John Ralph Williams and the Williams Cottage
John Ralph Williams (1827-1881) was born in the village of Orford, Suffolk, in December 1827. His father, William, was originally from Glamorgan in Wales, and his mother, Mary (née Ralph), was from Cornwall. Despite his East Anglian birth and his Welsh father, it is interesting that at his death his obituary referred to him as a ‘Cornishman’.
Little is known of Williams’ life from birth to his arrival in Queenstown ‘at the latter end of 1863’. The obituary of his long-time business partner, George Archer, indicates that the pair arrived together from the Victorian goldfields in about 1861 and came to the Wakatipu district after ‘trying their luck at Gabriels [Gully] with moderate success’. So it is possible that Williams worked first on the Australian goldfields before coming to mine in Otago. Archer would go on to marry one of Williams’ sisters, Elizabeth; his obituary also notes that Mary Williams and Anne (Mrs. Prior), two more of John’s sisters, were living in Queenstown by the 1880s.
Once in Queenstown Williams made the change from miner to boatman; his obituary called him a ‘nautical man [whose] services were availed of by Mr Rees, in boating on the Lake’. Williams was the captain of the boat that took the first escort of gold from the district to Kingston. Later in the 1860s, he was the first captain of the Paddle Steamer Antrim, one of the first boats to be built entirely on the lake with timber sourced from Kinloch at the Head of the Lake.
Under the partnership known as Archer and Williams, John Williams and George Archer served the transportation needs of the district, mostly on the waters of Lake Wakatipu – in 1871, they purchased the old cutter Moa and re-rigged the craft as a schooner under the new name of the Jane Williams. The craft was launched with much fanfare in July 1871; unfortunately, by the end of that same month the craft was caught in a squall in Table Bay (near Walter Peak Station), and sank in over 200 ft (60 m) of water.
However, a new Jane Williams would shortly be plying the waters of the lake. Less than seven months following the disastrous sinking of her predecessor, the steamer Jane Williams was launched from Queenstown beach on 10 February 1872. The new Jane Williams was designed by engineers Messrs Sparrow & Thomas of Dunedin and built under their supervision at Queenstown. As its power was derived from a steam engine, the vessel would avoid the effects of the notorious Wakatipu squalls which had done for the first Jane Williams in 1871. In 1886, the vessels name was changed to the Ben Lomond; she continued to ply the waters of the lake until she was scuttled in Kingston Bay in 1952 – at the time she was the oldest vessel on the Lloyds Register.
Both vessels were likely named for Jane Williams, one of John’s maternal aunts; despite John’s mother’s maiden name being Ralph, it appears that both of the Ralph sisters married a man called Williams. It is said that on the death of his mother, John (then aged 8) and his siblings were sent from East Anglia to live with Jane in Cornwall. This would explain why John was known in adulthood as a Cornishman, and also helps explain why he held his aunt in such high regard that he named two vessels after her.
After nearly 20 years in Queenstown, Williams died on Monday 5 September 1881 at the age of nearly 54 ‘from an inflammation of the lungs’. His obituary described him as ‘very generous, and possessed [of] many good qualities…he had numerous friends and well-wishers, but, we believe, not a single enemy.’
The Williams Cottage
The parcel of land on which the Williams Cottage currently sits was known as Section 9, Block III, Town of Queenstown; the original Crown Grant was issued to a Mr Israel Shaw; Shaw applied for the Crown Grant in January 1864, paying the sum of £23. It is likely that Shaw intended to build on the section himself, but was not able to do so – in April 1864, only three months following his purchase, Shaw sold the section to John Williams ‘with [the] timber on the ground’; the materials and land cost Williams only £20, a considerable loss on Shaw’s part.
It is likely that Williams was living nearby at the time of his 1864 purchase of Section 9. A survey plan dating to 1863 shows Williams as the owner of Section 8a, the next-door land parcel; later photographs show a small cottage on this section. The Williams Cottage was likely built between April 1864, when John Williams bought the property, and the end of that year – a photo, taken from the slopes of Ben Lomond and dating to 1864, shows the cottage in situ, set back from Queenstown Beach). The earliest full depiction of the cottage was made during the floods of 1866, which shows the Williams Cottage on the right beset by floodwaters, alongside the small cottage on the next-door section, and the building known as the ‘Archer Cottage’ towards the left of the photograph– the date for this image, January 1866, is corroborated by a description of the ‘great floods’ that beset the district at this time; Williams is listed as one of the ‘parties…who are more or less heavy losers’ due to flood damage.
Following its 1864 construction, the cottage was subject to some modifications during John Williams’ lifetime, the most extensive being the extension of the original kitchen lean-to. Figure 6 shows the cottage as sketched by visiting artist Nicholas Chevalier in 1866. The rear of the cottage terminates at the end of the north eastern lean-to. Figure 7, taken during the 1878 Queenstown flood, shows that by this point, an extension to the cottage had been added using part of a relocated building, with the roof pitch running counter to the previous lean-to and rear pitch of the main cottage.
At John’s death, the property passed to his sister, Mary, who owned the building until her death in 1906. The property then passed to Elizabeth, one of Mary and John’s other sisters, widow of George Archer; she owned the property until her death in 1915. Up until 1944, the cottage was owned by the McNeil family; James McNeil, who had married a descendant of John Williams’ sister, Anne, was a stonemason, noted for the construction of the nearby McNeil Cottage (Historic Place, Category 2, List No. 2330), on Church Street, and the Ballarat Street Bridge (Historic Place, Category 1, List No. 7097). The cottage was owned by the Mulholland family (also descendants of John Williams’ sister, Anne) until the early 1980s; it is significant that ownership of the property remained with the Williams family, or their descendants (the McNeils and the Mulhollands) right up to the late-20th century.
Following use as a holiday house by the Mulholland family, the building was purchased by an Auckland-based branch of Avis Rental Cars in 1981; the company proposed demolition and development of the site and the next-door properties. Following much pressure from the then Historic Places Trust and the local community, the Queenstown Lakes District Council bought the cottage ‘on behalf of the community and to ensure its future preservation on condition that other voluntary bodies contributed to the costs and took responsibility for its repair and on-going use.’ The Williams Cottage remains under the council’s ownership, with the Queenstown Heritage Trust owning and managing the on-going care of the cottage; the trust also retains a fifty percent legal interest in the land. The cottage currently houses a boutique design shop.
