Buying a Labour Party: Fowlds, Mills and the U.L.P.

Abstract

The United Labour Party was formed at a conference in Wellington in April 1912. It owed its origin to the initiative of a somewhat unsavoury American, ‘Professor’ Walter Thomas Mills, who arrived in New Zealand on 4 June 1911. Unscrupulous in financial and sexual matters, Mills was from all accounts a brilliant orator and an outstanding organiser, though his record in American labour organisations was deplorable.