Eliot Street

Eliot Street in New Plymouth is named for Edward Granville Eliot, 3rd Earl of St Germans, British politician and diplomat, and a director of the Plymouth Company. He sponsored Edward Gibbon Wakefield's petition on emigration to the Queen and Parliament and, as chairman of a select committee, recommended that New Zealand be colonised under the Wakefield system.

Born 29 August 1798, he was educated at Westminster School and matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford on 13 December 1815. He married Lady Jemima Cornwallis in 1824, and died on the 7 October 1877 at St. Germans.

Lord Eliot represented Liskeard, in Cornwall, from 1824 to 1832. Following the Reform Act of 1832, he was outside Parliament until becoming M.P. for Cornwall East from 1837 to 1845.  This is the period of the settlement of New Plymouth.

He is best remembered for his diplomatic mission to Spain in 1835 during the first Carlist War, when he brokered an agreement known as the Lord Eliot Convention (Convenio Lord Eliot) between the warring sides: "not to end the war itself but to end the indiscriminate executions by firing squad that had been committed by both sides."

Various correspondence and papers of Lord Eliot now reside in the Cornwall Record Office.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.