Burke Manuscript

Burke Manuscript: Page 275

Transcript

now the West Coast County Chairman, was a little wee fellow then. Another of their chums was poor old Goodacre, a great institution in those days, and who managed to get into Pigeon’s ribs for a sound sum, but hadn’t P. the delight of turning the debtor’s key of Lyttelton gaol on him for some twelve months, for there were no jolly “filing your shovels” in those days. Old Archer, of the Lincoln road, was also a pretty regular customer. In fact there was some good ullaging done in that store. Vale.

Later politicians came on the scene. Mr Montgomery, for example, whose first introduction to Canterbury was at the Ferry Road wharf, established by one of the very old ones, Alexander Webb, and where a roaring business was done for years in the old days, when all the small craft came round to Sumner and up the Heathcote. The Home ships were lightered round in this way, and the wharf abounded at times with goods of all sorts, and it was never heard that either a small craft, or the wharf premises, went short of luxuries. In those days there was no hurry and people were not particular. Even when out of the clutches of the ship, the small craft and the wharfinger wharfinger, the distillers in the old world, then retailed his consignments of Old Tom Whisky, Beer, and other consumable articles in a part of the building, and on each day he held a leve, and you can’t imagine how many friends he had. Why they were almost as numerous as professionals at a free lunch bar. There was old Joseph Fantham, father of A.A. Fantham, the great cattle breeder. He was a knowing old card, had seen the world before he emigrated to Canterbury and knowing the story of old Twigger, the drowned man’s lands on the Lincoln road, he just took possession, and squatted, and there he rested undisturbed for some years. Then there was one of his chums Old Harry Jackson of Riccarton; a rough diamond who could polish off his beer with any man, get as tight as a ladies’[sic] glove, and yet could not be done in a bargain. There was also Westby Hawkshaw Percival, whose son is now a solicitor, then a little child at the School House on the Lincoln road, which his mother kept. There was also Mr Frank Guinness, who has since gone through the degrees of policeman of some sort, Clerk to the Bench, Magistrate &c, and has now returned to his first love, with no doubt a deal of Colonial experience; Arthur Guinness [not completed]