BYGONE CUSTOMS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 May 1939, Page 8

BYGONE CUSTOMS

NEWSPAPER ADVERTISEMENTS IN 1860. It is not always in the news columns of old newspapers that we can learn most about bygone times and manners. The advertisement columns of such a paper as the “New Zealand Spectator” are full of interesting sidelights. The issue of July 11, 1860, gives us'the information that totara timber was selling at 14s per hundred feet, that a dentist’s hours were 10 a.m. to 4 p.m„ and that desirable building sites were for sale in the town of Beaver, the old name for Blenheim. “It possesses a newspaper and a Customs House” are mentioned as attractions. Old Dr Jac-' ob Townsend’s “Sarsaparilla,” to purify the blood,” vies with Holloway’s Ointment, “The Cure for the Million,” for the privilege of keeping the public healthy. Importing firms specially advertised the miscellaneous stocks, including furniture, just arrived by the last boat. The “Spectator” itself was in business selling books and charts. Carlyle’s “French Revolution” and the , latest by Thackeray, Tennyson and Dickens could be bought by readers who wished to be right up to the minute. The Wellington Grammar School was shortly to open under the headmastership of H. Beechy to teach Latin, Greek, Mathematics, French, German Pianoforte, “with the usual 'branches of a sound commercial education” as well. There is a reminder that the Maori War was in progress in the advertisement of Captain Jerningham Wakefield (son-of the great Edward Gibbon) calling for volunteers for the Wellington Yeomanry Cavalry, to provide their own mounts and accoutrements. But an insurance company had a cold douche to apply to all but this moderate martial ardour, rather underlining that the Volunteers were only for home defence. . It extended its ordinary life cover to men in the Volunteers but any policy-holder enlisted in the militia, at grips with the Maoris, would have to pay an extra two and a half per cent on their premiums.