Canterbury beginnings

THE Lyttelton Times, which celebrated its 70th birthday on Tuesday, may well look back with some degree of satisfaction to the printed record of its nativity, and that feeling should not be listened to by a comparison of its appearance as a newborn journalistic infant with its present air of full bodied maturity in journalistic stature. We have before us a copy of the first issue of the Lyttelton Times, published on

January 11, 1851, when it was launched as quite a diminutive weekly production. The contents are highly

interesting, and not least so the comprehensive editorial introducing the new journal to the public. Here it is observed: “It probably never before happened that a resolution was formed to print and publish a weekly journal upon the shores of a bay situated at the remotest corner of the globe, when, at that time, the surrounding country was a desert, and where scarcely 20 human habitations were in existence.” However, it must have been gratifying to the founders of the journal to be able to record in their first issue an increase in the population of the settlement in one day from 300 to 1100, this being the result of the arrival of the “three first ships” — the Charlotte Jane, the Randolph, and the Sir George Seymour each bringing its complement of immigrants. The record also stands of the serious loss to the colony sustained in the death of three of the five cows landed from the ships, one falling over a cliff, and the other two indulging in a diet of tutu.