Richard Seddon
Richard Seddon was premier of New Zealand for thirteen years, from 1893 to his death at sea in 1906, the longest anyone has held the office, the Lancashire engineer's son who came to the goldfields of the West Coast by way of Australia, kept a pub, and became the boss of a Liberal government that gave women the vote in 1893, the first country to do so, the old-age pension in 1898, compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes, state lending to farmers and the breaking-up of the big estates, and that annexed the Cook Islands and tried to annex Samoa and Fiji for a Pacific empire run from Wellington. The country called him King Dick and he did not mind. He was born in St Helens in 1845, left school at twelve, was a fitter in Liverpool and on the Victorian goldfields, and came to Westland in 1866, where he dug, kept a store and then a hotel at Kumara, sat on every local board and was elected to parliament in 1879. He was a big man with a big voice and no polish, and the Liberal ministry of 1891 made him minister of public works for the West Coast's votes. When the premier Ballance died in April 1893 Seddon took the office before the party could choose anyone else and kept it through five elections. The women's suffrage bill of 1893 he had tried to kill in the upper house and then, when it passed, took the credit for. The pension of 1898, seven shillings a week to the deserving poor over sixty-five, was his own and he pushed it through a ninety-hour sitting. He governed by being everywhere, the minister of everything, travelling the country by train and buggy and knowing every town's grievance, and by a patriotism of empire that sent New Zealand's contingents to the Boer war before Britain asked and had him at Victoria's jubilee and Edward's coronation in the front row. The Cook Islands were annexed in 1901. Samoa went to Germany and Fiji would not come. He was on the ship home from Australia, where he had gone to talk of federation, when he died of a heart attack on 10 June 1906, and the country closed for his funeral. The state he built, the paternal, regulating, land-settling state of the small farmer and the arbitration court, was New Zealand's for eighty years.
- Lived: 1845 CE – 1906 CE
- Nationality: New Zealander
- Roles: prime minister, politician
