On the morning of the twenty-first of November 1849 the road gang on the hill
above Lyttelton put their tools down and went off the job.
Canterbury did not exist yet. It had a name, a surveyor's grid on paper, and
nothing else. The gang they called Road Gang Number One had been in Lyttelton
since the second of September, sailed from Wellington on the Bee, a ship
chartered by the Canterbury Association: forty men, almost all Maori, most of
them Ngāti Toa, with three European supervisors.
Their first job was their own roofs. They built dwellings along the foreshore,
put up housing for their bosses, dug wells, planted a potato patch, and were
paid two shillings and sixpence a day. With those hands they formed Norwich
Quay, built Major Hornbrook's track, and started blasting the first
sections of the road that climbs to this pass — the Zig Zag — a few hundred
yards from where now you stand.
Then, in mid-November, it turned. George Compton, their supervisor,
dismissed a worker named Emo for laziness, let it be known a cut was coming,
and spoke to the crew with 'ill language', as the complaint filed with the
Canterbury Association puts it.
It was Canterbury's first industrial action. There was still no street, no
bank, no citizen anywhere in the province — only this road men were making.
It worked. The very next day Compton handed in his resignation. A foreman,
Baker Polhill, took over the gang, and work resumed. Word went round the
hills; Canterbury's Ngāi Tahu came down and signed on, and the forty grew to
seventy. The only complaint the supervisors entered on the books afterwards
was a few cases of drunkenness.
Then the money gave out. The Association was in debt, and in April 1850 John
Robert Godley, its chief agent, stopped the road works and paid out the crews.
Of the gang he wrote in his journal: 'most civil, good-natured fellows,
laughing immoderately at our questions, and chattering broken English very
fast in reply', and the men, he reported, set off for home carrying plenty
of money.
A year later the argument turned around. A few days before the first
settlement ships anchored, in December 1850, the European diggers on the same
rock refused to work beside Maori who took the same sixpence an hour as
themselves. Godley held the line. He fired the grumblers, hired more Maori in
their place, and the European men came back next day, at the same rate. The
dispute was settled the way the first one was: the rate didn't move.
And the supervisor who lost that first walkout, George Compton, did not go
far. He went into partnership with Major Hornbrook, the man whose track the
gang had built, and ran the Mitre, Lyttelton's oldest pub, a short street
from here. The gang he had tried to cut went home rich.
The rate never moved after that. Same shovel, same pay — won once against
the supervisor's cut, and again when the European diggers grumbled at the
same rate for the same work. The road and the town that followed went up on
the wages they had struck for. The road is a walk now; the rule is not.
Source
Peeling Back History