Brightwater’s chicken power

Brightwater lies on the banks of the Wairoa River, about 20 kilometres south-west of Nelson, and was one of the early villages serving the farms around it. Te Ara says it was named after a water-powered flour mill there; Wikipedia says the name was first used by Alfred Saunders for his flax mill on the river. Elsewhere in New Zealand, rivers were already being used to make electricity. In 1888 Reefton was lit by the first public supply of electric lighting, from a small hydro station on the Īnangahua River, and small municipal hydro schemes were run by local authorities or private enterprise. In 1896 Premier Richard Seddon introduced legislation to prevent the development of electrical power generation without government permission.

Robert (Bobby) Ellis was born in England in about 1861 and came to New Zealand in the early 1880s to join his brothers Richard and Louis (or Lewis), who had a farm in the upper Motueka Valley. According to The Prow, a regional history site whose page on him was written by Tasman Libraries, he found the area rich in harakeke (flax) and built a water-powered flax mill in the Norris Gully and Kōhatu area. He tried several ways to add to his income from the mill, including scouring wool with the water race, which did not work, making mud bricks for housing, and finding new uses for flax fibre, such as hard-wearing trousers. The Prow counts among his more successful projects a high-pressure turbine that produced electricity for the family home. The Prow, drawing on a regional biographical dictionary and his 1935 obituary, says his wife Kate was probably the first woman in the region to cook on an electric stove, and that the family had electric lights and a Pianola electric piano.

In March 1911 Ellis bought the flour mill and millpond at River Terrace, Brightwater. The Prow says his plan was to use the Wairoa River to power the mill by day and, in the evenings, to add a National alternator and supply electricity to nearby households. He had trouble obtaining licences under the Public Works Act and ongoing disagreements with the local council over water rights, but by 1913 he was supplying electricity to five streetlights in Brightwater, which The Prow describes as the first electrical streetlights in the district. He also connected a number of River Terrace households, for a fee of a shilling a night. The network soon grew to include 10 streetlights in Richmond, and by October 1914 electric lights were being installed at about 50 a month. Eventually he was supplying the area from Tāhunanui to Wakefield from his power plant. The supply was not reliable: floods, debris in the river and sudden loads caused frequent outages. The Prow says supply was rationed until about 1930, with electricity available only one day a week for ironing and other tasks, and lighting only from dusk until about 11 p.m.

The Prow calls Ellis a well-known eccentric who experimented with switches and levers to control his supply. At his home in Kōhatu he ran a long wire from the house to the flax mill and pulled it to turn the power plant on and off. The Prow's account of his 'chicken power' draws on interviews recorded for the Richmond Oral History Project in 1984, so it is what local people recalled about events some 70 years earlier. As The Prow tells it, in about 1915, when there were no time switches, he connected a switch to the perches in his chicken house to control Brightwater's street lighting. When the chickens went to roost at night their weight turned the lights on, and when they got down in the morning a spring switch turned the generator and the lights off.

During the First World War Ellis's eldest son, Henry Levinge Ellis, a sapper in the New Zealand Engineers, was killed in France. Another of his children, Howard, was seriously injured not long after, and Kate Ellis died in 1917. In 1924 Ellis donated a streetlight to the Brightwater War Memorial Committee in memory of his son. Ellis died in March 1935 and is buried in the St Paul's Anglican Church cemetery. In 1991 Tasman Energy installed another old-style streetlight to replace the original; The Prow says it can be seen near the memorial gates. Ellis Street in Brightwater is named after him.