Back in 2009, I came upon an image in the Papakura Museum collection of a bearded fellow named Amos Eyes standing on a railway platform, squinting into the sunlight. The curve of the railway lines, and the trees in the background told me that this was not Papakura, but our own Avondale station, and thus was just about the earliest photo known of someone at work in our suburb.
 
Amos Eyes, Avondale’s fourth stationmaster, was born in Wolverhampton, England, around 1835. He married Sarah Ward in 1862, by which time he was already a railway inspector for goods trains, possibly for the London and Northwestern Railway Company. His eldest child, Charles was born at Bushbury in 1863, one of the towns along the line. Charles in the 20th century was an early Waterview landowner, after being a farmer in Papakura, and in Waima in Northland.

The Eyes family set out for New Zealand as part of a special settlement scheme organised by the Church of England Emigration Society, the members of which intended to take up land just north of Leigh in the Pakiri Block. Eyes himself, as part of the “Pioneer Party of Special Settlers” (the main body was to follow in 1865) was a member of the Society’s working committee while on board the Golden City during the voyage. The ship arrived in Auckland on 5 March 1864, but it appears Eyes did not head north after all; or if he did, he wasn’t there long. Two more children were born in Freemans Bay in Auckland instead — Amos John Thomas (1867) and Minnie (1869).

Then, around 1870, the family left New Zealand briefly, only to return 23 March 1871, on board the Caduceus. As was common in those days, young Amy who was born on board during the voyage (17 January 1871, one day before the ship crossed the equator) was christened with “Caduceus” as her middle name.

On 7 June 1873, Amos Eyes wrote to the Railways Department asking for employment on the Auckland and Waikato railway and was eventually successful. He began working for the department in May 1874. By December that year he was a porter at Ellerslie station on the southern Auckland suburban line. There on Boxing Day, with the rush of passengers heading to the races, he was acting as a temporary ticket collector to help manage the numbers.
 
There was a promotion for him in 1875, to the position of stationmaster at Papakura. A house was provided for him there by the Railways Department as part of his salary, but he rented it out, and also owned other blocks of land in the district. Three of his children were born at Papakura: Lily Antigone (1877), Lois Mable (1878) and Daisy Effie (1882).

Next, he was at Mt Eden station as stationmaster from around 1884. During his time there, a young man named Waterhouse Nicholson was accidentally killed on the station platform in May 1885 when a single-barreled pinfire gun that had been handed to him discharged, shattering Nicholson’s skull. He and his companions had just got off the train from a shooting trip in the Waitakere Ranges. A railway by-law forbade the carriage of loaded guns and rifles on the trains. But Brabazon claimed that he hadn’t tried unloading the rifle before boarding the train because of the rush to catch it, and then found the cartridge had swollen due to rain so couldn’t be removed. The verdict was accidental death. Despite Eyes’ best efforts, Brabazon was cleared of a charge of breaching the railway regulation regarding loaded firearms on the technicality that he and his party had stood outside on the carriage platform all the way from West Auckland to Mt Eden.

A major port was envisaged at the end of the Rosebank Peninsula. But this was not the only strange proposal for Motu Mānawa/Pollen Island. Twice before, the idea of an aerodrome on the island had arisen. It is curious to think that from 1947 to 1989 Pollen Island was considered as a possible site for a major port. Weird ideas are not a new thing!

Motu means island, and Mānawa can mean mangrove. The other island (Traherne) that is overrun by the motorway is Motu Te Kou, meaning “fishhook.”

These islands, straddled today by the North-western Motorway, have long been part of the transport network. In pre-European times, waka paddled past the shell bank island on their way up and down the Whau to the intercoastal portage to the Manukau. The paddling tradition on the Whau is still maintained today by the West End Rowing Club on Saunders Reserve.

The mudbanks between the island and the mainland were used by Ngāti Pāoa as a burial ground, to preserve bodies. Some remains were disturbed during motorway construction in the 1950s.

While there are no remnants of permanent settlement in the area by Ngāti Pāoa, Te Kawerau a Maki, Te Waiohua or by Ngāti Whātua, there are remembered traditions linking it with the greater surrounding area used in general food gathering and fishing. And it is here that Avondale’s earliest historically dated event occurred: the battle at Te Rangimatariki between Ngā Oho, Te Taou, and Ngāti Pāoa in 1792.

When Rosebank Peninsula was surveyed in 1843, Motu Mānawa does not appear on the damaged map. The island remained unnoticed when the HMS Pandora surveyed the area in 1854. The earliest map of the island dates from 1857. Even now, commuters speeding along the motorway are largely oblivious to the wilderness between them and the sea.

Dr Daniel Pollen purchased the island on 10 March 1858. Pollen had brickworks on Rosebank Peninsula, and he also ran some sheep there. A son was born at his Rosebank property in 1856, but shortly after they were living in Eden Crescent. Pollen served as Native Minister, Colonial Secretary, and as the country’s ninth Premier for a seven-month period in the mid-1870s while Julius Vogel was overseas. He was also the editor of the New Zealand Times newspaper.

Mining of shell and sand from the two islands lasted 80 years, with a never-ending supply of shell being constantly washed ashore from the extensive cockle beds. A Mr Potterill offered to supply shell to the Avondale Road Board in 1915. Then Thomas Edwin Roe, called “Shellback Roe” by locals, burnt shell from Pollen Island to sell as lime.

Craigavon is the western-most reserve at Blockhouse Bay. Originally purchased from mana whenua by Charles Robinson in 1845, by the late 1840s it became Crown Land, part of the 1859 subdivision known as the South Whau township, the Auckland Provincial Council’s settlement where it was hoped a port town would emerge beside the harbour. This was not successful, so in 1884 the Central Government gave it another go, resurveyed the failed 1859 subdivision, but left the land west of Connell Street as a Crown Reserve.
The Government resurveyed the reserve in 1896, and laid out the line of Connaught Street. They started selling lots from August of that year. William Henry Smith bought four of them, around 20 acres (the Motu Moana site) that year, and the following year three more lots (15 acres) being more or less the Craigavon Park site. In 1900, two more lots were bought by Smith, followed by a further purchase of 4¾ acres in 1905, these last two purchases completing what is Craigavon Park today.

In 1899 the Auckland Star described Smith’s “block of fairly good land on the line of the proposed canal that may some day connect the waters of the Manukau and the Waitemata . This gentleman has a neat little furnished cottage close to the beach, on the site of an old Maori pah, and surrounded by a little bit of native bush, in what is known as Green Bay.”

Smith was born in Ireland around 1850. As a young man, he took up work at a Belfast drapery store, and in 1874 at Portaferry, he married Mary Anne Caughey, youngest daughter of a grocer named James Caughey. The Smiths sailed to New York immediately after, and lived in the United States until 1879, then returned to Belfast.

But, with William’s health deteriorating, they decided to emigrate yet again, this time to Auckland in 1880. Marianne (as she now spelled her name) is said to have set up her Smith’s Cheap Drapery House, at the corner of Queen and Airedale Streets, opposite the present-day Town Hall site, from 1880, joined in business by her husband William from 1881. William’s obituary states, though, that he set up the business with his brother-in-law Andrew Clark Caughey. Whatever really happened, Smith’s Cheap Drapery House was in business from the later date at least.
The partnership of William Smith and Andrew Caughey, with shops on Queen Street and at Newmarket, began in September 1882. William Smith was for a time a City Councillor, and like his wife Marianne was known for his generous philanthropy towards various ‘slum missions’ and Christian charities. Smith was also, though, first and foremost a businessman. The land he owned at Blockhouse Bay was more than just a getaway spot, or at least that was the intent.

Back in 1903, he joined in with the short-lived Waitemata and Manukau Canal Promotion Company.  At the time of his death in 1912, the Whau Canal proposal had been revived, and would be kept going clear through most of the 1920s, by promoter David Bruce Russell. So, while the Green Bay land the Smiths owned was a pleasant holiday spot for them, and while William Smith is said to have planted some trees there in a bout of bush restoration which was a trend at the time, it was most likely that the underlying reason for the purchases were as a long-term capital investment. We do have the canal schemes, in part, to thank for both Craigavon Park’s and the Motu Moana camp site’s existence today.

By 1922, Marianne Smith advertised camping sites and cottage on “Mrs Smith’s property” to let, for 25/- weekly plus rates. Then, in 1929, she decided to gift part of her Blockhouse Bay property to Auckland City Council. When Sir James Craig, Viscount Craigavon, Premier of Northern Ireland and a friend of hers visited New Zealand in November 1929, Marianne handed the deeds to him in a ceremony, and he in turn handed them to the Mayor of Auckland. The park was to be named in honour of her friend, as she wanted “to keep an honoured Ulster name for ever part of Auckland.” Mrs Smith also asked for the construction of entrance gates bearing the words “Craigavon Park.” The gates would cost the Council £382.

Lord Craigavon started out as James Craig (1871-1940), the son of a wealthy whiskey distiller, who followed a life-path that took him to the Second Anglo-Boer War until 1900, organiser of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers in Northern Ireland, a weapons smuggler supplying Imperial Germany prior to the First World War, and a politician. He was made a baronet in 1918, and appointed the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in 1921. In 1927, he was created Viscount Craigavon of Stormont.

From the 1930s he became increasingly controversial for his anti-Catholic and anti-Republic of Ireland views, and even suggested to Winston Churchill during World War II that the UK should invade the republic by force and install a Governor-General. He was still Prime Minister of Northern Ireland when he died peacefully at his home in November 1940.

The hearse pulled up outside Chrysalis Early Learning Centre. Bob Connell had come back for the last time to the site of the original homestead. The oak and the pohutukawa, planted about 80 years earlier by his family, were now magnificent trees. The Connells had grown up with the trees and now the family stopped to collect acorns for Bob’s funeral.

In pre-European times, Maori had lived for a while here, on the shore of the Whau River. Shell middens with traces of charcoal from their fires was mapped by archaeologists. They tell us that cockles were the main shellfish eaten, but a range of other sea creatures were also locally sourced and on the menu, likely eaten between 1540 and 1670 AD.

In an amazing link back to those early Maori, their mahi was uncovered in the form of two postholes, 1 m apart. The circular postholes were of a very regular shape, measured 30cm in diameter x 33cm deep and 15cm diameter x 12cm deep and had flat bases.

There was a succession of European owners before the Connell Family bought the property in 1921. All that was left from that period for the archaeologists to find was the remains of a small brick house or hut, and a scattering of early 20th century bottles broken bricks and other debris visible on the foreshore.
The Connells were market gardeners on the 10ha site that is now Jomac Place. They grew potatoes and kumara for many years. Bob Connell claimed, that for a while after WWII, they were probably the biggest kumara growers in the country.

The three brothers and their sister grew up on the farm, playing in the Whau River. Bob said, “We used to swim down there when we were kids, but it was mighty muddy!” They also had small boats and went fishing. One time they netted 740 flounder in one day, giving the surplus away to neighbours. “They were very nice flounder,” said Bob.

In December 1959, the three boys, Daniel, Roy, and Robert became tenants in common on the farm. In 1996 Roy’s share went to Daniel and Bob, who by then were both retired.

The original homestead was pulled down by the Connell brothers in 1951. Bob said that it had been built from kauri and had individually made blacksmith nails. After that, the site was farmed as part of the market garden, and a new house was built. The house was located approximately where the street is now (Jomac Place).

In 1993, Neville Exler filmed the three brothers on his Sony Handicam, giving an insight into their last few years market gardening. They had started selling off other parcels of land from 1965. The writing was on the wall as their land was surrounded by industrial buildings.

Bob noted, “We don’t have much compost in the soil now; we have worked it out. We have mined the soil. We know it’s going to factories, and we won’t last much longer. It’s like the house. It’s going to be pushed down in a year or two. It’s not worth spending money on.”

The Exler film shows them harvesting cabbages, loading the boxes onto the tray of their trusty Massey Fergusson tractor before taking the boxes to their truck to load for the markets. Asked about how they grew the cabbages, Bob said that they propagated the cabbages from seed they grew themselves. They selected about 100 of the best cabbage plants each year and transplanted them into a garden together. To avoid the bees crosspollinating the cabbages with cauliflowers and Brussels sprouts, they would cover the plants with scrim to keep the bees out. Then they would crawl under the scrim and worked them with little brushes to pollenate the cabbages themselves. Bob claimed that this gave them some of the finest seed in the country.

As flames lit up the December night in 1872 at the junction of Rosebank and Great North Roads in the district then known as the Whau, and as Martha Poppleton huddled nearby with her husband and family watching the first hotel in the district burn to the ground, I do wonder if she thought, “Oh, no, not again?”

Martha Rainey was born in Lincolnshire, England, in 1843. The Rainey family emigrated to Tasmania by early 1845. In 1855 Martha married Yorkshire-born James Poppleton in Victoria, and the couple headed briefly back to England in the early 1860s. They arrived in Auckland in November 1868.

The Poppletons appear to have settled immediately in Avondale. Martha was an accomplished amateur singer; she joined in with community performances at the local asylum at Pt Chevalier, and special events raising funds for various causes at the Whau Public Hall on St Georges Road. In December 1870, James Poppleton got the licence for the Waikomiti Hotel, and the family shifted further west.

On Monday 1 May 1871, the Poppletons entered local legend with Martha’s first accident.

About midnight on the Sunday before the incident, a man named James Thomas Steer had had somewhat too much to drink at another hostelry, was in possession of a revolver, and decided then was a great time to bang loudly on the Poppletons’ door to regale them with the story of a wild bull that had tried to attack him. Steer told the bleary-eyed Mr Poppleton that he’d fired his revolver three times at the bull and scared it away. Poppleton kindly invited Steer in to sleep things off for the rest of the night.

The next morning Steer, still quite excited by his adventure, decided to tell Martha Poppleton about it as well. He felt that, to prove the truth to his story, it would be a great idea to hand the weapon in question to Martha to check out. Martha, though, was quite inexperienced with any type of firearm, and was unaware that it was loaded, capped, and cocked at the time. It went off, while it was aimed at Steer.

To quote the news report from the time, Steer “then became very much excited, and Mr Poppleton and his servant got the wounded man put into a cart, in order to convey him to the Provincial Hospital. While being brought into Auckland, Steer got very violent, and bolted from his guardians. He then made rapidly for Auckland, and was arrested by Sergeant Walker and another constable at the Anchor Hotel, under the impression that he was suffering from mental derangement.” He was later examined, found not to be a lunatic but simply a man who had been accidentally shot by a woman in the shoulder, and was taken to hospital, where he later recovered.

Not long after this, in June 1871, James Poppleton took up the license for the Whau Hotel, and moved back to Avondale.

Things were fine. Martha was still singing and entertaining people, performing “in a manner that called forth a warm acknowledgement” from appreciative local audiences. She and James, as proprietors of the hotel, were at the centre of Avondale’s early community, the hotel being as much a gathering place for meetings and events as the public hall at the other end of the settlement. In mid-December 1872, James Poppleton was deeply involved with a committee planning for Boxing Day sports on one of the nearby paddocks.

On the night of 17 December 1872, Martha decided to hang a dress beside the last embers of the kitchen fireplace, then went to bed. James was the last to retire at 11.30 pm, checking that everything was all right before he did so. The only fire still alight was that in the kitchen.

Between 1am and 2am, Martha awoke, and found the hotel full of smoke. Frantic, she woke up James, who went downstairs to investigate, and found the kitchen ablaze, all round the fireplace. He decided not to try to put the fire out, as he felt it was beyond that. He called out to Martha, and the couple evacuated their family and tried to save what they could of their possessions, mainly the hotel’s money box, and some furniture. Within an hour, the entire two-storey, ten-roomed building, dating from 1861, was burned to the ground. While there was no real evidence as to the cause presented at the resulting inquest, it remains local belief that Martha may have hung that dress a bit too close to the embers …
The Poppletons moved away from Avondale after that. James would come to have the Eden Vine Hotel, then a store at Henderson, before the family left for Australia, where he died in 1882 after a painful illness. Martha outlived him by a number of decades, passing away in Victoria in 1924. Today, where Martha would practice her songs and had hung her dress to dry on that December evening, you can get your teeth examined by one of the local dentists. There are no signs left of the accidental Mrs Poppleton.

One summer’s day, in December 1881, two days before Christmas, Lawrence Teirney got off his horse bus outside the Whau Hotel (this being just before the district was renamed to Avondale) on the Great North Road, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and offered to give fellow horse bus driver a proper thrashing in the form of a spontaneous expression of the art of fisticuffs in the otherwise quiet rural surroundings.

Lawrence Teirney was born in County Cavan, Ireland, and sailed from London with his family in 1874. Teirney is said to have found work at first as a groom, but by at least early 1877 he was working for Frank Quick, driving one of the horse buses to and from Avondale. By January 1879, Teirney was in business for himself, in opposition to Quick.

He had two court appearances with regard to the way he conducted his public transport business. The first, in November 1879, resulted from an incident where he reportedly ran a buggy off the road near the junction of Symonds Street, Mt Eden Road and New North Road. Enough doubt was cast on the other party’s sobriety that Teirney was let off.

Then came the Collins incident of December 1881. Both Patrick Collins’ bus (working for Frank Quick) and Teirney’s left the city, Teirney half an hour ahead of Collins, but Collins managed to catch him at the Whau Hotel, near the present-day roundabout in Avondale. Teirney left the hotel five minutes before Collins, but Collins again caught up with Teirney, this time in New Lynn near Quick’s stables. Teirney stopped his bus, and blocked the road.

Collins called for Teirney to clear the road, the other refused. Collins tried edging his horse bus around Teirney, only to find the other man shifted his vehicle as well, blocking Collins. Then both drivers started a mad drive, at speed, back towards the Whau Bridge – which was a one-lane narrow timber affair at that time. Teirney reached the bridge first, and stopped his bus, blocking the bridge. Then, half a minute later, he drove on a bit further, blocking the other end of the bridge before finally taking off, racing up the hill back towards the Whau Hotel, Collins in pursuit.

Teirney was charged with a breach of the Public Works Act, by allowing his horse bus to remain for a length of time in the centre of the road, but as the prosecutor cited the wrong section of the Act with which to charge him, that part of the matter went no further. For creating the disturbance, Teirney was fined 20s plus costs of £1 4s.

The start-up of the Northern Omnibus Company in 1883, a short-lived venture (only until 1884) linking the City with Avondale (and New Lynn) via both the New North and Great North Road routes, seems to have brought an end to Teirney’s horse-bus driving career.
 
It looks like, by June 1886 he was making his living as a cabdriver and carter in the city. He and his wife Bridget made a successful application for land at Swanson, at the junction of Waitakere and Kay Roads. Bridget received a 999-year lease on the land – it left her children’s control in 1906, two years after her death.

Lawrence Teirney was elected to the first school committee in Swanson in 1887, and the Teirneys were also supporters of the local Catholic congregation. On 9 December 1915, Teirney died at his daughter’s Waihi home. He was buried in Swanson Cemetery, beside Bridget.
 
Adapted from Lisa Truttman’s Whau Heritage Talk about Lawrence Teirney, which will be uploaded on Auckland Library's Soundcloud site shortly. Check at  soundcloud.com/auckland-libraries

​Over the years since the railway line from New Lynn to Glen Eden was laid down in the late 1870s, it has changed. Before the trenching of New Lynn Station in 2008-2010, came the elimination of the level crossing at Titirangi Road from 1939 to 1940. This latter project also changed the appearance of the crossings over the streams that make up the Rewarewa Creek watershed, on either side of Titirangi Road. Today, we’d hardly know they were there.

Before the First World War, the two viaducts were still both visible, and were the scenes of two incidents from the early days of rail in New Lynn.

On Tuesday, 19 November 1912, a number of school children were playing in the scrub near the Titirangi Road crossing. One of them, Edward Dyer aged five or six, wandered onto the viaduct just above and west of Titirangi Road. Suddenly around the bend further up “Scroggy Hill” as that incline used to be known, a speeding train appeared. It was the train from Helensville, bound for the city. Terrified, young Edward fell across the rails, and clutched them tightly with fear, not knowing what else to do in his panic as the train came nearer.

But that day he was a very fortunate young boy. Another of the children nearby, Alexander Frederick Barron, aged 11, spotted what had happened, summed up what to do, and rushed onto the bridge. He scooped Edward up into his arms, and both of them leapt over the side into the scrub below, mere moments before the train passed above them.

It took a while for the greater community to become aware of the story. Perhaps the boys, fearful of the punishment for being so near a very dangerous place, kept quiet about it. But when John Gardner of the noted New Lynn brickmaking family approached the NZ Herald with the sum of 10s, as the start of a fund to reward Alexander for his heroism the following month, the story came out. At a special presentation at New Lynn School on 19 December, Alexander Barron was given an illuminated address, a copy of the Boys Own Annual from his schoolmates, a cheque for one guinea from John Bollard, the local MP, and a silver watch from John Gardner, inscribed: “Alexander Barron, for bravery, December. 1912, from a few admirers.” Early in 1913, Alexander was also awarded a bronze medal from the Royal Humane Society.

The remainder of his life was much more ordinary. He and his wife lived at Pt Chevalier during the 1920s to 1930s, but from the mid 1940s he was a farmer, living in Cliff View Drive, Green Bay. Barron Drive, so close to his home, may have been named after him and his family in the early 1960s. He died, still a resident at Green Bay, in 1976.

The other incident at the railway viaducts in New Lynn is a much more famous one, related in books and articles over the years.
On a foggy winter’s morning, Thursday 28 May 1913, a goods train from the city arrived at New Lynn Station. In those days, in order for the train to move onto a siding to keep the main line clear, it was necessary to go forward up the incline almost as far as Titirangi Road, then reverse back. Fog cut down visibility severely, and the rails were greasy and slippery. The driver of a passenger train from Helensville, rounding the bend and heading toward Titirangi Road, did not see the goods train that was still on the Rewarewa viaduct, and on the single line, just west of the road, until too late. The engines collided head on. Two of the passenger carriages telescoped and crumpled. The windows were blown out of the next two carriages behind them. It was fortunate that no one died, out of over 100 passengers aboard, but there were a number of injuries, including among the train crews involved. One passenger, a Mr E H Stone, remained in a critical condition for weeks, his chest badly crushed.

Locals from New Lynn and Henderson demanded a ministerial enquiry into how the accident happened. The Railways Minister at the time, William Herbert Herries, said that there needed to be a departmental enquiry first before he could instigate a ministerial one. The Railways Department did hold an enquiry, and the result was the dismissal of both the driver of the Helensville train, John James Corich, and the tablet porter Thomas William Mortimer who was in charge at the New Lynn station. But this enquiry was held behind closed doors.

The residents demanded a public enquiry, and so one got underway in September 1913, four months after the crash. It turned out that while the tablet porter had received the danger signal that the train coming from Helensville was approaching, he’d had too many duties to keep sufficient watch on what was happening (although Mortimer denied he was overworked). There was no fog signalling at New Lynn station – a fog signalman was appointed only two months after the crash. The practice of shunting goods trains from the main line to sidings was well-known in the district as a potential disaster waiting to happen, with four passenger trains a day passing through New Lynn station, and with New Lynn’s goods traffic, thanks to the brickyards, increasing month by month at that point.

The enquiry found that the driver of the passenger train, Corich, should have reduced his speed, given the weather conditions, but recommended reinstating him at a lower status due to his youth and lack of experience. Corich tried to appeal against the railway department’s ruling the next year, but was convinced to withdraw, as he still had a job with the department. Mortimer on the other hand was recommended to be exonerated. He was described as the New Lynn station master in 1914, before serving as a guard for most of the rest of his career.

Photos: ​Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 22 AWNS-19130605-10-05, -10-06, ​and -11-1

Albert Gubay was born in 1928 in Rhyl, Northern Wales, from an Irish mother and a Jewish emigrant father from Baghdad.

According to his obituary, his business was struggling in the mid-1950s, and with worries as far as supporting his wife and two children were concerned, Gubay apparently made a pact with God, he said in a later interview. “Lying on my bed one Sunday afternoon, I said, ‘God, where’s the next penny going to come from? God, please help me — and whatever I make, when I pass on, half will go to you.’ And that was it: I was at peace with the world.” Most of his fortune wound up being given away, in his lifetime and after he died in early 2016.

By 1967, Gubay had opened up a chain of Kwik Save Discount stores in Britain, following a world trend from just after WWII. Retailing was stripped to basics. Basic stores, basic fittings, often using adapted older buildings. By January 1973, he left Great Britain to live in New Zealand for a time.

The origin of “3 Guys” as a name is uncertain. The press thought it was Gubay himself and two relatives, but a study in 1998 found that Gubay was fascinated with an American discount retailer named “Two Guys from Harrison.” He left New Zealand permanently in April 1974. His New Zealand companies were sold in 1984.

The first Auckland store opened in Mangere in January 1973, followed by Papatoetoe, Mt Eden, Northcote, and Glen Eden. It’s said that he wanted to open a store in Green Bay, but local opposition changed his mind and he opted for Avondale instead; his Lynley Buildings Ltd owned the Avondale land, more or less, from August 1973.

I remember in Standard 4 at Avondale Primary in 1974 when the teacher brought up that Mr Albert Gubay was going to build a supermarket in our suburb and had us write letters of welcome to him as a class project. The supermarket here in Avondale was completed in September 1975. The development proved controversial from the start, because instead of the open-to-the-main-road view of the supermarket we had been expecting, a blank wall was to be the frontage to Great North Road right through to the building’s demolition in 1997.

Then there were the issues with Auckland City Council and the zoning of the property. When Lynley Buildings Ltd purchased the site, it was with the intention of building a full-sized supermarket as part of the standard size specifications of the chain and extending parking over what is today the state housing units, next door to the former Suburbs Rugby Football clubrooms. However, only part of the land, nearest Great North Road, was zoned as C3, commercial use. The rest was zoned R4, residential, with restrictions in terms of parking use and capacity. The company claimed that it thought the land could be used for parking when it was purchased. The Council stuck to their guns, and pointed out the zoning. So, the supermarket in Avondale was built 40 feet smaller than others in the chain, to provide more parking space at the rear. An application for a further 4800 square feet addition was also refused by the Council. The Council considered making an offer at the time to purchase the disputed land for parking purposes, but the offering price meant that idea had to be abandoned. That area, in Lynley Building’s plans as presented before later appeal hearings, was intended for the site of a tavern, operated by the Portage Licensing Trust, as part of a broader development of the block between the supermarket and the rugby club buildings. However, the Trust found themselves unable or unwilling to commit to such a development.

The former vehicle entrance off Great North Road was closed and became a covered mini-arcade just beside the supermarket. I recall a laundry there, a furniture shop, and other uses. But the land between the sealed carpark and the rugby clubrooms was left to the weeds, the houses that once existed there, the former horse paddocks, shed and garages, long since removed in the 1970s, in the expectation of full-on commercial development. The supermarket was never able to expand to regain that lost square footage. In 1988, the property was passed on to 3 Guys Property Ltd. The supermarket and arcade continued for a while but was finally closed on 27 June 1997. General Distributors Ltd (for Progressive Enterprises) merged with 3 Guys Property Ltd in August 1997, and the supermarket and arcade was demolished by the end of that year.

The property was transferred to Morning Star Enterprises Limited (a property arm of architect and developer Arthur Mortenstern), and subdivided. The surplus land was sold to Housing New Zealand in March 1998, and 36 units were built there.

The 3 Guys brand in Auckland, which had been taken over by Progressive Enterprises, eventually disappeared in 2003, replaced by Countdown stores.

Two restrictive covenants were placed in the title for the former 3 Guys site early in 1998. A supermarket owned by 3 Guys Property Ltd in Valley Road, Mt Eden was transferred to General Distributors back in May 1997 — and a covenant placed on the title of the Avondale land in January 1998 meant that while the land at Mt Eden was used as a supermarket, the land at Avondale could not be similarly used. In the same month, the Council placed a covenant on the title that while the Avondale supermarket site had been further subdivided into two parts, neither of these could be sold separately from each other.

Morning Star Enterprises conveyed the former Avondale 3 Guys site to Rawhiti Developments Limited in March 1998, and in turn it went to Challenge Petroleum Limited two months later. The company intended using the vacant site as a service station, a proposal that received approval from the City Council’s planning department.

However, around 40 business owners, plus the Avondale Primary School Board of Trustees took exception to the plans, and a community campaign ensued, fronted by local businessman Duncan Macdonald. The main issue was the impact on traffic in the area, and a likely increase in danger to pedestrians, especially school children. A petition was organised, and a picket staged on the Great North Road frontage. The protest was covered by local press: as a result, Challenge Petroleum withdrew their resource consent application in January 1999.

In April 1999, Auckland City Council purchased the site for $1.5 million, the transfer formalised in July, to ensure public access to the parking area. By now, Macdonald was president of the Avondale Business Association, and the ABA liaised with Council on concept plans to be presented to interested developers of the site. In September 2000, the ABA oversaw and supplied materials for local arts group 'Wai Kauri’ to paint a mural depicting the history of the Avondale area on the fence at the rear of the 3 Guys site.
 
It was announced that the Council had found a buyer in 2001 (at a loss of $153,650) and in 2002 the Council placed a further encumbrance on the title, ensuring that Quinnian Zhang had to provide 100 public carparks for recreational purposes, a street-level retail component on the majority of the Great North Road frontage, and to comply with certain community objectives for mixed use retail/residential for the property.

For the next 15 years though, the site remained empty, overgrown in places, and almost constantly used as a casual rubbish dumping ground. The owners prepared a number of development plans, none of which seemed to go very much further than the drawing board. One attempt in 2007 (for a development on the site of 54 residences, office, retail and café/restaurants) almost led to Council reversing their decision to amend the 100 public car park spaces encumbrance on the title to 61 spaces, with guarantees of access to the Avondale Central reserve. But negotiations appear to have broken down at the time.

Whau Arts Festivals were held there in 2014 and 2015, and in July 2017 four organisations sought to “reactivate” the site by installing two shipping containers there in an effort to create a community hub. This sparked controversy, and polarised part of the community. Eventually, after opposition from local businesses and the ABA, the containers were removed.

The private owners put the site back on the market, and Auckland Council’s regeneration agency Panuku purchased the site in October 2017. Panuku reported to the Council’s Planning Committee: “The large site in the middle of the town centre has been vacant since the late 1990s. This results in a lack of continuity of the town centre and a perception that the centre lacks vibrancy ... we will ... seek good development outcomes on the central development sites (1909 — 1949 Great North Road and 1907 Great North Road) through advocacy, negotiation or acquisition.”

In recent years the site has been the venue for the Art Park, as well as community activations.
Now the new library and community centre are being designed to replace the strip of shops west of the site and the Spider. The town square area where the Spider is will also be redeveloped. Along with the current demand for apartments, this renewal in Avondale should enable Panuku to negotiate a suitable sale of the site to a developer. Finally, the decades old vision for street level retail and apartments above could come to fruition.
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Adapted from publication “At the Heart of the Village. The Lives and Transactions at the Former 3 Guys Site, Avondale”, written by Lisa J Truttman for the Avondale Business Association.

In 1891, William married Harriet Sankey, and the couple would have one son: John Henry Allen Bollard, born 22 June 1893. Sadly, Harriet passed away just weeks later, and was buried in Rosebank Cemetery.
Bollard & Froude worked on the signwriting for commercial premises in central Auckland, and as a highlight were appointed the official signwriters for the Auckland Industrial Exhibition of 1896. In 1899 however, they parted ways, Froude buying William Bollard’s interest in the business. Froude carried on the business in his own name until he went bankrupt in 1913.

William Bollard, however, became involved with the Auckland Society of Arts, exhibiting his work at their shows but also attracting criticism from the press such as “not as good as his work of several years back.”
By 1904, he shifted to Dunedin, where he set up a studio. There, two of his paintings exhibited in the window of the Dresden Piano Company shop attracted much more favourable comment, said to “attract attention on account of their effective treatment and harmonious colouring.”

By 1906, his work was exhibited and auctioned at McCormick & Pugh’s Art Gallery in the city.
In 1910 he married for the second time, to Emma Hawkins Meadowcroft. The couple would have two children, Margaret Jane Ganley Bollard in 1911, and Albert Ernest Bollard in 1912. Emma, though, died 14 June 1915, aged only 37.

New Lynn, like most of the Whau area back in the mid-19th century, was sparsely-settled, and used mainly for the grazing of stock. Farmer Henry Hayr had a cattle run there in 1852, buying the original 84 acres from the Crown for his own farm in 1854. “Hayr’s Grant” went through a number of ownership changes and subdivisions, until in 1887 brothers Henry and James Binsted purchased nearly 19 acres of Hayr’s former ground, closest to the river.

The Binsted brothers were butchers, starting up their first shop in Victoria Street West in 1881. They ran a small slaughtering operation to stock their Freemans Bay shop, but then saw an opportunity in New Lynn for a site to continue running their own slaughterhouse, clear of restrictive Auckland City Council regulations. In 1886, they took over the £5 Waitemata County license from a Mr Frost, and in 1887 purchased the New Lynn property Frost may well have already been using for his own business.

It was a perfect spot for something like a slaughterhouse, close to main roads leading from the cattle ranges to the west and east, and where all the resulting effluent from their processing plant simply washed away on the tide down the river to the harbour. Their New Lynn slaughterhouse supplied not only their Freeman’s Bay store, but also the Avondale shop they took over at the St Judes Street corner by c.1890. That same year a road to the slaughterhouse was laid out, the future Binsted Road, ending right at the water’s edge.

From 1893, the brothers ran their “Avondale Styes” farm there as well, breeding and selling pedigree Berkshire and Yorkshire pigs. By then, their complex at New Lynn included (beside the pigs) a feeding room, scalding shed, “boiling down place” and the slaughterhouse.

In 1907, James Binsted stated that a bullock at his works could be killed and dressed in three-quarters of an hour, and the same time would see eight to ten sheep slaughtered. Men were paid £2 15s per week wages, and did other work as well as slaughtering. The Binsted slaughterhouse was one of New Lynn’s main sources of employment, rivalled only by the brickyards beside the railway line.

The Binsted land had a brief part to play in the story of the Sandford-Miller bi-plane which was being trialled at Avondale Racecourse during 1913. The plane achieved the first cross-country flight in New Zealand on 31 August that year, taking off with Sandford at the controls from Avondale, heading west. Sandford turned back to make for the racecourse again, but the engine failed, and he made a forced landing on a glide in Binsted’s paddock against the slaughterhouse. Two weeks later, after repairs by Miller, the plane returned across the Whau River to Avondale.

By the First World War, James’ son John Claude Binsted managed several country butcher shops, supplied by the family’s New Lynn operation. One thing the Binsteds couldn’t do was sell their meat within the bounds of Auckland City at the time, as they were of course not using a Council-approved or owned facility.

A fire at the slaughterhouse in 1916 did some damage, and probably heralded the end of the complex’s use. After James Binsted died in 1920 (his brother Henry had died in 1895), the Avondale shop was sold to Hellabys, and the sheds at New Lynn were dismantled in 1921.
Streets were planned across the property by 1939, including an esplanade along the coastline. Perhaps the family intended to subdivide the property for industrial use; only a small portion right at the tip was marked on the 1939 town plan as future reserve. Instead, from the late 1920s, the Binsteds’ land became a rubbish tip, so much so, that neighbours on Binsted Road complained to the town board about the nuisance.

The Binsted family retained ownership of the property through to 1951, when it was transferred to the last surviving trustee Harold Bollard. At that time, approaches were made to the New Lynn Borough Council to buy the land as a recreational reserve, along with a plea contained in the transfer deed for the preferred name of “Binsted Park”, recognising the many decades of the family’s ownership. The land title was formally conveyed in 1955 – but the Borough Council decided instead to call the new reserve “Rewa Park”.
Part of the land was sold to commercial interests, leaving only around two-thirds of the Binsted land as reserve. By 1956 football fields had been formed, and a mangrove swamp reclaimed by dumping still more municipal rubbish. The New Lynn Cricket Club established clubrooms there in 1961. By 1963, a bridge had been built linking the park with Queen Mary Avenue, ensuring that Rewa Park became a popular recreation area for locals. In 1967 though, it nearly became the site of a heliport, but local opposition to the idea proved too great.