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branch of the Ashburton River dried up. No water flowed into the domain or down the Wakanui Creek. However, acting at the first request from the borough, Baxter tapped the south branch of the river in order to maintain the flow at the mill intake. Nevertheless the connection did not always serve its purpose. Often enough, but especially in 1895 and 1897, the street channels, into which drained kitchen sullage and even urine, were allowed to dry with noisome results.

Resentment at such failures of the water supply to the streets lay behind the quarrel which blew up in August 1898. Wright was presenting a Water Supply Bill to Parliament on behalf of a Christchurch conference on irrigation and one clause in it would have prevented the borough from obtaining water from the river without County Council permission. The mayor, Charles Reid, took three legal opinions on the position, and Sir Robert Stout, who became Chief Justice in the following year, declared that the borough had a perfect right to the water under the Municipal Corporations Act. Reid, therefore, suggested to the County Council ‘a friendly test case to settle the question of right’. Instead of acknowledging this absurd proposal—for the Borough Council had no money to waste—the County Council replied that its staff had almost completed a new intake and would turn on the water ‘pending an amicable agreement as to the quantity . . . to be supplied for the future’.^[1] Mayor and councillors objected strongly to thus being told, however politely, that they would get water but had no right to demand it. In any case, Wright had the offending clause amended to apply only to Greytown, for which it was intended.

At some stage during a very disturbed month Donald Williamson, one-time pioneer hotelkeeper but now the owner of the Ashburton homestead property, revoked all the Borough Council’s rights over the water race through his land, as that body had neglected to renew the lease. The millowners then offered to hand over to the borough the intake headworks and their rights to draw water from the river and to pay £100 a year rent in return for a ‘perpetual supply’. Nothing had been settled in 1893^[2]. The Wakanui Road Board had taken up the cause of its ratepayers but had failed to get satisfaction from the millers, matters had been on the verge of litigation for some years, and the board had recently drawn the County Council into the dispute. However, the attempt now made by the millowners to enlist the Borough Council on