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Ashburton
(1859) he received a purse of fifty sovereigns from the Timaru people. This was a decided compliment, for although the Timaru district then extended to the Rakaia, its population was small and Timaru itself was little more than a hamlet. He obtained a better contract, too. To begin with, Baines carried the mails in leather bags slung on each side of a led horse, but by the end of 1858 he was using a conveyance as far as the Rakaia River. In June 1860 he began a combined passenger and mail service for the whole distance, and some six months later tried briefly to substitute a weekly service each way from both towns. When, in March 1861, this weekly service proved beyond Baines’s resources, Charles John Perceval took up the alternate week’s run. In popular memory, if perhaps not in reality, Perceval was a more colourful figure, the ‘man of title holding the ribbons on the coach’[1] although it was his son who succeeded to the family earldom. It appears that in the following year Baines and Perceval combined forces to provide a regular weekly connection both ways between the towns in forty-eight hours. However, in September 1862, D. H. Manning, who had been for two years on the road between Timaru and Christchurch with clothing and drapery, became Baines’s partner. The two then apparently introduced ‘two-horse Yankee coaches’.[2] The effort to improve conditions for their passengers may have been the reason for their failure in 1863.
When Charles C. Cole of Cole, Hoyt and Company introduced his Cobb and Company coaches into Canterbury, he began a new era in communications within the province. He had interests in Otago which he sold to his brother Henry, and he took another brother, Lee G. Cole, into partnership. They secured Samuel Stewart Griffin, a Canadian, as organizer and coachman. Griffin had driven in Australia after failing on the goldfields, had tried his luck again on the Otago goldfields and was prepared to return to the road. The firm bought Baines’s mail contract and his equipment, but they soon substituted their characteristic ‘Concord’ coach, the body of which was slung between the wheels by straps of six or eight thicknesses of leather. These coaches were comfortable compared with their predecessors, even if the rolling motion caused something akin to sea-sickness. More coaches were built and the firm reduced the time for the journey by leaving the vehicles on the banks of the Rakaia and Rangitata rivers, the passengers and mail crossing the rivers in punts. Griffin declared that ‘another enemy’ besides the rivers was fog. ‘There were no