Curator's Choice: 1930 School Certificate

From our archive comes a blank New Zealand School Certificate from the 1930s. Listed are all of the possible subjects then available to students. Nearly a quarter of them are technology based subjects suited to young males intending to sign articles for a five year industrial apprenticeship, with a further 20% tailored to the requirements of their eventual spouses to be.

Beyond compulsory English, a further six languages, including Mãori, offered graduation opportunities. Among them were Latin and Ancient Greek, and although the former might still be available in rare instances, by the later 1950s not even Christchurch's more exclusive groves of Academe offered Greek as part of their curriculum for a classical education.

Thus it was that a youthfull Mr CH would cycle down to Miller's Department Store in Tuam Street (currently the City Council offices) every Saturday morning, where Leslie Beaumont Miller (1890-1960) made his top floor staff cafeteria available as a classroom for serious lads hoping to learn sufficient Greek as to be able to enjoy Plato in the original.

Art Deco Christchurch: West Avon 1930

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The West Avon apartments on the south-west corner of Hereford and Montreal Streets in what was then the inner city suburb of West End.

Built in 1930, but now sporting a 1980s penthouse, the Grade 3 protected building is currently painted in shades of blue and orange.

West Avon was designed by the Christchurch architect Wilford Melville Lawry (1894-1980). A long time resident of Mount Pleasant, Lawry subsequently designed the now demolished 1934 Methodist Orphanage and Children's Home in Harewood Road, Papanui (below). The site is now occupied by an old people’s home.

Among Lawry's other surviving designs are the 1935 Regent Theatre at Hokitika (below top) and the 1940 Century Theatre in Edgeware Road, St. Albans (below bottom), which was converted into a supermarket in 1969.

Christchurch's A.1. Hotel 1857-1935

Founded in January 1851, the Lyttelton Times newspaper also published an evening edition known as The Star from 1868. More widely read in Sydenham than Fendalton in its heyday, the evening edition lingers on as a twice weekly giveaway, supported by no more than advertising and Christchurch City Council advertorials.

Sad to say that its reduced circumstances would seem to no longer allow for the expense of journalstic expertise, as further indicated by the above photograph, published under the heading The Way We Were on the 20th of May 2009, and erroneously captioned "The intersection of Cashel St and Colombo St in 1860, with Blake's Hotel and the A.I Hotel around the corner."

For the sake of the historical record we proffer the following alternative caption:

The A.1. Hotel was founded in 1857 on the Southeast corner of Cashel and Colombo Streets, a site now occupied by The Crossing bus terminus in the renovated former Beath's department store building of 1935. The original gabled hotel (below) was replaced in 1874 by the second A1 Hotel, a three storey building, which burnt down four years later.

In 1879 it was rebuilt as the two storey structure depicted in the above photograph. James Blake is known to have been the Publican of the A.1. Hotel by 1865, but there's no known reference to a Blake's Hotel in any local archive.

The Colombo Street facade of James Blake's first A.1. Hotel to the Left, with the Mechanic's Hotel to the Right and the Watchmaker's shop of Thomas Charles Barnard adjoining the A.1. Hotel.

By 1915 the ground floor of the third A.1. Hotel had been converted into shops


Beath's 1935 department store extension was originally designed to have six floors, but The Great Depression of the 1930s got in the way.


Beath's department store reincarnated as The Crossing bus terminus in 2003.

Curators Choice: Christchurch 1938 Lithograph

Detail from a circa 1938 lithographic poster of Christchurch for the New Zealand Department of Railways. Although unsigned, the painting can be attributed with reasonable certainty to the Wellington artist Leonard Cornwall Mitchell (1901-1971).

Depicted to the immediate Right of the Bridge of Remembrance is the lost tower of the 1918 Crystal Palace theatre, sadly demolished in 1986 in favour of the nondescript Crystal Plaza arcade.

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Christwegian Courtesans & Other Less Interesting Developments.

Subsequent to the opening of the second Railway Station on Moorhouse Avenue in 1867, Manchester Street South became the principal tram route between the inner city and the station. As a consequence, that part of Manchester Street from High Street to Moorhouse Avenue became lined with hotels, restaurants and various places of entertainment, etc.

Not surprisingly, in a tradition spanning at least 130 years, the street has been the favoured haunt of those practitioners of what is reputed to be among the world's older professions. Although probably unaware of their long precedent, Christwegian courtesans are still to be found plying their precarious trade along the more northern part of Manchester Street during the hours of darkness.


Marrying a rich widow, the dandified John Etherden Coker built his third hotel on her land. Opened in 1880, it would be far from the largest, but quite the most luxurious of the Manchester Street hotels. Pictured above is the hotel's dining room. With its marble statuary and starched table linen this room offered elaborate farinaceous repast to such notables as Rudyard Kipling and the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott. Two years after Coker's demise the hotel's public bar was reported to be the haunt of prostitutes and their consorts.


Alas all hotels have their heyday and long gone are the Terminus, Silver Grill, A1 Temperance, Railway, Manchester and Leviathan, but in much reduced circumstances, Coker's Hotel lingers on as a Backpacker's hostel. A significant part of its formerly elegant facade is now artistically rendered to represent a semi-derelict wooden shanty and the sadly dilapidated dining room (above) continues to serve a similar, but more modest purpose.

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In 1938 William Gray Young (1885-1962) submitted a Bauhaus inspired design for a new Railway Station. To be the city's largest building, construction was delayed until 1953 and the somewhat modified design was finally completed in 1960. The Railway Station survived as such for only 31 years to be sold off for redevelopment as an entertainment centre.

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Much touted as Christchurch's tallest building, the 86 metre, 23 level C1 apartment building in Gloucester Street East has been plagued with problems. Although all but four of the apartments have been pre-sold, the above photographs indicate the minimal extent of construction development between May 2008 and May 2009.

1935 Cycling Hazards

Entitled “Every Christchurch person who buys a car goes white-haired within a week,” this cartoon appeared in the June 1935 issue of The New Zealand Railways Magazine. Although cycling is less popular 74 years on, the subject is still quite topical.

Victoria Square 1949

Curator's Choice

This is an humourous Christchurch postcard dating from circa 1937, an era when the city was still in the waning clutches of the Prohibitionists and the Social Purity League. The wowsers were increasingly becoming the butt of humour from the more liberaly minded locals, as the quaintly class-conscious subject indicates.

The lower part of the image is a flap, behind which is a folding sequence of twelve Christchurch streetscapes by Arthur Bendigo Hurst (1880-1964), which can be dated to the early Spring of 1936.

From his Broma Studio at Napier, the former Nelson photographer and founding President of the New Zealand Institute of Professional Photography, regularly undertook commissions for the Tanner Brothers of Wellington, publisher's of the postcard. But Hurst is probably best remembered for his images of the 1931 Napier earthquake devastation.

Curator's Choice

This month's Curator's choices from the Canterbury Heritage collection are vintage luggage labels from Christchurch's most prominent hotels in the first half of last century.

A hand coloured, circa 1930, northery view from Cambridge Terrace towards the Bridge of Remembrance.

To the Right is the 1907 home of Doctor FitzGerald George Westenra (1861-1917) at 96 Oxford Terrace. Gerald Westenra built his house on the 1852-1857 site of Christ's College, which he attended from 1870. The house is now occupied by a vacuously named eatery - apparently the nickname of Gerald's daughter Theophania.

Lyttelton 3 January 1938

The Imperial Airways Short S23 C Class Flying Boat G-ADUT Centaurus at the port of Lyttelton on the 3rd of January, 1938 (with a coal hulk and a coastal collier at Gladstone Pier in the middle background).

Centaurus Road in the Christchurch suburb of Cashmere was named to commemorate this first visit of a flying-boat to the South Island.

Delivered in December 1936 the aircraft carried 5 crew, 17 passengers, and 2035 kg of mail. There was sleeping accommodation on night flights for 12 passengers.

Seconded to the Royal Australian Air Force in September 1939, she was sunk at her mooring in Roebuck Bay during a Japanese air raid on Broome on the 3rd of March 1942.

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From the photograph album of Ray Burgess and Elsie Mulholland published by John Willoughby of Didcot, Oxfordshire, England.

The Majestic Theatre

The Site

Originally the southwest corner of "Cabbage" Wilson's market garden, the Majestic Theatre site was designated in 1874 for an hotel as part of Wilson's Newmarket commercial development. William Wilson had become the city's first Mayor in 1868, but failed to attract an hotelier prepared to pay £117 per annum for a 21 year lease, so by the later 1870s a large two storey wooden building was erected on the corner as the premises of the grocers Hubbard, Hall & Company, with the offices of the Commercial Union Assurance Company above.

The Architects

The Australian Luttrell brothers: Alfred Edgar (1865-1924) and Edward Sidney (1872-1932) established one of New Zealand's foremost architectural practices when they arrived in Christchurch in 1902 after winning a competition for the design of the third White Hart Hotel in High St (demolished in 1984).

Alfred acted as the principal designer and engineer, while the smooth-talking Sidney co-ordinated building programmes and dealt with clients. Their skills and versatility made an impact on the architecture of Christchurch that remains an important and visible contribution to our architectural heritage.

Also building contractors, among their surviving projects are the 1902 Lyttelton Times Building (now the X-base Backpacker's Hostel) and the 1905 Royal Exchange building (now the Regent Theatre), both in Cathedral Square, the 1906 New Zealand Express Company building on the southeast corner of Hereford and Manchester Streets and the 1908 Theatre Royal in Gloucester Street.

After Alfred's death in 1924 the design work of the firm was undertaken by Jack Hollis and Allan Manson. Manson took over the practice when Sidney Luttrell died in 1932 (renamed as Manson, Seward & Stanton in 1936). In 1929 Allan Manson and Jack Hollis designed two major buildings, with similar facades, for the city.

Beath's Department Store at the corner of Colombo and Cashel Streets was originally intended to be six storeys, but the Great Depression put the project on hold and the store, which is now The Crossing transit centre, was completed at three levels in 1935.

The other project was the five level Majestic Theatre building for John Fuller & Sons Ltd at the corner of Manchester and Lichfield Streets. The original design proposal was for a three-tiered auditorium, with seating for 4,000, but this was later modified to two tiers with seating for 1,650.


The Theatre

Unlike Beath and Co, Sir Benjamin Fuller’s (1875-1952) cash rich Australian company, backed by their sixty-four New Zealand theatres, with unmortgaged freeholds, survived the Great Depression better than most.

The new theatre was the city’s first with a steel frame (of 380 tons), and the brick clad exterior was rendered with stucco to create an effect of two-tone Buff Limestone blocks, separated by white pointing.

The Fuller’s new building was completed in early 1930, with the western third of the upper three floors as offices. Known as Majestic House, with a separate entrance on Manchester Street, the offices were occupied by the Department of Labour (now Work and Income New Zealand).

Promoted as "The Show Place of Christchurch," the city's largest theatre was leased to Christchurch Cinemas Limited, which was made up of a partnership of Hayward Pictures Ltd, Waters and Spence Ltd, Fuller Pictures Ltd and Edward Joseph Righton of Christchurch. Fitted with sound apparatus for the "talkies," and seat plugs for hearing aids, it opened on the 1st of March, 1930.


Good though the restrained Art Deco exterior is, it is the theatre's auditorium that is probably the more significant. For more than three decades the discreet luxury of an interior in the Hispano-Moorish architectural tradition would ensure that the Majestic remained preëminent among the thirteen theatres within the central city.

The Fuller-Hayward organisation was also the original promoters of the Miss New Zealand contest, which was billed as a “Quest for a Screen Type.” Ten provincial finalists were chosen from the more than two thousand hopefuls who entered the contest. The finalists toured the country appearing in a spectacular show at the new Majestic Theatre, after which the patrons voted for the contestant of their choice.

In 1946 Christchurch Cinemas Limited was sold to locally born Sir Robert Kerridge (1901-1979) and in that same year the Majestic was badly damaged by fire. The building was subsequently renovated under the supervision of the Architect Harry Francis Willis (1893-1972), who had designed the 1932 New Regent Street development and the now concealed 1934 Art Deco facade of the State Cinema at the northeast corner of Gloucester and Colombo Streets.

By the 1950s there were fashion parades during the interval before the main feature and even three-dimensional films (requiring patrons to wear spectacles, with red and green lenses). In 1960 New Zealand cinema ticket sales peaked at forty million, but within three years television was beginning to take its toll on Christchurch cinemas. However, the large theatre, with its excellent stage facilities, enjoyed a revival with the Startime Spectacular live music shows. There were also performances by some of the legendary Rock 'n Roll groups of that era, these included the Beatles, The Kinks, The Dave Clark Five and Manfred Mann.

The theatre closed on the 28th of August, 1970, becoming Moby Dick's Nite Spot. The club is probably best remembered as the salubrious venue where the legendary Christchurch glam rock band Odyssey performed regularly. Six years later it was again badly damaged by fire and the night club closed.

Renaissance

The Christchurch Revival Fellowship, which had originally met in the old Horticultural Hall on Cambridge Terrace after being established in 1962, owned a building opposite the Majestic by 1976. On that fateful Sunday morning the churchgoers looked on as the old theatre burned. A member of the congregation purchased the gutted night club and two years later the Christchurch Revival Fellowship became the City New Life Centre, but it would still be another year before restoration was complete. With seating reduced to eleven hundred the former theatre is now known as the Majestic Church.


It is understood that there is a proposal to restore the Art Deco Theatre and it is to be hoped that the facade will be returned to its former glory.

New Regent Street Restoration

New Regent Street 1932

A distinctive rows of forty shops on New Regent Street are to benefit from a $500,000 Christchurch City Council grant. The project will include strengthening the buildings, reinstalling the original decorative tiles that some shops still feature beneath the front windows, and tidying modern additions to the street.

Built on the site of the massive Colosseum, which had been used as a skating rink, theatre, boot factory and finally a garage, the street was first proposed in 1929 by merchant George Gould II (1865-1941) and was opened by the Mayor Dan Sullivan on the first of April, 1932.

The street was the work of a local architect, Harry Francis Willis (1893-1972), who also designed the now concealed 1934 Art Deco facade of the nearby State Cinema at the northeast corner of Gloucester and Colombo Streets. Willis was the readiest in the Christchurch of the late 1920s and 1930s to experiment with decorative building design.

The distinctive Spanish Mission architectural style is unique on such a scale in New Zealand and was one of few big construction projects in the South Island during the Great Depression period.

Based on 2007 figures, the upgrade is likely to cost about $1.4 million for the whole street, with the cost for each property varying. Of this, the Council can provide grant money of up to 40% of the cost per property. The Council is expecting this to total about $500,000 over the life of the project.

A Council heritage conservation projects planner says the money will be used to repaint the street based on the original colour scheme, which is understood to be Cream, Ochre and a light Terracota.

Further reading:

Revamp planned for picturesque street, The Press, 04 June 2008

Press Release, Christchurch City Council. 5 June 2008

Lost Christchurch

The Christian Science church was built in stages between 1929 and 1935 on the North side of Worcester Boulevard between Montreal Street and Cambridge Terrace. It was a period of a marked Georgian revival in Christchurch architecture.

With its pillared and pedimented portico, it was the only church building in Christchurch reminiscent of American Georgian style. The elegant church was substantially built of plastered brick and concrete to a design by Heathcote Helmore, better known for his houses.

In the early 1980s the church became too costly to maintain for its diminished congregation, which took new premises elsewhere and sold the building to a Chinese restaurateur. In a bid to give the building a clear identity as a Chinese restaurant the new owner had an entirely new facade built in 1984. Despite efforts to persuade him that the building could be given the identity he wanted, the original facade was destroyed.

Situated next to the Christchurch Art Gallery, the Chung Wah restaurant closed in early 2006. Initially offered for lease and then for sale by Hope Island Holdings Ltd, the building was acquired in April 2007 by Gordon Chamberlain; the man behind the Ibis Hotel in Hereford Street and Novotel development of Warners Hotel in Cathedral Square.

Photo by Greg O'Beirne of Christchurch

The former church was demolished in August, 2007 and plans were announced for a $23 million, 14 storey, four to five star apartment-style hotel, with the upper levels either as residences or to lease back to the hotel as visitor accommodation.

Gordon Chamberlain was subsequently reported as negotiating with Quest Hotels Inc. of Florida to lease and run the lower levels of the new building. Quest already has the 75 apartment hotel in the Cathedral Junction building.

In the meantime the former church site in the city's cultural preceinct continues to remain vacant...

Christchurch's State Cinema

The third building on the North-east corner of Colombo and Gloucester Streets is an unfortunate example of recycling defacing rather than preserving a building's character.

When the State Cinema opened in 1935 the city gained a fine example of Art Deco decoration. It was the work of a local architect, Francis Willis, who was the readiest in the Christchurch of the late 1920s and 1930s to experiment with decorative building design.

His experiments were not always entirely successful, but in the case of the State Cinema he attractively embellished a simple box of a building with curves, chevrons and lettering, all in slight relief. The effect was stylised, but the cinema was one of the best examples in Christchurch of decorative work of the 1930s.

When the cinema's lease expired in 1977, the building was converted to accommodate the growth of a duty free shop which had long occupied the ground floor. The exterior of the building was sheathed in white fibre glass panels intended to create a modern look compatible with the new Rural Bank building on the opposite corner. The result has reduced what had been a notable building to a boring white box.

The Queen's Theatre

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Opened on the 31st of October 1912 by the Mayor of Christchurch, the city's first purpose built cinema occupies the Hereford Street site of the 1853 home of William Sefton Moorhouse.

Owned by the Melburnian theatrical impresario James F MacMahon, a competition to a name the cinema was held by The Press newspaper, with a first prize of five Guineas. Seating 934 patrons, films were shown continuously from 11 am to 11 pm.

McMahon had exhibited the first projected motion picture shown to a paying Christchurch audience in November 1896. His Salon Cinématographe in High Street near the Cashel Street intersection almost certainly screened the 1896 Melbourne Cup race on that occasion.

In 1929 the twenty-five year-old Royal Exchange building in Cathedral Square was refurbished as the Regent Theatre, thereby obliging McKenzie & Willis Ltd to find new premises. The furniture retailers acquired the Queen's Theatre, which closed on the 5th of January 1929.

In 1935 the former cinema underwent significant redevelopment. Although the original ceiling and the stairway to the Dress Circle were left intact, a fourth floor was added and the Neo-classic Hereford Street frontage (to the Right in the top Left image) was replaced with the surviving Art Deco facade.

The long, narrow building was subsequently refurbished and linked to the Colombo Street Kincaid building in the 1950s as the McKenzie & Willis Arcade. More recently acquired by the Auckland Savings Bank, the ground floor is partially occupied by a 24/7 convenience store.

In 2003 the Theatre and Film Department of the University of Canterbury took the vacant upper floors as teaching, rehearsal and performance space. Residential facilities for post-graduate students are also provided.


See the Queen's Theatre location

Christchurch 1939

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A recent addition to the archive is this extremely rare aerial photograph of central Christchurch in early 1939.

A Southerly aspect from Salisbury Street, centered on Manchester Street, with Madras Street to the Left and Colombo Street to the Right.

The photograph is exactly dateable by the nearly completed Municipal Electricity Department building on the corner of Armagh and Manchester Streets and also by the partially constructed Miller's department store in Tuam Street (currently the Christchurch City Council Civic Chambers).


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