The hotel that stood on this corner for nearly 150 years was named for a man the city called "the patriarch among licensed victuallers." William Francis Warner was a sailor before he was a publican. He arrived in 1861 as second mate of the Rhea Sylvia; somewhere in mid-ocean a passenger fell overboard and Warner jumped in after him, and both were saved. He explored the West Coast with Julius von Haast, among the first to cross the main divide, and in 1873 took over the Commercial Hotel here and renamed it Warner's. A jovial man with an inexhaustible stock of yarns, he was commodore of the New Brighton Sailing Club.
On the last night of February 1896, Warner went down to Sumner with two younger men, James Murray, the 32-year-old licensee of the New Brighton Hotel, and Herbert Stewart, late of the New Brighton tramways, to bring the 18-foot yacht Waitangi up the estuary to race the next day. The survivor, a baker named Harry Hawker, told the Star what happened. They waited in a shed at Monck's jetty until half-past midnight for the wind to drop. About a mile up the channel a puff of wind struck the boat broadside and turned her over. She was waterlogged at once. The three stood on the hull; Hawker took the main sheet, gave one end to Warner, and tried to swim the twenty-five yards ashore with the other end clamped in his teeth. The tide was too strong, the rope too short. He had to let go. He crawled across the mudflats to a house a mile away, raised the man who lived there, and went back out in a punt, but found nothing.
Murray's body was found on Saturday afternoon, Warner's on Sunday, about two hundred yards from where the boat lay. Stewart's took a week. Hawker was seriously ill.
The three funerals were among the biggest Christchurch had seen. Warner's, a cortege of about forty carriages, set out from the New Brighton Hotel and crossed the city, past this very corner, to the Riccarton cemetery. Prime Minister Richard Seddon sent flowers. The man who had jumped overboard to save a stranger in the Atlantic, and crossed the rivers of the South Island, drowned in the shallow waters of his own home estuary.
The hotel kept his name through a fire in 1900, a century of rebuilds, and the 2011 earthquake, which finally brought the old building down. The Novotel that stands here today wears a recreated copy of its 1901 face. Warner never saw any of it. He only lent it his name, and the name outlived him.
Source
Wikipedia