Tiverton Crescent

Tiverton Crescent in Whalers Gate was created in 1973 and its name drawn from a list of places borrowed from the southwest area of England.

An aerial photograph taken in November 1976 shows the subdivision under construction, with Bronte Place and St Ives Grove already laid out and several houses built on each. But three years after the Taranaki County Council signed off on it, work had only just begun on the northern end of Tiverton Crescent and farmland still surrounded the site.

Tiverton is a town in Devon. Its name comes from the Old English “Twyverton” meaning a town on two fords and its early growth and prosperity was based on the wool trade. The 12^th century Tiverton Castle was for a time the seat of the Earls of Devon, one of whom was a trustee of the Plymouth Company which settled New Plymouth and had his own thoroughfare here, Devon Street, named after him.

The Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars led to a decline in Tiverton’s wool industry, but lace making, quicklime production and connections to both the Great Western Canal and Great Western Railway in the 1830s and 1840s saw the area’s fortunes rise again.

The town provided a base for British soldiers and Belgian refugees during the First World War. Food shortages grew so bad that even parts of the cemetery were used for growing potatoes. The Second World War saw the construction of a camp for German POWs in the town and the arrival of the US Army 4^th Infantry division. This division eventually landed at Utah beach on D-Day and successfully captured it from the Nazis – one of the soldiers who spent three months stationed in Tiverton was J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.