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had successfully held a number of positions in commerce and the London Post Office before he emigrated at the age of twenty-seven years. He was short, perky, loquacious, by no means impressive or even attractive in appearance or manner, and overcareful of his health. Yet he became one of Canterbury’s foremost public men and administrators both in provincial and general governments. At the same time he built up a freehold estate out of the Terrace run of almost 30,000 acres, farmed it efficiently, and demonstrated on it the value of tree-planting. His brothers are of negligible importance.

By the end of 1854 applications for fifty-four runs covering the whole of the Ashburton plains had been made and most of them had been granted. These runs formed twenty-two stations or properties which extended along the river banks, lying back to back between the Rakaia and Ashburton and from river to river in the south. The marking of other boundaries awaited the arrival of surveyors. The land had thus been portioned out, but it was still largely uninhabited. The census of that year showed twenty-six people living between the Rakaia and Rangitata rivers. Most of them were shepherds for when the 1855 electoral roll was compiled only three householders were in residence in the region. They were Edward Chapman on Acton at the mouth of the Rakaia, Alfred Porter, manager of Rokeby, the next run inland, and John McLean on Glenfawin, the later Lagmhor, south of the Ashburton River.

Chapman had acquired two or three runs in July 1853. During the following years he bought the licences of five more runs from the first holders, until at the end of the decade he held 80,000 acres. Acton, named after his native village, then west of London, was the second largest station in the region under discussion. Only Double Hill, in the high country of the upper Rakaia, was larger. There were few bigger properties in the more accessible parts of Canterbury.

Porter did not remain long on the Rakaia. He was a member of the family which owned Castle Hill run and gave its name to Porters Pass on the West Coast Road.

Glenfawin or Lagmhor, which John McLean had only just taken over, lay on the eastern portion of the run claimed by Aitken from Colonel Campbell in 1851. The latter managed to award licences under the New Zealand Government’s land regulations for over fifty runs before in 1854 he was dismissed for incompetence