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their side was much too bare-faced. David Thomas and Joseph Sealy, the leading councillors, were prepared to support Reid in his self-appointed role of ‘village Hampden’ but not at the cost of championing private interests possibly in costly litigation.

On 24 August the county engineering staff shut off the supply of water, apparently while completing the change in the race. On 25 August, men sent from the mill opened the channel again. Next day a contingent from the council replaced the dam and, a day later, ‘a strong posse sent by the millmen’ opened the intake again. For several days nothing further was done and then both council and millowners sent altogether about a hundred men to the site, where the two parties took turns, ‘in the most amicable spirit’, in undoing each other’s work. As the Ashburton Guardian commented: ‘Those who anticipated a disturbance evidently undervalued the good sense of the men’.^[1]

One reason why ill feeling flared into open dissension could be found in the self-interested meddling of a recently started newspaper, the Standard. Ivess had turned on his tracks and founded this third local journal. Wright, whose water bill had probably sparked off the dispute, was also county chairman, and Ivess, by misreporting and misinterpretation, encouraged Reid to see events in personal terms. Having reached its foolish climax, the dispute subsided. The millowners capitulated, handed full control of the intake and creek to the County Council, met all the council’s legal and other costs and paid rent for their supplies of water. The county’s charge for water to the borough more than doubled. But it was of more consequence that the dispute aroused regrets that the borough had missed the opportunity to install a piped water supply. At one meeting during that August (1898) W. H. Collins contrasted Ashburton’s ‘plight’ with ‘the happy position of Timaru and Oamaru’ which had their high pressure systems. This was a different attitude from that of Councillor Alfred Harrison who, in 1886, had pointed complacently to Ashburton’s freedom from the debt and high rates which were crippling Oamaru.

The decision of the Ashburton Borough Council not to raise the water supply loan in spite of strong support for it at the poll of 1879 set the tone for the administration of borough affairs during almost the whole of this period. Economy was the chief characteristic of borough finance and almost the lowest town rate in New Zealand was the chief result.

The most immediately apparent outcome of a succession of