Little Port Cooper #2

In my last post I wrote briefly about the early whaling history of Little Port Cooper and the  growth of a small community focused on the activities of those who manned the pilot boat and the Adderley Head signal station. This post focuses on that tiny signal station community and its almost total dependence on the sea.

Archives NZ, ECan

A journalist from the Star, who paid a visit to Little Port Cooper on the occasion of the school opening in May 1883, has left us a detailed description of the bay and its residents.

Just under 30 men, women and children were living there. Buildings included the head pilot’s house and the men’s quarters with the school the latest addition. (At some point another house was added). On the day the reporter visited a birthday party coincided with the completion of the school and the schoolroom was hung with flags for an evening party. The reporter noted that in the school porch there was a neat row of bookshelves containing a small library belonging to ‘the men’. Books included “well thumbed copies of Dickens, Marryatt [sic], Thackery, George Eliott [sic] and Blackmore.” [1] Since the books had never been added to since the pilot station was established, the reporter suggested that readers might like to donate any unwanted “light and readable books” to the pilot station library. 

The staff in 1883 comprised head pilot Captain Galbraith, four men and the cockswain. According to the account in the Star, the signal station high on Adderley Head was 20 minutes uphill walk away from the settlement (we know, we walked it – it took us a lot more than 20 minutes given that slips had compromised the track and we had to scramble directly uphill!). A later account, from the first decade of the twentieth century, has the oncoming signalman riding a horse up to the station; the signalman going off-duty would then ride back down. The horse spent most of its time in a paddock behind the houses. 

One man was always on watch at the signal station. When the bell rang in the men’s quarters and the pilot house to signal the arrival of a ship (or other need for a pilot boat), the men would make their way round the waterfront to the boathouse and could be out on the water within 10 minutes. With all hands at sea, the man on watch had to remain there until relieved – and in the event of a drop in the wind, that could be a very long time. On the day of the reporter’s visit,

the man who went up to the look-out at 4 a.m. had to stay there till the return of the pilot-boat, which did not take place till as near as possible twelve hours later. And not only that but he would have to go back to his look-out at midnight. As for the boatmen, it is no extraordinary thing...for them to be away twenty hours at a stretch, for, besides piloting the vessels inward bound, removals up in port also have to be attended to. [2]

It’s worth remembering too, that the pilot boat was rowed across to Lyttelton and out to meet arriving ships. (Early on, from March to May 1859, six boatmen from Deal in Kent camped in Little Port Cooper and provided the rowing manpower. I might write about this episode in another post...). 

This map, dated December 1892, shows the track from the houses at Little Port Cooper up to the signal station on Adderley Head. The pilot boat shed and breakwater are visible but not the long jetty which wasn’t built until 1908, Archives NZ, ECan

Life for the women in the settlement must have been challenging too. We have some small insights. For example, in 1904, Oliver Archibald Nolan married Elizabeth Mary Pascoe and Oliver was appointed signalman at Adderley Head. The couple lived at Little Port Cooper from 1904-1910, occupying the middle of the three dwellings. Four children were born in that time and it is quite possible that they were born in the bay, given that Elizabeth’s mother, Elizabeth Jane Pascoe, was a midwife. [3] 

The women no doubt tended the gardens in the settlement. “So little are wind and cold felt here, that green peas can be picked two full months before the Christchurch greengrocer is able to offer them to his customers... Geraniums grow out all the year round, flowering in profusion." [4] Early photos indicate plenty of hens and hen houses - a certain self-sufficiency must have been a priority.

By the mid 1880s, with the signalmen and their families living on the flat area above the beach, there would have been a real need for regular, easy access to the sea. 

The signalmen’s access to or from their homes in Little Port Cooper was rarely by land, for it was a long, lonely walk through farmland to Camp Bay, Purau and Diamond Harbour. Their links were mostly with Lyttelton itself and were by sea. [5] 

All supplies came across the harbour from Lyttelton by mail boats or by a Harbour Board dredge or tug. A complicating factor was the fact that the Lyttelton Harbour Board regularly dumped spoil from harbour dredging in Little Port Cooper and Camp Bay. There are voluminous records detailing the amount of spoil extracted and deposited over the years and an equally voluminous correspondence between those who argued that the dumping affected the navigability of bays and those who asserted no impact at all.

In March 1908 the Harbour Improvement Committee recommended that the Lyttelton Harbour Board approve the construction of a jetty at Little Port Cooper at a cost of £475 [6]. By August 1908 “progress with the jetty at Little Port Cooper had been slow, but the jetty was now out about 250 feet out of 475 feet. Another month should see the work finished.” [7]

Little Port Cooper c. 1890,  before the long jetty was built, Canterbury Museum

Plans for the jetty at Little Port Cooper, Archives NZ, ECan

We have a number of (partial) photos of the completed jetty and of the signalmen’s accommodation.

Little Port Cooper (no date), Archives NZ, ECan

Little Port Cooper 1945, shortly before the settlement closed down and the houses were removed. 

Canterbury Museum

Over the decades the residents of Little Port Cooper were witness to, and involved in, a number of sea rescues. One nearly tragic incident in 1924 was reported in detail in the Christchurch Press. Five children from the Burns family (Jack Burns was the chief signalman at the time) had gone for a row in fine, calm weather. The children, aged between 13 and two years, paddled about in the 14ft dinghy, never more than two or three hundred yards from the jetty. Then, as it can do in Lyttelton Harbour, the weather changed suddenly and the boat was blown offshore into the more fierce seas. The older children rowed hard in the teeth of the gale, making for the comparative shelter of the cliffs at Adderley Head. However the anchor wouldn’t hold and an oar was lost in the heavy seas. Isabel, the oldest child, tried to swim to the shore beneath the cliffs to attach a rope to the rocks but the task proved impossible. In the meantime the Lyttelton tug had been alerted. It steamed down the harbour and spotted the dinghy heaving close to the rocks. With great difficulty and not before a crewman went overboard, the five frozen children were finally hauled on board the tug.

The tug is feeling her way into Little Port Cooper. It is nearly low tide, and she cannot make the jetty. On the end of the jetty are seen a few figures, the parents of the children and one or two other adults who comprise the little community. They are plainly tense with anxiety. “All safe” comes the megaphone voice from the tug, and there is an answering wave from the jetty. The children are brought up from below. There is another boat journey to be made, this time in charge of two seamen. Soon they are being hurried up to the house, to warm beds and a hot meal, no doubt. [8]

The difficulty accessing the jetty was raised by one of the signalmen in late 1927.  As a result of the deposition of spoil from the dredge Canterbury, there was an increased need to keep a channel clear for the tug or other ‘fair draught vessel’ calling at the Little Port Cooper wharf. [9]

By 1949 there was no longer any need for a manned signal station. The men were redeployed and the houses, with the exception of the small but exceptionally robust school building, were dismantled. 

Two upright posts by the orange buoy, and two diagonal posts almost submerged in the sand (foreground), are the only evidence we could observe of the long jetty (Jane Robertson)

The lonely schoolhouse – all that remains, along with some stone foundations, silver poplars and macrocarpas – of the once busy settlement (Jane Robertson)

[1] Star, 1 May 1883

[2] Ibid

[3] http://nolanfamilies.org/newsletter/TheNolan-19.pdf
[4] Star, 1 May 1883
[5] Mary Stapylton-Smith, Adderley to Bradley
[6] HIC minutes, LHB Archives NZ 
[7] Press, 6 August 1908
[8] Press, 12 May 1924
[9] Press, 1 November 1927