Rutherford Waddell (1850–1932) was a New Zealand Presbyterian minister, social reformer and writer. He was born in Ireland, and after failing to finding a position as a missionary or a minister Waddell and his wife migrated to New Zealand in 1877. Settling in Dunedin, he led St Andrew's Presbyterian Church for forty years from 1879 to 1919. An important liberalizing influence in the Presbyterian church in New Zealand, he believed in the value of the ministry to promote social justice. He oversaw the establishment of a mission hall, savings bank, free library and free kindergarten within his parish, and promoted the founding of a number of cultural and sporting groups.
Waddell's most notable accomplishment in nineteenth-century New Zealand, however, was his crusade against sweat shops. In October 1888, his sermon "On the sin of cheapness", stirred many of the local community into action, which led to the establishment in 1890 of a royal commission on sweating. Its subsequent recommendations formed the basis of many of the country's social reforms of the following decade. Waddell was a believer in the value of trade unions, and became the first president of the Tailoresses' Union of New Zealand in July 1889.
Biography Early life and education Rutherford Waddell was born in 1849 or 1850 in Glenarm, in County Antrim, Ireland. Other sources state that he was born between 1850 and 1852 and give his birthplace as Ballyroney, County Down, Ireland.
His parents were Margaret (née Reid, 1809–) and Hugh Waddell (1803–1875). His father was a Presbyterian minister while his mother was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and the sister of the novelist Thomas Mayne Reid. One of eight children, many of his ancestors on both sides of the family had been ministers in Ulster for generations. Among them was the 17th century Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford, after whom he was named. His older brother Hugh (1839–1901) became a minister and went on in 1869 to pioneer the Irish Presbyterian mission to China. Later he moved on to undertake a lifetime of missionary work in Japan. Waddell grew up in rural Antrim and Down. Waddell's mother died when he was young and his father was largely absent, which lead to him being brought up by his spinster aunt, Jean Reid, in a farmhouse at Annaghbane near Donaghmore in County Down. She continued to care for him when his father married Anne Atkinson and had two more children.
He did not enjoy his time at school, largely due to the cruelties of an abusive teacher. Despite becoming a frequent truant he developed a love of reading, remaining a prodigious reader for the rest of his life, of subjects including contemporary fiction, economics, sociology and theology.
He left school at the age of 14 to become a shop assistant in a drapery in the linen manufacturing town of Banbridge. After four years of working long hours he decided to follow the calling of his father as a minister which he said was due to hearing a sermon by a preacher in a country church and the example of his older brother Hugh. He graduated with an MA from Queen's University in Ireland in October 1875. He also studied at the Presbyterian Theological College, Belfast, from 1874 to 1876.
Immigrates to New Zealand After being ordained at Newtownards in County Down, Waddell struggled to find employment, being rejected both for missionary service in Syria and by the congregation of Ballygrainey Presbyterian Church at Six Road Ends in Bangor. This led Waddell to accept an invitation to join the ministry of the Canterbury Presbyterian Church Extension Association, for which he would receive a salary of £200 per annum. He sailed with his wife Kathleen (who he had married in January 1877), to Lyttelton, New Zealand, on the Piako.
Following their arrival after an 89 day long voyage in May 1877, Waddell took a service at the Papanui Presbyterian Church and was then employed for three months as a relieving minister at St Paul's Church in Christchurch. He was then inducted to the charge of Prebbleton and Lincoln on 25 September 1877. This was a small parish and its congregation had struggled to pay the salary of the previous ministers.
St Andrews Church Following the resignation of its previous minister, the Reverend John Gow in July 1878, St Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Dunedin began looking for a replacement. There were claims that Gow had disgraced himself with drink which resolved the congregation to seek an exemplary candidate, which they felt could only be obtained by recruiting a minister from Scotland. In the interim a number of ministers served the congregation for a month at a time. One planned temporary minister was Rutherford Waddell, who came with the recommendation of the Rev. John Elmslie, the minister of St Paul's in Christchurch. The congregation was electrified by the first sermon Waddell preached and issued a call on the spot. Years later a parishioner recalled the congregation's excited reaction. “I well remember the meeting on the footpath outside the Church door in Melville Street where excited groups of earnest men and women discussed the sermon, and it was then and there decided he would do for St Andrew's, and nobody else need apply.”
In January 1879 two hundred and one members of St Andrew's congregation signed to call Waddell to become their minister with not a single dissenter. He accepted in early March and was inducted as the parish's minister on 18 April 1879, at a time when the congregation numbered about 300 members. At the time of Waddell's appointment he was only the third Irishman to serve in the Otago Presbyterian Church as its ministers had until the 1860s been overwhelmingly recruited from the Scottish Free Church until a lack of ministers had forced them to consider other nationalities.
At this time St Andrew's parish stretched from the lower reaches of prosperous Mornington, home to the middle-class as well as rich merchants and notable residents such as William Reynolds, seed merchants Robert Nimmo and John Blair, importer Alexander S. Paterson and drapery owner Thomas Brown – all the way down to the overcrowded slums and sleaze of the Devil's Half-Acre.
Waddell threw himself immediately into the life of his challenging parish, reinvigorating St Andrews after its hiatus without a permanent minister with the impassioned directness of his sermons soon won the confidence of the congregation. Under his leadership the debt on the church property was halved by the end of 1880, the Session strengthened and the Deacon's Court reorganized.
In 1880, he set up the St Andrew's Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association to provide education and friendship that would "strengthen ... character".
After an application for funding to the Church Extension Committee of the Dunedin Presbytery was turned down St Andrew's funded the construction of a mission hall in 1886 to provide a home for the church's outreach projects using money raised by a bazaar and from public lectures by Waddell. In the mission hall Waddell set up a savings bank, a free library.
Stephenson tragedy In the early 1880s Waddell attempted to mediate in the bitter estrangement of George Stephenson and his wife, Mary (née Stenhouse). After the couple separated Stephenson contributed nothing to the support of his wife and their two children, and Mary obtained a protection order against him. For his efforts threats were made against Waddell by George Stephenson. On the evening of 7 July 1883 Stephenson rushed up to his wife while she was out walking in Manor Place, seized her round the neck with his left arm, and pulled a dynamite cartridge out of his pocket, which he detonated, blowing both their heads off. Waddell officiated at Mary's funeral.
The Sin of Cheapness The economic boom of the 1860s, driven by the discovery of gold, was followed by a long depression in New Zealand that started in the 1870s and extended into the 1890s. This worsened the living conditions of Dunedin's poor, many of them living in St Andrew's parish. Waddell believed that the Christian gospel should be actively interpreted through social justice so he responded with a number of practical church-based initiatives – the moribund Ladies Association was restructured within three years of his arrival and charged with distributing food, clothing, coal and blankets to the poor of the parish. It was later renamed the Friendly Aid Society and later still the Sisterhood of St Andrews. From 1883 St Andrew's also worked closely with the Salvation Army to improve social services to the poor and destitute of its parish. Waddell had once worked long hours for no pay during his time as a draper's apprentice in Banbridge so he was sympathetic when he became aware that women and children in the garment and footwear trades in Dunedin, were working 72-hour weeks in dirty, dangerous plants for nine shillings. Outworkers fared even worse with one woman receiving twopence for finishing a pair of trousers. As the depression continued wages were reduced in the clothing industry in 1877, followed a year later by warehousemen having their wages reduced and manufacturers further cutting wages and employing more women and children as they cost less than skilled male workers. Early in 1888, Waddell delivered a series of lectures on social issues in the St Andrews Church Hall. In the fourth lecture he covered socialism.
Following on from these lectures he delivered a sermon at St Andrew's Church in early October 1888 on the "sin of cheapness", arguing that community's "enormous rage to get cheap things", was resulting in cost-cutting by manufacturers and middlemen. This practice was forcing prices down to a point where wages fell below subsistence level, a process known as “sweating”. The sermon (of which no copies have survived), is regarded as a pivotal moment in New Zealand's labour history as it inspired George Fenwick, editor of the Otago Daily Times and the paper's chief reporter Silas Spragg to take up the issue. The resulting articles in the newspaper on the working conditions in clothing manufacturing and shoe making industries galvanized church, labour leaders and the public, In November 1888 Waddell took the matter to the Synod of the Presbyterian Church of Otago and Southland which passed a motion passed deploring the existence of sweating in New Zealand. Waddell in letters pushed for the appointment of a royal commission on female labour and for the formation of trade unions among female workers.
When no other body took up the cause he organized what was a well-attended public meeting in the Athenaeum Hall on 14 February 1889. Chaired by William Downie Stewart the meeting agreed that a committee be formed to support better working conditions and better pay for those living on low wages. Among the eight members of the committee were Waddell, William Downie Stewart Sr, Winifred Bathgate, Rachel Reynolds and Silas Spragg. Over the following weeks, the committee came to the opinion that agreeing on minimum wage rates were the best means of improving working conditions. After being approached Dunedin individual employers agreed not to hire any contractor who did not pay the minimum wage. However, in May the four major warehousing firms of Bing, Harris and Co.; Butterworth Brothers; Ross and Glendining; and Sargood, Son, and Ewen wrote a joint letter to the committee arguing that unless minimum wage rates were agreed throughout New Zealand, Dunedin firms could not compete. They refused to require their contractors to pay minimum wages and suggested that the committee deal directly between contractor and worker.