Whitcombe Street (Lepperton)

Lepperton’s Whitcombe Street is named after a man who enjoyed a colourful career as a soldier and journalist.

Charles Douglas Whitcombe was born in Kent in 1836, eldest son of an army captain. Educated in Europe, he held a government job for several years before following family tradition and becoming a soldier. He even served under General Garibaldi, along with many other British ‘brothers of liberty’ who took part in the struggle for Italian unification.

In 1864 Charles immigrated down under with his brother William. The pair made their way from Nelson to New Plymouth where they both joined the Military Settlers during the Taranaki Wars. Amongst other adventures, Charles helped retrieve the body of missionary John Whiteley after he was killed by a Ngāti Maniapoto war party, in between teaching French and Italian to New Plymouth schoolchildren and helping run the local Agricultural Society and Literary Institute. Both brothers were awarded land for their service including a half-acre town section each in Lepperton, then known as Manutahi.

Charles married Mary Archer Wells, daughter of historian Benjamin Wells, in New Plymouth in 1871 and the couple had eight children. He worked for the Taranaki Provincial Council after the wars, responsible for managing New Plymouth’s cemetery, and became Commissioner of Crown Lands in 1874. In 1885 the family moved to Auckland where Charles took up the role of private secretary to former premier Sir George Grey.

Known for his sense of humour, Charles travelled to Tonga as a journalist for the New Zealand Herald where he clearly made an impression on the King, who appointed him his foreign secretary in 1890. Over the next seven years Charles became an expert on the languages and customs of the Pacific islands, also editing the Polynesian Gazette in Fiji and working as private tutor to King George Tupou II, whilst giving popular public lectures about the region on trips back to New Zealand.

Charles Whitcombe and his family returned to Taranaki for good in 1902 and he died at home in New Plymouth on 4 January 1904. Whitcombe Road in Opunake is also named after him.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.