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backs remained—the absence of high pressure water and full household sewerage, the second being a direct consequence of the first.

The town’s need of a water supply was as great as that of the country. The County Council recognized as much when the borough was established and voted £5000 towards any scheme which the Borough Council decided on. The latter body began to plan for a high pressure system which would meet all needs for drinking, for household use, for fire-fighting and for flushing the gutters in the streets. There were even at times suggestions of full sewerage. It accepted a scheme drawn up by C. E. Fooks, ordered £4000 worth of pipes from London and at a poll on 17 July 1879 obtained the agreement of the ratepayers to the raising of a water supply loan of £15,000. Of this amount £7000 was to supplement the £5000 grant and pay for the water-works. The remaining £8000 was to provide ‘underground and surface drainage for the . . . Borough’.^[1]

The depression was already making itself felt, but the citizens did not hesitate, voting three to one in favour of the loan. It was the council which drew back and sentenced the town to thirty years of inconvenience and sometimes of deprivation and ill health.

At one of the earliest meetings of the council (December 1878) its water committee recommended ‘that a temporary supply of water be brought through the Domain into the Dry Gully immediately for fire prevention purposes . . .”. Some seven wells already sunk in the streets were apparently not thought sufficient. It became usual afterwards to declare that nature had pointed the way to this method of obtaining an easy supply, because an overflow of the river which flooded the town in October 1878 enabled the brigade to extinguish a blaze before it reached the main block of business premises.

To this ‘temporary’ plan the council returned after more than a year of wrangling over various high pressure schemes. It involved using the inlet for the mill stream, near the original Ashburton homestead, and significantly its chief advocate was Edward Saunders, a proprietor of the mill. Nevertheless the Saunders brothers immediately found fault with the agreement drawn up by the borough solicitor, and the document was amended to secure ‘a full supply of water for their mill’. James Wilkie obtained the contract and by June 1880 completed the race and pipe laying which carried the water into the domain and thence