The “Bombay” Boys.

The foreign name was not given to the place until the year 1866, when a number of English immigrants who had arrived in Auckland in the ship “Bombay,” after an uncommonly long and stormy voyage, were given sections here, and set to with axe and saw and plough in a new and wild but fertile land.

Those “Bombays” were fortunate in that they arrived just after the Waikato War. This was a land of martial stir and bugle call and gun-play in the period 1863–64, when thousands of British and Colonial troops tramped along the bush road from Drury to Pokeno, and when the escorts with the supply carts now and again fought Maori ambush parties. A redoubt known as the Baird's Hill Post stood on the spot now occupied by the Bombay Presbyterian Church. There was another redoubt, the Razorback Post, on the southern end of the up-and-down hill road.