The human presence in Wellington is said to begin with the explorer Kupe, who travelled to Aotearoa New Zealand from Hawaiki, the ancestral Polynesian homeland of Māori. He left his mark on the land by naming places, such as the islands Matiu and Mākaro in the harbour, before returning home. Following permanent settlement, the rangatira Tara, son of Whātonga and the eponymous ancestor of Ngāi Tara, travelled south from Māhia Peninsula and settled at the harbour, which came to be known as Te Whanganui-a-Tara, the great harbour of Tara. In the seventeenth century Ngāti Ira of Hawke’s Bay joined Ngāi Tara and extensive intermarriage occurred between the two tribes. Other iwi who made a home in the region included Ngāti Kahungunu, Rangitāne, Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Māmoe.
Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Mutunga migrated south from Taranaki in the 1820s and early 1830s during a period of great upheaval associated with the introduction of Pākehā muskets into te ao Māori. Initially based on the Kāpiti Coast, the Taranaki people moved further south to Wellington, where they became dominant. In 1824 Ngāti Mutunga built the five-acre Te Aro Pā, which straddled both sides of present-day Taranaki Street just north of the intersection with Courtenay Place and Manners Street. The Waimapihi Stream flowed nearby and was an important food resource alongside the harbour’s kaimoana. Following organised Pākehā settlement, the pā would give its name to the wider area.
Pākehā Settlement
Te Aro Flat, as it became known, was included in the purchase of land at Te Whanganui-a-Tara by British colonising firm the New Zealand Company in 1839. The new town was initially located at Pito-one (Petone) near the mouth of the Heretaunga (Hutt River) but flooding in 1840 forced the settlers to the other side of the harbour, where Te Aro Pā was. The land purchase was highly dubious and many of the area’s occupants had not sold their land. Nevertheless, the New Zealand Company proceeded to divide the land into town acres and larger country sections and sold them to would-be settlers and speculators.
Town Acre 157
In 1860 Town Acre 157, the future site of the Wellington Trades Hall, was granted to John Martin, founder of the Wairarapa town of Martinborough. This was an investment purchase and the land remained undeveloped for 30 years. In 1890 Martin’s son Albert, a doctor, built an 18-room, two-storied house designed by architect Charles Tringham on part of the acre adjacent to Ingestre Street (now Vivian Street). Dr Martin and family lived in the house until 1917 when he died from blood poisoning after pricking his thumb with a surgical needle during an operation. The following year the Wellington Trades and Labour Council (WTLC; later the Wellington Trades Hall Incorporated or WTHI) purchased the building for a trades hall and was congratulated in the media for securing ‘such a fine home for Labour’.
Trade Unions
Early British settlers brought trade unionism to New Zealand but few local labour organisations existed before the 1870s. Some groups formed to contest particular battles but fell into abeyance once the contentious issues that prompted their creation were resolved. This changed following the mass migrations of the 1870s, when the New Zealand government worked with the British National Agricultural Farm Labourers’ Union to bring skilled farm workers to New Zealand. Unionism was strong among the likes of immigrant miners, seamen and shearers. This created the foundations for home grown-organised unions and in 1878 trade unions gained legal status.
The election of the Liberal-Labour government in 1890 was favourable for working people and unions. The creation of the Arbitration Court by this government in 1894 was a major milestone as employers now had to negotiate with registered unions on matters of work hours, pay and conditions. Union membership grew rapidly in the early 1900s and by 1913 New Zealand was one of the most unionised countries in the world.
New Building
Trades halls – buildings where different unions had offices, and meetings, lectures and social events were held – ‘symbolised the civic presence of the unions and their respectability’. In Wellington, the trades hall was in various rented premises in central city locations including Lambton Quay, Manners Street and Cuba Street, before the Martin house was purchased in 1918. As early as 1901, citing a rapidly growing membership, WTLC was on the lookout for a site on which to erect a purpose-built trades hall, arguing that ‘it is something approaching a disgrace that the capital city of the Colony…does not possess a building worthy of being designated a Trades’ Hall’.
Progress was slow. Fundraising did not begin in earnest until around 1914 and union members contributed a portion of their wages to a new building fund. Though the Martin house was spacious and well appointed, it was not big enough to accommodate the numerous labour organisations in the city and its days were numbered. Wellington architect William Fielding (1875-1946), who ‘made a substantial contribution to the fabric of Wellington city’ over the course of his career, was engaged to design a much larger replacement.
The resulting complex, designed in 1927 and built in sections over the next two years by Harold Edwards, was comprised of three separate parts, a neo-Classical three-storey office building on the street front connected by a bridge to an assembly hall in the middle and a printing works at the rear. The assembly hall and printing works were opened first in 1928, the occasion marked by four-day carnival of ‘entertainments, side-shows, competitions, sale of work, fancy fair, tearoom … children’s fancy dress ball [and a] Saturday evening dance’ with a jazz band. The printing works was leased by the New Zealand Worker Printing and Publishing Company, publisher of the New Zealand Worker journal (previously the Maoriland Worker) and the company bought the building in 1938. On 5 June 1929 Labour Party leader Harry Holland opened the three storey office building, which included a caretaker’s cottage on the roof. The New Zealand Worker published a 20-page souvenir edition to mark the occasion.
A Home for Unions
The entire construction project, an enormous undertaking for the WTLC, was described as a venture ‘easily the greatest undertaken by the [labour] Movement in this country up to the present time.’ In pronouncing it as ‘one of the steps which opens up the way… [to] a Government that will organise an industrial, political, and social system in which all shall contribute according to their ability, and shall receive according to their needs’, Labour Party secretary (and future prime minister) Walter Nash saw its presence as a sign of the party’s progress in the ascension to government. Indeed, after the 1928 general election the Labour Party’s 19 Members of Parliament held the balance of power, and would become the government for the first time in 1935.
Almost all the unions in Wellington moved into the office building and it was the headquarters of the Labour Party national office until 1939. In the first year of operation 32 different unions had offices there, representing a variety of workers, from the tramway workers, carpenters and joiners, plumbers and gasfitters and cooks. Many invested in the building and received interest payments every six months. The office rooms on three floors were arranged around a central glass-roofed atrium and there were five small shops on the ground floor. The offices were small, reflecting the financial position of the typical union. Some of the smaller unions shared a secretary and a room. For instance, in 1940 T.J.L. Tucker was the secretary for the Wellington Soap, Candle and Related Trades Union, the Wellington Drug, Chemical, Condiment, Sauce and Pickle Manufacturers Industrial Union of Workers, and the Wellington Tobacco Industrial Union of Workers.
The Clarté Book Shop, started by Walter Nash and taken over by the Labour Party in 1924, was an early shop tenant. Nash also had an office on the first floor in the early 1930s, in his business capacity and also as national secretary of the Labour Party. Other businesses included a ladies’ hairdresser (1930s and 1940s), Hannah Barsht’s fancy goods store (1940s and 1950s) and General Optical Laboratories (1960s).
As the home of the union movement in the capital city, the Wellington Trades Hall was associated with nationally significant events and organisations. During the great depression of the early 1930s, unemployed people and strikers gathered in the assembly hall for meetings. In May 1932 a 2,000-strong group of protestors, who had met at the hall earlier in the day, ‘the hall, stairways and corridors on every floor…jammed with humanity,’ marched up nearby Cuba Street to a rally at a vacant section at the south end of the street. The protestors were met by a strong contingent of police and the ensuing riot was a major local event in depression period. Police armed with batons charged protestors and the injured were taken back to the trades hall.
The election of the first Labour government in 1935 galvanised the union movement, particularly when compulsory unionism was instituted the following year. Deputy Prime Minister Peter Fraser was instrumental in the creation of the second New Zealand Federation of Labour (FoL), a pan-union organisation launched at the 1937 Unity Conference held in the assembly hall. The FoL became a major player in national wage negotiations and ‘helped to establish a basic living wage for all, which became a vital part of the welfare state’. The FoL headquarters was in the office building until the early 1970s; vice-president (1944-46, 1948-53) and president (1953-63) Fintan Patrick Walsh, who was also secretary for a number of unions, has been described as ‘unquestionably the most important figure in the history of the New Zealand labour movement. The FoL annual conferences were held in the assembly hall, which also hosted Labour Party and union conferences and a range of political meetings and social events, such as the 1936 conference of the new Labour Party Maori Organising Committee, which was created after the Rātana movement and Labour formed an alliance that year.
Wellington Trades Hall was an important meeting and gathering site during the 1951 waterfront dispute. The Waterside Workers’ Union met there daily during the dispute and members of other unions joined them in solidarity. Women’s groups formed to organise relief for locked out workers’ families also met at the hall. On 2 May 1951 over 1,000 unionists gathered outside the building, intending to march to Parliament.
‘Marching four abreast, singing popular soldiers’ songs and exchanging good-natured pleasantries with the early morning crowd, the long column of men was still turning from Vivian Street as its head reached the Cuba Street-Dixon Street intersection. Suddenly police raced from hiding and blocked the street….The hush of surprise at the first impact with the police was followed by the sharp crack and thud of batons falling on the front ranks of marchers….Then an angry roar filled Cuba Street. The unionists broke ranks to surge forward at the one hundred police bunched in the narrow street.’
Union leaders successfully encouraged the marchers to disperse, averting a riot, and the injured were taken back to the hall. Unionists marched again from the hall a few days later, this time in smaller groups, and made it to Parliament.
1984 Bombing
On 27 March 1984 Wellington Trades Hall became the site of New Zealand’s first fatal terrorist attack. At 5:19pm caretaker Ernie Abbott, who lived in the rooftop cottage, picked up a small suitcase which had been sitting in a ground-floor hallway for several hours. This activated a home-made bomb inside the suitcase and Abbott was killed by the huge explosion. The front doors of the building were blown off and a car parked outside was shunted across the street. While suspects were identified and interviewed, no-one was charged and Abbott’s death remains an unsolved crime. Though the precise motivation is unknown, forensic profiling suggested the perpetrator was highly likely to be a loner with explosives expertise who held a grudge against the union movement.
The bombing occurred within a context of fraught relationships between the government and unions. The decades-old arbitration system, which allowed unions to take an active role in pay negotiations, had broken down after a ‘nil wage order’ was instituted in 1968, meaning pay did not rise with inflation. In response, unions became more militant and the 1970s saw the most industrial disputes in the nation’s history, leading many New Zealanders to view unions unfavourably. At the same time the economy was foundering under the weight of global oil shocks, growing inflation, rising unemployment and unstable growth. In 1982 Prime Minister Robert Muldoon announced a price and wage freeze in an attempt to control inflation, a move strenuously opposed by unions, towards whom Muldoon was overtly hostile. Action against the wage freeze was organised from Wellington Trades Hall and on the day of the bombing, unionists met in the building, including president of the Wellington District Council of the FoL and noted union leader Pat Kelly. Whether this group was the intended target is unknown but Abbott himself is unlikely to have been singled out by the bomber. The attack was a significant event in the history of New Zealand politics and the union movement; there was a sense at the time of political innocence lost.
Recent History
The Labour Party victory in the 1984 general election did not benefit the union movement. The Labour government wound back financial support for industry and government departments and agencies involved in any sort of business activity were corporatised and in some cases privatised. Life was challenging for workers and unions and ‘for the first time in a century, many unions were suddenly on the defensive.’ When National regained power in 1991 compulsory unionism was ended and unions no longer had an exclusive right to represent members. Union membership declined dramatically and the number of unions was the lowest in over a century. However, while some unions moved out of Wellington Trades Hall, others remained and occupancy was not significantly affected by these challenges. Since at least the 1970s, social justice, peace and environmental organisations and voluntary groups and small businesses have found a home in the hall, supplementing the traditional union tenants, who continue to occupy the building. Wellington Trades Hall remains the original home of unions in the city.
Building Changes
In 1957 the original verandah, which was in two sections on either side of the office building’s main door, was replaced by a full length verandah. The following year the building’s central atrium was enclosed to make more floor space. The atrium’s glazed roof was covered over and new office partitions were installed on the first and second floors. The entrance foyer was repaired after the 1984 bombing.
The most dramatic change occurred in late 1988 when the assembly hall was demolished. The 1980s were a boom period for commercial development in the Wellington CBD and a new building had been planned for the site. This did not eventuate and the site was instead used for car parking. Uncertainty about the route of a proposed extension to the city’s urban motorway, known as the Inner City Bypass (ICB), halted maintenance on the office building in the 1990s and early 2000s. The ICB did not in the end directly affect Wellington Trades Hall and work proceeded, the most significant being the sealing of the roof with a waterproof membrane to prevent leaks in 2009.
In the 2010s there was a change of guard at the WTHI and members of the committee committed to the preservation of the building. A conservation plan was commissioned in 2010. Between 2017 and 2018 the building was earthquake strengthened, which entailed installing a ground beam, anchor piles, shear walls and collector beams. At the same time the ground floor lobby was restored, with new wall and floor tiles made to match the originals. In March 2018 the building was re-opened by the Prime Minister and Labour Party leader Jacinda Ardern, who acknowledged its significance to the Aotearoa New Zealand labour movement past and present, and what it symbolised:
'Can I acknowledge what this place stands for, what this structure stands for, the support it gives the people within it, who continue to drive a movement that is as necessary today as it has ever been, as we continue to make sure we look after one another, we look after working people, we drive those values that are so important to us and the thing that we stand true to, the most important thing in this world continues to be, the people, the people, the people. '
And the people came to Wellington Trades Hall. In the words of the former secretary Lynette Stutz in 2009:
'Wellington Trades Hall … receives many visitors. They call in to simply look around, or to see (or re-visit) a building that is significant to themselves or members of their family and to relate stories of events that occurred there; to visit the site of many important events in the history of working people in this country.'
In line with this interest, aided by community fundraising, WTHI began creating a museum in the lobby in 2019.
