The Price of a Cheap Day Out

On a summer's morning in 1906 the ten o'clock tram to Sumner was waiting

outside the Royal Exchange in Cathedral Square, and it was full. Four

carriages full, and the open-top decks stacked as well. It was a coal-fired

Kitson steam tram, sacks of coal riding on the seats for later, and the

leather-aproned driver was striding toward the cab past a conductor who had

done his job rather too well. Nobody at the Square thought anything of it.

Sumner was the cheapest day out a Christchurch family could buy. Eight miles

down the line, past the Heathcote crossing and along the cliffs, and you

were at the sea — Cave Rock, donkey rides, the Cafe Continental, the band

playing and fireworks going off from the rock at the first day of summer in 1890. The Tram Company organized all of it, not out of kindness. Every

round trip was a fare.

And they packed the trams to sell more of them. In 1898 a fourteen-year-old boy named Bowron tried to jump on a

moving Sumner tram, slipped between two cars, and a wheel ran over his leg

just above the knee. He was taken to hospital, where he died shortly after

admission. The papers told the story in full, gruesome detail, as was the

fashion of the day, and that was that.

It took a bigger accident to end the habit. In May 1919, at Heathcote, a

double-decker tram with two trailers, fully loaded, was coming up the line

late in the day when it overturned. Nine adults and five children were

badly hurt in the wreck, and twenty more were injured before it was done;

a passenger died. The accident itself — an overturn on a crowded evening

route — was recorded, but it was the inquiry that did the damage.

The Government appointed a commissioner, a stipendiary magistrate named

S. E. McCarthy, to find out how far the fault went. His finding, issued in

December, did not spare anyone: the tram and its trailers had been loaded

beyond the limit of safety; overcrowding was common practice; and the

Tramway Board connived at it, in his words, "for financial reasons." The

day out stayed cheap. Nobody in the Board ever stood trial for it.

Today the trams are gone. A photographer, Henry Thomson, would sit

on the cliffs above with his camera on summer evenings, waiting for the

last tram to pull out across the sand, and the picture he caught was pure

calm: empty beach, outgoing tide, one little train heading home. He never

photographed what it took to fill that train.