Butler’s Wall is the legacy of pioneer publican William Butler. By 1886 he had been more than 20 years in the township and owned the Ballarat Hotel at the western end of the main street and over the road from the small park known as Butler’s Green.
From the hotel led the main track to Macetown and it needed work to keep it open, so Butler engaged Peter Henderson to build a wall of stacked stone schist from nearby Feehly Hill at a cost of £225 (about $60,000 today) and much of the skilled labour may have been carried out by Chinese miners living nearby.
Something like $2 million is needed to restore the wall and the Queenstown Lakes District Council has allocated $1.8m in its long-term plan in 2029-31 but Amanda Viana of the Arrowtown Charitable Trust, which has kicked off a fundraising campaign, says repairs are needed now and delay would make the project more expensive. Of course, all this got me fired up to add William Butler to my file of stories about goldfields publicans.
William was born in Tipperary in Ireland in 1835 and after trying his luck on the Victorian goldfields came to Arrowtown in 1862 with his wife Mary, 5-year-old William and infant Kingsley. Kinglsey in old age recalled his father saying, ‘‘I could make an ounce of gold a day on the river but there were other ways of earning good money.’’
William established a store under canvas but by 1863 he was running the Prince of Wales Hotel on the site of today’s Arrowtown Bakery.
In June 1863 he was at the centre of the Great Cat Case. He was charged with ‘‘feloniously abstracting a tom cat’’ from Henry Richmond’s New Orleans Hotel (Richmond was born in New Orleans).
Mary Butler claimed the cat was hers and William removed the animal. Various witnesses, including Andrew Lockhart, the manager of the Union Bank, swore that the cat belonged to Richmond and magistrate Richmond Beetham ordered Butler to return the tom to the New Orleans.
Barely was this drama over when a great storm wrecked the Post Office Hotel and other pubs, including the Prince of Wales, had their roofs torn off.
Schoolmaster Edward Ings refused, claiming that the presence of such infants retarded the progress of older pupils and pointing out that Mary Butler had already left Kingsley at the school just to be taken care of.
William Butler, incensed at his wife’s request being refused, inserted a vitriolic letter as a paid advertisement in the Lake Wakatip Mail. He listed the committee men as ‘‘the butcher, the snob and the haberdasher’’ and accused teacher Ings of banishing his son to the half-built chimney when he did attend the school.
The newspaper apologised for inserting such material and yet another Arrowtown squabble died down and by the 1880s William himself was elected to the borough council.
William Butler junior, described as a ‘‘quiet, manly, unselfish boy’’, was a popular scholar but it was noted that he was continually absent, being kept at home to help out at the Ballarat. Among the Butlers’ other children were a daughter Esther, born in 1867, and another son, Thomas, born in 1870.
Kingsley Butler soaked up goldfields pub life. He later described billiards, dances and gambling, and recalled a miner losing £2000 (about $300,000 today) at cards.
Mary was obviously a character behind the bar and once greeted two old diggers, one with a large nose and one with no teeth, with, ‘‘Well, Clawhammer and Gummy, what’ll you have?’’ The miners were offended and had Mary charged with insulting behaviour, resulting in a one-shilling fine.
In August 1878 an earthquake destroyed one of the stone walls of the Ballarat and the Butlers left the pub in 1881 with William senior taking up farming until his death in 1887.
Kingsley later did road work before farming while William junior was a blacksmith in the town until moving to Wairarapa and owning a pub.
Mary died in 1907 and Kingsley died at the age of 96 in 1957.
The Ballarat Hotel continued to feature in Arrowtown life under several publicans until 1923 and those years are worth another column sometime. The pub was demolished in 1938, but the name of its founder, William Butler, lives on in Butler’s Wall which, hopefully, may last another 140 years.
• Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
