Mr. Antill Alfred Adley, who is an old colonist and a long-standing Canterbury settler, and the son of the Rev. William Adley, late of South Wales, was born in Ceylon in 1832, and was educated at King William's College, Isle of Man. At the age of nineteen he sailed for Lyttelton in the ship “Castle Eden,” settled in Christchurch, was employed in the grocery trade with Mr. George Gould (afterwards Gould and Miles), and three years later with Mr. J. S. White, of Kaiapoi. For a short time, subsequently, he had a goldfields' experience at Gabriel's Gully, Otago, and on his return to Canterbury was for a short time employed in business as a grocer. Mr. Adley entered into boarding-house keeping on the site of the Oxford Hotel, which he built in 1860, and conducted for twelve years, retiring in 1873, when he purchased property at Opawa. Mr. Adley was married, in 1858, to the widow of the late Mr. East, of Oxford, England. She died in 1890, leaving one son, Mr. H. A. Adley, joint agent and attorney of the Liverpool and London and Globe Insurance Co., and secretary of the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce.