Biography

William Gregg (1836-1901)

William Gregg was a flamboyant merchant-adventurer who founded what became one of Dunedin’s best-known firms. He was born in Ballymena in County Antrim in Ulster (the source of many of New Zealand’s Ulster immigrants), the son of a farmer, and emigrated at an early age to Victoria where he established himself as a coffee and spice maker in gold-rush Ballarat.

He arrived in Dunedin in 1862, setting up a shop in Moray Place and later in Princes Street (not far from where mailman ‘Jock’ or ‘Redcoat’ Graham used to address gold miners scrambling up from the pier on the best route to the gold fields).

During the 1880s Gregg established a manufacturing venture in Pelichet Bay and eventually shifted his whole enterprise to Forth Street. Sloppy accounting and speculation in shares of the short-lived gold companies of Otago’s first gold-dredging boom bankrupted Gregg in 1894. He had, it was said, ‘too many irons in the fire’ – buying land throughout New Zealand, running a chicory farm, manufacturing starch, wax vestas, and sulphates at Pelichet Bay. Assisted by his wife’s independent wealth, Gregg survived and in 1897 his firm was incorporated with Gregg as managing director.