Gladstone Road

It has been written in council records that Gladstone Road was named “after the Right Hon. W.E. Gladstone, who at the time this road was marked off, was Secretary for the Colonies”. Now this comes as a surprise as William Ewart Gladstone was only ever Under-secretary for war and the colonies in 1835. The first map of New Plymouth was drawn by Frederic Alonzo Carrington in 1841 and does not yet show a Gladstone Road.

There is no doubt the road is named after William as he was a towering figure in the British parliament, but it probably it had less to do with his relatively minor role in the secretariat for the colonies and more to do with him being Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer (the equivalent of our Minister of Finance) many times in a career beginning in 1832 and lasting until 1894. He still holds the record for having been elected Prime Minister four times and as the oldest British Prime Minister on record, at 84 years old.

As a politician, Gladstone made the transition from a Conservative to a Liberal and was popular for his financial reforms and the abolition of many taxes and tariffs. Apparently he had visited Naples in the early 1850s and saw extreme poverty there that seemed to be the result of Conservative policy. He even proposed Irish home rule, but was ultimately defeated by the House of Lords having got it through the Commons.

He also embarked on a personal campaign dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of prostitutes. He would walk the streets at night and offer them shelter and a way to a respectable life. Some cynics were of course suspicious of his motives, but there is no doubt he had deep convictions about bettering the lot of the poor. Maybe that is why we named a street after him in the colonies.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.

Related plan:

Barrett Road Distict, Town Belt B DP1896, ICS Pre 300,000 Cadastral Plan Index (Imaged by LINZ)