The Woman Who Held Up the Trams

Charlotte Knight was forty-five, she'd had twenty-four children, and a horse tram had just tried to run her husband over. Standing on the cheap, water-logged farmland of Aranui, she was the wrong person to pick a fight with.

She had arrived in Lyttelton in 1863 on the _Accrington_ with her husband John and three small children, an English labourer's daughter from Devon who would bear two dozen children and bury several of them. By the 1880s the family scratched out a dairy farm on land the newspapers called "cheap, though infertile", a quagmire in winter, a desert in summer. So when the New Brighton Tramway Company ran a line along what is now Pages Road, carrying day-trippers from Linwood out to the sea, the Knights bought shares and gave land, on the company's promise to build a public road alongside the track and keep the drains clear.

The company built the trams. It did not build the road. And it did not clear the drains.

What followed was one woman's war against a corporation. Charlotte, her husband and her sons would climb into their cart and meander slowly down the tram track, forcing the trams to crawl behind them. At night they smashed down the company gates built to keep the line locked. One moonlit night, tram stopped, Charlotte levelled a gorse stick at her shoulder like a rifle, and, wrote one witness, "the outside tram passengers sought cover with haste," while the Clerk of the Magistrate's Court dived headlong into the ditch. When a spotty youth shouted abuse at her, she asked whether he called himself a man, and when he made no answer, came back with "Well, you don't look like one."

The company hit back with lawsuits, extracting fines the family couldn't pay. Once, in town, the bailiff seized Charlotte's cart with her in it. She refused to get out. So they unhitched the horse and hauled the cart, with Charlotte still seated, around Oxford Terrace in the middle of the day, so all the city could watch her disgrace. Another time a runaway tram threatened John Knight, who answered by driving a pitchfork at the company's man, and an "understanding judge" fined him exactly one shilling, and not a farthing more.

She was called "imposing stature and formidable proportions," a burly woman in a deerstalker hat with an "amazonian tread." Her husband was "a squib." a term for a cowardly man popular back in the day. She kept her own case as a shareholder at the annual meetings, and the civilians cycling out to their camp at New Brighton passed through Aranui in peace, public sympathy entirely with Mrs Knight.

Did she win? Not really. She died in December 1907 of a failing heart, and was buried here to the west at Linwood Cemetery. But the chronicles of the city, who dubbed her a "warrior bold," and reached for Gray's famous poem to call her a "village Hampden," all tell it the same way: she never received satisfaction, and she wasn't bitter. She "chuckled greatly at her exploits." The tramway company spent years trying to crush her, and she went on making the city laugh, and the trams stop, in a deerstalker hat.