From a Timaru childhood to 35 years of organising working women
1873–1950
Tailoress
Trade unions and social reform
Justice of the peace
Jane Elizabeth Runciman was ten years old when she arrived in Timaru with her mother and sisters in 1883.
Born in Waterford, Ireland, on 4 June 1873, Jane was the eldest child of William Edward Runciman and Susan Propert Williams. Her father had already travelled to New Zealand, and the family joined him in Timaru. Another daughter, Violet, was born here in 1885. By the end of the decade, the family had moved to Dunedin.
Those few Timaru years formed part of Jane’s childhood, but the surviving evidence does not establish which local school she attended or show that her later political ideas began here.
In Dunedin, Jane attended Macandrew Road School, completed an apprenticeship and became a skilled tailoress. She worked mainly at the New Zealand Clothing Factory and became involved with the Dunedin Tailoresses’ Union during the 1890s. In 1902 she gave evidence on the union’s behalf before the Court of Arbitration.
(Note, She arrived in Timaru in 1883 aged ten and the family did not move to Dunedin until the late 1880s, I haven't found evidence that she attended a Timaru School yet).
After about 20 years in the clothing industry, Jane became full-time secretary of the Dunedin union and the New Zealand Federated Tailoresses’ Association in 1908. She later helped establish a union branch in Invercargill.
Her work was practical. She argued that women needed to organise collectively if they were to improve their pay and working conditions. She represented tailoresses at labour conferences and, in 1918, became one of three women elected to the New Zealand Labour Party’s national executive.
Jane also challenged the idea that girls’ education should be limited to household training. As a member of the King Edward Technical College board, she supported broader general education and training for clerical work.
During the Depression, she became a leading member of Dunedin’s Women’s Unemployment Committee and repeatedly called for better assistance for single working women. In December 1926, she was among New Zealand’s first 18 women appointed as justices of the peace.
Jane retired from union office in 1943, aged 70, after 35 years of service. She died in Dunedin on 13 November 1950.
Her South Canterbury connection was brief but real. Timaru was the first New Zealand community in which Jane lived. Her wider impact came later, through decades spent making women workers harder to ignore and better able to speak collectively for themselves.
Read the WuHoo story: Following the Breadcrumbs: Jane Runciman and a Timaru Chapter of Women’s Ambition
Sources
Dictionary of New Zealand Biography: Jane Elizabeth Runciman
The strongest source for her identity, Timaru childhood, tailoring career, union leadership, political work, educational advocacy, welfare service and death.
NZHistory: Jane Elizabeth Runciman
Confirms her labour and welfare work, appointment as a justice of the peace, wartime fundraising and burial information.