Edward Lionel Terry (1873-20 August 1952) was a New Zealand white supremacist and murderer, incarcerated in psychiatric institutions after murdering a Chinese immigrant, Mr. Joe Kum Yung, in Wellington, New Zealand in 1905.
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Edward Lionel Terry was born in Sandwich, Kent in 1873. He was the son of Edward Terry and Frances Thompson. His father was a prosperous corn merchant in Kent, and later managed Pall Mall Real Estate.
Lionel Terry was educated at Merton College in Wimbledon, until he tired of that life, and joined the Royal Regiment Artillery in 1892. After his father secured his discharge in 1895, he became involved in successive itinerant occupations in South Africa, British Columbia, Canada, and the United States in 1895-6, before he finally emigrated to New Zealand in 1901. During his period in Canada and the United States, Terry developed his virulent white supremacist attitudes, which were to have a tragic outcome in his immediate future.
In New Zealand, Terry first worked for the Department of Lands and Survey in Auckland, before he tried to establish a horticultural market garden north of Auckland in 1901. In 1903, he worked as a Taihape bush feller, north of Palmerston North and Feilding, before recommencing employment with the Department of Lands and Survey as a surveyor, based in Mangonui, Northland in 1905.
Terry gave the first indication that he was a white supremacist when he wrote and privately published The Shadow. A copy of the original is in the State Library of Victoria in Australia (among other sources) and can be read online on that library's webpage. It can be found by going to the search page at [1]. This text dealt with his obsessions against Chinese and East Asian immigration to New Zealand to work the goldfields, or in horticulture or small business ventures. He then undertook a 900 km trek from Mangonui to Wellington in 1905, distributing copies of The Shadow as he went. Once he reached the nation's capital, he attempted to convince New Zealand's Parliament to ban any further Chinese and East Asian immigration to New Zealand, but failed to do so.
On September 24, 1905, Terry shot Joe Kum Yung, a Chinese immigrant, in Haining Street, Wellington. Mr. Yung died later of injuries. According to John Dunmore, Mr Yung was an elderly Canton Chinese gold prospector, aged 70, who had a pronounced limp as a result of a past mining accident. Terry selected Yung as his victim due to this infirmity. Ironically, Mr. Yung appears to have been destitute, given his lack of luck on the declining goldfields, and yearned to return to his native Canton.
Terry submitted himself to the authorities and the New Zealand Supreme Court convicted him of murder on 21 November 1905. Originally, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life incarceration within New Zealand psychiatric institutions. Over the next 47 years Terry served time in Christchurch's Sunnyside, Dunedin's Seacliff Lunatic Asylum and Lyttelton Prison. He was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This did not prevent white supremacist New Zealanders from circulating a petition for mitigation of his sentence, although the local Chinese community circulated a counter-petition in response.
Terry absconded from Sunnyside twice, in 1909 and 1914. Under Seacliff administrator Truby King, he seemed to recover slightly from his ongoing mental illness, and was allowed to produce more poetry, paint, and undertake horticulture. Over time, he developed messianic religious delusions and later assaulted a doctor who attempted to administer an anti-typhoid injection in 1940, whereupon he was returned to solitary confinement. Terry died in 1952 from a stroke, aged 79.
There has been some posthumous interest in Terry's life and times, which has led to some poetry about his offending, and a biography in the late seventies. Terry has received a capsule biography in the online Dictionary of New Zealand biography, and a further section in the recently published Wild Cards: Eccentric Characters From New Zealand's Past (2006). Not all of this interest has been scholarly in tone, as the neofascist New Zealand Nationalist Workers Party republished copies of The Shadow for their own anti-immigrant racist purposes in the eighties.
Terry and his trial in the Supreme Court feature in the early part of Alison Wong's novel, As the Earth Turns Silver, published by Penguin in 2009.
Works About Terry: