Mr. Long Wrey

Mr. Walter Long Wrey, chief promotor of the Dun Mountain undertaking, seems to have transferred his attention to Marlborough. MacIntosh's history of Marlborough records that in 1866 he induced the Provincial Government there to advance him £1000 with which to proceed to England to get interested people to build a railway from Picton to Blenheim. If he succeeded, the £1000 was to be a bonus to him and if he failed the money was to be repaid, the Provincial Government taking over a certain Wrey property as security. Four years later, no railway, and no Mr. Wrey being in sight, the mortgaged properties were sold at public auction for £135/15/0. A brook named the Wrey, however, still trickles down the side of Nelson's Dun Mountain.

In the course of this historical investigation, it would appear that Mr. Wrey was a man of limited training and knowledge, but of very sanguine outlook.

In 1865 Joseph Cock, of Colstock, Cornwall, was sent by the London Directors to report on the Dun Mountain Copper Mine. He arrived in Nelson with a son aged 17, John Honeycombe Cock. On Joseph Cock's return to Cornwall, John remained in Nelson as a junior clerk in the employ of Nathaniel Edwards and Company. In 1880 the firm became J. H. Cock & Co., and Joseph Henry Cock, who for nine years had worked in the London branch of Nathanial Edwards, joined his brother, John Honeycombe Cock, in Nelson.