A HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: THE COMPANY, 1890s

Coal mining was very different from gold mining. Gold rushes in their early days had been based on a sort of republic of digging ‘parties’ that governed themselves and shared their earnings. Although the later days of gold saw the rise of companies employing wage workers, those companies were small and found their capital among merchants, hotelkeepers and other businesspeople of the West Coast.

Coal mines by contrast needed massive investment and backing by big capitalists.

The Blackball Coal Company went through various restructures from the late 1880s into the early 1900s. After the restructures the company had two boards of directors: one in Christchurch and the other in London. The London shareholders and directors were mostly city patricians and landed gentry. Christchurch shareholders and directors were mostly city patricians and landed gentry, too. One of the most active of moneyed Canterbury people behind the company was George Gatonby Stead of Strowan. None of these owners and directors ever lived anywhere near Blackball. None even lived on the West Coast. They preferred the luxury of big houses on the Canterbury Plains or the Home Counties of England.

Workers who hewed, trucked, tipped, got wounded, got sickened and sometimes got killed by the coal mine all lived in and around the raw new sooty streets of Blackball.