In January 1868 the English aristocrat Lord Lyttelton, with his son and London magistrate Henry Selfe, arrived in Canterbury to see the colony which Lyttelton and Selfe, as members of the Canterbury Association, had helped establish almost 20 years before.
The trio travelled from Lyttelton to Christchurch via the recently completed railway tunnel, the first visitors of note to use this route. Although their headquarters were at the `commodious and comfortable' Christchurch Club, they ranged widely. Lord Lyttelton took in the whole of the province and part of the West Coast, leaving his impressions in Two lectures on a visit to the Canterbury colony . `Lyttelton, my namesake, the ... birthplace of the settlement' was `small ...poor (and) cramped in between the shore and the hills'. In Christchurch the Provincial Council Chambers were ` too chapel-like and ecclesiastical-looking but of exquisite work throughout', the Godley statue ` admirable and well-placed but ... so slovenly in its surroundings as to lose much of its grace', the Barbadoes Street Cemetery `retired and picturesque'. Hard economic times meant that plans to build the cathedral had been put on hold. The foundations were `covered in or buried and partly overgrown with long grass'. At Hagley Park, named after His Lordship's country seat in Gloucestershire, Lyttelton junior astonished the colonists by scoring more than 100 runs at cricket.
Presumably Selfe visited Lake Selfe, `a very pretty lake at the foot of Mt Ida ... the centre lake in a chain of three which have been called up there in the queer bush nomenclature, "the world, the flesh and the devil"'. It was here that naturalist T H Potts first noted that slender-necked bird, the crested grebe.
On 5 and 6 February, in Christchurch, provincial authorities put on a formal dinner and less formal breakfast for the tourists. Nature provided a more spectacular and less welcome reception, sending a flood down from the Waimakariri. In Market Square, now Victoria Square, the Post Office was surrounded by three feet of water.
The 5 and 6 March were the visitors' last days in the province. They saw the restored frame of a moa at the museum, attended a `very pretty and well-arranged horticultural show' and popped in to the Supreme Court where John Swale, destined to be the first man hanged in Canterbury, was being tried for murder. At the Upper Riccarton Anglican church, Lyttelton and Selfe were godparents at the baptism of George, son of Charles and Georgina Bowen.
Thereafter the party travelled by steamer to Wellington where they visited the grave of a co-worker in the founding of Canterbury, Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Thence they returned to England. They came no more. In 1870 Selfe died from complications of his chronic gout problem. Lord Lyttelton, prone to bouts of insanity, killed himself in 1876.
Ref: Richard L N Greenaway, Genealogy Librarian, Christchurch City Library, Christchurch, New Zealand.
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CEMETERIES
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Burwood Anglican Cemetery, Notable Graves,
Selfe
Caleb Selfe died, at 87, in 1920. Martha, his wife, died, at 81, in 1916. Some of their children are buried in the graveyard, among them Charles who died, at 86, in 1955.
Caleb was a veteran of the Otago gold rush and the 1868 removal, from the beach, of timber which had been washed down by the Waimakariri flood from the mills at Kaiapoi. He became a patriarchal figure at Burwood and dwelt in a picturesque sod cottage with a cabbage tree at the door.
When in his twenties, Charles Selfe fell in love with the youthful Elizabeth, youngest daughter of another Burwood patriarch, John Campbell. Alas, Elizabeth married another. Elizabeth's daughter, Elsie Haffenden, believed that the fact that he was rejected led to Charles becoming a lifetime bachelor. Perhaps she was right.
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Linwood Cemetery, Christchurch:
AREA 8, ROW V, MATTHEWS
Bernard MATTHEWS was a young Englishman of family, intellect and education. His father was the Rev J H D MATTHEWS, his mother a daughter of Henry Selfe SELFE, an active member of the Canterbury Association which founded the Canterbury province in 1850. Bernard gained an M. A. at Cambridge University, emigrated to New Zealand, became Senior Classical Master at Christ's College in 1913, teaching such subjects as Latin and Greek. He died at 30 on 8 September 1915.
AREA 8, ROW W, SELFE
The wording on the gravestone reads:
"James Alfred SELFE, eldest son of Henry Selfe SELFE, Metropolitan
Police Magistrate (one of the founders of the Province of Canterbury)
born 20 August 1841, died 10 October 1913".
James SELFE was the son of Henry Selfe SELFE (1810-1870), London police magistrate, agent in England for the Province of Canterbury in the 1850s and 60s, and a man who visited Canterbury in the company of Lord LYTTELTON, at the time of the great Waimakariri flood in 1868. H S SELFE is commemorated in a stained glass window in the church of St Michael and All Angels.
James, a sports journalist, wrote under the pseudonym 'Hermit'. One of his interesting pieces is the obituary for the famous horse 'Traducer' in the 1880 New Zealand country journal. In his younger day, James was a worry to his parents in England because of the rough company which he kept after coming to Canterbury. Unfortunately for James but fortunately for historians, the father kept a voluminous correspondence which included letters of concern about the young man. In the early years of the twentieth century, James' brother, Sir William Lucius SELFE, a judge, gave the letters to Dr Thomas Morland HOCKEN who was visiting the United Kingdom in search of historical material relating to New Zealand. The original letters are now in the Hocken Library, Dunedin, while copies are at the Canterbury Museum.
In maturity James frequented brothels. In one he bit off the end of the nose of another man. For this he was jailed. James was the uncle of Bernard MATTHEWS, mentioned above, and a far different personality.
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