I do. Although if I am honest, the building has changed so much over the years that I cannot quite picture exactly where the shop was. But I remember going there with my Dad. I remember standing at the counter. I remember staff taking the time to demonstrate a stereo and help me choose one to buy and take home. I definitely remember the volume knob being turned up. At the time, it was just a shop. A place you went to buy something you had saved for. A stereo. A washing machine... Something electrical that was not cheap but you expected it to last. I had no idea then that the name on the shops facade sign carried more than a century of South Canterbury history behind it. I only learned that later...
Recently, I have been cleaning up old hard drives for work and came across a history article that I helped work on loading onto their website. It was a while ago that I helped build the site, and a while ago now since the business was sold and passed on. Finding that file felt like opening a time capsule. Not just the words, but the moment in time they belonged to.
At the time, it was just another job. Listen to the owners, learn about their story, scan the photos, check dates and upload the content onto the world wide web. But reading it now, years later, I understand it differently. The Spillane story was all there, a family adapting as the world changed around them. I realised how much of it I had half known without really knowing. Names I recognised. Businesses I had walked into. Stories that had been part of the background of growing up here.
Their story starts back in 1869, when Mick Spillane arrived as a young Irish immigrant and took up a small farm near Pleasant Point. Like many people in those early years, he tried a few things. There is talk he may have been a gold miner before settling. By 1875 he had shifted direction again, selling the farm and taking on the Arowhenua Hotel. That same year he married Mary, and together they raised twelve sons, all born in Canterbury hotels.
In 1879 a major flood of the Ōpihi River undermined the riverbank and threatened to tip the Arowhenua Hotel into the river. At the time it sat on the north west side of the road. Mick gathered a team and had the entire building towed across to safer ground. It sounds almost unbelievable now.
Mick stayed in the hotel trade for decades. Arowhenua. The Royal Hotel in Timaru. The Old Bank Hotel. The Bush Hotel in Geraldine. Then back to Arowhenua again before retiring in the 1890s. By then, the family’s roots in South Canterbury were well and truly set.
The Spillanes did not cling to hotels just because that was what they knew. In 1906, several of Mick’s sons started a cycle and motor business in Temuka. Bicycles at first. Then motorbikes. Agricultural machinery. Cars. Whatever people needed to keep moving. Through wars, through the Depression, through changing technology, the business shifted and survived.
Joe Spillane started work in the bike shop in 1931, right in the middle of the Depression, on five shillings a week. He later took over, served in the army during the Second World War, and came back to keep things going again. When motorcycles declined after the war, appliances were added instead. Not because it was exciting, but because it made sense.
By the time Jim and Des Spillane were coming through in the 1950s and 60s, technology was changing fast again. Television arrived. Electrical work expanded. New skills were needed. So they learned them. In 1972, Jim Spillane and Peter Sullivan formalised what had already been happening for generations by founding Sullivan & Spillane Electrical. They said did not start with deep pockets. They market gardened in their spare time to raise the capital...
From there, the business grew steadily. A Timaru base on Hilton Highway. Appliance sales and servicing. Electrical contracting. Later, marine and industrial electronics as Des brought experience from avionics and early computing work. Some parts of the business eventually closed when they no longer stacked up. Others grew. Through it all, the business stayed local, practical and quietly reliable.
By the time I was standing in that Stafford Street store as a kid, listening to Fleetwood Mac turned up loud, the Spillane's had already been adapting for more than a hundred years. I had no idea. I just knew this was where you went to buy electrical things.
Finding that old history article made me remember how important it is that we document and pass these stories on. Once a business is sold. Once a website goes offline. Once a hard drive gets wiped. Whole layers of local memory can disappear. And I don't think it is because anyone means to lose them, but I guess because no one thinks to keep them.
At the time, helping load that history onto a website felt practical. Now it feels like I was a very small part of their history stewardship.
Some heritage will live on in monuments, books and plaques. Other heritage will have to live on in our memories and the stories we share, like the shops we remember going to with our parents. In businesses that evolve alongside a town. In folders labelled “old site content”, waiting for someone to pull from an archive, open and read... Sullivan & Spillane was one of those names for me. Familiar long before I understood why.
And now that I know the story, I appreciate it even more.