Who was Chase? Chasing the past at Chases Gorge

Members of the Danks family enjoy summer at their Chases Gorge Camp Club camp site in January, 1926. A bach at the site is still in family ownership. Photo / Demler and Danks family archive.

The owners of a group of baches at Baylys Beach are chasing stories about the life and times of their historic, share-owned property.

One of the first things the Chases Gorge Camp Club owners/trustees hope to find out is who was "Chase" whom the club and neighbouring settlement are named after.

Was Chase an original landowner in the area or the person responsible for setting up a camping ground at the site, circa 1914, for World War I veterans and their families? Did the current communal land ownership scheme evolve from that camping ground or did it come later?

If the answers come to light, they will be included in a booklet the present owners are planning to mark the camp club's centenary this year.

"Chases Gorge Camp Club has been here for at least 100 years and while we have documentation going back to its early days, there is still much of its history we don't know," club secretary Marissa Palmer said.

Bob Cuthbert and Sydney Thorne were the first known owners-trustees of the land they bought from Dargaville baker Tom Brady, circa 1920, and turned into a communal land-owning holiday camp.

The road onto the beach runs alongside the stream bed. The club property was split in two when it gave land to the local council for the road access. Photo / Robyn E. Preston.

Among the records are receipts for individual camp sites purchased in 1921. Others refer to "ballots" for sites.

"We're using that date to mark the centenary and putting together a booklet about those hundred years,"' Palmer said.

"We'd like anyone who has family or other connections with the Chases Gorge Camp Club to share their stories and old photos or other documents with us."

Files of early AGM and other meetings' minutes include letters exchanged with the then-Hobson County Council, contractors, government departments, legal firms and many other groups and individuals.

They include one camp chairman sending the New Zealand Army a stiff telling off about the bad behaviour of officers after the army hired the club's hall for a few days in 1937. The minutes record strong statements about "drinking, cawkinism and un-British-like behaviour" on that occasion and during other events at the hall.

The small hall, built in 1929, was the venue of many local dances, meetings, celebrations and church services until it burned to the ground some time in the 1940s. Little is recorded about the fire but there were whispers at the time about how the blaze ended problems the hall attracted.

While 18 privately owned baches and permanent homes sit on the club's shared 1.6ha, its landholding was once much bigger. It straddled both sides of the gorge where the road access to the beach is now and included the 6ha Moeatoa hill between the club's southern boundary and the similar but 10-year older Bayly Town Camp Club scheme in the gorge to the south.

In 1953 the Chases Gorge club vested the Moeatoa block in the Hobson County Council for public use and it was finally formally classified as a reserve in 1984.

Other minutes refer to the 1943 hand-over of a strip of land along the creek bed so the council could create public road access to the beach. When it became apparent the public toilets and a surf lifesaving clubhouse sat on land that still belonged to the camp club, a deal was done. The council paid £50 for the strip and the club immediately paid that £50 back so the council would form a driveway to club members' baches at the end of what is now Ocean View Tce.

Some current owners represent generations of families who have enjoyed the coastal holiday legacy their forebears started a century ago.

For many years, often decades, owners would camp at their sites in tents before building rudimentary baches or selling their sites.

Most original baches have been pulled down and more comfortable dwellings built; while some remain in family hands others come and go on the open market. All of them are potential treasure chests of memories, local history and coast culture.

Today's owners hope to hear from people who remember holidaying or living in the Chases Gorge Camp Club and its vicinity who can share a few true and even tall tales of the "if walls could talk" variety.

Among them might be stories of time spent on the beach, on the cliffs, fishing, the annual Toheroa Cup competitions between the Chases and Baylys Gorges sides of what is now the beach town of Baylys Beach, of derring-do, skin of the teeth escapes, perhaps changes in the coastal and social environments.

Any information, anecdotes and photos for loan would be very welcome, Palmer said.

* Information can be sent in written form or told to journalist Lindy Laird, who is one of the current owner/trustees at Chases Gorge Camp Club. Contact llaird@xtra.co.nz to send material, arrange a meeting or a phone chat.