With the introduction of the double-furrow handled plough in 1868, with reapers and binders, the grain drill, and the traction engines, the expansion of wheat farming went ahead and N. Gardener, J. Coopland, the Moderate brothers, and the Baxter brothers, all began threshing in the Carlton and View Hill districts. By 1870 Barr & Brown, James Dixon, J.S. White and Belsher & Fairweather, began contracting too.

Another early contractor was Launcelot Giles. He arrived in Lyttelton by the ship ‘Oriental’ in 1856 and spent a few months in Christchurch before going over the Waimakariri and buying land at Clarkville. He was experienced with threshing machinery and early imported a plant to New Zealand. Later he bought out more modern machines and worked them for a long period.

As time went by more and more wheat was being produced on the land over the Waimakariri (and in those days the production of grain crops was very much higher than it is today). Eventually, names such as Jack Herman, M. McFarlane, Robert James Reid, Holland & Giles, T. Hanna, Charles Bitmead, Richard Bowman, Ernie Bowman, Martin Daniel and Harry Maindonald, William Pearson, James Judson and Graham Bruere, to name but a few, became well known with the threshing-mills.

One of his (Launcelot Giles) sons, Edward, who was born at Clarkville in 1857, also became a traction engine proprietor in that district. At the age of seven he began to learn to drive bullocks and four years later, while driving a bullock waggon, he had an accident and lost one of his legs.

By the time he was thirteen he had gained experience with his father's threshing machines and when he was twenty-two he bought 33 acres of freehold land at Clarkville and started a threshing machine and traction engine outfit. Not withstanding his disability of one leg, he succeeded in working his plant and threshed in various parts of the district.

The Water Joey, Chapter 14, Over The Waimakariri, Mona Anderson, A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1976

Photographs:   Robert James Reid and Giles & Holland