DIXON, MARMADUKE (1828-95) was born at Caistor, Lincolnshire, the third son of James Green Dixon, and grandson of Thomas Dixon, a well-known sheep-breeder of Holton Park. Educated at Caistor Grammar School, Dixon was rather delicate. He was apprenticed at the age of 14 to the shipping firm of Robert Brooks and Co., and he sailed in their ships the whole of the time he was at sea. On one of his early voyages he was wrecked on the coast of Brazil, and spent six weeks at Pernambuco before getting a passage to England in the ship Swordfish.

Dixon made several voyages to Australia in the Senator, and about 1844 or 1845 he visited New Zealand. When he was first mate his ship arrived in Port Phillip to find 400 vessels lying idle, their crews having deserted to try the goldfields. Dixon managed to keep his men together to discharge the cargo and get to sea. He was due for command of a ship and had been offered by Bishop Selwyn command of the mission yacht, but on the advice of John Murphy, an Australian squatter, who had taken up a run near Cust, he decided to settle in New Zealand. He accordingly left the sea (1851) and took his passage in the Samarang (in which Sir John Hall was a fellow-passenger), landing in Canterbury early in 1852.

Dixon took up 6,000 acres on the Waimakariri river and for the first five years lived in a hut in the manuka. In 1854 The Hermitage was running 3,000 sheep. Other runs were added from time to time until in 1889 the land was granted to the Midland Railway Co. in consideration of the construction of the line. The company gave the tenants the first right of acquiring the freehold, and Dixon purchased for 15s an acre his own run and two others. Of a practical turn of mind, Dixon resorted to ingenious means of getting the work done, and in later years led the settlers in the adoption of modern appliances. His property being poorly supplied with water, he moved his camp to the site of the present homestead, where water was abundant. By 1860 there was a good well, and bullock teams from the stations to the westward and timber wagons from Mount Oxford made it a stopping-place. Dixon had great confidence in manuka land. He spent much money in crushing the scrub with rollers and burning off preparatory to sowing tussock seed on the bare soil, as a protection for the finer varieties of grass which were to follow. He was one of the first to use three-furrow ploughs, of which he imported a dozen (1866). He was an advocate of the Australian soil scoop for roadmaking and imported some to demonstrate their efficacy. In 1868 he imported a threshing machine and used straw elevators and slipgates for drafting sheep. Dixon is believed to have been the first to ship wheat in bags from Canterbury to England. Perhaps he served the province best by his courageous fight for irrigation. In 1887 he started an irrigation farm near the Waimakariri, and when he died he had 1,200 acres watered. He and his son engineered the intake from the Waimakariri for the Ashley-Waimakariri system. A flood after the hard winter of 1895 carried it away, but a year after Dixon's death Seddon officially opened the system which he devised.

Dixon was first chairman of the Mandeville and Rangiora, Cust, and East and West Eyreton road boards. For five years he was a member of all these boards. Dixon was elected to the Provincial Council for Mandeville, which he represented from 1865 until the abolition. He was an earnest supporter of education, and a promoter of the North Canterbury A. and P. association, of which he was a vice-president. When the Canterbury Frozen Meat Co. was formed he sent to London 25 carcases of lamb, of which the Duke of Edinburgh accepted five and London editors smaller lots. A great reader and thinker, Dixon devoted much study to natural science. He believed that the atmosphere of the earth was affected by spots on the sun.

In 1859 Dixon married Eliza Agnes, daughter of the Rev Dr James Suttell Wood, of Wensleydale, Yorkshire, and sometime rector of Cranfield, Bedfordshire. He died on 15 Nov 1895.

Canterbury P.C. Proc.; Acland; Col. Gent.; The Press, 4 Oct 1930 (p).

Reference: Volume 1, page 122

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