Tom Brooking - Richard Seddon: King of Gods Own

The debate as to whether Seddon or Massey was the greater Prime Minister was a no contest in my household. The Fraser side of my mothers family idolised Seddon because my maternal great-grandfather, Donald Fraser, knew him in mining days in Kumara before moving north to help establish Tui Brewery at Mangatainoka. As far as the Frasers were concerned, he was a champion of gold miners and the politician who prevented New Zealand going dry. Initially my paternal grandfather a self-made bookseller from Auckland who ran a 1931 Buick Straight 8 and owned a comfortable villa in Wanganui Avenue, Herne Bay, very close to where Michael Joseph Savage boarded supported Massey. After the Great Depression seriously dented his business fortunes he changed his mind and sang the praises of Seddon and the inheritors of his mantle the First Labour Government.

My father taught at Seddon Memorial Technical College for 16 years from 1944 and the name of Seddon was uttered so reverentially in our house that when my father exclaimed when all is said and done I thought he said when all that Seddon done. My wifes Irish Catholic family also holds Seddon in high regard, especially its West Coast branch. So the task of writing a twenty-first-century biography of Seddon is one I have relished.

Why is it timely to produce such a text? As our longest-serving Prime Minister who won four out of five elections with more than 50 per cent of the vote in the worlds first full democracy, he occupies a significant place in New Zealand history. Given that it is over 50 years since the last major biography appeared, this is reason enough.

There are three obvious ways of writing a new biography of Richard John Seddon. First, to incorporate the two generations of national and international scholarship (particularly that produced by the new Imperial history school and scholars working on popular Liberalism) published since R. M. Burdons 1955 biography, a book so infused with purple prose and quaint archaisms as to be almost incomprehensible to a modern reader.

Second, to incorporate Mori views of Seddon as expressed in Mori newspapers, some of which are now available online. This perspective suggests that although the fissure of race tainted Seddons career like those of leading American Presidents such as George Washington and Andrew Jackson with whom he is sometimes compared, he also developed an extraordinarily complex relationship with Mori which contained many positive aspects in addition to some of those more negative dimensions already revealed by existing scholarship. This source, nevertheless, did not produce as much new material as originally hoped. A project lies ahead for a group of young Mori scholars to check out views of Seddon contained in the rapidly growing oral archive of various iwi as well as the expanding iwi archive of written material.

Third, to visit as many places as possible associated with Seddon such as St Helens, Preston, London, Sydney, Melbourne, and obscure parts of the West Coast which the invalided Burdon could not, even if my limited funding meant I could not track Seddon through South Africa, the United States of America and Canada, nor undertake a lengthy tour of the Pacific Islands.