Russell Stone

Russell Cyril James Stone was born on 7 April 1923 in a nursing home in Mount Eden, Auckland. He grew up in the inner suburbs of Grey Lynn and Ponsonby in the years between the two world wars, a childhood he later described in his memoir As It Was. He attended Mount Albert Grammar School and enrolled at Auckland University College in 1941, beginning an association with the institution that lasted more than 80 years.

He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1945 and a Master of Arts with first-class honours in history in 1949. He then worked for some years as a secondary school teacher. Decades later, while living at Ranfurly Hospital, he introduced a visiting colleague to a fellow resident who had been one of his pupils.

In 1964 Stone was appointed a lecturer in history at the University of Auckland, which he called his dream job because it let him combine research and teaching. He completed his PhD in 1969 under Sir Keith Sinclair with a thesis on Auckland business and businessmen in the 1880s, published in 1973 by Auckland University Press as Makers of Fortune: A Colonial Business Community and Its Fall.

He turned next to Sir John Logan Campbell, one of Auckland's founders, publishing Young Logan Campbell (1982) and The Father and His Gift: John Logan Campbell's Later Years (1987). He also republished Campbell's long out-of-print memoir Poenamo. He retired in 1989 and was made professor emeritus.

His most ambitious work, From Tamaki-Makau-rau to Auckland (2001), traced the region from first settlement around 800 years ago to 1840, using Maori oral histories, archaeological evidence and early missionary diaries. It was joint winner of the biennial J.M. Sherrard Award in New Zealand local and regional history in 2004. Logan Campbell's Auckland: Tales from the Early Years followed in 2007, and his memoir As It Was: Growing Up in Grey Lynn and Ponsonby Between the Wars appeared in 2017. The former Chief Historian Jock Phillips praised the memoir as a reliable source for social historians of the inter-war years.

He gave his last formal lecture in the history department in 2018 and, in 2019, the opening lecture of the first symposium of the Auckland History Initiative. In 2020, aged 97, he delivered a two-hour lecture to students over Zoom without consulting his notes.

Stone was a man of wide cultural interests. He served for many years as a trustee of the Auckland Library Heritage Trust, read the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books, attended the Auckland Philharmonia regularly, and liked to read Shakespeare's sonnets at bedtime. At 100 he told the University of Auckland that he still read and wrote every day, kept a one-page daily diary he had begun on retirement, and attributed his long life to chance and inheritance, noting that his mother had also lived to 103. He had three children, Paul, Liz and Kate, and two granddaughters, Ella and Lauren; all three generations studied at the University of Auckland.

Russell Stone died in Auckland aged 103. The University of Auckland announced his death on 22 October 2026 with an obituary by his former colleague Emeritus Professor Linda Bryder, titled Russell Stone: a scholar and a gentleman. He had been living at Ranfurly Hospital, from whose windows he could see the Mount Eden nursing home where he was born, and he told Bryder he felt he had come full circle. The exact date and cause of death were not made public. His funeral was arranged for 1pm on Thursday 29 October 2026 at St Mary's-in-Holy Trinity, Parnell Road, Auckland.

Stone was a pioneer of local and urban history in New Zealand at a time when the field was unfashionable, and his rigorous but readable books earned him the title of father of Auckland history. His work remains a foundation for the University of Auckland's Auckland History Initiative and for schools now teaching local history. Bryder wrote that his death was a sad loss not only to his family and friends but to the wider community in Auckland and New Zealand.