William Pember Reeves

Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘William Pember Reeves’

William Pember Reeves (1857-1932) was born in Lyttelton, Canterbury region, New Zealand, and served as Minister of Labour from 1891 to 1896. He subsequently became Director of the London School of Economics (1908–19) and chairman of the board of the National Bank of New Zealand (1917-1931). A keen social reformer, he was President of the Anglo-Hellenic League (1913–25), founded to reply to anti-Greek propaganda in Britain following the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and headed the committee organising the First Universal Races Congress in London in 1911, an early initiative to combat racism.

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Careless Talk by William Pember Reeves

A French sea-captain let his tongue wag over dinner, and New Zealand’s destiny took a different turn.

When Britain finally decided to make a colony of New Zealand, she sent Captain William Hobson (1792-1842) of the Royal Navy to North Island, as Lieutenant to the Governor of New South Wales in Australia. He landed at Kororareka (now Russell) in the Bay of Islands on January 29th, 1840.

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2

Abel Tasman in New Zealand by William Pember Reeves

The Dutch explorer ran across two islands in the Pacific of which Europeans knew nothing, but his chief desire was to get past them.

New Zealand came under British control with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840; James Cook had charted its coasts in the 1770s, but Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had set the first European eyes on the islands, over a century before. As William Reeves notes, however, he was interested only in getting past them.

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