Augustus Florance 1847 - 1897

Augustus Florance senior and wife Elizabeth, about 1870

Born at Portland, Dorset, on 28 May 1847, Augustus Florance was the son of Jane Angell Stone and her husband, also Augustus, a doctor. Dr Florance, a “cribbage... [and] chess player, a man interested in natural philosophy, a reader of Shakespeare... Cervantes... [and] Desiderus Erasmus”, was a social reformer, endeavouring “to accomplish the Sisyphean task of bringing temperance to the delinquents of Portland”.
Augustus junior and his contemporaries inherited this antipathy to the drink trade. A cousin, who emigrated to the USA, wrote, in 1886: “I hope he (Augustus junior) adheres to his temperance sympathies. Tell him he has all my sympathy on that question. I belong to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union... We all hope and pray that the curse of strong drink will be removed from our republic, which will come in God’s own time”.
When his wife died, Dr Florance left his family in the care of relatives and sailed for New Zealand. He lived at the Hutt, near Wellington, produced “primitive” paintings of the area (now held in the Alexander Turnbull Library), married a second time, went back to England and emigrated to Lyttelton as ship’s doctor on the Mersey in 1862.
Dr and Mrs Florance settled in St Albans, Christchurch, the narrow blind lane up to their home being where Ranfurly Street now runs off Caledonian Road. The doctor, a popular general practitioner, dressed in silk dust coat and top hat, cultivated medicinal herbs, supported the Total Abstinence and St Albans Mutual Improvement societies, and died in 1879, “a poor man with an honoured name”. His widow, Elizabeth, lived on at the property till her death, at 91, in 1906.
In England, Augustus junior dwelt in a loving Christian environment. The cousin who settled in America noted: “I used to get Gussie to sleep many a time in Portland”. Augustus himself wrote that, at 10, he was “converted to know and believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, by earnestly reading the New Testament at school…” He emigrated to Canterbury on the Captain Cook, arriving in September 1863. Although he was assisted by the provincial government, Dr Florance paid the greater part of his passage money.