LocalEyes: Joe Bennett
We invited Lytteltonian Joe Bennett to have an advance look through the Museum’s newly scanned image collection, choose a few that caught his eye and tell us what he noticed.
Collett's Corner, and D.E.L. Chemist, corner of Oxford and London Streets. This building was pulled down January 1950. Lyttelton Museum ref. 14625.181
“There was still a chemist on this corner when I first came to Lyttelton in 1987, as indeed there was until the earthquake of 2011. The 'inter-island steamer' sign on the telegraph pole also tells a story. And then there's the Empire Hotel, which when I first knew it had an Irish landlord and the carpet squelched underfoot. One night Viktor the Russian trawlerman played the accordion in exchange for drink and we ended up on board his ship eating ersatz caviar from a tin and drinking, inevitably, vodka.”
“Like most of the Norwich quay pubs the Canterbury was a relic of former times, when sailors poured off the boats and into the first pub they met and when the wharf employed thousands. The rooms at the back seemed to go on for ever, and included a ball room of sorts that I never saw used.”
“Until, I think, 2001, you could not only park in the port you could wander along the quays and slap the great iron sides of the ships and admire the metal guards that they used to slide over the hawsers to keep the rats from coming on board. They painted them with cats' faces. And you could fish for red cod and spotties.”
“That road on the right of the photo is Ticehurst Terrace, leading to the top of Ticehurst Road and then onto Bridle Path Road. I lived for ten years at 35 Ticehurst Road. Here it's still just a paddock with a path through it. Many of the cottages in the gulley still exist, if much altered.”
“Who knows where this was taken, or when, or why? You've just got to love the grins.”
“The dry dock and the rail tunnel are extraordinary feats of engineering from the days before the internal combustion engine. And they are still functional. Today there's a ship in the dry dock held upright by exactly the same method as depicted in this photo of Scott’s Discovery from 120 years before.”
“I'm guessing this crowd is milling to come in to some sort of jumble sale or similar. But the point of the photo is the two kids sitting apart by the wall. One's eating. One's drinking.”
“Evocative stuff: the bare land behind Reserve Terrace, the weatherboard fronts, the verandas on the south side of the London Street, the empty road dotted with horse shit, and a solitary man in a hat.”
“This is pure wild west, a frontier town. And two years later most of it burned down.”
“A neighbour in Ripon Street, Les Hinds, who was over 90, told me how as a boy he used to fish in the open water on the bottom right of this photo. It's the tank farm now.”
“Another of the big Norwich Quay hotels that was lost to the earthquakes. We often used to drink there after playing squash, unless one of our friends who worked on the wharf was with us. He wouldn't drink in the Royal for some reason associated with union solidarity.”