Historical Project

Over the past couple of months I have been working on a project which has absorbed a lot of time and energy.

This year is the centenary of the founding of the New Zealand Labour Party, and I have undertaken to try to arrange the mounting of an exhibition to celebrate our history in New Plymouth.

Along the way I have found a lot of interesting material. Not all is suitable for exhibition.

But we have fastened on the building of the first State Housing precinct as a suitable peg to hang the exhibition on, because it is tangible, interesting, and contributed a lot to the development of our city.

After a lot of trawling through old newspapers, I have found the reports of the opening of the first houses in New Plymouth in May of 1938. Others working alongside me have located models of state houses from the Auckland University School of Architecture, and maps and plans from the Housing Corporation archives in Wellington

So we are making some progress on that front.

Some of the other details are interesting too. The branches here were kicked off by none other than Walter Nash, who lived here from 1916 to 1920. Labour supporters were active in the local body and general elections of 1918 and 1919.

Nash was also a key person in setting up community support arrangements for people suffering in the influenza epidemic. And probably his most successful project here was in carrying a vote on changing the rating system to unimproved value.

After twenty years of effort, the party eventually managed to elect its first MP, Fred Frost, who had been a clergyman. He served from 1938 until 1943. That parliament was extended to five years because of the war. When he was beaten in 1943, his unpopularity was partly due, so the records say, to his turning up at an event in shorts and open necked shirt!

He was elected in the strong swing to Labour in 1938, just weeks after the first state houses were occupied, and while the drive to build plenty of them had not been halted by the war. So those houses are an important symbol of Labour Party history here.

These three houses featured in a photo in the Taranaki Herald the week they were occupied in May of 1938.
They do not appear to have changed a great deal in their shape in the eighty years since.