Larkin, Tom

Tom Larkin was born on 17 November 1917. His father, Herbert, worked for the Government’s railways department and his mother, Irene, was a teacher. When the family arrived in New Plymouth, Tom attended Central School, then the Boys’ High School.

Tom was a prominent sportsman in Taranaki in the 1930s. He played rugby for the Boys’ High School First XV, but it was the game of cricket that caught his imagination.

Good enough to be selected for the Taranaki cricket team while still a schoolboy, throughout the 1930s he was consistently among the top-scoring batsmen in Taranaki club cricket. He would often outscore his teammate, future New Zealand player Martin Donnelly. Tom was selected to play several Hawke Cup matches for Taranaki and, between 1934 and 1946, in a playing career disrupted by his university studies and later the war, he played a total of nine games for the province.

With his parents also prominent in the administration of the game, cricket was very much a family affair. In 2016, he would fondly recall “Taranaki was a very good place to live as a boy. I loved growing up and playing cricket there.”

They weren’t all great memories, however. He was playing in a game at the Boys’ High School in February 1934 when a member of the opposition team collapsed and died on the field.

Tom was also talented academically. In 1934 he was the Dux of the Boys’ High School and won a scholarship to attend Victoria University.

During World War Two, he served in the Royal Navy, commanding a patrol boat in the Suez Canal. After the war he settled in Wellington, working as a lecturer in English at Victoria University, then taking a job in the government’s Foreign Affairs division. In the 1950s he represented New Zealand at the United Nations, and in 1972 he was appointed New Zealand’s Ambassador to Japan.

Tom was awarded an ONZM – Office of the New Zealand Order of Merit – in 2008 for his services to New Zealand-Japan relationships.

After marrying Sarah (nee Williams) in 1970, the couple had three children, one of whom, Tom, was a member of the band ‘Shihad’.

Tom Larkin died at the age of 103, on 17 August 2021.

Books

The Honours Board by Brian Beer. Page 124 et al.

Taranaki Cricket: The Hawke Cup Years (Vol. 1) by Brian Beer. Pages 109-118 et al.