Basil Arthur

Arthur was born in Timaru, New Zealand, and educated at Timaru Boys' High School.[1] As a youth he was a keen athlete and competed in representative rugby, badminton and hockey. Aged 15 he found work in Otago on a fishing trawler and later gained employment as a freezing worker. When he reached age 18, in 1947, he enlisted in the army and served for a year as a driver in J Force during the occupation of Japan.[2]

He returned to New Zealand and found work as a hotel manager and on 5 January 1950 he married Elizabeth Rita Wells in Auckland. He soon after became a clerk for the Ministry of Works in Mangakino. Arthur had a preference for hard, physical activity and disliked clerical work. Thusly, he resigned three years later and worked in a series of labouring jobs subsequently. Whilst working in a sawmill, Arthur became secretary of the Waikato section of the New Zealand Workers’ Union. In 1956 he was elected to the unions national executive, and served as president of the Auckland branch for three years.[2]

His father, a hotel proprietor, inherited the title of 4th Baronet in 1941, and Arthur in turn inherited it on his father's death in 1949. However, he deliberately made little use of his title. The title fitted uneasily with his lifestyle as a working man and he kept it hidden. It was not until the mid-1950s, by which time he was working as a concrete layer, that it became known that he was a baronet.[2]

Aged just 16, he joined the Labour Party and delivered its pamphlets during the 1946 election. In 1957 Arthur decided to stand for parliament himself and unsuccessfully contested the Labour nomination for the Waitomo electorate, losing to Vic Haines the Mayor of Te Kuiti. In 1960 Arthur won nomination to stand for Labour in the Hamilton electorate, coming second.[2]

In 1962, he contested two by-elections for the Labour Party: first, unsuccessfully, in Waitaki; then, successfully, in Timaru. On entering Parliament at age 33 he was the country's youngest member of parliament. He was reluctant to be called "Sir", but the Speaker at the time, Ronald Algie, said that refusing this honorific would be disrespectful to the Queen.[2]

Arthur was both Minister of Transport and Minister in Charge of the State Insurance Office from 1972 until 1975 during the Third Labour Government.[3] AS Minister of Transport he established the Shipping Corporation of New Zealand, which he later considered his greatest contribution to New Zealand. As Minister of State Insurance he instituted a 50% rebate on insurance premiums for means-tested beneficiaries.[2]

When Labour won the 1984 election, Arthur became Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives.[2] He served in that capacity for one year, before dying in office of Legionnaires' disease.[4] The then Prime Minister, David Lange recalled in My Life (2005) that Arthur was gravely ill in Wellington Hospital, and if he resigned from the member's superannuation scheme before he died (but not otherwise) his estate would get a lump-sum payment. He had to answer a question in the house, then went to hospital with a letter of resignation "only to find that he had died hardly a minute before I got there". Labour lost the subsequent Timaru by-election, with a candidate that did not suit "the conservative character of the electorate."[5]

Arthur was the second baronet to serve as Speaker, the first being Sir Charles Clifford, 1st Baronet (the first Speaker of the House of Representatives), although he was made a baronet some time after he had retired from politics.