Henry Charles Clarke Wright

On his death on 22 May 1936, Henry Charles Wright was described by the Evening Post as being one of "Wellington's oldest and best known citizens". He was born in England in 1844, moving first to Australia as a young child for health reasons. Having trained as an accountant, he became a manager for a Coromandel mining company in the early 1870s. He then moved to Auckland where he became manager and accountant for a merchant firm and also an advisory accountant for the Auckland City Council. He moved to Wellington in 1877 to work for the firm Guthrie and Larnach before becoming secretary of the Gear Meat Works and the Wellington Meat Export Company. He had a significant role in arranging the first exports of frozen meat from Wellington which by 1900 led to the port becoming the busiest in New Zealand which dramatically transformed the local economy.  Though successful in business, recent research indicates that his personal life was fraught and unstable with a series of unhappy marriages. On his death at the age of 92 he bequeathed his extensive collection of  rare books to the Turnbull Library and donated a collection of valuable orchids to the Botanic Gardens. This print is one of two S. P. Andrew portraits which were not included in the main set gifted by the photographer to the Wellington Public Library in 1936 but has been included in this series for consistency.