Mr Locke at Wairoa.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 984, 5 October 1881, Page 3

Mr Locke at Wairoa.

Mb. J. W. Witty has addressed a letter to the Wairoa Guardian in which, amongst other things, he says : —Mr. Locke, at his “ preliminary meeting,” had merely given us a long yarn of old times in the Wairoa—how he and 16 men had overawed seme 500 or 600 Hauhaus —a statement which highly amused myself and several other of Fraser’s old company who were present, who remembered the episode of those days and Mr. Locke’s “ Block-house Warriors," as we used to call them, although we failed to re-

member Mr. Locke’s rank as Head Trumpeter in those times and certainly thought that any praise for action taken in the matter, before the arrival of Fraser, Biggs, Wilson, and Richardson, was due to the then R.M , Mr. Samuel Deighton, and the late respected Captain John Jude Taylor, but we. found we had been giving credit where it was not due, and we “ sat corrected." Mr. Locke had also told us how he had purchased a lot of Native land, some 300,000 acres between here apd Waikare Moana. Here, again, we “ sat corrected]' for we had all given the credit of purchasing the greater portion of this land to Mr. Josiah Hamlin and Mr. Maney, and we had, also, ignorantly imagined that a large portion of this land was confiscated by the late Sir Donald McLean, to whom we had also, until Mr. Locke lightened our darkness, given the credit of having acquired the township of Clyde and its immediate vicinity.

Mr. Locke also told us that no dispute had ever arisen with respect to the title to any of this land, and that dispelled a foggy notion that we had entertained that the Government (i.e. the ratepayers) had to pay Messrs. Cable and Co. some £5OOO as compensation for relinquishing a title granted to them for Tukurangi or some other portion of this land acquired by Mr. Locke, and for the acquisition of which he told us the Government thanked him We had imagined, erroneously it appears, that his services had received a more substantial reward, especially after reading that one of his assistants had claimed £l5OO for his small share in the transaction. In the matter of the telegraph line to Poverty Bay coming this way instead of as usual with anything under the control of the circumlocution office, making a circumbendibus via Taupo, Tauranga, and Opotoki, we were also enlightened that the suggestion was due to Mr. Locke, and not as we had previously thought to the practical common sense of Mr. Bold.