog shops and not worrying about lodgers.

With the influx of more settlers at Akaroa aboard Johnny Jones’s trading schooner Scotia late in 1843, the business poten-

tial at Akaroa was also noted by William (“Paddy”) Woods. who built a hotel there after he retired from whaling in 1848. His site was where Garwood’s building later stood (now Brasell’s Motel). Woods was evidently a very rough and disputatious publican and a vigorous rival of his next-door neighbour, Captain Bruce. Woods did not last long. Gold was discovered in California in 1849 and he took off for America, leaving his wife and children behind, and never returned.

So, when in August, 1544, Captain William Wakefield visited Akaroa and noted “some houses of entertainment > both French and English” round the frontage to the anchorage, these would have been the hotels of Green, Francois and Bruce. (Jacobson says Woods had his pub going by this time, but it’s doubtful). Rowdiness and drunken brawling were a regular problem, with the British usually creating much more uproar than the French or German settlers, it seems. ' .

Once the Canterbury Association settlers began arriving in the immigrant ships at the end of 1850, Akaroa became a popular place for the new residents of Lyttelton and Christchurch to visit — whether on business or

pleasure, or out of sheer curiosity. Though a number of pilgrims from the 1850 s have left accounts of their first visit to Akaroa. and there were four other pubs by 1564, Bruce’s Hotel is the only accommodation place named in any of them. John Robert Godley met Bruce there; Colonel James Campbell, Commissioner of Crown Lands for the area outside the Canterbury Block, bargained with hopeful land purchasers in one of Bruce’s back rooms; Governor Gray stayed at the hotel; likewise Henry Sewell, who had come to New Zealand to wind up the affairs and finances of the Canterbury Association.

Sewell writes in his journal about meeting Captain Bruce at Akaroa on June 24, 1853. After a freezing and wet trip in an open boat from Duvauchelles, he was much comforted to be shown into a snug, panelled room at Bruce’s Hotel and allowed to build up a blazing fire. Dry socks, a pair of Bruce’s Sunday-best trousers to change into, and a glass of hot brandy and water, soon helped restore Sewell’s morale. But Bruce himself did not impress him. He took “a patronising interest in his customers and has the reputation of being when half-fuddled (which is the

best part of 24 hours) a good sort of Boniface, shrewd and rough with a red face and a portly person.” Elsewhere, however, he does at least give Bruce credit for running an establishment whose “quarters are clean and not uncomfortable.”

Whatever Captain Bruce might have seemed like to Sewell, he was a celebrity to Peninsula dwellers; in the words of one contemporary “a capital townsman, being the life and soul of the place." At the beginning of 1858, his health failing, James Bruce retired and the new licensee, Samuel Gibbs, stageu t dinner and ball at Bruce’s Hotel. Bruce was guest of honour and Gibbs proposed a gracious toast “to the Ancient Mariner.” Bruce responded, according to the “Lyttelton Times,” in “his usual laconic style.” Bruce’s lifestyle in his latter years had led to an enlargement of his heart and he died, still a bachelor on October 3, 1858, of dropsy,' at the age of 52. He was buried in the new Akaroa cemetery. Two more hotels were to succeed his original building (the last of these was destroyed by fire in 1962), not to mention a whole string of publicans and licensees. But Akaroa was never to see the equal again of this worthy captain and his historic pub.