Charlotte Knight's Feud with the Tramway Company

On September 26, 1842, Charlotte Copp was born in Tiverton, Devon. She married John Knight in July 1858, and five years later, she arrived in Lyttelton on the *Accrington* with her husband and three children.

Charlotte gave birth to 24 children, and 15 of them survived their mother. Her 24th child was born in 1885. By the 1880s, the family was dairy farming at Aranui between Bexley and Breezes Road. The land was described as "cheap, though infertile" and "apt to be water-logged in winter and a desert in summer."

The Knights bought shares in the New Brighton Tramway Company and ceded land to them for a track from the Linwood Cemetery to the sea along what is now Pages Road. The company started a horse tram service in 1887. A dispute started between the Knights and the company, with the family claiming the company had promised to form a public roadway alongside the track and keep the drains clear, but failed to do so.

A feud followed. Charlotte, her husband, and their sons would use their cart to meander along the track to slow the trams. They also smashed the gates the company built at either end of its property and locked at night. Frank Thompson described Charlotte using a gorse stick to make outside tram passengers seek cover. Once, when a tram was delayed, a "pimply youth" used stern language with Charlotte. She asked him, "Do you call yourself a man?" and when he replied inarticulately, she scorned him, "Well, you don't look like one." Charlotte also used her position as a company shareholder to present her case at annual meetings.

The company took the family to court repeatedly, extracting fines they couldn't afford. Once, a court bailiff seized Charlotte's cart while she was driving through town. She refused to move, so the horse was taken out, and the cart was drawn around Oxford Terrace with Mrs. Knight sitting in it, making her "the laughing stock of hundreds of people." Another time, a runaway tramcar threatened John Knight, and he attacked the company employee with a pitchfork. A judge fined him one shilling but no costs. On another occasion, the company ruled that the Knight children "must not walk along the tram line to school any more."

W. A. Taylor said that in the 1890s, when he and other members of the Volunteer armed forces movement cycled through Aranui, they were allowed to pass in peace, and he commented that "Public sympathy was with Mrs Knight." Newspapers described Charlotte as of "imposing stature and formidable proportions" with a "deerstalker hat" and "amazonian tread." W. A. Taylor also said, "Mrs Knight was a burly woman, while Mr K was a 'squib' like me." Frank Thompson said she "chuckled greatly at her exploits" and called her a "warrior bold." G. R. Macdonald conceded that "she had become a famous character."

Charlotte died in December 1907 of "fatty degeneration of the heart" and was buried in the Linwood Cemetery.