The Haweral New Plymouth rift, January 1886

We are now in a better position to understand the Hawera/New Plymouth rift. Underlying it was New Plymouth's resentment at the whittling away of its capital status as Hawera pressed for the leadership of South Taranaki, and Wanganui increased its dominance of the region. New Plymouth and Hawera were also competing for control of the hinterland opened up by the railway between them. The New Plymouth offer, a day or two before the disaster, of the loan of their fire engine to Stratford, may not have been entirely disinterested. At the first sale of Stratford township land in 1878 the main buyers had been leading New Plymouth citizens, including two members of the 1885–86 borough council and both of its two valuers.²⁷ New Plymouth investors probably became heavily involved in the new bush townships over the following years. They were certainly steady contributors of mortgages on central Taranaki bush sections. In 1884 the New Plymouth Sash & Door Factory & Timber Co bought the Ngaere sawmill of Robson Brothers, pioneers of the South Taranaki timber industry. This meant that many members of the New Plymouth business community were directly involved in the fire threat to this mill. They included two of the current borough councillors, the town clerk, the council's solicitor and one of its valuers.²⁸ But South Taranaki and the Wanganui district were also involved in central Taranaki. When entrepreneur A.C. Fookes put the Midhirst Special Settlement on the market in 1877 many of the buyers were from Wanganui. In July 1878 the settlement was launched by the drawing of lots for the rural sections in Hawera, indicating that most of the takers must have come from the south.²⁹ (Fookes himself had moved to New Plymouth in 1876, after a career as a storekeeper and land speculator at Waverley.) It would seem that the Hawera Star and the New Plymouth press were tussling for the readership of these bush settlements—both covered their local affairs in some depth. page 190 These few examples are merely indicative of what was probably a wideranging commercial and social competition.

The first tensions in New Plymouth were concerned with the use of the railway. Hawera had only had to wait some hours for Wanganui's approval of a special train on the evening of 6 January; New Plymouth's bids for special trains on the 7th and 8th met with much more tardy responses. To understand the frustration which underlay mayor Paul's confrontation with stationmaster Bass on the 8th, one needs to realise that until the closing of the Hawera-Patea gap a few months earlier New Plymouth had been ‘Head Office’ to the Taranaki railway. No doubt the district manager had been accepted as a worthy member of the New Plymouth establishment, with whom one could conduct informal, gentlemanly negotiations. The demotion of the New Plymouth office to the control of a mere bureaucratic underling, answerable to Wanganui, must have seemed like just another blow in the debasement of New Plymouth.

Eventually New Plymouth's hurt feelings about the railway were mollified as emergency control of the trains passed into local hands. But then, in the midst of the town's somewhat belated but eventually vigorous and effective response to the crisis, came mayor Paul's ill-considered telegram, countermanding Hawera's colonial appeal for aid. This move suggests real resentment of Hawera's unilateral action, coming as it did on top of other recent hurts. Combined with New Plymouth's setting up of ‘the Central Relief Committee’ without consulting Hawera, it represented a tough-minded public rebuke to Hawera's leaders. Yet it was ill-considered, showing no understanding of the frightening circumstances in which Hawera had been moved to act, and also probably reflecting a townsman's lack of awareness of the scope and long term effects of the rural losses. With the New Plymouth immigration barracks to house the homeless, and the staff of the New Plymouth Crown Lands, Land Registry and Survey offices working with them, Paul and his committee would inevitably have edged their way into control of the reconstruction process. The deeply antagonised Hawera community was able to hit back by matching the relief investigations of government surveyor and Crown Lands ranger with the local knowledge of George Marchant, promoted and publicised by the Hawera Star. A good deal of behind the scenes negotiation seems to have gone into defusing the situation. Leadership from outside the two towns, and even from outside the province, came into play in the healing of the rift.³⁰ To fully understand this colonial world we must appreciate its ability both to harness deep local loyalties and to control them.