North Canterbury Gazette

The town of Rangiora in North Canterbury got its first newspaper in December 1875, when James Graham Niven (1844-1899) started up the Canterbury News. It lasted just 6 months and Niven then returned to Britain, where he started up the Evening News at Portsmouth. 

Shortly after the Canterbury News closed, a second Rangiora paper, the North Canterbury Standard, was started up by Thomas Motton Holland (?-1903) and Marshall Hume Browne (1850-1921). Holland had sold his interest in the Standard to Henry Turner (1851-1941) by July 1877. Turner then ran the paper until he was 85. He closed it in 1936, after a fire gutted the office and damaged the presses and type. 

The North Canterbury Gazette grew from one of the Standard’s competitors, the North Canterbury News, which started in 1924. The News was soon renamed the Rangiora Record, and was run by Robert Joseph Logan (c.1878-1938), who published it on alternate days to his other paper, the Kaiapoi Record. In 1929, the offices of the Kaiapoi Record burnt down, and that newspaper stopped, but Logan kept the Rangiora Record going, issuing it three times a week from 1931. 

In 1932, after a fire in the Rangiora office, Logan sold the Record to Oliver Duff (1883-1967) and Ernest A Adams (1892–1976). They renamed it the North Canterbury Gazette and made it a bi-weekly again. In 1936 two of their employees, Robert George Asquith Logan (1911-2001) and Syd Brookes (1915-?1987) took it over. As Logan and Brookes found that only around a third of the homes in Rangiora were willing to pay an annual subscription for the newspaper, they decided to make it a free weekly instead, hoping that the advertising revenue would cover the costs. 

By 1937 Logan had complete control of the paper, after Brookes moved to Mount Cook to become a professional mountain guide. World War II interrupted Logan’s plans for the North Canterbury Gazette, and he stopped printing it on 21 December 1939. However, after the war, on 21 September 1945, he revived the paper and continued running it until he moved to Gisborne in 1951. 

The paper was sold to C T Sleeman and P J Woodhouse who ran it for six years until 1957. It was then owned by Harold Hills (1906-1977) and Annie Hills (1911-1996) along with Richard Irvine Farrant (1928-2000), who took over as editor. The Hillses and Farrant closed the North Canterbury Gazette in 1962, due to increasing costs and a lack of local support.