By Roselyn Fauth
Somewhere on the Bay Hill was a building containing five shops and five flats. It was erected in 1928 for a returned soldier and baker named Samuel Shears, just as Timaru was heading into one of the hardest economic periods in its history.
We know some of the people who traded there. We have several old shop numbers. We know there was a milk bar nearby, a block of flats behind it and, eventually, a modern food store next door.
What we do not yet know with certainty is exactly how the original development fitted together, and I think I know which building it might have been but I have to confirm it... that makes the Shears Building a history hunt...
The clues survive in a family memoir, old street numbers, newspaper reports, business advertisements and the buildings that remain along the hill today. Piece by piece, they reveal a story of enterprise, economic hardship and the small shops that once sustained a neighbourhood.
Built at the worst possible time
The main account comes from Doug Shears, whose father, Samuel Shears, had the building erected in 1928.
Samuel was a returned First World War serviceman who had trained as a baker and pastrycook. According to Doug, his father intended to control a development containing five shops and five flats, as well as another similar building farther up the hill.
Then the Depression arrived.
Doug wrote that the downturn “wiped out everything”. Instead of controlling the larger development, Samuel was left with two shops and two flats on the corner.
The exact financial and property arrangements still need to be established through building permits, valuation rolls and historic land titles. However, the timing is clear. The development was completed only a short time before the international economic crash of 1929 and the severe unemployment and falling incomes that followed.
The quarter loaf
One of Doug’s strongest memories was not about the building itself, but about a loaf of bread. A woman with six children entered the family shop and asked for a quarter loaf, priced at threepence. Samuel knew the family was struggling and gave her an additional sultana loaf without charge. She left, then returned almost immediately. Could she give back the quarter loaf? She would manage with the loaf she had been given.
It is a small story, but it shows how desperate household finances had become. Even the cost of a quarter loaf mattered.
The incident survives as a Shears family recollection rather than a documented transaction, but the price is consistent with bread prices reported during the Depression.
It also tells us something about the role of the neighbourhood shopkeeper. Before supermarkets and large retail chains, local traders often knew their customers personally. They knew which families were struggling and sometimes helped quietly, without forms, agencies or publicity.
Clue one: the shop numbers
Doug named several people who operated businesses in the block:
Mrs Daisy Coughlan, fruiterer and confectioner, at No. 402
Robert Clark, hairdresser, at No. 404
Mrs Lillian Young, tailoress, at No. 410
These numbers are valuable clues, but they cannot yet be matched confidently with modern street addresses. Timaru’s street numbering has changed, and the businesses may have been listed under Stafford Street, the Bay Hill or an earlier combined numbering sequence.
Historic directories should eventually allow the sequence to be reconstructed.
The names are also reminders that the history of a commercial building is not only about its owner or architect. It is about the people who occupied its shops, worked behind its counters and served the community.
Daisy Coughlan and Lillian Young are particularly interesting. Women operated many small shops, workrooms and family businesses, although their role was not always fully recognised in official records.
Doug remembered that Lillian Young made him a new suit after he returned from the Second World War. Suiting fabric was almost impossible to obtain in the South Island, and he secured a length only through a friend who managed a J. R. McKenzie Ltd store in Lower Hutt.
The finished suit connects one small Bay Hill shop with the wider story of wartime rationing, shortages and skilled local dressmaking.
Clue two: the Caroline Milk Bar
Another landmark in Doug’s account is the Caroline Milk Bar.
He wrote that Mr and Mrs Johnson came from Gore and established the business, earning a reputation for their homemade sweets.
The Johnsons later sold the milk bar to Mrs Delaney. The Shears family then purchased it and operated the business until the 1960s.
This gives us another chain of names to investigate:
Johnson, Delaney, Shears.
Electoral rolls, telephone books, trade directories and newspaper advertisements may help establish when each proprietor took over and whether the business remained in the same premises throughout.
The milk bar belonged to a period when the Bay Hill supported numerous grocers, fruiterers and food shops. Local residents could buy bread, sweets, fruit and household supplies without travelling into the central shopping area.
Clue three: Thriftyway Foods
Doug wrote that the family later built Thriftyway Foods on the vacant section beside the Caroline Milk Bar and in front of Moana Flats.
Thriftyway was operating on the Bay Hill by 1966. It was promoted as a modern speciality food store selling local and continental products.
Its name alone signals a change in retail culture. The small grocer and milk bar were giving way to larger, more modern food stores, broader product ranges and the growing influence of supermarkets.
Doug recorded that Thriftyway later became Zanzibar Restaurant and Bar, while the former Caroline Milk Bar became Boudicca’s Cafe and Wine Bar.
These later businesses give us a possible way to work backwards through the buildings, comparing photographs, property boundaries and council files to identify where the original Shears shops stood.
Clue four: Caroline Courts
Doug described the proposed second building as being farther up the hill towards Caroline Courts.
Caroline Courts, however, was not built until 1936.
This does not undermine his account. Doug was writing many decades later and using a familiar building to help readers locate the site. It is a good example of how people naturally describe an earlier landscape using landmarks that appeared afterwards.
Caroline Courts remains an important fixed point in the search. From there, the locations of Moana Flats, Thriftyway Foods, the milk bar and the earlier shops may be plotted along the hill.
When the road became the enemy
Businesses survived the Depression and wartime shortages, only to face another major disruption when the Bay Hill was realigned in the early 1950s.
Doug remembered about 15 months of severely reduced trade. Access was restricted, the road was narrowed to one lane and stopping and parking were limited. He believed two firms went bankrupt during the works.
A notice reproduced in his book, reportedly from the Timaru Herald in December 1952, said exceptionally wet weather had delayed the reopening of the road. The city council acknowledged that shopkeepers had suffered a recession in trade because of the diversion.
Samuel Shears was furious.
He wrote to the editor of the Timaru Herald, and a reporter came to ask why the project had upset him so much.
Samuel pointed out that Christchurch was about 100 miles away, while the section of road being worked on was only a small part of the main highway. At the rate the council was progressing, he joked, it would have needed to begin the road to Christchurch when Julius Caesar and the Romans landed in Britain in 55 BC.
The remark is memorable because it sounds like a shopkeeper who had reached the end of his patience.
Behind the joke was a serious concern. A small business depended on passing traffic, access and nearby parking. Fifteen months of disruption could undo years of work.
Reading the Bay Hill differently
The Shears Building history is still incomplete.
We need the 1928 building permit. We need to establish who designed and built it. We need the valuation records, historic titles and directories that will show how the shops and flats were divided. We need to match Nos. 402, 404 and 410 to the present streetscape.
But that is part of the value of the story.
Built heritage research does not always begin with a plaque or a complete architectural file. Sometimes it begins with an old photograph, a shop number, a family memory or a sentence in a locally published book.
The buildings then become evidence.
Look closely at the Bay Hill and it is possible to trace layers of Timaru’s economic and social history: flats above shops, small groceries, milk bars, tailors, hairdressers, restaurants and road improvements that reshaped how the street functioned.
The Shears Building is one piece of that larger streetscape.
Its story takes us from the optimism of 1928 into the Depression, through wartime shortages, post-war retail change and the arrival of modern food stores.
It also reminds us why ordinary commercial buildings matter.
They preserve the places where people earned a living, bought their bread, ordered a suit, stopped for sweets and helped their neighbours through difficult times.
The history hunt continues...
Source
Doug Shears, Tales of South Canterbury, Vol. 3: The Bay Hill (Timaru: Bay Hill Publishers, 2004), pp. 23–25. Aoraki Heritage Collection, accessed 23 July 2026, https://aorakiheritage.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/8185
The quarter-loaf incident, individual shop tenancies, development plans and the effects of the road works are drawn from Doug Shears’ personal and family recollections. Further confirmation is being sought through contemporary newspapers, directories, council records and property files.