SEEN BY ONE OF THE OLD HANDS

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 90, 13 October 1934, Page 14

SEEN BY ONE OF THE OLD HANDS

(By "Mai

High on the fastnesses of Mount Victoria, whore Wellington's well-known ozone is kept in fresh condition by zephyrs, winds, gales, and other climatic conveniences there lives a man who claims to be one of the happiest fellows alive and who, if you have a kindly light in your eye, will probably call you "honey." That's Bill Lanliam; a figure in local shipping circles who has seen Wellington grow up and probably knows as much about nautical matters as all the harbour boards in New Zealand put together. In a short time Mr, Lanham is going to turn in his job as the official in charge of. the Mount Victoria signal station; but he's going to be sorry about it. He just wants to keep on working and maybe he wants to die with his boots on; but in the meantime he feels fit to run up 170 ft of ratlines- or so to furl a sail. So he told me.

He is now nearly 66—and he's not ashamed of it either, Over 39 years of that time he has spent perched on the tops of Mount Victoria and Beacon Hill, Seatoun Heights. It's a pretty long time to stay up in the air about anything, but, if the wind I struck going up Mount Victoria this week was any sample of what they usually.get there, it.'s no wonder he feels young and

healthy. It's tho open air job that counts, he said to me and took me up to the top of the hill where tine wind was playing draughts at 30 mriles an hour or so. I believed him.

At 12 years of ago Bill Lanham took to the sea. None of your big-timie liners with hot baths and jazz orchestras in those days. But real ships. He rattled a few of them off for- me-^Kentish Lass. Sarah Pile, barque Colleen, ship Grasmere, barque Nautilus, brig Peerless, brig Ikavuka, barque Kafeha, and brig.Prospero. Ikavuka, he added, was Fijian for flying fish. At fourteen'years of age he was aboard n ship hounding Capo Horn; some of the really tough days that make modern sefimaiiship look like pleasure cruising. And then the steamors: the old Wainui, Mawhera, Wariatea, Neptune, Penguin,: Taiaroa, Stormbird, Neptune, and Te Anau. He served about fourteen years with ship? before taking a shore position at the Beacon Hill signal station. During his life at sea he was connected chiefly with the intercolonial arid Pacific trades. ' :

Beacon Hill —he has manj? memories of the old days when the tramlines ran only to the foot of Constable Street and the pilots and signalman out Seatoun way used to think nothing of walking that far. The Worser Bay pilot station, which was mentioned recently in these columns, was about a mile and a half away from the HiE. In July, 1917, he shifted camp to Mount Victoria and there he has beem ever since, while about him has risen a now Wellington. Standing up on the heights playing hide and seek with the northerly gale, he pointed but to me where in days gone by he had lived—a spot which Hope Gibbons's building now occupies. The Levy Building property now occupies a site which was then part of the beach which curved up: to where the Duke of Edinburgh Hotel now stands. Mr. Lanham recalls the days when sailing ships took ballast from near Stewart Dawson's corner and when there were shipbuilders' yards where Farish Street is now located. Those w,ere tho times when houses in Taranaki Street and • Cuba Street had gardens. ... He has seen them all, the relentless changing of,the years, new streets and buildings and people; and the result—a new city rising on the site of a Wellington known to very few of Us. Eemote from/ the capital and yet in the midst of it he has seen thoroughfares creep -op the hillsides and after them follow homes. North and south and east and west it has been the same", the relentless expanding of a city, the restless crowding and breaking away. Kilbirnie, Miramar, Lyall Bay, and Seatoun, Brooklyn and Newtown, Wadestowjr and Kelburn and Karori, Ngaio and" Khandallah. The greater part of their growth has occurred during his life in Wellington, for he was born in Molesworth Street. And as for ships—-ivell, he probably knows, more about the history of shipping in this port tSian any other man who has learned fflom his own experience.

WELLINGTON GROWS. UP—AND UP