St Pauls Papanui Cemetery - Christchurch City Libraries

Sarah Travis, 65, died on 7 May 1897. William, 83, died on 20 December 1910.
William left his housekeeper 450 pounds. The rest of the property was divided equally
among the four children, the sons, Edward and William Henry, being trustees of their
sisters’ shares. Edward got the western half of the swamp; William Henry the eastern
half of ‘my farm at Burwood known as Travis Swamp’.
Area 4
Row B
No. 278-282
Rhodes
This is a large square concrete plot with five headstones inside.
Sophia Latter, 76, ‘relict’ or widow of a Lyttelton merchant, Robert Latter, was the
mother of Sophia Circuit Rhodes, mother-in-law of Robert Heaton Rhodes senior and
grandmother of Sir Robert Heaton Rhodes. She died on 7 March 1878.
Robert Heaton Rhodes senior was the sixth surviving son in a family of 14 children
born to Theodosia Maria Heaton and her husband, William Rhodes, a tenant farmer in
the southernmost corner of Yorkshire in the district surrounding Doncaster.
An older brother, William Barnard Rhodes, the first to come to New Zealand, looked
down from the Port Hills at the site of Christchurch He noted that he had seen the
Plain and two pieces of bush. ‘All the land that I saw was swamp and mostly covered
with water’.
Three of William’s siblings settled in the Antipodes, Robert Heaton, Joseph and
George. Robert arrived in Australia in 1837 and, at William’s instruction, spent 13
years driving sheep and cattle between various settlements. He bought stock to
Lyttelton as arrangements for the Canterbury Settlements were getting under way in
1850. William, the ‘Millionaire of Wellington’, was now the controlling personality in
a vast family pastoral business, William Barnard and George being active in the South
Island while Joseph held property in Hawkes Bay.
Within the Canterbury Block, Robert and George ran a farm at Purau. From there they
supplied Lyttelton and Christchurch with fresh meat and vegetables. The two men
drove stock to an area outside the Block and there George established the famed
Levels Station which was named after the area whence the family came in Yorkshire.
James Hay thought that the brothers had ‘sterling qualities … [and were] just the right
sort of men for starting as young colony’. Alfred Cox described Robert as ‘active
minded, practical, persevering and thrifty’. The genteel looked down on the family
because they had not been to university and, beside planning their enterprises, also
laboured manually so that they might be carried out. Henry Sewell described Robert
as ‘a substantial old Shagroon, wealthy and respectable but uneducated and with a
hankering after cheap land’. Writing of the sheep men who were a powerful influence
in the Canterbury Provincial Council, Crosbie Ward described Robert as:
The hard-headed one from Yorkshire.
He the prince of all the squatters, largest holder of run holders.
St. Paul’s Papanui Cemetery
2007
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