The newspaper with its roots firmly in the Capital

Saturday, 8 February 2025

The Post - formerly The Evening Post and The Dominion Post - has turned 160 years old and Deborah Morris looks back at the newspaper whose birthplace was the Capital.

A newspaper is born

If one newspaper could be said to have grown up with its city - it would be The Evening Post.

The first four-page paper rolled off the hand cranked press on February 8, 1865, and 250 were out on the street for the price of one penny.

For the 4900 residents of Wellington - a city built around its harbour - it was the first daily newspaper of its own. Other competing newspapers published two or three times a week.

It was a crowded market, there was already the New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian, the New Zealand Advertiser and the Independent.

It was not The Evening Post founder Henry Blundell’s first newspaper, he had been the manager of Dublin’s Evening Mail but had resigned over disagreements with the paper’s policy to its employees.

He came to New Zealand and managed the Lyttelton Times and started a newspaper himself in Havelock in1864 with business partner David Curle.

He then moved to Wellington and with his sons John, Henry Thomas and Louis along with Curle, started The Evening Post.

Like most newspapers of the time, the front page was advertising - including for itself - and that continued with no editorial content on the front for 100 years.

Included were shipping notices, the opening of a new pub, the sale of properties and an advertisement extolling the virtues of Lea and Perrins’ Worcestershire Sauce

It wasn’t until the second page that there was editorial content - an editorial announcing itself.

“A liberal course of policy will be pursued; and the bounds of moderation will not be overstepped in giving expression to the views entertained by them [the proprietors] as journalists.'

Editorial content, news from the provinces and comment on the Māori war along with a great many more advertisements filled out the four pages.

One of the longest lasting advertising partnerships was with premier department store Kirkcaldie and Stains, established itself only a couple of years before The Evening Post. The advertisements for the department store ran almost from the first paper and continued for decades.

The local paper

Very quickly The Evening Post took up local news.

Reporters went to court, to council meetings, to local public meetings, anything and everything to bring readers what they needed to know about what was happening locally.

Crime was a big driver, like this early report,

“On May 1,1865, The Evening Post reported that the sole policeman on duty in Lambton Quay had at 10am found a drunken man with a box of lucifers endeavouring to light his pipe amid a heap of shavings collected at a house in the course of erection. Were it not for the vigilance of the office the most disastrous consequences might have resulted.”

It would be prophetic - decades later a fire destroyed a third of Lambton Quay, wiping out whole businesses in one night.

Government, both central and local, were also rich mines of news.

The opening of the town hall in 1904 included a report of the cost and that the venue meant the little capital finally had a venue that could seat several thousands for big performances.

Along with the wharf and shipping, unions, a new zoo, wars and celebrity news, there was plenty to fill the pages.

There were also old favourites - complaints about the costs of imported goods, like tinned goods, and letters to the editor - published without real names like “Grumpy of Karori”.

By July 1865, Blundell had bought out his partner and the paper was truly a family affair, with Henry Jnr a reporter and advertising canvasser, John and Louis compositors.

A new printing press in 1870 was capable of printing 700 copies an hour - although it was still hand operated.

The first non-family member editor was Frank Gifford in 1868 who had previously written for the Wanganui Herald.

By then the paper very much had its own voice - anti-government of the day but broadly liberal.

The first takeover bid came in 1889 - from Sir George Fenwick of the Otago Daily Times and A G Horton from the New Zealand Herald. They offered £30,000, it was refused. Later Rupert Murdoch would take over the Dominion.

By the next year the number of papers put out each day had grown to 4900 and in 1896 land in Willis St, long associated with both The Evening Post and the Dominion, was bought and the first rotary press installed.

Not long after The Evening Post started a new tradition - front windows. These were huge posters of the day’s news displayed at the front of the building, sometimes drawing crowds.

A competitor enters the market

The Dominion began in 1907 and was the most direct competition for The Evening Post.

News wasn’t hard to come by, there would be two World Wars, the influenza epidemic, royal visits, the opening of Wellington’s first opera house, early films and talkies.

In 1929, the Murchison earthquake was huge news and Neil Blundell - the great-grandson of the founder - was sent to cover it. Only two years later it was the Napier earthquake and The Evening Post ran eye witness accounts.

Screeds of column inches were devoted to rugby and local teams were hotly followed.

Racing too was huge - so much so that The Evening Post kept its own pigeons that were taken to Trentham racecourse and sent back with the race results so they could be put into the earliest edition of the paper.

In fact sports was so big that in 1936 Blundell launched the first edition of the Sports Post - one of the biggest stories of its first year being Jack Lovelock winning the 1500 metres at the Berlin Olympic Games in world record time.

By then the world was in the grip of a depression and for New Zealand the racehorse Phar Lap proved the distraction many needed.

The first Labour Government which came into power in 1935 also started an Evening Post tradition - it published a picture of every member of Parliament in a poster, something The Post still does today.

News did not appear on the front page until 1968 and even then only on the top half of the front page - called in the industry above the fold of a broadsheet paper.

Along with news, the paper had its own cartoonists - Neville Colvin, Nevile Lodge, Tom Scott, and later Sharon Murdoch.

And it started a cultural phenomenon when editor Mike Robson took a chance on running a new cartoon strip by Murray Ball - initially called Damned Dog but ended up as Footrot Flats.

By 1951 the circulation of the paper was more than 71,000 and rising, alongside the Sports Post which reached over 111,000 in 1956.

Photos taken over time became iconic - the Wahine rolled on its side, the Beatles on the balcony of the Old St George, the train wreck at the disaster at Tangiwai, an aerial shot of the Wanganella grounded on the rocks near the entrance to Wellington harbour.

The Evening Post’s photographers went out in all weather to get the shot.

In the 1960s when the future editor of the Sports Post and The Evening Post, Don Churchill, joined the paper, he said there was a sense that the Evening Post was the paper of home and family.

The newsroom then had an Imperial typewriter on each desk and there was one phone that the whole newsroom had to use.

In 1965, Henry Neil - great-grandson of the original Henry - was asked by the board of the company about a joint Sunday paper with the publisher of the Dominion. He said no but the Wellington Publishing Company went ahead with the Sunday Times which was published for the first time on May 30, 1965.

In the 70s the two companies that published The Evening Post and the Dominion merged into one owner, but the two newspapers remained independent of each other despite working in the same building and sharing the same press. There was many a cut-off conversation if two sets of opposing journalists happened to cross on the stairwell or in the elevator.

Sometimes - like with the merger talks that ended up in court action - the papers themselves became the news. A young man armed with a rifle holed up on the mezzanine floor of The Evening Post building in 1973 and it took several hours of talking from the police to get him to surrender.

The armed siege shut down much of central Wellington for the better part of a day.

By now newspapers were feeling the arrival of television on their sales. The Evening Post’s circulation was over 100,000 but the Sports Post was suffering from declining numbers and in 1975 it was closed.

Even so, the 70s was a time of huge news - Robert Muldoon, who regularly sparred with journalists, was making his mark, the inflation rate climbed, nuclear testing, Think Big economics, a new motorway for Wellington and a new mayor, Michael Fowler who thought there should be one council for the Wellington region.

Turbulent times

How news looked was changing - the women’s pages became general features and huge stories like Bastion Point, the Erebus disaster and the boycott of the Montreal Olympics were all covered in detail.

Then in 1981 came a rugby tour by the Springboks which polarised the country and by the end of that decade a stock market crash that ended many businesses.

The paper also ended up as part of crimes scenes. In 1889 Louis Chemis was convicted of the murder of Thomas Hawkings on May 31, 1889.

Fragments of the Evening Post were found in the shotgun wounds, pieces of a wad used in the gun. A date - May 23, was readable.

The same paper was found torn in Chemis’ home. The torn pieces in the wound exactly fitted the torn portion found in his house.

Later caretaker and unionist Ernie Abbott was killed on March 27, 1984, when a bomb exploded inside Trades’ Hall on Wellington’s Vivian St. Trades’ Hall was the headquarters for many trade unions

The device was wrapped in newspaper and fragments from the scene were identified as coming from a 1977 edition of the Evening Post.

A wave of technology

One of the biggest technological changes came in 1987 when typewriters became a thing of the past and a computer system was introduced.

After that came the cellular phone, brick sized and with its own charger that weighed several kilos.

Later - with a new press up and running in Petone - the papers began printing in colour.

Then in June 2000 a little news website called Stuff was launched. It worked out of The Evening Post floor of the building, with both teams working side by side.

The Evening Post always saw itself as a Wellington paper first - and nothing said that more than a collaboration between the advertising manager Ty Dallas and ad giant Saatchi and Saatchi whose slogan Absolutely Positively Wellington became the catch cry for the city.

Famous names came out of The Evening Post. Peter Jackson became an apprentice photo-engraver while on the side he was beginning to make movies - often using workmates as cast and crew. Fran Wilde, a former mayor and MP, also worked for the paper.

Along the way The Evening Post took on campaigns - the Transmission Gully road was one the paper championed from the beginning.

There were also stories where every word was devoured such as the attack on America in 2001 and the kidnapping of Baby Kahu in Lower Hutt.

But by now neither paper was showing strong signs of growth and in 2002 a merger was announced between the newspapers creating The Dominion Post. And for the first time two sets of staff worked together on one floor of the building.

A merger and a new identity

The merger married the strengths of the Dominion, known for its political and business focus, and The Evening Post’s grass roots community knowledge.

The Dominion Post went on to push boundaries - like the exposing of Louise Nicholas’ story about being raped by police officers and publishing articles which quoted transcripts of conversations police secretly recorded in an investigation into military-style training camps in the Ureweras and the 40-hour Napier siege where a police officer was killed.

Huge events required huge stories and the Dominion Post responded. The Christchurch earthquake required not only Wellington’s paper - but Christchurch’s paper The Press - to be printed in Wellington as the Press building was badly damaged.

After the earthquake the long-time buildings that had housed the paper needed earthquake strengthening work and the staff moved up Boulcott St into shiny new offices.

The paper won Newspaper of the Year in 2014 and, along with other publications, it won best coverage of a major news event in 2017 for the Kaikōura earthquake.

The Dominion Post won awards, pushed the boundaries of journalism and continued to report national affairs from the Capital while with it, the Stuff website grew.

The paper also changed its look, moving from broadsheet to compact size for week-day papers, cleaned up the masthead and revitalised its print look.

A shift to a new home in Brandon St put the paper at street level for the first time in decades. It meant the paper had a unique view to report on the 2022 occupation at Parliament that dominated news for weeks.

In 2023 the paper decided to change with the times - dropping Dominion from its title masthead and becoming the Post - as it was always called by locals anyway - was born.

And despite the Post’s age, it continues to shift with the times, it now has its own dedicated website.

Sources: The Dominion Post: 150 years of News by Paul Elenio; Evening Post library; Te Ara The Encyclopedia of New Zealand; National Library’s Papers Past.

The story has been amended to show that the Sunday Times was first published by Wellington Publishing who put out the Dominion.