Worlingham
(Run 119, and later 78)

Worlingham was the next station on the Waimakariri above Eyrewell. Run 119, fourteen thousand five hundred acres of country on the Waimakariri, was taken up in August, 1853, by Thomas Kesteven, who kept it until 1867 when he sold it to Thomas James Curtis.

Kesteven was born in London in 1808. Before he came to New Zealand he had had a cloth warehouse in London in partnership with two of his brothers. After he sold Worlingham, which he named after the village near Beccles where his mother was born, he retired and lived at Fendalton where he died in 1873.

Run 78, the country on the Eyre, was taken by Robert Higgins for J. T. Murphy on 23rd February, 1852. Murphy worked this from his station on the other side of the Eyre until some time in the late 'sixties when he sold it to Curtis and it became part of Worlingham.

Curtis sold Worlingham to Joseph Pearson of Burnt Hill in 1873. I do not know anything about Curtis except that he was an American from Massachusetts and was naturalised a British subject on 1st January, 1861, and that in 1862 he was Superintendent of the Lyttelton Fire Brigade, and someone, I forget who, told me that he went to Australia after he sold his station. He seems to have always lived in Lyttelton.

Pearson did not keep Worlingham long. He made it over to his son William Fisher Pearson and Harry Brettagh. They shore about 6500 sheep there. The old homestead had been on the Waimakariri, but Brettagh and Pearson moved it over to the Eyre.

The New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Company took the station over from Brettagh and Pearson in page 551890. The company sold it to Major P. Johnson, now of Raincliff, in 1894.

In 1904 Johnson sold the country on the Waimakariri to the second Marmaduke Dixon, and the homestead and country on the Eyre to J. T. Tipping. In 1907 Tipping sold most of the country he had bought, to Dixon, but sold the homestead and a small part of the land to Thomas Izard who transferred it a year or two afterwards to G. L. le Vee.