BRITISH & IRISH LIONS

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Lancaster Park, Jade Stadium and the Lions

Thursday 23rd June 2005

City, ground and results

The Lions have played 39 Tests in New Zealand, winning six. Their average is even worse at Christchurch where they have played eight, winning just one - in 1977 the only match in the four-match series the Lions won.

If Dunedin is Scottish, Christchurch is English. People have lived in the area for about a thousand years but much of the naming of the area comes from the settlers who started coming in 1830 and they came from Canterbury in England, and they named their city of Christchurch, the Oxford College founded by Cardinal Wolsey in 1525. Its chapel became Oxford's cathedral. It is a cathedral college.

Names around about proclaim the Englishness of the place - Avon, Shirley, Richmond, Avonside, Linwood, Woolston, St Alban's. The Maori called the place Otautahi after the chief Tautahi, and there are Maori names amongst the English - Akaroa with its great peninsula, Opawa and the Waimakariri River.

Christchurch, with just under 400 000 inhabitants is the main city on South Island, the third biggest in New Zealand. It's far enough south to be a place that Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton set off from there to the Antarctic.

For years and years the ground where the first Test between the All Blacks and the Lions will be played was called Lancaster Park. Now it's a stadium. "Park" reminds one of the old days when rugby players pitched their poles in a park and played the game, as happens still, for example in the USA.

The brainchild of AM Ollivier, the park was founded in 1880 on land bought from Benjamin Lancaster, originally from of Bournemouth - hence the name of the park given it in 1881 - by the Canterbury Cricket and Athletics Sports Co Ltd which bought 10 acres, 3 roods 30 perches (great old measures slain by decimalisation) of the Lancaster Estate for £2 841.

The famous ground was used for many purposes - cricket and rugby to be sure, but also Davis Cup tennis, cycling, pop concerts, Mass said by Pope John Paul II, Peter Snell's world records, trotting, ballooning, swimming, soccer, rugby league and, during World war I, growing potatoes.

Rugby was first played in 1882 when the Canterbury Rugby Union, the first established in New Zealand, organised a match between Home Born and Colonial Born at a time when cricket was the great game of empire. On Easter Monday in 1884 the two got together. Canterbury were playing Wellington at cricket and during the lunch break East Christchurch played South Canterbury at rugby.

The first Test was played at the ground in 1913, and the Lions first played a Test there in 1930.

Lions' Test results in Christchurch.

1930: New Zealand won 13-10
1950: New Zealand won 8-0
1959: New Zealand won 22-8
1966: New Zealand won 19-6
1971: New Zealand won 22-12
1977: Lions won 13-9
1983: New Zealand won 16-12
1993: New Zealand won 20-18

In 1998 the ground became Jade Stadium.

Jade? Jade Software Corporation, a New Zealand company founded by Sir Gil Simpson in 1878 and involved in the IT business. In 1998 Jade Software Corporation bought the naming rights to the ground and it became Jade Stadium.

Since 2000, when Jade Stadium became smoke-free, a great deal of redevelopment of the stadium has taken place though it remains a ground used by cricket and rugby. In came the DB Draught Stand and the new West Stand which became the Paul Kelly Motor Company Stand.