Dove-Myer Robinson

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His statue in Aotea Square, Auckland City.

Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, KB (15 June 1901 - 14 August 1989) served as Mayor of Auckland from 1959 to 1965 and from 1968 to 1980, the longest total time of any mayor so far in the city.^[1]

He was a colourful character and became affectionately known across New Zealand as "Robbie".^[2] He was one of several Jewish mayors of Auckland City, although he rejected Judaism as a teenager and became a lifelong atheist.^[3] He has been described as a "slight, bespectacled man whose tiny stature was offset by a booming voice and massive ego".^[3]

1 Life
2 Remembrance
3 Mayoral terms
4 References

[edit] Life

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Born Mayer Dove Robinson in Sheffield, England, he had seven siblings (being the sixth). His parents were Ida Brown and Moss Robinson. While his father described himself as a master jeweller, he actually sold trinkets, and second-hand furniture, and the family was poor and often on the move. Dove-Mayer's mother influenced the upbringing of her son by transmitting the strict values her own rabbi father had taught her. His Jewish heritage ensured that he was often targeted by anti-semitic violence in the schools he attended. The family moved to New Zealand in 1914, where his father then worked as a pawnbroker. Dove-Myer, as he later called himself (ignoring his Robinson family name), found New Zealand agreeable and lacking in the intermittent persecutions he had previously faced.^[3]

Robinson entered politics in the late 1940s when he led the opposition to a sewage dumping scheme which would have seen the effluent discharged into the Hauraki Gulf untreated. Instead, when elected in 1953 as a councillor, he proposed and eventually realised a scheme to break down the sewage in oxidation ponds ('Robbie's ponds') near the Manukau Harbour. His success in the scheme later on helped him gain his first mayoralty.^[1]

[edit] Remembrance

Dame Barbara Goodman, former Auckland Mayoress and councillor, is his niece, and spearheaded a campaign for the Auckland City Council to build a statue of him in Aotea Square; the statue was completed in 2002.^[4]

[edit] Mayoral terms

Preceded by Keith Buttle	Mayor of Auckland (first time) 1959-1965	Succeeded by Roy McElroy
Preceded by Roy McElroy	Mayor of Auckland (second time) 1968-1980	Succeeded by Colin Kay