Halse Place (Opunake)

Halse Place in Opunake was named after a lawyer with a penchant for gambling.

William Henry Halse was born in London on 25 May 1817. His father John served as court secretary and his mother Clarissa was a lady-in-waiting to the queen, so they raised their family at St James’ Palace. William trained as a solicitor and immigrated to Taranaki with his brother Henry on the ship Amelia Thompson in 1841. The adventurous young bachelors gained a reputation for being tearaways, with William brought before the local magistrate in March 1843 for “enticing away the wife of a Māori native”. But he was deemed trustworthy enough to be appointed a Justice of the Peace and in 1848 became Resident Agent for the New Zealand Company. He was then made Commissioner of Crown Lands in 1851 and Deputy Superintendent of the Taranaki Provincial Council in 1858, as well as establishing his own successful law firm.

William married Harriet Wood in New Plymouth on 24 July 1856. The two first met on board the Amelia Thompson, when Harriet was just a toddler travelling with her parents, and she was still only a teenager when they wed.

Unfortunately, by the 1880s William’s law firm was in dire straits as a gambling addiction saw him lose thousands of pounds borrowed from elderly clients. Looming bankruptcy coupled with severe depression led the 65-year-old to take his own life at his summer home in Waitara on 13 April 1882. William wrote a suicide note claiming “My head is bursting” then poisoned himself with strychnine, his obituary in the Taranaki Herald claiming “he had become the victim of temporary insanity”.

William is buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s in New Plymouth, alongside his wife and three of their 11 children who died in childhood.

There is nothing to suggest Halse had any special connection to Opunake, but perhaps the people of Waitara felt that the manner of his death precluded naming a street after him there.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.