Mr. Edward Tregear, I.S.O. (1846–1931).

“He does not die who can bequeath Some influence to the land he knows, Or dares, persistent, interwreathe Love permanent with the wild hedgerows; He does not die, but still remains Substantiate with his darling plains.”

—Hilaire Belloc.

It is given to comparatively few men, and women, to make conspicuous and enduring impress for the better on the world around them, to leave a name and a reputation, and some memorial more useful than a tombstone. Edward Tregear was one of those who in his lifetime, in a quiet unspectacular way, was a force and an inspiration in the causes on which his heart was set. He left his country something the better, and something the wiser, for his presence in it. He was a man of many experiences, of many adventures and experiments, and from all he gained a knowledge and a sympathetic insight into the life of his fellowmen that qualified him for the administrative post in which he initiated social and industrial reforms. He was a pioneer in the days when strange hazards were many; he was a man of culture whose studious mind and vast industry set an example of tireless research; he was a man whose earnestness and disinterestedness won attention and respect when he spoke or wrote on national questions. He never was a politician, but his outlook was statesmanlike. Those of us who were fortunate enough to know him in his days of activity remember him as a kindly gentleman and scholar, a chivalrous Englishman whose natural love of fair play was broadened and deepened by his experience of all classes of men and all conditions of life. His social sympathies lay in the direction of which Mr. John Masefield wrote in his “Consecration”:

“Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road, … The man with too weighty a burden, too heavy a load.”

Edward Tregear's enduring fame among us rests on two great activities in his busy life—his industry and achievements as a Maori-Polynesian student and writer, and his service to the State as a builder and law-framer in the domain of labour, the amelioration of the conditions of life of the working man and woman. In the first field, no worker in the Pacific-wide area of enquiry into language and tradition has attained world fame outrivalling Tregear's. Honours came to him unsought from the sources he valued most, the world of scholarship and science. In the field of labour reform the name of Tregear carried high mana at a period when the legislation that he initiated, now a commonplace of our national life, was in many quarters considered daring and revolutionary. He was a prophet, a poet, an enthusiast for knowledge, a crusader for the rights of man. His was the perennially youthful heart. He used to say that he was never too old to learn; he was a student in his chosen avenues of research to the last; he never posed as an authority, but was always ready to consider a new viewpoint on his particular lines of study and discovery.

The Adventurous Years.

Edward Tregear came of a Cornish family, as is indicated by his name. In the land of “Tre, Pol and Pen” his forbears had dwelt over many generations; his pedigree went back to the dim faery days of Britain. When he was just over seventeen he landed in New Zealand. The Waikato War was then beginning (1863), and in South Auckland young Tregear had his first schooling in the military life and the hazards of the bush and frontier. He took up surveying as his life calling, and there was peril enough in that profession in the Sixties to satisfy the most adventurous of young colonial hands. By the time he was nineteen he was assisting in the survey of the land confiscated from the Maoris of the Tauranga district for their rebellion against the Government. This land, on the hills in the rear of Tauranga, in the direction of the forest which covered all the ranges separating the seaward slants from the Rotorua region was partly owned by the Ngai-te-Rangi tribe, the defenders of the Gate Pa in 1864, and the bush-dwelling tribe called the Piri-Rakau, the “people who cling to the forest.” Outlying settlers were attacked, and survey parties had their instruments seized. The Government sent out armed forces, and there was a bush campaign in 1867 in which many fights took place, at Whakamarama and other places occupied by the Piri-Rakau and their allies the Ngati-Raukawa from inland. The Ngai-te- page 18 Rangi for the most part remained neutral; they had surrendered to the Queen's forces after the battles of 1864. The surveyors and their parties, being temporarily blocked in their work, formed a special volunteer corps and served as scouts and advance skirmishers. Mr. Goldsmith was captain of the corps, whose members were armed with carbine and revolver, like the Forest Rangers in the Waikato War. Tregear was one of the carbineers, and served on many a rough hard march and several attacks on Maori villages and camps. The two Mair brothers, William and Gilbert—the subject of a recent biographical sketch in the present series—were on the war-path in that bush campaign, and it was there that Tregear first saw the gallant brothers, who became his friends in after years. Peace came at last, with the dispersal of the Piri-Rakau, and the cutting-up of the confiscated blocks for settlement was completed. For his services in the Tauranga expeditions Tregear received the New Zealand war medal.

On the King Country Frontier.

Later on, in the beginning of the Seventies, we find Mr. Tregear, now holding a commission as captain in the New Zealand Militia, engaged in pioneer work as surveyor and military roadmaker, in the Upper Waikato, on the border of the King Country. His headquarters were at Orakau, where he stayed with the furthest out settler, Mr. Andrew Kay. He had a contingent of friendly Maoris under him, men of the Ngati-Naho and Ngati-Tipa, two lower Waikato tribes; they were encamped on the north bank of the Puniu, the frontier river. That was an anxious period on the Waikato border; there were alarms of coming raids; it was known that some of the Kingite Maoris were planning descents on the frontier townships and farms. Te Kooti, too, lived only a few hours' ride away, an outlaw chieftain; and although he had had enough of war, his name and reputation inspired nervousness along the border. So the presence of Tregear's armed Maoris, opponents of the Kingite party, helped to restore confidence among the settlers. They were auxiliaries to the Armed Constabulary in the redoubts and blockhouses, and the Waikato Cavalry, a competent body of settler volunteers, in two troops, one at Te Awamutu, under Major William Jackson, and the other at Cambridge under Captain James Runciman.

Tregear used to say that those adventurous times along the frontier were the best days of his life. He laid out the Frontier Road, a patrol route along the Puniu north bank; he made scouting expeditions with one or two of his Maoris. But it never came to actual fighting though there was more than one stray killing along the border. The last affair of the kind was the murder of Timothy Sullivan, a farm-worker near Roto-o-Rangi, by a Maori with a grievance over nonpayment for land leased by settlers, just across the frontier.

Edward Tregear was a bit of a dandy in those days, as one who knew him at Orakau in the early Seventies told me. He had a weakness for a crimson sash and a brightly-coloured waist shawl. Many a frontiersman and bushman of those times took to the kilt costume of the Maori, a rapaki or waist-shawl or bit of blanket, for campaigning and rough-country travel. He came to know the Maori people intimately on this military and road-making duty, and those years of his young vigorous life gave him much practical knowledge and wisdom that influenced his after career and his writings.

At one time, following on this frontier experience, Mr. Tregear was interested in a sawmill venture on the Waikato River, and carried on the timber work with native labour, but it did not turn out a financial success. He had not the money-making bent. He practised his profession as surveyor for many years in the Government employ, in Waikato, on the Coromandel Peninsula; and in Taranaki, and he continued in the service of the Survey Department in Wellington, until the creation of the Department of Labour by the Ballance Government. That was in the year 1891. Then opened his new field of effort, one into which he threw his whole soul, and in which he initiated much of the humanitarian legislation which attracted to New Zealand the attention of social reformers the world over.

Tregear's early war-time experience, when many parts of the North Island were frontiers and when military duty devolved on most of the able-bodied male population in the Auckland and Taranaki provinces, gave him an interest and pride in soldierly service which remained with him long after the Maori campaigns had ended. When he was engaged in survey work in South Taranaki in 1879 he held a commission as Captain of the Patea Rifles, and at a later period in Wellington he was Captain of one of the Wellington volunteer companies, the Civil Service Rifles.

Maori-Polynesian Research.

The interests that are usually styled hobbies often become the things by which a man is chiefly remembered. It was so with Edward Tregear. Apart from his professional and official work, he found time for a vast amount of research. His special enthusiasm was the study of Maori-Polynesian subjects, and in particular language, the dialects of the Pacific. He loved, too, the bush and all its life; he knew New Zealand in the wild unspoiled state, and he delighted to speak and write of it. His early-days' close contact with the Maori gave him a knowledge of the life and customs and the special culture of the native race, and he began then a study of the language which he continued to the end of his days. His poetic mind appreciated the songs and chants and oratory of the Maori, and the endless store of legendry and tradition. He saw the people in war and in peace, and when opportunities came for confidential talk in camp and kainga he strove to penetrate the secrets of the Maori soul. He gathered much data, which he published in his later days in a book on “The Maori Race.” But he did not long confine his studies to the New Zealand Maori alone. From these islands his range of enquiry passed on to the tropic north, to embrace the whole of the Pacific groups which are included in the term Polynesia, and on again to the lands of Indonesia, tracing back to remote origins the words of the Maori, and linking up in philology the New Zealander, the natives of Tahiti, and the Tuamotus, and Rarotonga and other South Sea isles and groups with the Malay tribes, and further on carrying the connection to the plains of India. The fruit of his long and enormous labours in the study of words was that great work the “Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary.”

This is without exception the most notable contribution yet made to our knowledge of the Maori tongue and its allied languages or dialects of the Pacific Islands. It represents many years of enquiry, an immense amount of correspondence and delving into vocabularies of peoples from the Eastern Pacific to the Malays and the shores of Asia. Its special value to a student of Maori lies in the comparative lists which follow the New Zealand word; the Polynesian and other equivalents are given after each word, and its meaning. In this way we are shown at a glance the exact relation between our Maori words and the South Sea tongues, and the ancient meanings of words whose significance has somewhat changed, and of many South Sea words now obsolete here. Archaic expressions in Maori poetry and sacred ritual are sometimes page 19

The late Mr. S. Percy Smith (Surveyor-General) co-worker with Mr. Edward Tregear in Maori-Polynesian research.

explained by a reference to the dictionary; it is appreciated by those of us who now and again engage in the translation of Maori lore. Perhaps it is only a few who can fully appreciate the magnitude of Tregear's labour and achievement in this work. But even a brief study of the book will impress the reader with some sense of the toil, the industry, the skill which went to its making.

Besides the “Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary” a number of smaller dictionaries and vocabularies engaged Tregear's patient brain. The publication of these, which included a dictionary of the Mangareva Islands (the Gambier group) in the Eastern Pacific, crowned the efforts displayed in the Comparative Dictionary and attracted a great deal of attention from philogists all over the world. The French Government took official cognisance of the great amount of work devoted to the dialects of the Pacific Islands under the control of France, and he received the high honour of Officer of the Academie Francaise.

Another work was a compilation of Maori-Polynesian folk-stories under the title of “Fairy Tales of New Zealand and the South Seas.” Another, and one which attracted a good deal of criticism, was “The Aryan Maori.” This book was raked fore and aft by one or two erudite New Zealand critics, who disagreed with Tregear's enthusiastic linking-up of the Maori with the peoples of India, offshoots of the Ayran race, and questioned his linguistic derivations and comparisons. Nevertheless, Tregear's theories were in the main soundly based. There were some also who questioned certain matters in the Comparative Dictionary. But that work remains unequalled. He put his life and soul into it, and it is by it that the value of his services to Polynesian research will chiefly be estimated.

Tregear's reputation as an ethnologist and philologist was worldwide. He became a member of several great learned associations—the Anthropological Society, the Historical Society, the French Society for the Study of Polynesian Lore, the Polynesian Society of Hawaii, the Royal Society of Italy, and he was also for many years a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. The Imperial Institute, too, elected him to membership. The names of these bodies sufficiently indicate the wide range of our busy New Zealander's interests and activities.

A Founder of the Polynesian Society.

The Polynesian Society of New Zealand, which for more than forty years has been engaged in the gathering and publishing of anthropological and linguistic knowledge in this country and the Pacific Islands, was established by Mr. Tregear and his great friend and fellow-worker, the late Mr. S. Percy Smith (Surveyor-General), and a few other like-minded students of matters Maori. Smith and Tregear were the chief pillars of the Society for many a year, and they initiated the collecting of material about the races of this ocean which presently assumed great proportions. Through their efforts a very large amount of lore touching the traditions and origins of the Maori-Polynesians was placed on record, forming a solid foundation and setting an example for other workers in this field of knowledge.

Tregear's Work for Labour.

Mr. Tregear's first office under the State when he was transferred from his professional duties in the Survey Department to the world of newly-organised labour was Secretary of the Bureau of Industries. Then he was Chief Inspector of Factories, and in 1898 Mr. Seddon appointed him the first Secretary of the new Department of Labour. This position he held until his retirement from the Government service on superannuation in 1912. His inborn sympathy with the under-dog, his intense humanitarian sentiments, and his progressive views on industrial matters commended him at once to Mr. Seddon; the two men had a great deal in common in their broad-based hatred of anything like oppression of the weak and the suffering. Seddon had the driving force, the bullock-like strength, and the dogged tenacity needful for pressing through reform legislation.

Tregear had the ideals, the brains, and the insight and education necessary in the initiation and framing of the new laws, some of which were, in those days, considered quite revolutionary. He devised and framed much of the early labour legislation. Mr. F. W. Rowley, who was Secretary for Labour at a later period, and who has written a book on “The Industrial Situation in New Zealand” (1931), says of the pioneer of the Department that probably Mr. Tregear's only disappointments were that the legislation was not page 20 page 21 rapidly enough proceeded with, and that it sometimes did not reach far enough. “He held Socialistic views, and in writing to one of his numerous correspondents abroad remarked that we in New Zealand had barely touched the fringe of the Socialistic government.”

Mr. Rowley recollects, also, what was at the time a famous memorandum issued by Mr. Tregear to the Premier, Mr. Seddon. “In this memorandum attention was called to the then surprising fact that when the first new awards of the Court of Arbitration had been brought into operation the employers had in many cases added the costs of the increased wages to their prices instead of paying it out of their own pockets. Such a movement on the part of the employers had been quite unexpected, and it was thought called for drastic action. The memorandum was considered by the Premier to be of sufficient importance to be printed and laid before Parliament.”

Another note from Mr. Rowley: “Mr. Tregear was always exceedingly busy with an enormous amount of literature and correspondence on labour and other social questions arriving by every mail from various other countries as well as New Zealand, and although he had an unusually large table in his room it was so constantly piled to overflowing that he never had any clear space on which to write. At last he suggested that if we could let him have

The Hapuawhenua viaduct, Main Trunk Line, North Island, New Zealand. This viaduct is built with a ten chain curve, is 932ft. long, and 147ft. above the centre of the gully.

a smaller table it would not be possible to get so much on to it, which was done.”

All manner of social and industrial reforms, the amelioration of workers' conditions of labour, life and pay, came under Mr. Tregear's sympathetic care in his official career. He chiefly shaped much of the legislation in the Seddon and Ward regimes on such subjects as industrial conciliation and arbitration, shops and factories, workers' compensation, advances to workers, shearers' accommodation, and the abolition of the truck system on large contract works.

At the conclusion of his long and useful official career Mr. Tregear was awarded the honour of the Imperial Service Order by way of appreciation of his labours for the State. Perhaps he valued even more than that decoration the memory of certain words from the great Liberal Premier's lips. Mr. Seddon, it is recorded, once referred to Mr. Tregear as a man whose name was revered throughout the world in the cause of Labour reforms. No doubt, had he been inclined that way, there was a promising field in politics for the Secretary of Labour when he retired from his official post. But his tastes were otherwise. He had seen enough of the wrangles of the political world; he had had enough of noise and stir and strife. His books and his Maori-Polynesian studies engrossed him for the rest of his days. He lived a very quiet life in Picton, where he died in 1931, at the age of eighty-six years. A serenely peaceful fading-out of life. Edward Tregear could have soliloquised with the ancient Colla in Ossian's warrior pages, philosophically viewing the many-coloured past:

“Friends of my youth … the darkness of age comes like the mist of the desert. My shield is worn with years! My sword is fixed in its place. I said to my soul, Thy evening shall be calm, Thy departure like a fading light!”

“When a total stranger accosts me in the street and tells me he objects to my smoking (as a man did yesterday) I consider he is guilty of gross impertinence,” wrote an indignant correspondent of a London daily, adding “I might just as justifiably tell him I object to the cut of the suit he is wearing. If people had always minded their own business and refrained from meddling with other people's the pages of the historian would make pleasanter reading.” Hear, hear! Although tobacco cranks are growing scarcer every day there are still those who would gladly see smoking made a criminal offence. Yet tobacco can be as harmless as fresh air, provided it's good. If you find smoking is affecting heart or nerves your tobacco is at fault, and contains too much nicotine. The toasted New Zealand is the best. Almost free from nicotine—eliminated by the toasting—all four brands, (Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendish, Riverhead Gold, and Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead) are not only delightful smoking but absolutely innocuous.*