New Zealand House & Cottage 1.

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I wrote and illustrated ‘New Zealand House & Cottage’. It was published in 1997. It’s a snapshot of some historic New Zealand homes - both grand and modest - as they were preserved at the end of the 20th century.

I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

This is the title page of the book

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz 
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The Rat Trap Re-visited

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 it was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

The book contained 37 pubs, inns, taverns or hotels (call them what you will). This is the final page.

On 19 May 1994 The Upper Takaka Tavern, for years affectionately known as ‘The Rat Trap’, suffered the same fate as many other pubs in New Zealand’s history.

At the time I wrote and illustrated this book, the latest such fires had been on 26 October 1994 at the Burkes Pass Hotel, the central portion of which was 133 years old, and on 4 February 1995 at the New Empire Hotel, Hamilton. Perhaps ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’ may serve as a reminder that the old pubs, which, like old soldiers, seem fated slowly to fade away, were much more than drinking holes; they played a big part in the social, economic and geographical development of the New Zealand we have today and so deserve a valued place in our history.

Don Donovan, Albany, 1995 [Re-published 2012]

© DON DONOVAN 
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Vulcan Hotel, St.Bathans

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

St Bathans was born of a gold boom in 1863. A year later it had ten hotels, forty businesses and a population of up to 2000 in the surrounding hills and gullies. Across the road from the pub you can look down into ‘The Glory Hole’, a blue lake that was once a hill 120 metres high! Gold fever hit St Bathans in a big way and, blinded by the urge to win metal above everything else, the early citizens tolerated a mushroom shanty-town of ‘corrugated iron, red iron, tin, gin cases, staves and canvas’. But there seems to have been born into gold miners a need for dignity and a prayer for permanence and so, as the town survived into and beyond the 1870s, more substantial buildings appeared, some of them with sufficient stamina to have lasted into modern times.

St Bathans today is like a time capsule from which it’s possible, in just a couple of hours, to get an appreciation of the composition of a goldfields town: a public hall that was the miners’ billiards saloon, the Bank of New South Wales Gold Office of the late 1860s, the stately old Post Office and postmaster’s residence, the ruins of the 1866 public school, damaged irreparably by earthquake in 1948, the church of St Alban the Martyr given to the town by Captain Dalgety and shipped out, pre-fabricated from England in 1883, and the stone cottage, one of the earliest permanent buildings in the town, first occupied by Sam Hanger who owned the first Vulcan Hotel.

Bank of New South Wales Gold Office
 

There’s been a Vulcan in St Bathans since 1869. Sam Hanger’s first one was a little farther north than is today’s, an impermanent affair thrown up to cater for thirsts rather than architectural appreciation. Twelve years later, they replaced corrugated iron with a structure of sun-dried bricks that became the new Vulcan: it stood until early 1914 when it was burned down. In its turn it was replaced by red brick which was also destroyed by fire. The Vulcan’s licence was transferred at this time to the Ballarat Hotel, which was not in use.

It had been built in 1882 and is the uniquely handsome little Vulcan Hotel in my illustration.
Through the left hand door is a narrow, intimate public bar and beyond that, the lounge bar. There are four accommodation rooms, one of which is said to be haunted. The hotel is owned by a company mainly consisting of local shareholders. I can’t think of a nicer place to hold a shareholders meeting.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Goldfields Hotel, Roxburgh

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

Yellow and square as a block of butter, it’s the brightest thing in Scotland Street, the main highway through Roxburgh. It hasn’t always been yellow and its shape has probably altered over the years: it’s certainly changed its name for when it was established around 1870, it was called the Queens Head.

It became the Goldfields Hotel thirty years later, had a ‘face-lift’ in 1912, a pool room was added in the 1960s, followed by a dining room in the ’70s but then, in August 1992, there was a serious fire which burned out the roof of the bar and damaged some of the guest rooms. Although major re-furbishment was necessary on the inside, the outside of the pub was undamaged. As a reward for its sufferings, it was given a much deserved coat of new yellow paint.

These days, Roxburgh is all about fruit orchards - particularly apricots - and the hydro-electric power station north of the town. But Roxburgh (its first name was Teviot) was born out of the Otago gold rushes. Gold was first discovered in 1862 when two young men, Andrew Young and James Woodhouse, searching with two companions for colours in the area, did a little prospecting in the river while their clothes were hanging to dry in the bushes. They found such rich deposits that they precipitated a gold rush that lasted until the later dredging boom petered out in the 1920s.

Old goldfields water wheel
 

Be careful where you put your car in Scotland Street: if, inadvertently, you take Geordie’s carpark outside the Goldfields Hotel (his name is painted on the kerb, he’s parked there for 42 years) it’ll cost you a fine of one jug of beer; the proceeds to St John’s Ambulance.

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz

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Read It Quickly

 

When I was a little boy growing up in a working class district of south London I thought that rich people only came from the so-called upper classes. 

Then at the end of the war, I read of a virtually uneducated man who made millions of pounds out of scrap metal. At that point I realized that you didn’t have to be ‘posh’ to be rich, but riches might make you posh!

I photographed this gate post outside a house in one of Sydney’s most exclusive semi-rural suburbs: Bayview. It reminded me of that scrap metal dealer; once he’d made his pile he didn’t care a damn about anybody!

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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North Western Hotel, Palmerston

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

The first coach travellers from Dunedin to the Otago gold rushes in the early 1860s were treated to a terrifying trip over the flood-prone Taieri Plain and across the hostile hills and valleys of the Old Dunstan Road. Despite the legendary skills of determined coachmen it wasn’t a satisfactory route and so, around 1864, a safer, more reliable alternative was developed which saw Cobb & Co’s coaches bustling up the coast road from Dunedin to Palmerston and then following the Shag River valley ‘Pigroot’ into Central Otago. 

The first North Western which was built in 1863, described by E.M. Lovell-Smith in ‘Old Coaching Days’ as a ‘pretentious wooden building’, became the depot for Cobb & Co. But it burned down and was replaced by the hotel that still stands today.

Built of bricks from a local kiln in 1887, it prospered until 1906 when it was hit by local prohibition. The wonder of it is that the building survived for it was variously used as a boarding house, fish and chip shop and a babies’ clothing shop until a tourist licence was granted almost eighty years later.

In 1989, with a new licensing act in place, it obtained a restaurant licence, but only in 1992 did it become fully licensed once more. Today’s North Western is a handsome structure and, being the only survivor out of fourteen original hotels in Palmerston, is an important remnant - as is the town hall (above) - of this historic junction town; especially as the original stables, essential to Cobb & Co coach travel along the ‘Pigroot’ to the gold fields, are still there.

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz

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Hororata Hotel

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

Hororata came close to being a railway town when a line from Christchurch to the West Coast via Browning Pass was surveyed. It’s on record that the Hororata Domain Board members kicked up a stink when they heard that it might pass through the eastern part of the domain.

In 1865, fortunately for Hororata and the travelling public, Arthur Dudley Dobson found Arthur’s Pass where it had always been, and the threat disappeared. All the same there was pedestrian demand for accommodation along the old Maori greenstone route, from hunters, and from drovers taking cattle from Longbeach to Hokitika via Browning Pass. A chain of accommodation houses grew, one of which was set up in Hororata by Edwin Derrett. Having arrived in 1852, he was one of the first settlers in the district and it seems he spread his interests between farming and hospitality. Sometime later he built a hotel which was sold as new in 1873 and re-sold in 1874 to Thomas Napier.

In 1882, Napier had a new, two-storeyed timber pub built by local tradesmen. It was described as: ‘large and lofty… almost entirely surrounded by tall pines, and the crescent-shaped roadway by which it is approached from the main road gives it a pleasing appearance.’

A 1903 photograph from the ‘Cyclopaedia of New Zealand’ shows Thomas Napier’s pub, owned at the time by Patrick Crowe. It is a fine clapboard building with modillioned eaves, and ornamented lintels over the doors and windows. Arranged before the pub, in attitudes of studied indifference, is a group of local patrons; the whole scene is framed by large macrocarpa trees. It is that same hotel that stands today; macrocarpas still frame the scene and the windows and doors still have their bracketed lintels but the modillions have disappeared and the clapboard exterior is hidden under a stucco cladding. The pub was ‘re-designed and modernised’ in 1967 but I suspect that the old timbers are still slumbering under all that plaster.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Hôtel des Pècheurs, Banks Peninsula

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

As with the streets of Akaroa, the names of both the Hôtel des Pècheurs and its settlement are evidence of how close this area came to being a French colony. Duvauchelle was named after two brothers who, in 1843, had acquired sections at the head of Akaroa Harbour from the colonially minded Nanto-Bordelaise company: they never took up residence.

In 1851 the first inn at Duvauchelle was opened by Francois Le Lievre, a member of one of the original French families brought to Banks Peninsula in 1840. He also ran a ferry service to save travellers who’d tramped across the hills from Lyttelton Harbour the last hard plod to Akaroa.

Ben Shadbolt, an ex-convict from Van Diemen’s Land, bought Anderson’s Accommodation House at the head of the bay in 1861 and named it, appropriately if unoriginally ‘The Travellers Rest’. Ironically a condition of the licence was that Shadbolt was sworn in as local constable; thus the poacher turned gamekeeper! He and his wife, Elizabeth, were at the heart of the community and, with his larger-than-life ebullience, he was famed as a racehorse owner, trainer and breeder, farmer, forest owner, local politician and proprietor of a coach service.

The Travellers Rest burned down in 1876 whereupon Shadbolt erected ‘The Somerset’, a palatial affair named after Elizabeth’s birthplace in England. For six more years The Somerset served the travelling and resident communities with grog, sustenance, accommodation, travel and a post office; but a wowser arsonist maniac, who laid fires in a number of Banks Peninsula hotels, burned it down in 1882: that, coincidentally, was the year of Ben’s death.

The redoubtable Elizabeth rebuilt the pub, which has lasted over a century with few changes apart from odd additions, several changes of name - ‘The Crown’, ‘Duvauchelle Hotel’, ‘The Bricks’ and now ‘Hôtel des Pècheurs’ - exotic and complete with accents Françaises. The biggest change is that the road now passes what was the back of the pub and so, like the Hukerenui Tavern, it’s back to front.

Ah, yes - and they’ve painted it white since I did my illustration. Oh well, as the French say, ‘Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose…’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Hilltop Tavern, Banks Peninsula

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

There aren’t too many Kiwi proprietors who can say their pub has been in the family as long as Joy Tarling’s has. These are her words about The Hilltop:-

‘First built in 1872 by James Garwood. Burned down April 7th, 1931. The hotel was a stopover in the coach and horse days. Then the drovers stayed when they brought stock out to the rail at Little River. My grandfather, Harry Bell, bought the licence on 15th November 1920. The freehold has remained in our family ever since. 

Prior to 1920 there had been eight owners. My parents lived here until 1951 then it was leased out. Now we have been here since 1990. My children are the fourth generation of our family to live here’.

And why, I ask, would anybody want to live anywhere else than on the rim of this ancient volcanic crater of Akaroa Harbour where the air is clean and clear as crystal?

The tavern lies just below Barry’s Pass, which was named after a shepherd who settled in the bay at the foot of the hill in 1847. In those days Banks Peninsula was largely covered in stands of native timber, but by the turn of the century it had been virtually clear-felled and milled, mainly to supply lumber for the buildings of Lyttleton and Christchurch. But what we’ve never seen we can’t miss and I love the peninsula the way it is; one of New Zealand’s magic places with its secret valleys, remote bays and the old stock routes that trace the contours of its scoria hills.

The coach road from Christchurch to Akaroa, completed in 1871, was opened the next year to Cobb & Co’s coach service which soon added Hilltop Hotel to the string of other coaching inns along the route. Then the railway came to Little River in 1886 and that boosted the hotel’s business further, bringing many travellers to the peninsula settlements. I’ve seen a historic photograph which marks the decline of the stage coach era. It was taken in 1910 and shows a coach with its horse outside the old Hilltop Hotel (a pretty building, I should have loved to have painted it). The first motorized transport service over Barry’s Pass started that year.

Tourism brings ever more visitors to the tavern. These days coach loads of camera clickers and videotapers, arrive daily, intent on recording the unchanging panorama that has kept Hilltop in the same family all these years.

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Valley Inn Tavern, Heathcote

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 it was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

Much history lies in and around the Heathcote Valley and most of it is to do with the fact that the Christchurch settlement had, as its deep water harbour, the flooded crater of an extinct volcano - Lyttleton Harbour. When the first settlers arrived in 1850 they had to tramp up a precipitous bridle path to the saddle above Heathcote, from which they could gaze down into the estuary of the Heathcote and Avon rivers and across the tussocked Canterbury Plains to the Southern Alps.

It didn’t take the newcomers long to realize that a railway tunnel through the hills would make life easier and, amazingly, within nine years of the pioneers’ arrival trial shafts were being sunk by the English contractor’s agents. The first sod of the tunnel’s construction was turned on 1 7 July 1861 in the Heathcote Valley and the first passenger train ran through on 9 December 1867. The second tunnel was built in 1964 for road traffic, and a recently constructed gondola cableway now makes light of the old bridle path. Thus what should have been a peaceful valley enjoying its micro-climate - so favourable for orcharding - became an increasingly important artery between port and city.

The Valley Inn, I was assured, originated as an accommodation house for the workers on the Lyttleton Rail Tunnel; but the house was built in 1870, three years after the tunnel opened. The truth of it is that the workers were building a 500 000 gallon reservoir 65 metres above sea level on Te Tihi o Kahukura, otherwise known as Castle Rock, overlooking Heathcote Valley. It was the town supply for Lyttleton and its water was piped through the railway tunnel.

In 1877 the Valley Inn, with its trapeziform rooms and not a right-angle anywhere, became a licensed hotel. Out the back, beyond the garden where they hang the bar towels to dry, you can still see the original stables; in the lounge bar is an old, brick lined, artesian well, sunk in the 1860s, from which they drew water for the animals working on the tunnel.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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West Oxford Hotel

 I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

The first licence in Oxford was granted to William Satchell in 1859. His ‘pub’ was a four-roomed accommodation house. It was taken over by Salathiel Redfern who promptly put up the two-storeyed Oxford Hotel. Next came David Fisher’s Forest Inn of 1863, which was later named the Terminus Hotel (historical clues are in both names for there was a large forest near Oxford and there were two railway lines with stations at East and West Oxford). Pub number three, the Harewood Arms, built by a sawmiller named Luers, went up in 1864. They’ve all gone.

In July 1878 William Paget raised the Commercial Hotel. The licence had been granted on the condition that the pub was up within a month - imagine that happening nowadays! Designed by architect Jacobson of Christchurch, it was declared ‘one of the finest country hotels in the province’, and is now the West Oxford Hotel, the survivor of Oxford’s first four pubs. Paget owned livery stables opposite his hotel and every Saturday he’d hitch up a brougham and collect thirty thirsty sawmillers from Coopers Creek in Oxford Forest and bring them to the pub. (In so doing he anticipated ‘Dial-a-Driver’ service by over a hundred years!).

‘The West’, its solid walls a tribute to the craftsmen who built it, still offers accommodation and good service - although the ornate bells in the passageways no longer ring to summon chambermaids.

Under some straggly old pines in the adjacent paddock is a classical old two-door lock-up, looking a bit the worse for wear. It was brought there from the Heathcote Valley in 1869. No notable criminals languished in its darkness but it’s said that Michael Leahy, constable, locked-up a miscreant one night for being drunk in charge of a horse and dray. Leahy, next day unlocked the gaol door to find an even drunker drunk: he had forgotten that the cells contained a considerable amount of confiscated liquor!

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Provincial Hotel, Christchurch

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog

The east side of Christchurch city lacks the leafy charm of the Hagley Park end where government and university buildings confidently - and with a distinct air of superiority - reflect a stately English heritage. The pity of it is that the Provincial Hotel rubs shoulders with dreary, small manufacturing units and industrial warehouses rather than being at the ‘hotter end’ of town for, architecturally, it is one of the more unusual pubs in New Zealand and would look well among willows on the grassy banks of the Avon.

It has been described as ‘Dutch-style’ but just what mode it really expresses is a bit of a mystery. Records show that its architects were Clarkson and Ballantyne - two good Canterbury names - but I suspect that the job was given to a promising young designer who, to show off his potential, mixed vaguely Elizabethan and Jacobean styles and threw in some baroque cartouches and Georgian windows to produce what I can only describe as an enormous piece of architectural fun.

The first licence on this site was granted to Robert Warner in 1865 but the present pub probably dates from 1904 as tenders were called for the ‘re-building of the Provincial Hotel’ in 1902 after it was condemned by the licensing committee.


© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Hurunui Hotel

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995. It’s a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

John Hastie, a man known widely for his kindness, opened the ‘Hurunui Accommodation House, South Bank’ with a licence issued in Christchurch by J.W Hamilton, Resident Magistrate, on 1 June 1860.

There were conditions: ‘All premises to be kept in good repair… Not less than eight beds for travellers in not less than four rooms… Accommodation for at least six horses… A lamp to be kept burning from sunset to sunrise but not to be visible from the north bank of the Hurunui River… The licence to be cancelled if any drunkenness be proved or if spirits be supplied to any aboriginal native’. Hastie was also required to be sworn in and perform as a constable if required.

The limestone building, still standing well into its second century, was constructed of stone quarried from the gentle hills of nearby Weka Pass. Therein, perhaps, lies the secret of its survival for when most other pubs of its vintage, ticking like tinder-dry time bombs, have gone up in flames these thick, white walls remain. That is not to say that the Hurunui Hotel hasn’t faced its perils. There was a mighty flood in 1868 when the river burst its banks and flowed ‘a mile wide’. Although the hotel suffered no damage it was moved, block by block, to its present site in 1869. By then poor Hastie had died of epilepsy.

The hotel was a meeting place for North Canterbury farmers who would ride in for their mail and to catch up with gossip, maybe pausing for a pint while they watched drovers from the north dipping their sheep to keep Canterbury clear of ‘the dreaded scab’. Through the years the pub experienced varying fortunes and there came a period, as with so many architectural gems, when the worth of its heritage was misunderstood and it fell into disrepair. It had reached its nadir in 1980, patronless, beerless and on the point of closure when, at the eleventh hour, a group of locals, after surprisingly little discussion, pledged over $100 000 and set up a trust to save it.

And so it continues its tradition of welcoming travellers on the Lewis Pass and Hanmer road to its shade and hospitality; and is it too much to fancy that in some cool corner of its restful bar the spirit of John Hastie smiles and nods approvingly?

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz

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Lake Mahinapua Hotel

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

Not so long ago it stood on a quiet back road. Now the main highway runs right past the front door, which suits New Zealand tourists with long memories who want to see for themselves this pub made famous by a television advertising campaign. Advertising themes are notoriously short-lived but the clever use of nostalgia, personified by a grumpy old man and given location by the almost ramshackle pub made those Mainland Cheese TV commercials rather more memorable than most.

When I painted the pub and its wild west sky the advertising campaign had developed to a point where the Mainland people, in return for cheesy wrappers sent in by consumers, were giving cash to a good cause - the establishment of a protected area where penguins could make love in peace. But things arc seldom what they seem; that grumpy old man didn’t live within cooee of Lake Mahinapua, he was an actor from Wellington; and the habitat of the Hoiho, or Yellow Eyed Penguin, is over the alps and far away, somewhere between Oamaru and the Campbell Islands!

A Mahinapua Hotel was built in 1905, close to the lake, eleven kilometres south of Hokitika. It was described as a ’solidly built house’, containing twelve accommodation rooms, and offering a ‘moderate tariff’. The proprietor, James Henderson, a Scotsman from Edinburgh, had spent time in Otago and, later, on the West Coast as a miner and dredge worker.

It would be interesting to know whether he was familiar with or had worked on the Phillips Dryland Dredge. Unlike most gold dredges, which were waterborne, this one was operated from a railway line. The first gold dredge in Westland County was a Phillips and it first operated on the sandy foreshore of Lake Mahinapua between 1897 and 1902.

In gold mining days, on the shallow lake which is only one metre above sea-level, steamers and barges plied its seven kilometre length conveying the constant flow of gold-seekers rushing from from one strike to another, as rumours of riches flew up and down the coast. It’s now a favourite spot of yachties and picnickers, much prized for its clear, colourful reflections from the surrounding bush.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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The Amberley Lime Company Ltd.

I did this oil painting sometime in the 1960s. The building lay over a siding of the main trunk railway line somewhere between Amberley and Waipara in North Canterbury, New Zealand. Open railway trucks would be run under the two storey part of the building from where the crushed lime would be loaded.

A warm nor’wester was blowing at the time of the painting; it formed the typical heavy lenticular cloud which would build up for the length of Canterbury province; the cloud’s base can be seen in the background where blue sky marks the chain of Southern Alps mountains that lie roughly north-south. The yellow cushions are formed of moss whose colour is enriched, presumably, by lime dust. I did not exaggerate the colour!

The building no longer exists. I have tried to find its site from time to time but there is no evidence left. I have searched the Internet to try to elicit something of the building’s history and that of the Amberley Lime Company; no luck. I’d welcome information if anybody has any.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Castle Rising

Seven kilometres beyond Kings Lynn*, close by the shallow waters of The Wash on Norfolk’s north western shore, lie the impressive 12th century ruins of Castle Rising on an estate of ill-defined Roman and Saxon origins covering about five hectares.

The castle was built by William d’Albini, Earl of Sussex, who married Adeliza, widow of Henry I (he who had died of eating a surfeit of lampreys).

(D’Albini, interestingly, was the son of William the Conqueror’s butler. In those days that title was not indicative of humble status. The butler was a senior officer of the royal court, often titled. Among other things he had responsibility for controlling wine supplies for the household. William had firstly given the manor of Rising to his brother-in-law, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, but Odo rebelled against him and had his fief confiscated. )

Castle Rising stands in an elevated, level, grassed depression formed by earth ramparts 20 metres high whose outer slopes plunge a further 18 metres to the bed of the encircling moat. The circumference of the main rampart is over 900 metres and even today, with the moat dry and the slopes eroded, its storming would be a daunting prospect.

Entry to the castle is by way of a stone bridge across the deep moat. At the inner end of the bridge are the ruins of the gatehouse whose crumbling arch artistically frames the finely proportioned main tower of the keep with its steeply pitched roof.

The keep, its great hall and chambers, date from 1150. Although that was eighty-four years after the Battle of Hastings, and despite the efforts of Henry I to ‘Anglo-Normanize’ the nation, it still symbolized the arrogant establishment of feudalism imposed upon the Anglo-Saxons by their Norman rulers. But the invaders came to stay and now, after over 800 years of integration, who knows who is Anglo-Saxon or Norman, and who, apart from introspective scholars, recalls the brutal, post-Conquest excursions of William of Normandy and his ill-starred son, Rufus?

On a pleasant summer’s day I found Castle Rising a pretty sight from the springy turf of the footpath on its ramparts and when I came to enter the keep it was open to exploration without petty restriction.

I thought I had the castle to myself and freely examined the eroded, fern laced stones of its lower chambers, trying to imagine life there in the twelfth century. By the time I had reached the top of the staircase with its vaulted vestibule, then inspected the elegant chapel, turrets and gallery above, and had spent time contemplating the vast sweep of surrounding countryside, a large party of senior citizens had started to arrive on the upper floor by way of the only access, a stone spiral staircase just wide enough for one chain-mailed guard with pike. I was trapped for quite some time until the last of the party, a game invader with a walking stick, had puffed her way through the time-worn doorway. One man could have defended that floor against hundreds - senior citizens, boy scouts or mediaeval dissidents - for they could only arrive one at a time. In fact, defence was not put to the test for the castle was never threatened.

All in all, Castle Rising is a well used fortress in surprisingly good repair. It has a ‘hall keep’ as distinct from a ‘tower keep’, being wider than it is high, and although roofless, the walls have suffered very little erosion and still reach their original height. The main, arched stairway is wide and stately and the hall and chambers, for all their remnant bleakness, are redolent of the grandeur and comfort that made the castle appropriate accommodation for the likes of Queen Isabella, conspiratorial widow of murdered Edward II, who made it her principal home from 1331 to 1356 and was often visited there by her son, Edward III and grandson, The Black Prince, who subsequently became its owner.

Once one of the most important strategic fortresses of East Anglia, Castle Rising now belongs to the Howard family it having been given to Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk in 1544 by Henry VIII; a logical transfer of title for Howard was a descendant, through the female line of his family, to William d’Albini, the castle’s first Norman landlord. It is today administered by English Heritage.

*Kings Lynn is 150 km north of London via the M1 motorway to Cambridge, then the A10 highway which passes through historic Ely.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Revington’s, Greymouth

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog

I have a confession to make: back in 1961, long before the present proprietors owned Revingtons, my wife and I stayed there one freezing winter weekend, having foolhardedly crossed the mountains from Christchurch in deteriorating weather. We were dismayed to find that the tap on the gas fire in our bedroom was padlocked. A notice advised that the lock would be undone upon payment of half-a-crown (25 cents). I was affronted at such parsimony and promptly picked the lock with a hairpin. I have felt vaguely guilty ever since; but I feel better now that I have told you.

It’s a splendid pub and I thoroughly enjoyed drawing it in its new livery; it is much cherished by its present owners, the Dalzells.

Its ancestry is traced to a hotel built opposite the Greymouth post office by John William Oliver in 1876 which, predictably, he called the Post Office Hotel. Twenty years later - by which time Greymouth had become respectable and was known more for its coal than the rough and tumble of its goldfields - it was purchased by Captain W. D. Revington who added his name to its title.

But ‘Revington’s Post Office Hotel’ must have been such a mouthful, and West Coasters are generally people of few words (well chosen, usually) inevitably it became ‘Revington’s’ which, I think, has quite a ring to it. I’m told that the locals shorten it even further, to ‘Revvies’, which tends to knock the top off any attempt at grandeur.

The first Revingtons was a fine looking hotel but it was replaced in 1938 by this art deco style building with its Spanish tiles, built by the owners of the day, Allan and Margaret Marshall. They must have had a presentiment that, one day, Royalty would grace the pub for they incorporated that fine balcony. From its double doors, below the flagstaff, Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh waved to the loyal Greymouth crowd when they paid a visit on 18 January 1954.

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz

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Owen River Tavern

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

It’s worth reflecting that in 1847-48 Thomas Brunner took 550 days to explore, with his Maori guides, the return journey from Nelson to the West Coast glaciers by way of the Buller Gorge. They suffered dreadfully and risked, among many others, the threats of drowning and exposure. They came so close to starvation that they were forced to kill and eat Brunner’s beloved dog, Rover. The explorer was enough of a detached scientist to record ‘The flesh… is very palatable, tasting something between mutton and pork . . .’

That same journey today by car on the fine, tar-sealed highway might take three or four leisurely days (or one day at pace); although Nature, hereabouts, isn’t above reminding us, by rock fall and the occasional flood, that we shouldn’t take too much for granted.

In the valley of Brunner’s Buller River, on the Nelson to Murchison road, lies Owen River, named for a small stream draining the Lookout Hills and Marino Mountains to the north. Dating to the 1880s, it was once a small town founded when rich quartz reefs were discovered in the area. Nowadays the shouts of both gold and coal miners are faint echoes of the past while the solitary tavern refreshes tourists, fishers, hunters, Buller River rafters and cave explorers, and the local farming community.

Mt. Owen, 1875m, is a pleasant prospect from the beer garden on a summer’s day, the sort of day that poor Thomas Brunner might have welcomed for drying clothes and equipment and mourning his loyal and, in the end, sacrificial Rover…

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Kohatu Hotel

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

Solitary, it stands where the winding road that follows the pretty Motueka River joins the highway from Nelson. It’s at a point where the mind of the southbound traveller prepares tor the rugged bluffs of the Buller Gorge, leaving the gentle orchards of Tasman Bay behind.

You might be tricked by those big flashy bar windows, pseudo shutters and plaster rendering into thinking that the Kohatu Hotel is a modern building but the two-storey front portion of it is over one hundred years old. What’s more, apart from the big fascia board with the name lettered on it, and the absence of one chimney, that part has not changed since 1894 when it was built by Harry Bromell. It replaced the Bromell’s Hotel which his father, Thomas, had erected in 1877 in competition, perhaps, with an older accommodation house on the other side of the river. With the opening of the road over the Hope Saddle, traffic from Nelson had increased and Thomas had wanted to take advantage of obvious commercial opportunities.

Bromell’s became even more important in 1899, when Motupiko Station (the name was changed to Kohatu Station in 1906) became the terminus of the Nelson Railway. It was here that train passengers and freight were transferred to road coaches for the onward journey to Murchison and the Buller. Around then, its name was changed to the Terminus Hotel; what a bustling place it must have been when the trains and coaches met and passengers and horses needed to be fed and watered, accommodated and stabled.

It was from outside Bromell’s, too, that Nelson sheep were taken by drovers for sale in Canterbury - a journey that could take almost a month via Tophouse and Hanmer. Drovers like legendary Ern Robinson (coincidentally a kinsman of my mate, Mac Fairweather) would have known both the old and new Bromell’s Hotels and would have witnessed the coming of the railway and Newmans transition from horse drawn transport to motor vehicles.

The railway failed to survive and you’d have to look hard to find any traces of it now, although the old Glenhope Station still stands, twenty-five kilometres south of the Kohatu Hotel. Or, by chance, you might find someone in the bar with a long memory!

© DON DONOVAN
 donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Okaramio Tavern

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995 and was a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

I’m always amused by tenuous claims to greatness. One such was made for Okaramio’s post office (in the days when such institutions were still fashionable) which was described as ‘the smallest in New Zealand.’ I can’t imagine that many people would have come from far and wide to see it, but the Okaramio Tavern is a welcome sight as it comes into view on the Blenheim to Nelson road. It has a jolly look about it which is enhanced by the plump, red lettering of its name which stretches the length of the pub. (For the typographically minded, the lettering style is derived from ‘Cooper Black’; I’ve used it for the cover of this book).

The first hotel on the same site, called the Half-Way House, was established John Dickson in 1872. When it was taken over in 1897 by John Johnston, one contemporary description had it as ‘a pleasing two-storeyed building of thirteen rooms and accommodation for twenty’. It was a dropping-off point for Harry Newman’s four-horse Blenheim-Nelson mail coach and was surrounded by a forty-acre paddock where drovers’ stock could be held over night.

An Irish woman, Teresa Briggs, widowed in Wellington in 1891 by her boot merchant husband, bought the hotel from Johnston in 1902. It burned to the ground one year later. To keep the licence alive, the widow Briggs sold liquor from a ‘tin shed’ (see The Tin Hut at Tauherenikau) until the present pub was built in 1905. Mine-hostess also owned a public hall over the road, which she would hire out for functions; and she ran that small post office, too - clearly a capable woman.

The place thrived under the Woosters during the First World War until they sold out in 1920 to an engineer, John Watson, whose widow Margaret ran the pub after his death in 1931 for fifteen years ‘with the help of an old Scottish sailor.’

It became the Okaramio Tavern in the mid-70s when demand for accommodation declined. But I can’t help feeling that it would be a nice place to stay, here in the green and restful Kaituna Valley (which, incidentally, was explored by Thomas Brunner in 1848 not long after he’d returned from his ‘Great Journey’ which I’ve mentioned in my Owen River text).

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz

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