Birchfield: Industrial Hub of Buller, 1880s-1930s

Ray Griffiths was born in Westport in 1945 and in his early childhood years was surrounded by family across the Buller region. This included grandparents and great-grandparents. His father worked for NZ Railways and, when Ray was nine, the family moved to Central Hawkes Bay – the first of many moves. After completing secondary education at Central Hawkes Bay College, Ray did his teacher training at Ardmore Teachers College. His career in education spanned fifty years, the first half in classroom teaching followed by 25 years in Dunedin as District Adviser in Reading for Otago – first with the Department of Education, then the Dunedin College of Education and finally with the University of Otago. His last few years were as South Island Team Leader for national literacy contracts in school professional development with Learning Media Ltd, Wellington. Collecting information and writing about the family was an early interest for Ray and was pursued throughout his adult life. It involved much researching and visiting family, historical sites and cemeteries. All of this included a visit to the village of Lisvane (now a suburb of Cardiff in Wales) in 2013 and the farmlet called Panteg that the pioneering Griffiths family left behind when emigrating in the 1870s. The Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 sped up the final stages of preparing the book for publication. The process of publicising the book began when we had fifty people present at the unveiling of a memorial to the six original Griffiths family members at Birchfield on 14 October 2020.