The Sumner Road Part II, 1904-today

By JC Betts

“I heard a rush upstairs and breathless shouting – all three ships are coming in! They will be in in an hour!” You can imagine how quickly we huddled on clothes and tore off on the road over the Port Hills to Lyttelton. We did that walk of four miles in record time”.

Katharine MacInnes, Woman with the Iceberg Eyes, The History Press, 2019, p.69.

The day was 15 April 1904, the writer was Oriana Wilson, who had been staying on Scarborough Hill in Matuku Takotako Sumner, awaiting the return from Antarctica of the Discovery expedition and her husband Dr Edward Wilson.

In 1904 Evans Pass Road followed the same rather steep route as it does today.

Things were different on the Ōhinehou Lyttelton side – a tight and steep zig-zag led down to a comparatively flat but winding road skirting the harbour.

In a book published to celebrate Canterbury’s 50th anniversary in 1900, CC Bowen suggested building the road along the “trotting gradient” (one in 20) route originally surveyed in 1849 – the benchmarks were still visible on the hillside. Editorials and correspondence in the local newspapers enthusiastically supported the idea, but no progress was made until 1913, when the Canterbury Automobile Association and the Lyttelton Borough Council joined forces to raise funds. It was noted that if the rail tunnel were blocked, the road was the only route in an emergency. Another factor was the extortionate charges the Railways demanded for transporting goods through the tunnel.

Luckily the Minister of Public Works J Fraser and local MP James McCombs (husband of New Zealand’s first female MP, Elizabeth McCombs) were supportive and the government supplied about half the funding. The rest was contributed by Christchurch City Council, Lyttelton, Sumner, and Woolston Borough Councils, and the Automobile Association.

70 men started work in 1914, although some prospective labourers took one look at the worksite and went straight back to town. Whenever blasting was being done the existing road was closed to avoid the danger of rocks falling on the traffic below. The Lyttelton Gaol’s Hard Labour Gang contributed to the work, as they had with the earlier road. The Public Works department did not consider the work to be urgent “a start had been made on it solely for the purpose of relieving the unemployment situation”. Star, 30 May 1921. Unemployed married men were put to work on the Sumner side, where the six to one gradient was improved to 12 to one.

In 1920 a “little industrial upheaval” was reported in the Lyttelton Times “due to the refusal of white labourers to work with Hindus”. The Indians were redeployed but criticism came from Ben C Pratt on 6 July, under the heading ‘Brotherhood of Man’ “The moral is simply this, that we English are arrant, hypocritical humbugs”.

Finally, on 21 August 1929, the Press reported that Lyttelton Borough Council staff were tarsealing the last section of Sumner Road. Once it was in use, the old route beside the harbour was known as the Dump Road as the Lyttelton dump was in the gully behind Gollans Bay.

The zig-zag was gradually quarried away in the 1950s and 1960s to construct Cashin Quay, the new container port. The 1964 Road Tunnel took the pressure off Evans Pass, but oversize and dangerous loads still had to use it. After the 2010-2011 earthquakes, the road was closed for five years and all traffic was forced to use Gebbies or Dyers Pass roads.

It was worth the wait. The reopened road is wider and smoother, rockfall danger has been mitigated and waterways channelled, but it is still steep on the Sumner side. On the other hand, if you need to test drive a car, it’s the route every local person takes.