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theless depended on Grigg’s reputation and great enthusiasm to get the project off the ground. Grigg was elected chairman of the meeting of seventeen runholders and businessmen which decided, on his initiative and following his investigation, to form a company. Murray Aynsley, Hart, D. Gordon Holmes and Matthew Holmes were also present. They added Studholme, Wilkin and Gould to their committee.

The frozen meat industry did not attract the same degree of public attention in Ashburton as wheat production. While the local newspapers provided detailed accounts of the state of the harvest in each district every year, they made few references to the magnitude of the operations which enabled Grigg to remain by far the greatest supplier of the freezing works. He provided half of the frozen cargo in the British King in early 1883, the first such cargo to leave the port of Lyttelton. In the same year, he probably chartered the Mataura to take his own frozen lambs to England. The annual returns show that his flock increased from 10,000 in 1881 to 41,000 in 1892 and remained at about the latter figure. These numbers, on which he was rated, represent the holding on one particular day in May. Greater still, apparently, were the numbers of lambs bought, fattened and sent to the works for export. They amounted, according to one source,^[1] to as many as 80,000 in one year. Certainly 61,533 sheep were trucked at Winslow in the year 1894-5, and the average for sixteen years was almost 40,000.

No similar figures are available for Springfield although over 100,000 sheep went outwards on the Methven line in four separate years in the 1890s. Indeed Cameron prided himself on sharing with Grigg much of the credit for maintaining the frozen meat industry, by guaranteeing the supply of sheep from twelve to eighteen months ahead and thus ensuring the supply of shipping.

The frozen meat company did not deal in mutton. It killed sheep, processed the carcasses and provided for their transport to Britain. Individual suppliers had to arrange their own sales usually in London and so only the larger farmers and runholders were able to participate, directly, in the trade. Smaller men could only sell to dealers. In 1889, therefore, Cooke started a second freezing company which proposed to buy sheep from farmers. He expected to make a profit largely from full use of the by-products. The new concern, known at first as the Christchurch Meat Company, later adopted the name of a subsidiary, the New Zealand Refrigerating