HISTORY STOP PRESS

The purpose of this blog is to publish history that is available nowhere else. Here is one fact for starters.

1. Many sources give the original name of Blairgowrie on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula as Canterbury. Sidney Smith Crispo, who was granted 100 acres near the west corner of the beach road and Canterbury Jetty Rd 1n 1863-4 and later acquired Cockburn's 37 acre grant at the actual corner, originally named his proposed town Manners-Sutton after the Governor (1866-73) who became Viscount Canterbury in 1869. His blocks did not sell until Sorrento Village was alienated (at his suggestion to solve a dispute between W.A.Blair and Duffy) and by the time the first blocks were sold in 1878, he had renamed it Canterbury. The use of Blairgowrie to describe the locality appears to coincide with sales of the Cain Estate (Tyrone) in 1949, the area having been called Sorrento for many decades previously. Details about Dr John Blair renaming Michael O'Grady's house "Villa Maria" as "Blairgowrie" abound but trove reveals details about Indian servants, adopted aborigines, the sanatorium, subdivision of the estate by 1924 and so on.