Newbie query - reading data into R

Try sep="\t", if they are really separated by tabs (they were not in
your email by the time it reached here).  Actually, you don't need
as.if=F, either, as the first column should be the row names:

read.table("test.dat", header=T, row.names=1, sep="\t")

             Number
Napier          324
Auckland        657
Wellington      879
Christchurch    904

works on your example (with tabs in the file).

(S-PLUS behaves differently here, and guesses the first column
should be the row names without being told).  

read.table("~/tmp/testdata", header=T)

class(read.table("~/tmp/testdata", header=T))