St Pauls Papanui Cemetery - Christchurch City Libraries

Duncan was the first Crown Prosecutor for the Supreme Court in Christchurch.
Although, in his later years, he left much of the work to J. C. Martin, he kept the title
till his death. Duncan was also the first President of the Law Society of Canterbury.
This was another position which he held until his death.
Duncan’s death, ‘not altogether unexpected [though] still all too sudden’, took place
at his Papanui home, on 22 December 1884. A daughter had died when very young.
The Crown Prosecutor was survived by his wife and six sons.
In April 1890 Duncan’s executors sold an irregular block of 10 acres 38 perches
embracing the area on which stand most of the present St. Andrew’s College
buildings and the north-west corner of the grounds to prominent merchant George
Gatonby Stead. It was after Stead’s death that the school was established.
The tombstone of T. S. Duncan was ‘erected by a number of … personal friends to
whom he had endeared himself by his generous and amiable qualities from the time
he landed in the colony’.
Duncan’s widow, Eliza Zephemia, died at Wellington on 13 July 1910 and was
interred at Karori.
Row C
No. 47
Alley
Sarah Ward claimed to have had an upper class Irish upbringing. A granddaughter
was to recall that:
Titled aunts, dukes and duchesses filled Grandma’s early days: visits to …
aunts in the brougham on Sundays; her father’s hunting; starving villagers
trying to snatch meat for the hounds from the loaded drays, then all younger
members of the family disappearing ‘as far as God had any ground’ in search
of land, as she had done with her brothers in the fifties.
On 20 September 1864, at St. Paul’s, Papanui, the Rev. Lorenzo Moore officiated at
the wedding of the genteel Sarah and John Alley, a farmer. Three children were born
to the couple, Henry (1865), Frederick (1866) and Amy Jane (1868). Two, Frederick
and Amy, were to become primary school teachers.
The Alleys had a property contiguous to the Sawyers’ Arms Hotel. At 5 p.m. on the
evening of 13 February 1869 John went out on horseback in search of stray pigs. He
did not return and, next day, his partner found him lying unconscious in a paddock,
the horse standing nearby with its foreleg broken. It was ‘so much injured that it was
found necessary to shoot it’.
John was taken home but, despite the ministrations of Doctor Prins and Dr. Coward,
he died, aged 34, at 6 p.m. on Sunday 14 February.
St. Paul’s Papanui Cemetery
2007
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