2026: Timaru Booksellers just north of here. Soul & Co and The Menswear are where Fitzsimmons Forge used to be.
Bob Fitzsimmons (1863–1917), known as ‘The Fighting Blacksmith worked for his family on Stafford St and in the 1880s learned to box at the Beswick St Saloon. He said working at the forge and managing horses gave him a competitive advantage in the ring. He moved to Timaru with his family from Cornwall in 1873, aged 10, grew up at 45 Grey Rd, and attended Main School.
Bob became the sport’s first three-division world champion in 1903. His 1897 world heavyweight title fight was the first championship fight filmed in full and became cinema’s first feature-length film. Bob returned to Timaru in 1910, welcomed by 1,000 people at the railway station. He visited family, the old Stafford St forge, and watched his fights on film at the Theatre Royal for a civic reception. He died in Chicago in 1917, aged 54.
WATCH Bob Fitzsimmons fight James J. Corbett for the world heavyweight championship when boxing was banned in many states.
CARSON CITY, NEVADA, 17/03/1897 https://archive.org/details/TheCorbettFitzsimmonsFight
1909 A horse and donkey hitched to a wagon taking part on the Jubilee Celebrations. South Canterbury Museum (2755)
1902 Te Papa O 051719 right section
In 1926, the pasture, oats and chaff needed to feed a six-horse team were estimated to require 40 to 50 acres of Canterbury farmland. Timaru Borough Council still employed a stableman-blacksmith in 1926 and was using horse teams to collect rubbish two years later. Many early NZ settlements developed about 26 km apart, roughly a day’s travel by horse. In 1911, horses reached their peak, with 404,284 horses, about one for every three people. By 1926: one for every four. By 1950: about one for every ten.