Daily Photo – Akaroa’s Grand Hotel
I was staying at Akaroa’s Grand Hotel, which in 1882 was the scene of a devastating arson attack rumoured to be the work of a lone radical waging a fiery war against the town’s liquor trade. Just who the culprit was, and why he was so anti-alcohol, was never discovered. What we do know is that over the course of three nights, four hotels were attacked. Two were completely destroyed, one was significantly damaged, and the fourth was saved when the fire was discovered before it could take hold.
On the night of 28 August 1882, as the clock ticked past 2:00am, the crawl space beneath the floorboards of Waeckerle’s Hotel was packed with dried gorse bushes heavily soaked in kerosene. Across town, the same had been set at the Criterion Hotel and Bruce’s Hotel, while two nights later the Somerset Hotel was added to the list. The goal of the attacks was believed to create chaos. By setting fires at multiple points across the borough, the arsonist ensured the town’s small pool of residents would be too thinly stretched to save them all.
While the Criterion, Bruce’s, and Somerset hotels were all targeted, our focus is on Waeckerle’s Hotel. There, the fire took hold quickly, and thick smoke trapped guests on the upper floors. When the alarm finally broke, it was absolute chaos. A local constable ran through the streets yelling “Fire!” in what newspapers described as “stentorian tones” to wake the town. Children were passed through windows and evacuated into the street, while townspeople frantically smashed open doors to haul out furniture and fragile belongings before the wooden hotel collapsed into a pile of ash.
When a new building was commissioned, it was constructed from thick brick finished with a sturdy plaster façade, completely rejecting the wooden structures that had been popular up until that time. It was a deliberate and practical choice. When it reopened just nine months later in May 1883, the establishment didn’t just change materials, it upgraded its entire identity. It reopened as “Waeckerle’s New Grand Commercial Hotel”, a title eventually shortened to simply the Grand Hotel.
