Lyttelton early February, 1982.  A westerly aspect of the principal shopping precinct in London Street from the intersection at Oxford Street across Canterbury and Dublin Streets to Hawkhurst Road.

The photographer supplied three faded Kodachrome prints of a visit to the town in January or early February, 1982.  The angle of the shadows in the images indicated that they were taken close to mid-day on a weekday when children could be seen wearing school uniforms, which ruled out the school holiday month of January.

Until about 1990 colour fading of Kodachrome chromogenic process 35 mm prints was caused by spontaneous chemical changes in the image dyes of colour prints.  Today's prints are more stable and significant fading will occur in about forty years at room temperature, the colder the conditions, the slower the fading.

Thanks to Gerard Richards of Auckland for the original photograph.

The Tramway Hotel, Millerton, New Zealand, 1902-1982.

Seen in the 1902 photograph is the newly opened Tramway Hotel just above the Taramakau bridge on Millerton Road.  The hotel offered fourteen guest rooms, three lounges, a billiard room and a dining room with seating for thirty.

By 1982 (lower image) the old hotel had been closed for some time and within a further three years virtually nothing of the building remained, all of the recyclable materials having been taken by the community for improvements to their homes.

Thanks to Gerard Richards of Auckland for the four 1982 pics of the hotel, restored and blogged in fond remembrance of good times at Millerton in the '80s.

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The Village Green Revisited

The communal centre of the village of Freemans Bay at Auckland, New Zealand, from a pair of aerial photographs, dated to the 18th of February,1954 and the 5th of July,1979.

Known to bureaucracy as the Pratt Street Block in the time of the earlier image, the area is enclosed by Wellington, Hepburn, Anglesea and Collingwood Streets.

Pratt Street Block 1974

Subjected to compulsory purchase orders all of the properties within the block (with a few exceptions in the South-west corner) were cleared of all structures, the site was extensively landscaped using bulldozers and Pratt Street became a cul-de-sac culminating in a pedestrian entrance to an internal square of beguiling sylvan beauty (below).

The 1979 image was taken shortly after the completion of the Community Hall (1), the Kindergarten (2), the shopping centre (3) and the first and largest of the three apartment blocks (4)

Much is knowable about the people who have lived here, from the time when the first cottage (5) overlooked a swamp at the bottom of its backyard.

For instance the eight-room, two story Grocery shop at the corner of Wellington and Pratt Streets (6) first appears in the photographic record in 1881.  By 1908 it belonged to a widow, Ellen Wilkins also owned the two-room cottage next door and the pair of two storied town-houses beyond that.  Mrs Wilkins sold her shop in 1920 and was succeeded by the Francis, Emmerton, Barchard, Jeffs and Rupa families until it was demolished in 1968.

Or Richard and Esther Poulgrain of 18 Pratt Street (7).  Born in 1851, the proprietor of the Vulcan Ironworks in Albert Street, raised eight children in what had begun as a simple two-room cottage in 1873.

Both the widow Wilkins' shop and the Poulgrain's cottage would make way for the 30 apartment Wellington Court building (4).  Completed as social housing in April 1979 for $440,099, the territorial authority sold the freeholds of most of the apartments between 1997 and 1999.  And so it came to pass that within four decades these handy little pied-à-terres would be changing hands at around 40 times their initial cost.

Denniston, New Zealand, 1981.

Fifteen kilometres up The Coast from Westport, Denniston is situated on the Mount Rochfort plateau, 600 metres above the beach and about one and a half kilometres inland.

The sitting room had panoramic views to the West out across the Tasman Sea to the curvature of the earth (amazing sunsets).   Windows at the other end of the room looked out to the snow clad peaks of the Papahaua mountain range.

By the time that this photograph was taken the population of Denniston had reduced from around 1,400 to 23.

Taken from near the front of the fire station, to the Right is the garage of Denniston Motors, with a petrol bowser on the forecourt and, unmoved for many years, an early 1930s school bus within.

Across the intersection, with its' red-lead painted corrugated iron cladding is the Doctor's house and surgery facing the (unseen) Post Office.  Beyond the Doctors' is the Police Station, with the cell block (unseen) in the back yard.

It was a good time to be living on the sub-alpine plateau, the residents were mainly artists, musicians and potters, etc. and there were great parties that would attract friends from across the island and go on for days. 

But the halcyon era would not last, by the 1990s commercial dope growers had moved in, arson became the new game in town and the doctors' was fortified, even the garage burnt. But what little is left slumbers on as a no more than a ghostly curiosity for tourist.

Original photo by Gerard Richards of Auckland (his sporty Vauxhall HC Viva to Left), subsequently tarted up and reminisced upon by self.

The Village Green

An elevated westerly aspect of the village green at the south-west corner of the intersection of Wellington and Hepburn Streets, Freemans Bay, Auckland, New Zealand.  Sunday, 31st December, 2017.

There was a time when our village green was a swamp where waterfowl roamed amid marsh-misted reeds at the headwaters of a stream.  One hundred and seventy eight years ago the least affluent of the earliest European settlers came to this place to cut bull-rushes for the liveable huts they would construct nearby.  

By the beginning of the 1850s the stream was forded by a steep livestock track that led from David and Margaret Archibald's suburban farm on Franklin Road to the garrison towns' markets.  The first settler's cottage stood close to where a fashionable Japanese restaurant can now be seen just to the right of centre in the photograph.

By the mid 1860s the stream had been enclosed in a brick tunnel down to the lagoon at the far western side of Freemans Bay, where the last boat shed survives opposite the supermarket.  As the pressure of suburban in-fill increased six houses and three shops soon occupied the site of what is now the village green.

With its panoramic views of the city and the harbour Wellington Street West, as it was formerly known, was originally deemed to be in the suburb of Ponsonby, rather than industrial Freemans Bay, and thereby to nominally separate it from the city end of the street, with its pubs, boarding houses and brothels. 

Between 1878  and 1886 Auckland's population doubled and about a dozen shops; grocers, bakeries, a butcher, and a boot maker, etc. formed the centre of the village.  Suburban in-fill was complete by 1900 and remained more or less intact until 1970.  Diagonally opposite the green one the original grocer's shops survives as the iconic Rupa's Cafe.

From 1952 the territorial authority began acquiring much of the Freemans Bay area by compulsory purchase for residential redevelopment.  Demolition of the structures on the site of the village green took place from 1968 to 1974.  Formerly occupying the back garden of a cottage on Hepburn Street, only the gnarled tree to the Left of centre in the photograph survives from the early 1950s, all of the other trees in the image are less than forty years old.

Opposite the village green on Hepburn Street, new social housing was completed in 1965 (David Lange, sometime Prime Minister of New Zealand, lived here in his time as a Legal Aid lawyer at the Magistrate's Court). Gentrification of Freemans Bay began in 1970 with the completion of the Sheridan Square town-house development opposite on Wellington Street, and the eleven shops that adjoin the village green were built between 1974 and 1978.

The population of Freemans Bay peaked a century ago at 10,500, today it's somewhat less than half of that.  More than a million dollars is now required in order to acquire a bijou town-house in the vicinity of this village green that's within an easy walk to both the Paris end of town at Ponsonby and the centre of Auckland city.

Not trusting the fallibility of received history, the foregoing was mostly compiled from contemporary newspaper reports and 339 old photos.

Auckland, New Zealand Then & Now

Dated to 1979 and 2018 is a pair of northerly aspects towards the Hobson Street ridge, with the Central Police Station visible to the Right.

Postcard from the Edge

This could be entitled Swamp Gully sure ain't what it used ter be, but is in fact the subsequently renamed city of Auckland as might be seen from the South Island of New Zealand, or in the Godzonian* dialect as The risible naïveté of Pig Islanders as sympathetically viewed from the Mainland.

* Godzonian; adjective derived from Godzone, an ironic contraction of God's Own Country, being a trope that's indicative of the gullibility that permeates within our snug South Sea Bubble.

Program cover - Auckland Chamber Orchestra

Program cover for the Auckland Chamber Orchestra

Raye Freedman Arts Centre - 5pm Sunday 26 November 2017

Concert: Capriccio

Peter Scholes conductor
Soloist Ben Hoadley bassoon

Program

Ibert - Capriccio
Sofia Gubaidulina - Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings
Debussy - Syrinx
Arnold - Divertimento
Ravel - Introduction and Allegro

Auckland Chamber Orchestra

Fleeting Fragments Artful

Program cover for the Auckland Chamber Orchestra

Sunday Morning Boulevardiers, Ponsonby, Auckland, 2017.

The Cruise of the Rosaura

With nearly a hundred cruise ship visits to the Auckland of 2017, we're currently beset by our bureaucratic spin doctors' assumptions on just how popular their alleged world-class super-city has become as a port-of-call.

However, such hyperbolic acclaim is reduced to a mere shade of a much earlier era when internecine war between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan, which included the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons, put paid to the Far East as a destination for the cruise ships of the 1930s. 

And so it came to pass that the fashionable landing-places of the South Seas enjoyed a prosperity that would not be repeated for eight decades, for in that earlier time the sight of three or four cruise ships lined up along our wharves was not uncommon, with even the Oil Wharf at Freemans Bay called into duty as a passenger terminus.

However, this particular tale doesn't concern those ships, but rather about the first of the large Passenger Yachts to call, which was to be seen at the Oil Wharf in February 1935.  Well we might goggle at the floating gin palaces that flaunt their owners' brazen wealth in the environs of what is now called Viaduct Harbour, but when 55 year old brewing magnate Wally Moyne brought his entourage of through-and-through posh persons to town aboard his 83 metre Rosaura few gobs were left unsmacked among the more impressionable our forebears.

Also known as Lieutenant Colonel Walter Edward Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, DSO & Bar, said Wally was cruising for four months on his new boat - he'd sunk her predecessor, the equally gargantuan Roussalka, when she ran on to a rock in thick fog off the Irish coast 17 months earlier. On that occasion all of the passengers and crew were rescued, as was his pet Panamanian monkey.  Named Gandhi (to whom it bore a peculiar resemblance), the antics of the securely chained beastie were now amusing the colonial beau monde, whose eyes had never bulged further from their sockets.

Eight en-suite staterooms provided accommodation for up to a dozen guests, but by the time the graceful craft arrived at the farthest reach of her 52,424 kilometre cruise, there were only three passenger aboard.  First was Wally's lady friend Vera, better known in the gossip mags as the estranged wife of the Baronet Sir Henry John Delves Broughton, who is chiefly remembered for, (although acquitted), murdering the Earl of Erroll (an event that was the basis of the 1987 film White Mischief).

After their wining and dining the Governor General and his missus at Wellington, 43 year old Vera Broughton, that big game hunter and intrepid sports-person, thrashed Viscountess Bledisloe at tennis before flying from Rongotai aerodrome to Auckland's Hobsonville in an open two seater biplane, from whence she made an amphibian flight to the Bay of Islands for a spot of big game fishing.

Also aboard was Terence Philip, with just a touch of Attila the Hun around the jaw line, Philip was excruciatingly handsome, charming and a well-heeled London art dealer, who specialised in flogging expensive British pictures to rich Yanks.  He was also a good mate of the last passenger's 'æsthete' cousin by marriage.  She was the 50 year old Mrs Winston Churchill, who would seem to be having a sorely needed break from the frenetic lifestyle of her manic-depressive husband and the rough-and-tumble of his more dubious chums.

So far we've recounted not much more than bowdlerised version concerning the toffs swanning around our coasts on their floating realm of conspicuous wealth, but for rat’s arse connoisseurs of lascivious titillation, let us digress to a tad more dishing of the that most fiercely spiced of dirts...

Mr Pug, who'd lead us a decade later to a two-nil victory in the final round of that spot of bother we had with the Boche, had finally outgrown his rambunctious predilection for batting for the other side - that virtually ubiquitous rite of passage among his caste, (among whom it was reasoned that such experience went a long way to making a enlightened sort of cove more fun for an eventual better half when it came to bedroom sports).  So exotic matinee idols that looked like Tarzan, but talked like Jane, gave way to an heterodoxical sort of bit on the side named Doris.  

Emanating from the wrong side of the tracks, the Viscountess Castlerosse had taken life by the scruff of the neck and screwed her way to the top in her role as outrageous enchantress on the international society circuit.  Legend would have us believe that she bewitched the naïve Winnie with the Cleopatra Clench.  A talent for which technique she was said to share with a certain American divorcee, who would besot a king-to-be on a previous cruise of the Rosaura.

So while her husband was snuggling up with his notorious courtesan on the Riviera, darling Clementine fell head-over-heels for the only superficially eligible guest aboard the motor yacht. Unburdened by an overwhelming work ethic, or anything so shoddy as driving ambition, and so utterly unlike her husband in almost every respect, the suave Terence Philip, an homme fatale, with a reputation for witty drawing-room persiflage was "not the marrying kind" - as they used to say in those relatively well-mannered days before we all succumbed to politically correct gay-speak.  

And so, after a fortnight on our coasts and laden with a couple of Komodo Dragons, a pair of Tuatara and two Malayan Sun bears in a deck cage, the Rosaura cleared Deep Water Cove in the Bay of Islands for New Caledonia, while a somewhat embarrassed and melancholic Clemmie, who'd been shaken to her core by Terence Philip's extravagant travesties of flirtation, moped around the ship's ultra-luxe music room and library.

Retold and embellished by subsequent generations, the past is said to be the only dead thing that smells sweet, so, of course there's a whole lot more to this tale of adventure, but this ain't gonna be the place for it.  We'll just have to settle here for the eventual fates of those involved.

Named after Moyne's daughter, the Rosaura was the first to go; requisitioned by the Royal Navy the motor yacht struck a mine off the coast of Libya in 1941 and sank taking 78 lives with her.

At 64 the colossally rich, well-meaning, and intelligent bon viveur, Lord Moyne was assassinated at Cairo by Israeli terrorists in 1944.

Considered one of the best-dressed women of her time, the distinguished ethnographic photographer Vera Broughton never remarried, soldiering on to a timely demise in 1968.

Subsequently a life peeress in her own right, Baroness Clementine Ogilvy Spencer-Churchill, died at the age of 92 in 1977.

To have news value has been likened to having a tin can tied to one's tail and Terence Philip's place in posterity appears to be represented by no more than his friendship with Clementine Churchill.  However, the alleged receiver of swollen goods is depicted by the actor Simon Williams in the 2002 TV movie The Gathering Storm, a biographical film about the Churchills in the years between 1934 and 1939. Other parts include Vanessa Redgrave as Clementine Churchill, John Standing as Lord Moyne and Albert Finney as Winston Churchill.

La penultimo Dogaressa of the unfinished Palazzo Venier dei Leoni at Venice, Winnie's by then impoverished girlfriend Doris, whose Lion-hunting career among the denizens of deepest Belgravia might be compared to the ups and downs of a barmaid's knickers, turned out to be just another notch on some mighty fine bedposts.  Exhausted, the grande horizontale succumbed to a drug overdose in 1942.

Winston had wanted every kind of love that was available, but couldn't find all of them in the same person, or the same sex.  But like Rudyard Kipling, having at the end of the day probably come to the conclusion that a good woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke, at the age of 90 he faded away to a real bonzer send-off in 1965. 

And the moral of the yarn?  Like the more ostentatious of our current batch of gadflying Real Estate speculators, with a fondness for beige Leatherette - you'll never know how popular you are until you own an effin big motor boat.