Russell Stone: a scholar and a gentleman

22 October 2026

Education and society, Faculty of Arts and Education, Staff news, Te ao Māori

1923-2026

Russell Cyril James Stone ONZM was born in a nursing home in the Auckland suburb of Mt Eden in 1923. In 2026, resident at Ranfurly Hospital, he could see that nursing home from the window of his room and told me that he strangely felt he had come full circle.

Russell attended Mount Albert Grammar School and Auckland University College (as the University of Auckland was then called), graduating with a Master of Arts (first class honours), before taking up secondary school teaching. At Ranfurly Hospital earlier this year he proudly introduced me to one of his former pupils, who was also a resident there!

In 1964 Russell secured what he described as his dream job, becoming a lecturer in history at the University of Auckland where he had the opportunity to indulge his passion for research along with teaching.

He remained there until he retired in 1989. While a lecturer, in 1969 he completed his PhD thesis under the supervision of prominent New Zealand historian Sir Keith Sinclair. This thesis, on Auckland businesses in the 1880s, published as Makers of Fortune: A Colonial Business Community and its Fall (1973), launched his lifelong career in Auckland history.

Russell was a pioneer of local and urban history. When he began to study Auckland history, it was unfashionable. Historians chose to focus on empires, national histories, wars and diplomacy, and not local history. Russell was ahead of his time, and the immense importance of studying local history has now been widely recognised.

In 2019 he gave the opening lecture at the first symposium of the Auckland History Initiative, based in University's School of Humanities, where his work is still inspiring young scholars. This is even more important with secondary schools now using local history as a way of encouraging young people to connect with their immediate surroundings and localities.

Following Makers of Fortune, Russell focused on the prominent early Auckland leader, Sir John Logan Campbell, publishing two volumes in the 1980s on Logan Campbell's life. He was to return to this topic 18 years after he had retired from University, when he wrote: Logan Campbell's Auckland: Tales from the Early Years, Auckland University Press, 2007.

In 2001 he published his monumental From Tamaki-Makau-rau to Auckland (Auckland University Press), drawing on local Māori oral histories, archaeological evidence and early missionary diaries and histories. This was a model of local history and a comprehensive account of the city from first settlement about 800 years ago to 1840, and it undoubtedly contributed to his being appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to historical research in 2002.

Even at the age of 103, he was pursued by graduate students eager to pick his brains on whatever aspect of Auckland history they happened to be researching and they were never disappointed.

His prolific work on Auckland history was eventually to take a more personal turn when he published an autobiographic account: As It Was: Growing Up in Grey Lynn and Ponsonby Between the Wars (David Ling Publishing, 2017). This was effectively a social history of Auckland of that time. As former Chief Historian Jock Phillips wrote in his 2019 review in the New Zealand Journal of History, Russell used his personal memories as a springboard to examine the material and cultural conditions of working-class Auckland.

As It Was, Phillips concluded, was such a valuable account of the social experience of the inter-war years that it should function not only as an engrossing read, but as a reliable source of reference for social historians.

Without exception, Russell's work was based on rigorous and meticulous research, written in a way that was accessible to a wide readership, authoritative at the same time as popular. His extensive publications on Auckland history soon earned him the appellation of the 'Father of Auckland history'.

Russell was always generous to a fault with his time, knowledge and insights, and was constantly sought out on aspects of Auckland's histories by journalists, students and others, who would continue to phone the University long after he retired, to secure his contact details.

Even at the age of 103, he was pursued by graduate students eager to pick his brains on whatever aspect of Auckland history they happened to be researching and they were never disappointed. His death is a sad loss not only to his friends and family but to the wider community in Auckland and New Zealand.

Finally, it should be mentioned that Russell was also a man of culture and the arts. He was a long-serving trustee of the Auckland Library Heritage Trust. He was an avid reader of the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books, a regular attendee of the Auckland Philharmonia, and he revealed that he liked to read Shakespearean sonnets before going to sleep at night.

By Linda Bryder

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