From a cart in the south-east corner of this Square, outside the old Bank of
New Zealand, a man named Sali Mahomet sold ice cream to Christchurch for
forty years. Everyone called him Ice-cream Charlie, and his cart stood so
squarely in the middle of town that people said the sight of him and his
ice cream was the official beginning of summer.
He was a Muslim from Asia in a mostly European, Christian city — a
dark-skinned man who hawked household goods across Otago and Canterbury by
horseback in the 1890s before a riding accident left him with a limp and a
shoe built up, and sent him looking for gentler work. In 1903 he had a cart
built, painted white and bright red with gold patterns, bought a recipe,
and stood where you are now standing.
Sali's ice cream was a serious business. He roasted vanilla beans in his
home oven, had a city druggist make his fruit syrups and essence, churned
the mix before dawn, and packed the finished product in ice for the trip
into the Square. He sold from August to April, saying that in the other
months "you can keep cool without an ice-cream." His wares cost from a
penny to a shilling. At the end of a long day, small and well-behaved
children were rewarded with one of Charlie's products.
In 1906 he married Florence Johnstone, a nineteen-year-old domestic, in one
of the few mixed-race marriages the town had seen; he gave his age as
twenty-seven, though he was about forty. The business paid for a kauri
house on Caledonian Road, with a bay window, rose patterns on the ceiling,
and electricity run specially to his outhouse dairy. He was generous with
his money, and at Christmas supplied St Albans people, orphanages, and the
asylum with his ice cream.
He was also, for the times, quietly brave. When a neighbour's house caught
fire, Sali and Florence gave up their large bed to the distraught wife and
her two children. During the First World War he was abused as a "Turk";
youths shouted racist names at him in the street, and the short, rotund man
would try to chase them from his cart. In the late 1930s he employed an
orphan lad who went off to the Second World War and was killed; the sad
ice-cream seller received the young man's personal possessions.
In 1942, he was struck down by a stroke, and a legal firm defrauded him of
his savings. The family had to sell the kauri home he was so proud of and
move to a small house in Addington. He died in 1943 and is buried in
Linwood Cemetery, next to his father. His cart survives — preserved at
Ferrymead Historic Park, still painted red and white and gold, waiting for
the open road to the Square.