- Denniston, New Zealand
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Denniston 
DennistonCoordinates: 41°44′17″S 171°47′44″E / 41.73806°S 171.79556°E Country New Zealand Region West Coast District Buller District Denniston is a small settlement in the northwestern South Island of New Zealand. in the West Coast region. It is on the small Mount Rochfort Plateau in the Papahaua Ranges 600 metres above sea level, 18 kilometres north-east of Westport.
During the early years of the 20th century Denniston's population was close to 2000, due to the large coal mine close to the town. It is now little more than a ghost town, with a population of less than 50. The location, history and fate of Denniston are similar to those of Millerton, New Zealand.
Contents
Social History
An Overview
At one stage Denniston had a population that could justify having its own lodges, churches and sports clubs. It had its own RSA, its own Masonic Lodge, Druids Lodge, Orange Lodge and Buffaloes Lodge, and many other organisations and even at one time had a few pubs, the last of these, the Red Dog Saloon at Burnetts Face, closing in the 1960s. With the ground being too hard to dig graves, the deceased in early years were often shipped down the Denniston Incline to the cemetery at Waimangaroa. Later, when the road was constructed, it made things easier on the people living and working on the “Hill”. However in its early days, Denniston’s communities were well and truly isolated, the incline and the skipways forming the only real means of transportation around and off the plateau.
The Mount Rochfort Lodge No 29 RAOB
Part of the "Lost History" of the Denniston Community is the Fraternal Lodges and the important role they played in the community supporting their members or the dependents of members in hard times. At one stage Denniston boasted at least 1 representative lodge from each of the major fraternal orders. The earliest fraternal lodges to be formed at Denniston were no doubt of the Freemasons, Oddfellows and Orangemen. Later on, in the 1920s The Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes was established on the Hill. Before the introduction of television and social security people had to band together to support each other and also support the community. In most cases they did this through the fraternal lodges.
Nowadays the names "Oddfellows" or "Buffaloes" seem strange, a throwback to an era that when compared to today would seem Ancient. However in the era when Denniston was a major producer of coal, It paid to be in the lodge weather it was the Oddfellows or the Buffaloes or Both, for group financial aid and social reasons the lodge was the place to be in and formed the backbone of the community. The Fraternal Lodge provided a means to improving their members. Because the lodges provided group benevolence schemes and also a means for organizing social activity's there was a high demand in the old days from men who wanted to join the lodges.
In terms of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, The Mount Rochfort Lodge began because of the efforts of Bro. James Insull whom emigrated to the West Coast from South Wales in 1924. Being a Buff in the old Country He was desirous of forming a lodge at Denniston. He wasent alone. The Mount Rochfort lodge No 29 was issued with its Dispensation in 1925. The Lodge almost didn't start at all the Provincial Grand Secretary of Canterbury Bro. D.S.Jones having missed the train from Christchurch to Greymouth. Luckily however he had managed to post the Dispensation over to the Founders of Mount Rochfort Lodge a few days prior and they received it in time to start the lodge. The founders of the lodge were Bro. Thomas J Thomas KoM, Bro. James Henry Insull C.P., Bro Harry Pearson KoM and Bro James Smalley C.P. 7 Brothers of the Order were present for the consecration of the Lodge Rooms for use by a Buffalo Lodge. These Lodge Rooms were the Orange Hall Denniston. The consecration was duly carried out by Bro A Smith C.P. Grand Primo of The Grand Lodge of New Zealand. The Mount Rochfort Lodge having been inaugurated, new members were initiated into Order many of whom hailed from Burnetts face. The first Officers of Mount Rochfort Lodge were Bro. Pearson KoM (Worthy Primo) Bro.Insull C.P.(Alderman of Benevolence) Bro. J. Jones(City Marshall) Bro. T.J.Thomas (City Secretary) Bro. E Jones (City Tyler) Bro. B Blake (City Chamberlain) Bro. T Bethell (City Treasurer) Bro. Smart (City Registrar) Bro Hearne (City Constable) Bro. E Bethell (City Waiter) Bro. S Holbrock (City Minstrel) Trustees were Bro Pearson KoM and Bro. Holbrock. Auditors were Bro Smart and Primo Insull. The registration fee at the Lodge was 2/- out of which the Brothers decided that 6ds from each Registration would go into the benevolent fund of the Lodge. Once the lodge became established it really took off. Its support was no doubt due almost entirely to the fact that Denniston was for a time rather isolated. Accordingly the Lodge was one of the few community activities available to the local men. With the establishment of the lodge on Denniston The Mount Rochfort lodge no 29 became the "Mother Lodge" of the West Coast for the Buffaloes Order. The Dispensation for this lodge (now located in the RAOB Museum of New Zealand) being proof of its establishment. This Dispensation contains no written number on it at all however the Lodge is officially No 29 on the Roll of the Grand Lodge of New Zealand whilst its Grand Lodge of England Number is 4656.
During its boom years the Mount Rochfort Lodge was getting up to 40 members a meeting. This is a marked improvement from its early years. For the first six months after the lodge had opened it was averaging around 13.5 attendances a meeting. Another six months after that the attendances were up to around 18-19 a meeting. During the boom years of the Order, the lodge did much to assist its members, providing the usual benevolence grants and sickness grants to members in need as well as to the orphans of members. Because of such a social mechanism as the lodge, organizations such as the Buffaloes were very strong in the communities of the West Coast Coalfields during the heyday of "Coast" in the middle 20th century, Of the Buffaloes, aside from Mount Rochfiort Lodge there were lodges established at the following locations. Wesport(Kowhai Lodge No 40 Established July 8, 1927 Closed 2004) Fairdown (Prosperity Lodge No 62) Greymouth (Harbour Lodge No 73) Runanga (Runanga Lodge No 74) Blackball (Blackball Lodge No 80) Wallsend (Rocky Island Lodge No 83) Millerton (Lookout Lodge No 127) Reefton (Bucks Head Lodge No 190) As can be seen there were enough RAOB Lodges on the Coast to eventually justify the establishment of two Provincial Grand Lodges. Originally The West Coast Lodges came under the auspices of the Canterbury Provincial Grand Lodge NZC of GLE, however, with the establishment of the first four Minor Lodges came the deamand and the desire for local Governance of the Lodges. And so The West Coast Provincial Grand Lodge was formed being initially responsible for the whole of the West Coast. This changed a few years later when a second Provincial Grand Lodge, to manage the lodges of the Greymouth area and south of Greymouth and called the Westland Provincial Grand Lodge, was established in the 1950s.
In 1943 Bro. J.H.Insull RoH, one of the founders of the Mount Rochfort Lodge No 29, was Elected to the position of the Grand Primo of New Zealand. The following year Grand Lodge Conference was held at the Buffalo Temple Wesport. Also in the 1940s the Mount Rochfort Lodge No 29 was still recorded as having met at the Orange Lodge Hall Denniston. By the Mid 1960’s however the lodge had changed to the Denniston RSA Hall on Alternate Saturdays (this according to the 1967 RAOB world Lodges Directory).
When the famous Denniston Incline closed the Mount Rochfort Lodge No 29 relocated down to Waimangaroa where many of the remaining people on the hill had relocated to, leaving just a handful of hardy locals on Denniston. In 1969, according the RAOB World Lodges Directory, the Mount Rochfort Lodge No 29 met in the Waimangaroa Community Hall. Interestingly, Mount Rochfort Lodge didn't finally close up until 1996! It's then Secretary signing by saying that the Lodge closed with "sorrow". The whole of the West Coast’s Two Provincial Grand Lodges had folded up by 2004 when the last vestiges of the West Coast PGL closed along with Kowhai Lodge No 40. Buffaloism on the West Coast is now confined it would appear to one solitary lodge, Greymouth Lodge No 306, a lodge established in more recent times circa 1980.
Information for this article was researched and derived from several resources most notably the Recollections of the Late Bro. James Insull RoH LM Past Grand Primo of NZ 1943, founder of the Buffaloe Order on the West Coast of the South Island. His Recollections in typed format are located in A Private Lodge Museum in the North Island. A complete copy of the Original Mt Rochfort Lodge Members book was also perused from which much valuable information was gained.
Industrial history
Denniston Incline, ca 1880s-90s
Denniston was the location where coal from mines on the Denniston Plateau would come to be sorted and dispatched into "Q" Class Hopper wagons for shipment to industry. The wagons would descend the famous Denniston Incline.
The Denniston incline was a steeply graded incline railway that linked Denniston with Conns Creek, the railway terminus at the bottom of the incline. The incline fell 510 metres in 1.7 kilometres, with some sections having gradients over 1 in 1.3 Westcoast.org. The track gauge was the standard NZR track gauge of 3 ft 6 inches and the system was designed to provide coal for coal ships at Westport. The wagons used on the incline were the ubiquitous “Q” class hopper wagons that could be detached from their wagon bodies and lifted by wharf crane over the hold of a ship, and the bottom discharge doors of the wagons opened manually to discharge coal into the ships' holds.
The 'Incline' was actually two inclines. The first of the two began at the top at Denniston, and descended steeply until it got to the appropriately named "Middle Brake". Here the wagon was disconnected from the first incline's rope, and placed on the rope of the second incline for a more gentle descent to Conns Creek, where the accumulated wagons would then be marshalled into trains to be taken to the port of Westport for unloading into coal ships.
The Denniston incline worked by means of gravity operation. One loaded wagon of coal going down the incline would pull an empty wagon up. The braking system of the winding drums used water to slow the pistons of the drums. One of these drums, the drum from Middle Brake, can be found at Westport's coal mining museum, Coaltown.
The two inclines were single line operation with passing loops. It was at these “passing loops” where the empty and full wagons were expected to cross, although this was not always the case as can be attested to by former incline staff, their recollections of head-ons and near misses being backed up by the few wagons still lying beside the incline formation that never made it down the line because of head-on collisions. The up side was known as the "Donkey Side". The down side was known as the "Company Side". A wagon going down would come down the “company” side, pulling an empty up the “donkey”.
The incline had many accidents and a number of workers or people traversing the incline route in its era of operation died as a result of collisions and runaways.
Denniston was always a working town; its life was the coal. The community at Denniston served no other purpose than to support the operations of the coal mines and the incline. Once the road was put through, people started to drift off Denniston to the warmer climate of Waimangaroa since it is said that the weather on Denniston is not for the faint of heart and is not the place many would consider to be an idyllic existence. The first of Denniston's communities to suffer the pinch were quite naturally the smaller settlements such as Burnett’s Face, the town half a mile up the plateau, whose main road was the constantly-running narrow gauge skipway linking the coal face with the Bins at the head of the Denniston Incline. Burnett's Face was always a rough and ready outpost on the edge of civilisation, and by the 1950s little remained of the settlement. The skipway which had been used to convey coal from the mines to Denniston since the early days of the Denniston Incline, was replaced in 1952 with an aerial ropeway.
By the 1960s the writing was on the wall for the Denniston Incline and the decision was taken to close it by 1969, the actual last day of operation being 16 August 1967. The Conns Creek branch which connected to the foot of the incline was cut back to a siding about 1 mile long where the coal was loaded from trucks. A few months later the aerial ropeway from the mines also closed down in favour of direct trucking of coal from the mine to Waimangaroa. In May 1968 the Inangahua earthquake caused much damage to the incline, making the closure irreversible. With declining coal markets, and the fact the system was almost entirely reliant on the outdated "Q Class Wagons", it was seen to be more cost effective to truck any remaining coal from the plateau down the hill via the public road, rather than rebuild the Incline. Thus what was once described as the "Eighth Wonder of the World" by locals, faded into history. An estimated 12 million tons of coal was carried in the incline's working life.[1]
The closure of the incline didn’t necessarily mean the end of mining, and some coal mining activity remained on the plateau, albeit with the output being trucked down the hill.
The Incline’s remains and the formidable community of the Denniston Plateau slowly diminished over time following the closure of the incline in 1968, the relics of the past slowly disappearing. However, interest in Denniston has continued to grow, and this growth and interest in Denniston has been aided by a recent novel by Jenny Pattrick entitled “The Denniston Rose”.
With recognition of the historic nature of Denniston and its increasing status as a local tourist icon and one that is close to Westport, attention was needed immediately to ensure that what was left of the settlement and its coal mining past wasn’t completely lost forever. As a result a band of enthusiastic dedicated locals set about working to preserve Denniston’s heritage and interpret it in an effective way for the benefit of people making a pilgrimage to one of NZ's most infamous coalfield settlements.
Recent works include restoration of some of the rail tracks in the yard area where the coal loading bins were located, and this work also includes the restoration of a genuine "Q" Class coal wagon, permanently moored to some rail track laid on the precipice that is the top ledge of the incline just as it drops down from the yard level onto the incline, thus giving visitors an insight into what the incline would have been like in its operating days.
A side trip to Denniston is always recommended, but will depend on the weather and you will need a car. You can access the settlement of Denniston by road. At the top, you will find what is left of the once sprawling settlement, a few houses, the old school hall which houses the local museum, and a few other buildings as well as the rusting entrails and remnants of the town’s industrial past.
Coal is still mined in the area, at the Stockton coal field.
References
- ^ Coaling From the Clouds, R J Meyer, NZRLS 1971.
External links
Categories:- Buller District
- Ghost towns in New Zealand
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