1943: The Battle of Manners Street

April 3, 2023

By AHNZ

Tonight in history, 3 April, 1943, the alleged ‘Battle of Manners Street’. Many government history books in recent decades record this as a scuffle between NZ and US servicemen in central Wellington. Seemingly related to racism toward Maoris and ending up in fatalities for the Americans.

However, An Eyewitness History of New Zealand (1985) has this to say,

”
…”

Yes that’s right. Absolutely nothing.

The fact that no official records can substantiate the legend of the Battle of Manners Street is taken as evidence that it most certainly did happen and that the government hushed it up! But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Certainly a scuffle did occur this night but it didn’t particularly stand out from the many others. It’s more that many tales have been rolled into one, and given a place and a time as part of the story. It’s more folklore than history and perhaps that’s really why I can’t read about it until about the 1990s. However, it does appear in McLintock’s (1966) encyclopedia…

“This riot, which has passed into Wellington legend as “the Battle of Manners Street”, took place on the evening of Saturday, 3 April 1943…The fighting spread to the A.N.A. Club in Willis Street, where belts and knives were used, and into Cuba Street. It has been estimated that over 1,000 American and New Zealand, troops were involved, as well as several hundreds of civilians.”

“In no case has the result of any of the ensuing inquiries been published; and, owing to the strictures of wartime censorship, no reference to the riots appeared at the time in local newspapers.” – An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, A. H. McLintock (1966);  Te Ara

“The most celebrated incident of this sort was Wellington’s ‘Battle of Manners Street’ on Saturday 3 April 1943. It apparently began with a confrontation between Southern Marines and Maoris, a crowd gathered, largely from nearby Service clubs, and a general fracas developed. Reports were that several men had been killed and more sent to hospital…‘There was not a single person injured, much less taken to hospital or killed, as rumour has it’, said the Police Commissioner, reproving rumour-mongers…The New Zealand Herald remarked that official suppression of facts had bred grotesque rumours. If the eventual plain and straightforward account of what had actually happened had been made public at the time there would have been no scope for the distorted version.” – The Home Front Volume 1, Nancy Taylor (1986); New Zealand Electronic Text Collection

Might it be that the Legend of Manners Street really is just that? Or else how could 1,000 men (most of them killers) going at each other with batons and knives be so missing from the records? From an Anarchist point of view it would be a useful incident to make a point about culture clash and government intervention but this is denied us if there’s no evidence to back it up.

One of the central criticisms that the Anarchist History of New Zealand puts to Government History is that it simply regurgitates and re-offers the same old events and tellings of them over and over again. The so-called ‘Battle of Manners Street’ is one of those workhorse ‘events’ complete with time and place that mainstream history books constantly echo and re-echo. From the 1990s in particular a number of books note the Battle but for a source are only quoting each other!  If AHNZ isn’t going to be anything other than yet another cut-and-paste-history just like all the rest then it must be critical of received ‘facts’. The fact seems to be that the Battle of Manners Street owes much more to legend and rumor than to evidence.

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Note: Very similar incident, Battle of Brisbane, is real history from 1942

Ref. 1943: Eleanor Roosevelt Aggravates Unrest, AHNZ

Ref. 1950s: Conquered Pacific Theatre Converted into Americana, AHNZ

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