List Street

When Thomas Currie List arrived in New Plymouth in 1904 he took up the job as proprietor of the Taranaki Daily News. He is credited with improving and expanding the paper and went on to become director of the Press Association. This job took him to the Imperial Press Conference in London in 1930 and he wrote a book about his travels.

As a founding member of the New Plymouth Rotary club he became president and later District Governor for New Zealand. On a trip to the US in 1933 he gifted a silk flag that had been carried over the South Pole by Admiral Richard E. Byrd. Byrd was present at the ceremony and promised to further the link between the two countries by naming his next place of discovery “Little New Zealand”.

Thomas List had a passion for the preservation and restoration of the New Zealand bush. He served for over twenty years as Chairman of the Egmont National Park Board. He was said to be happiest when working in the beautiful grounds of his home Maranui. After his death a three-hectare portion of his property was added to the adjacent Pukekura Park.

Thomas met his demise at the early age of 55 while attending a Rotarian conference in Wellington in 1934. It was surmised that Thomas pushed himself to go while feeling unwell out of a sense of duty to service and brotherhood.

Archdeacon Evans remembered Thomas List in a service at St Mary’s Church: “Mr List has been for so many years ultimately connected with almost every activity in Taranaki and has given ungrudgingly his time and effort in every movement for the benefit of his fellow citizens that people expected instinctively that he would live for many years to carry on the work that was so useful”.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.