The ‘Takahe’

Press, 12 September 1981, Page 16

The ‘Takahe’

The sign of the Takahe, an extraordinary building in medieval style high on the Port Hills above Christchurch stands as a memorial to the man who was known in his own lifetime as the “Custodian of the Hills,” — Harry Ell, M.P. and Cabinet Minister, whose energy and vision were the creative force behind the making of the Summit Road, arguably the most spectacular scenic drive in Canterbury. Ell devoted much of his political career to the making of the Summit Road, and was responsible in 1903 for the Scenery Preservation Act, a major step towards his goal. Elected to Parliament in 1899 as member for Christchurch South he was ousted by the voters in 1919 when he switched to Lyttelton hoping to represent the electorate that included the Port Hills. At the age of 57 he returned to Christchurch on a Parliamentary pension of £l2 7s a month, to devote the rest of his life to the selfimposed task of beautifying the Port Hills and providing more and better public access to them. One of his dreams was of a series of eight rest houses, sited at natural stopping places along the Summit Road, and while he was still in Parliament he saw three of them completed — the Sign of the Bellbird at Kennedys Bush in 1914, the Sign of the Kiwi, on the Dyers Pass summit, and the Sign of the Packhorse at Kaituna Pass in 1916. He was to see no more. ' The Takahe was his last big project and one that was to come dangerously close to breaking his heart. He wrote in 1927: “The building of the Takahe has been the tragedy of my life — nothing but trouble from the time I started.” Ell’s plan for the Takahe was to make it a museum of Old England complete with baronial hall and walled garden. He acquired the site in 1918, and started work with two stonemasons. The project became a series of crises, both political and financial. Finance was perpetually short, and Ell scrapped with the authorities over his plans for the hills. For some time he carried on a “war” with the Heathcote County Council over his stone walls below the Takahe; as fast as the county workers pulled them down, Ell rebuilt them. In 1921, all the crises came to a head. Ell was forbidden to set foot on the site, and when he ignored the order and went on working he was told in no uncertain terms to stay out of the building — in consequence of which some of the flooring was put in through a window because Ell was not allowed to enter by the door. After resolving this crisis, he faced another: the neighbouring land, owned by the Cracroft Wilson estate and which Ell had envisaged as a reserve surrounding the Takahe, was subdivided for sale as housing

Pencil drawing by OWEN R. LEE Text by DERRICK ROONEY

sections. He solved this by persuading a group of citizens to buy the sections and to form a Summit Road Public Trust to administer them as a reserve. Ell established a tea-rooms at the Takahe, and his idea was to use the profits from this to provide a network of walking tracks on the Port Hills; but there were seldom any profits, only expenses, and for long periods the staff worked without salaries. Ell’s persistence prevented the project from dying, though, and during the Depression he was able to obtain gangs of relief workers for his projects on the Summit Road. The rows continued between Ell and the authorities and also, on one notable occasion when he branded their leaders as communists, between Ell and his men — but the work also continued. Among the unemployed men Ell found skilled stonesmasons and carvers whose abilities combined to make the Takahe what some have called a “miracle in stone and wood." They built the imposing armorial gallery round whose walls were mounted carved shields representing the arms of pioneer families; and the great arched stone entranceway, copied from a Tudor house in Suffolk, and surmounted by replicas of the heraldic shields in Westminster Abbey. With the stone walls that Ell planned or built in its grounds and its Tudor-Gothie exterior the Takahe does have some flavour of Old England. But it was wholly a Christchurch project.' The stone was local, the panelling was carved in locally grown timber, and even the impressive stained-glass armorial windows were Christchurch made, by the firm of Smith and Smith, Ltd. When Ell died in 1934 the building was unfinished and with his death the Takahe project immediately ran out of momentum. The building was in debt and the site was subject to a mortgage. Work halted, and in 1936 a citizens’ committee was formed to raise funds to liquidate the debts and secure the seven-acre reserve and the building. The committee succeeded in preventing foreclosure, but exhausted its funds in doing so, and the project again languished until, in 1942, the Christchurch City Council bought the land and the partly completed building for £4545. Over the next seven years the council spent another £25,455 to complete and furnish the building, thus giving reality to Ell’s dream. When the council took over vandals had been chipping away at the uncompleted building for years, and its interior resembled a junkyard. Much of the original construction had been done to Ell’s designs (he was an enthusiast for medieval Enlish architecture) without the advice of a professional architect, and the council asked a Christchurch architect, J. G. Collins, to help it complete the building. Collins was responsible for many of the intricate design features that can be seen in it today.

In the past year knowledge about Saturn has made its most dramatic advance since the seventeenth century. The two Voyager spacecraft, the second of which has just passed the giant planet have between them gathered thousands of times more information than had been gained in all man’s previous study. It was Galileo, in 1610, who first looked at Saturn through a telescope; Christian Huyghens, in 1655, who first spotted Titan, Saturn’s largest moon: and G. D. Cassini, in 1675, who realised that the rings were not continuous but had a gap between them. Cassini also found three more satellites. Voyager-2 looked at Saturn and its moons with a telescope recognisably descended from that of Galileo; but with a resolution 1000 times greater than is possible with even the finest of Earth-based instruments. From, a billion miles away it has sent back the faintest of signals — a mere million million millionth of a Watt — which has been picked up by the antennae in California and turned into superb pictures. It is an achievement to marvel at. The new data have created some puzzles which will keep the astronomers busy for years. Instead of the few rings which can be seen from Earth, or the hundreds which Voyager-1 identified, the latest pictures show thousands of them. By flying closer, Voyager-2 showed that the rings have a fine scale, a density of detail which the scientists had not suspected. By peering through the rings at the image of a star as it passed behind them, Voyager-2 was able to make an even more precise count. As the star appeared and disappeared behind each successive ring, it was observed and counted. Across the tens of thousands of miles occupied by the rings, this technique provides the possibility of resolving detail down to a scale of 100 metres — a single city block. Analysing the results will take some time, but there already appear to be difficulties. According to accepted theories, the gaps in the rings — of which Cassini’s is merely the widest and most easily observed — are caused by the satellites of Saturn. Cassini's Division is caused by the gravitational effects of the satellite Mimas, whose orbit is exactly right to account for the wide gap in the ring. But it seems almost impossible to explain the many thousands of much narrower gaps by the same mechanism. Scientists were looking hard at the pictures for evidence of “moonlets” about a kilometre or so in diameter, particularly in the Bring, the one immediately inside the Cassini Division. Such tiny moons would help explain why there are so many gaps in this ring. But first examination of the pictures showed no such moonlets; another theory may need rethinking. They were also hoping to find a larger moon, perhaps 20 to 30 miles across, at the inner edge of the Cassini Division. Together with Mimas, which lies just outside the ring system, this could explain the gap very satisfactorily. It failed to show up.