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Council invited the borough to join in its administration and support. Costs were shared in proportion to population, the county paying about ten times as much as the town. A small controlling committee was nominated by both councils. At the end of the period, this committee which had been under pressure for some time, allowed the local medical men to attend their own patients in the hospital. The argument advanced was hardly relevant; that patients were being lost to a recently established private hospital. Certainly numbers had declined. The committee thus recognized a practice which, though it probably caused no difficulty at that time, opened the way for trouble in the future.

Within its limited scope, the Ashburton hospital had a good record. The complaints made about the buildings appeared to be the result of rising standards of what was required by the authorities rather than of local decline. In any case it was paradoxical that while the hospital was probably the most expensive building in the town, the allied institution the old men’s home was housed in one of the meanest.

When Ashburton secured its own hospital, the district remained under the North Canterbury Charitable Aid Board. Local people protested at times that they paid excessive levies for the benefit of the Christchurch poor, and presented at least one petition to Parliament asking for separation. However, the connection with Christchurch was regularly in the public eye more because of the presence in Ashburton of the old men’s home for the whole of North Canterbury.

In 1878 the Charitable Aid Board, dissatisfied with the condition of the building used to house indigent men, transferred the twenty-three inmates to the one-time Ashburton immigration barracks. This action was taken against local objections that the place was unfit for habitation. Bullock, the mayor, received assurances that the measure was strictly a temporary one.

Soon afterwards, as a result, there arrived in Ashburton the most widely-known man to be buried there. The brilliant and unstable Edward Jerningham Wakefield, son of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, first came to New Zealand in 1839 at the age of nineteen. Five years later, driven out by political quarrels, he returned to England and in 1845 published ‘a vivid, amusing and prejudiced book’ on the early settlements and his own explorations. Adventure in New Zealand is quite the raciest account of life in New Zealand at the time. He then assisted with preparations for the Canterbury settle-