Post Office Square, 1913 Great Strike

Strike meetings and agitational rallies here during 1913 helped spread the strikers’ message, give information out to strikers, and keep up morale. The crowd in this picture gives some sense of the scale of the struggle, and the women in the foreground remind us that not only men were involved in the battles. On 26 October a mass meeting at Post Office Square marched from here to the Basin Reserve. Four days later ‘special constables’ on horseback attacked strikers here, and the square was the site of a pitched battle with batons, stones and street fighting.

This photograph may show socialist leader Harry Holland addressing the crowd.

Want to learn more?

Go to: www.nzhistory.net.nz/politics/1913-great-strike

Image Credit

‘War on the Wharves’ Flickr account.