Richard John Seddon

Prime minister of New Zealand (1893-1906)

• Born: June 22, 1845
• Birthplace: Eccleston, St. Helens, Lancashire, England
• Died: June 10, 1906
• Place of death: On board SS <I>Oswestry Grange</I>, off Sydney, Australia

The first New Zealand prime minister who was not considered a “gentleman,” Seddon completely dominated the fledgling nation’s politics between 1893 and 1906. Astute, domineering, and incredibly popular, Seddon laid the foundation of the first social democratic, egalitarian welfare state in the world.

Early Life

Richard John Seddon (SEHD-n) was the second son of Thomas Seddon, the headmaster of Eccleston Hill Grammar School, and his Scottish wife, Jane Lindsay of Annan, Dumfriesshire. His mother, who had lost a leg as a child and whose willpower and intellect Richard inherited along with his father’s powerful physique and stentorian voice, was schoolmistress of the local denominational school. Seddon’s school record was undistinguished. Unmanageable, unruly, and disinterested, he was sent at the age of twelve to his grandfather’s farm at Bickerstaffe. This was a disaster, and in 1859, when he was fourteen, he was apprenticed to a firm of engineers at St. Helens.

Although a competent workman, Seddon was sacked for agitating for better pay; he then moved to the Vauxhall works at Liverpool, where he obtained his Board of Trade engineer’s certificate. Trade depression and restlessness compelled him to emigrate to the goldfields of Australia in 1863. He worked first at the government railway workshops at Williamstown, Melbourne, and returned to that job after he failed to find gold at Bendigo. In Williamstown, Seddon became a corporal in the local Volunteer Artillery Corps and a noted boxer and athlete. Already, he was a young man of great strength, on one occasion walking the length of a two-hundred-foot-long workshop with fifty-six-pound weights attached to each foot and two others strapped to each hand. A further twenty-eight-pound weight he held in his teeth.

Seddon became engaged to Louisa Jane Spotswood, the daughter of a former Geelong ferryman whose family, after distinguished service in the East India Company, had gone down in the world. On hearing that alluvial gold had been discovered on the west coast of New Zealand, Seddon joined the rush and arrived at Hokitika on March 1, 1866. A diligent prospector and member of mining parties, he put his Australian experience to work in constructing Californian-type water races, dams, and sluices. By 1866, he was a storekeeper and butcher at Big Dam, Waimea, where in 1872 he opened a saloon, adjacent to his store. Seddon walked around the diggings with a five-gallon keg of beer strapped on his back, refreshing miners and expounding his political views. He knew most people on the goldfields and never lost his great political talent for remembering names and distributing patronage.

At this time in his life, Seddon was a huge, broad-shouldered man with heavy features, fair hair, and piercing blue eyes—an unmistakable personality in a small world of rough-and-ready miners. He had already returned to Geelong and married Louisa, by whom he had three sons and six daughters. His family life was contented, simple, and loving. One son later became a member of Parliament and another was killed in action in France in 1918.

Seddon began his political career in 1870, when he was elected to the Arahura Road Board. Service on the Westland Provincial Council followed. He obtained a growing reputation as a miners’ advocate whose intimate knowledge of mining legislation and of local needs carried him into the New Zealand parliament in 1879. In 1876, he had shifted his Queen’s Hotel and store to the Kumara goldfields, was bankrupted but recovered, and was regarded as a clever, loquacious local politician.

In the New Zealand parliament, Seddon joined a small band of radicals who unswervingly supported Sir George Grey, his political mentor. Seddon’s early career in the New Zealand parliament was relatively undistinguished, although he did, after seven years, manage to get the gold duty abolished. It was in Parliament that he developed his great capacity for stonewalling, his antipathy to Chinese miners (which he shared with his Australian and Californian brethren), and his complete mastery of parliamentary procedures and tactics. A rough diamond, the like of whom the New Zealand parliament had seldom seen, a man whose aitches were misplaced or not used at all, Seddon was nevertheless the complete, new, working individual’s politician, giving long speeches packed with detail in which “his words came in a full flood, rushing along with a great sound like many waters.”

In 1890, this humanist, radical, vigorous bush lawyer and complete politician was returned as a member of a group that in 1891, as the new Liberal-Labour government, embarked on the most thorough series of social democratic reforms in New Zealand history.

Life’s Work

Seddon became minister for public works, mines, and defense in the John Ballance ministry. Working nearly eighteen hours a day, he quickly mastered the routines of his department and, after establishing a new system of railways and roads construction on the cooperative principle, embarked, as the “Jolly Minister,” on a continuous series of travels throughout New Zealand. This developed into a royal progress, during which Seddon attended countless banquets, saw innumerable delegations, and distributed largess in the form of patronage, roads, and railways. At the same time, the Liberal ministry was embarking on the greatest program of reforms in New Zealand history. Under the lands minister John Mackenzie, large estates were acquired for settlement and distribution to small farmers on favorable terms and cheap loans from the state.

Under William Pember Reeves, the minister for labor and education, the world’s first Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, designed to avoid clashes between capital and labor and to regulate every aspect of labor relations, was introduced. A redistributive land and income tax was introduced and the ability of the Legislative Council to reject radical legislation was smashed when the colonial secretary acknowledged the right of Ballance to nominate enough councillors to allow the passage of his legislation.

Ballance was already a dying man when Seddon became acting premier and leader of the House in 1892. He had no special claims to succeed Ballance, especially as Sir Robert Stout was the acknowledged leader of the radical Liberals and Reeves the most creative and intelligent member of the cabinet. Seddon, believing that possession was nine-tenths of the law, completely outmaneuvered them both and became premier on May 1, 1893, after New Zealand’s most extreme cabinet crisis. As Seddon himself said, “When the Captain was called away, the First Mate took his place.” From then until his death, Seddon reigned supreme in New Zealand politics. Indeed, after 1900, he secured increasing majorities at the elections, although his dominance over mediocre cabinet colleagues created a vacuum that the Liberals could not fill after his death.

Although Seddon never matched the great range of reforms of 1891-1893, his speedy response in saving the Bank of New Zealand during the financial crisis of 1894, by giving it a state guarantee and making the government supreme in public finance, laid the foundation for monetary policies more in tune with his humane feelings. In restraining those who wanted to prohibit the sale of liquor by introducing local option polls, he outflanked the most powerful social protest movement of the time. Though an early enemy of woman suffrage, he facilitated the measures by which New Zealand became the first nation in the world (after the American states of Wyoming and Utah) to grant the vote to women.

Seddon’s great triumph came with the passing of the world’s first Old Age Pensions Act in 1898. This guaranteed New Zealand’s preeminence as the world’s social democratic laboratory. The act was extended in 1905, and further measures safeguarded women’s and children’s lives while at the same time access to state secondary and technical education was granted. The state involved itself in virtually all aspects of New Zealand life.

Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb visited New Zealand in 1898 and, with a combination of English condescension and fascination, observed Seddon at the height of his power. They had seen him in England at the Jubilee as “a gross, illiterate and forceful man… incurably rough in manner and sometimes rather the worse for liquor.” However, on his native ground, the New Zealand parliament, he was a gentleman with tremendous courage and unbelievable industry; he kept three secretaries busy at dictation at once, and was “shrewd, quick, genial—but intensely vulgar—tolerant and blunt.” Devoted almost entirely to politics and politicians, he was a great practical “doer” whom the common people adored as he responded, “like a player upon a pianner,” to their every need and wish. In short, the Webbs compared him with a successful American city boss, which was rather unfair. Their further assessment that he resembled a talented popular senator from the western United States was nearer the mark.

After attending Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in London in 1897, Seddon took up the imperial mantle that Grey had worn. He maintained his complete grip on New Zealand politics and his place in the hearts of the people, whose material circumstances rose as New Zealand recovered from the ravages of the world depression. Already, on September 15, 1893, Grey had telegraphed Seddon that his “position is a capital training for higher things—all the great questions between England and her colonies, and the United States are coming on in the greatest way the world has ever known.”

Seddon visited Great Britain again for the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902. He became a privy councillor of Great Britain and pressed for more formal ties between the various parts of the empire. His visits reinforced his horror at the evils of industrialism, and he constantly reiterated his creed that New Zealand was “God’s own country.” He attempted to annex Samoa, New Caledonia, Fiji, and the Cook Islands, but only succeeded in persuading the British Colonial Office to allow New Zealand to control the latter. Seddon even saw President William McKinley but got short shrift when he requested that the United States allow New Zealand to control the Hawaiian Islands.

Under Seddon’s leadership, New Zealand became in 1899 an enthusiastic participant in the South African War , sending six thousand troops and much unsolicited and bombastic advice. Seddon visited South Africa on his way to the coronation and renewed his unsuccessful attempts to make the British Empire economically and militarily self-sufficient and contained. Indeed, it was after a hectic visit to Australia seeking preference for New Zealand goods after New Zealand had declined to join the Australian Federation that the 280-pound Seddon clutched his heart and died with his head resting on his wife’s shoulder. He died on board the SS Oswestry Grange on June 10, 1906. His body was embalmed, and he was buried at Wellington, New Zealand, amid scenes of mourning and a sense of loss that was both genuine and universal.

Significance

Through his long career, Richard John Seddon displayed political skills of a high order. A tremendously hardworking premier, he carried a load of additional portfolios ranging from treasury to Maori affairs that would have killed lesser men. He never faltered; indeed, his popularity increased with his tenure of office. He placed New Zealand on the map with his social legislation, and his reforms lasted. He managed prosperity well; as a conservative said, “I would sooner have Seddon with prosperity than anyone else without.” He left his country prosperous and contented and for a brief time strutted on the imperial stage during the glittering height of the British Empire. Above all, he left the lot of the common people much improved. He divined and reflected their aspirations for modest property and for economic security. As he said soon before his death,

All legislation which I have brought to bear upon the human side of life is the legislation which counts most with me.… There is much talk of men being Radicals, Conservatives, Socialists, and Liberals. I am none of these. I am a humanist. I desire to improve the conditions of the people, to inspire them with hope, to provide for their comfort, and to improve them socially, morally, and politically.

Bibliography

Burdon, Randal Mathews. King Dick: A Biography of Richard John Seddon. Christchurch, England: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1955. Although more than fifty years old, this thorough, vigorous, and critical biography remains the standard reference. It should be supplemented by more recent interpretations summarized in the relevant chapters of The Oxford History of New Zealand. Burdon also wrote the entry for Seddon in A. H. McLintock’s The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, Vol. 3 (Wellington: Government Printer, 1966).

Drummond, James. The Life and Work of Richard John Seddon. Christchurch, England: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1906. Completed by a journalist soon after Seddon’s death, this eulogistic panegyric nevertheless conveys some of the spirit of the times and the popular (and populist) appeal of “King Dick.”

Reeves, William Pember. State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand. 2 vols. London: Alexander Morning, 1902. The classic account, still not superseded, of the state initiatives taken by reforming liberal governments in Australia and New Zealand. Particularly useful on the Ballance and Seddon administrations. Reeves, a Fabian socialist, was Seddon’s minister for labor and education until 1896, when he became agent-general for New Zealand in London after failing to stop the Seddon surge to political dominance. His history of New Zealand, The Long White Cloud (3d ed. London: Allen and Unwin, 1924), is still worth consulting for its cool appraisal of Seddon and his ministry. Reeves himself coined the sobriquet “King Dick,” the title of chapter 24, still the most lively and perceptive profile of Seddon.

Ross, Angus. New Zealand Aspirations in the Pacific in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1964. Chapters 14 and 15, “Seddon’s Imperialism I and II,” analyze in a scholarly and seminal fashion Seddon’s attempts to fulfill New Zealand’s imperial dream of a “mini-empire” in the Southwest Pacific.

Siegfried, André. Democracy in New Zealand. Translated by E. V. Burns. London: G. Bell, 1914. The Tocqueville of the Antipodes, Siegfried’s shrewd and rational French insights encapsulate Seddon’s colonial milieu.

Sinclair, Sir Keith. William Pember Reeves: New Zealand Fabian. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1965. An intriguing biography of one of the few intellectuals in New Zealand politics. Chapter 11, “The Captain Called Away,” is especially useful, as are the numerous quotations and descriptions of Seddon from Reeves’s unpublished papers.

Webb, Beatrice, and Sidney Webb. Visit to New Zealand in 1898: Beatrice Webb’s Diary with Entries by Sidney Webb. Wellington, New Zealand: Price, Milburn, 1959. A valuable portrait of Seddon in political action by two English Fabians.