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under the railway line to the Post Office and the side channels of the town.^[1]

The success of this quite elementary project received an almost rapturous welcome. A local reporter informed Christchurch and indeed the whole of Canterbury that ‘a living stream flowing down each street, with a delightful sheet of water and a winding stream in the public Domain are the result of the Borough’s promptness and the Engineer’s skill’.^[2] It was perhaps the same reporter who returned to the subject five years later and made higher claims for the scheme. He wrote, with some justification, that ‘the water had made a park out of a wilderness’, especially as he admitted that Fooks had also helped. However, when he claimed that the engineers had made ‘for £1500 what did as well as the £15,000 scheme proposed would have done’,^[3] he was wildly astray. All that could be said in palliation of such a mis-statement was that the inadequacy of the town’s water supply had not yet been fully exposed.

In the first place, no large fire had tested the supply in the channels; during the decade there had been none, it seemed, except for those which fortunately cleared out the flimsier of the shanties. An agitation for a steam fire-engine encountered the objection that such a plant would have done little good in the previous ten years and was likely to benefit only those who would save on fire insurance premiums. Moreover, only a few streets were served by water and extending the supply, for example to Aitken Street, would be expensive. In 1889 the fire brigade obtained a steam plant, called ‘The Pride of Ashburton’ but, as the Ashburton Guardian commented: ‘Fortunately Ashburton holds a sort of charmed existence so far as fires are concerned, and as yet, notwithstanding the possession of an excellent plant and a Brigade that has given a remarkably good account of itself in many a competition with the best Brigades of the Colony—its 5-man time is the New Zealand record of the day—there has been no opportunity given to the Brigade to fight the fire demon. May the opportunity be long withheld!’^[4]

Under these conditions the brigade developed into a select club, entry into which was obtained only after election by the committee and approval by the Borough Council. The town felt so little dependent on its services that a councillor even described it as a ‘Mutual Admiration Society’. It was most in evidence during its