Heritage

Different thinkers in Christchurch and Canterbury

The Peace Library

Christchurch City Libraries has a large collection of material about the Peace movement in New Zealand. Our Peace Library is a collection of books and magazines held in trust by Christchurch City Libraries for the Peace Foundation and the Women's International League for Peace. Archival material is held by the Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury, and other material is held by the Canterbury Museum. A full list of the items catalogued can be found with a subject search Peace Library.

Christchurch has been home to some distinctive personalities and thinkers over the years. They challenged the status quo in politics, economics and social morality and they lived and acted on their beliefs in practical ways that made a lasting impact.

Peace Activism

The city has been home to a strong group of peace activists over the years and in the vanguard was Elsie Locke.

Elsie Locke (1912 - 2001)

Elsie Locke was born in Waiuku and graduated from Auckland University. She moved to Christchurch with her husband Jack and lived in the same cottage in the Avon Loop for over 40 years. Elsie wrote extensively for children, about New Zealand history and about the peace movement. She was a lifelong political activist, peace campaigner and feminist. She was active at community level in the Avon Loop (see our Sustainability page), as well as campaigning to retain and improve Christchurch’s Centennial Pool (the neighbouring park is named after her).

Locke was also a key figure in the restoration, with native plants, of the banks of the Avon as it flowed through the Avon Loop. She was a foundation member of CAFCINZ (now CAFCA) (Campaign Against Foreign Control in New Zealand) in 1975 and continued her membership until her death.

Elsie Locke resources

Controversial Characters Ettie Rout and Professor Bickerton

Ettie Rout (1877 - 1936)

Ettie Rout is most famous as a safe sex campaigner in World War 1, setting up a safe sex brothel and designinga safe sex kit which was officially adopted by the NZEF and handed out compulsorily to all soldiers going on leave. However, during her years in Christchurch (1896 1915), she was a strikingly alternative figure for a woman of her time. After becoming a court shorthand writer, she set up her own public typing business with Horace Gilby in Chancery Lane. She reported for the Lyttelton Times, she was a cyclist and physical fitness advocate who wore unorthodox clothes short skirts, mens’ boots, trousers and no corsets. She had “advanced” ideas on sexuality, was a socialist and freethinker, and was a close friend of the radical thinker Professor A.W Bickerton.

During World War I she set up the New Zealand Volunteer Sisterhood and took a group of women to Egypt to care for New Zealand soldiers. Here she encountered the problems with the high rate of venereal disease among the soldiers and launched her controversial campaign.

After the war she lived in London and wrote a number of books including Sex and exercise, Safe Marriage (a contraceptive and prophylactic manual for women which was banned in New Zealand, though not in Britain and Australia), a vegetarian cookbook and a book about Māori culture called Māori Symbolism.

She died in the Cook Islands in 1936.

Ettie Rout resources

Professor A. W. Bickerton (1842 - 1929)

Professor Bickerton's home and the promenade, from the Wainoni entrance
Professor Bickerton's home and the promenade, from the Wainoni entrance
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Alexander William Bickerton was Canterbury College's (the forerunner of the University of Canterbury) first professor of chemistry, and a figure of some notoriety in early Christchurch. He was acknowledged as a brilliant teacher and Ernest Rutherford was his most famous pupil. He built a large house (long since demolished) called “Wainoni” on 20 to 30 acres of land in what is now the suburb of Wainoni. Initially he tried to establish a new form of society in a “federative home” at Wainoni, but this was not a success. He then turned the gardens of Wainoni into a pleasure garden where thousands came to watch the spectacles he created including naval battles with real explosives, shipwrecks and rescues,which were staged on an artificial lake.

Bickerton’s controversial views on many topics including university reform and the institution of marriage finally led to him being sacked from the university. He returned to England in 1910 and died in 1929. The year before his death he was made Professor Emeritus of Canterbury College. His ashes are lodged in the wall of the Great Hall of the Arts Centre.

A. W. Bickerton resources