The Voice of Suburban Auckland: The legacy of Noel Roseman and his newspapers

There was a time not long ago when nearly every substantial community in Auckland hosted its own weekly newspaper. Most of these emerged in the aftermath of World War II, when returning soldiers moved into new homes in the suburbs. They quickly began commercial ventures and became involved in local politics. By 1960, there were around 30 community newspapers in the area that would become Auckland catering to a population of about 500,000. A few suburbs even supported multiple papers that catered to specific interest groups. Auckland Council Libraries and its predecessors have done their best to collect as many of these newspapers as possible and through this effort, stories have emerged from the golden age of community newspapers.

Photo: Portrait of Noel E Roseman from the front page of the Ribbon News-Pictorial, 14 May 1968.

Noel Eric Roseman of Grey Lynn was an unremarkable man when he printed his first newspaper in 1949. During the war, he had served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as the pilot of a de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito bomber. Afterwards, he returned to New Zealand and settled in Grey Lynn with his new wife, Betty Wilkinson, and boldly decided, despite lacking any experience in the industry, to start a newspaper. According to an interview in the Western Leader published on 30 November 1982, Noel got the idea for the West Coast Gazette from a friend in Glen Eden, who convinced him that there was a need for a local advertising circular.

Photo: Noel Roseman with fellow cadets in the Pilot's Course 23A, No 1 Service Flying Training School, RNZAF Station Wigram, 9 March 1942. Photo by Matthew O'Sullivan. Air Force Museum of New Zealand WgF2217.

The Gazette had no funding, no paid staff, and no dedicated facilities when its first four-page issue was published in March 1949. Noel negotiated with local businesses to fund via advertising an initial run of 2,700 copies per month for six months. The people of Henderson, the target audience of the weekly, were initially unimpressed with Noel’s editorial and writing skills, yet he carried on. Lacking his own printing press, he printed the newspaper in Mount Roskill. Every week, he took his motorcycle 20 km to pick up the newspapers and rode back with 2,700 papers perched atop its handlebars. He and his family also distributed the newspaper since it did not make enough money to support carriers. After its first year, the Gazette had grown to eight pages per issue and profited Noel a grand total of £200.

Photo: Masthead of the 18 October 1951 issue of the West Coast Gazette. 

The poor returns prompted Noel to buy his own printing press in 1950 for £45. Although he had no knowledge of how to operate a printing press, he successfully dismantled it and reassembled it in his garage. He quickly mastered the device and borrowed space in a daughter’s room for composing and typesetting. Lacking a paper guillotine, Betty used a carving knife given as a wedding gift to trim newspapers prior to distribution. Eventually, the printing press and a linotype machine were moved to the lounge and living room. The Roseman’s Glen Eden residence was as much a print shop as a living space. Noel and his wife worked tirelessly during these first years to print and distribute the Gazette first monthly and then fortnightly while simultaneously raising their three young girls. By the end of 1950, the Gazette had doubled the first year’s profit, and each year Noel eked out a little more.

Photo: Masthead of the 12 April 1952 issue of the Waitakere Gazette.

The West Coast Gazette rapidly grew in readership and geographic coverage. Owing to confusion relating to the more well-known West Coast on the South Island, the newspaper was rechristened The Waitakere Gazette on 29 March 1952. It would keep this name for the next fourteen years. Around the same time, Noel purchased a home at 357 Great North Road in Henderson and expanded it into a printshop and storefront, with a new family residence upstairs. Noel had been using the fictitious name Suburban Publishers since 1949, but he finally incorporated it into a company in 1955. By October 1957, the Gazette had become a weekly newspaper averaging sixteen pages per issue.

Photo: Masthead of the 4 May 1953 issue of the Avondale Dispatch.

Suburban Publishers quickly began publishing newspapers for communities across West-Central Auckland. Acquisition of the Avondale Dispatch, established in 1949, may have prompted the creation of the company, while it began printing the Pt. Chevalier Gazette soon afterwards. The Ponsonby Gazette followed in June 1956. These were amalgamated into the Western Suburbs Gazette in June 1957. What happened to this newspaper is unclear; its last known issue was published on 28 November 1958. Most likely, it was merged into the Waitakere Gazette and ultimately became a predecessor to the Central Leader in 1970.

Photo: Masthead of the 7 March 1961 issue of The Henderson Gazette.

In February 1961, Suburban Publishers acquired an upstart rival, The Henderson Independent. For a month the newspaper ran under the revised name The Henderson Gazette before merging into the Waitakere Gazette in April 1961. Its legacy lived on, though, when the Gazette spun off its Tuesday newspaper as the West Auckland Press, branded as a direct continuation of The Henderson Independent. The two newspapers survived in West Auckland until both were sold in February 1965 and promptly amalgamated to form the West Auckland Gazette in April 1966.

Photo: Masthead of the 14 May 1968 issue of the Ribbon News-Pictorial.

In 1957, Suburban Publishers began dabbling with South and East Auckland-focused newspapers. Noel founded the Papatoetoe Gazette in March but less than three months later sold it to the Papatoetoe News, suggesting he was not quite ready for the challenge. The next year, however, he acquired Papakura’s Ribbon News-Pictorial from Frank Utting. This newspaper had been started a decade earlier by Leslie Gordon Healy as The Ribbon, a reference to a nearby housing subdivision along the Great North Road. It had become a pictorial newspaper in 1957 and Noel threw everything he had into the investment, promptly moving his entire family to Papakura. Noel also gained the South Auckland Advertiser and Farm Journal and Associated Newspapers Ltd. 

Photo: The printing press at the Ribbon News-Pictorial Ltd printshop in Papakura, ca 1965. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections NZMS-2583.

The new machinery Noel had acquired meant he could finally produce colour and photographic images in higher quality than ever before. In October 1958, Noel attempted to expand his reach into Central Auckland when he acquired Mt Eden’s The Guardian. This gamble apparently failed, as the newspaper was discontinued soon afterwards. A year later, he acquired the well-respected Tamaki Times. This proved to be more successful as it firmly entrenched Noel in the East Auckland newspaper market. Reflecting its new visual format, the newspaper was renamed the Tamaki Times Pictorial in 1960. Its name returned to the Tamaki Times in 1963 before becoming the Eastern Suburbs and Tamaki Times in 1965. Noel further cemented his place within South and East Auckland when he bought the Papatoetoe News in June 1961, rebranding it as the Papatoetoe-Otara Gazette in October 1964.

Photo: Masthead for the 24 March 1965 issue of the Eastern Suburbs and Tamaki Times. 

An unfortunate drama unfolded in 1961 that almost saw the collapse of Noel’s bourgeoning suburban newspaper empire. The South Auckland market was still perilous and Noel had fallen into debt. He decided reluctantly to sell his newly created Ribbon News Pictorial Ltd to two young newspapermen, Brian Young and Jack Elliott, who seemed eager to run their own newspaper. Shortly afterwards, Noel became ill and it was while he was in hospital that he discovered the sale had never gone through. He still owned the Ribbon News-Pictorial and all its debt. He placed an advertisement for a general manager and soon found one in Clifford A Churchill, an experienced Auckland Star staffer. Over the next year, Churchill cleaned up the company and made it solvent. He even experimented with his own newspaper, The Tatler of Remuera, but he sold it to Suburban Publishers in late 1962. Meanwhile, Noel took his family overseas in a mission to improve his companies’ machinery and production methods.

Photo: A printer being loaded into the Ribbon News-Pictorial Ltd offices, ca 1963. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections NZMS-2583.

The Roseman family travelled to the United States where Noel learned the emerging craft of web offset (cold type) printing. He spent a year travelling between jobs, sometimes working for pay and other times for experience. He settled in Hammond, Louisiana, where he quickly rose up the ranks of a local newspaper, learning new techniques and how to master the web offset printer. When he returned to Papakura in 1963, he negotiated the purchase and importation of his own web offset printer at a cost of $50,000. The Tamaki Times was the first newspaper in the Southern Hemisphere to be printed via paste-up composition and web offset printing. Two months after this issue was printed, New Zealand Newspapers Ltd, owners of the Auckland Star, offered to buy Noel’s companies and machinery. He politely declined. Noel had spent years and a lot of money to reach this point, and he was not yet ready to throw in the towel.

Photo: Masthead of the 4 February 1965 issue of the Papatoetoe-Otara Gazette, printed in colour to celebrate the first issue using web-offset printing.

Only a few weeks after the Star’s offer, Noel headed off to London to make his case before Lord Roy Herbert Thomson against his proposed News Media Ownership Bill, which would make foreign control of New Zealand’s newspapers much easier. Thomson himself had a controlling interest in Wellington’s Dominion at the time. Though Noel’s meeting was successful, New Zealand Newspapers pulled a fast one while he was away and convinced all his staff to defect in exchange for better pay and benefits. Noel hopped on the first available flight and made it to New Zealand the day before the next issue of the Ribbon News-Pictorial was due. He quickly recruited a former compositor and two housewives and miraculously managed to get the newspaper out on time. He performed a similar feat the next week, after which he was able to hire new staff and return to business as usual.

Photo: Betty Roseman beside a stack of newspapers, ca 1962. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections NZMS-2583.

Noel continued to dominate the South Auckland market, despite a fire that destroyed $50,000 worth of machinery. His largest print run was a 137,000-issue advertising campaign called the ‘Shopping News’ in late 1965 that was distributed in every major newspaper in Auckland. With this last push, Noel was able to pay off his debt and begin his plans for retirement. He had already passed on daily management of Suburban Publishers to I S Clews and in May 1968, he retired from the Ribbon News-Pictorial and sold its titles, though not its plant, to Suburban Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of New Zealand Newspapers, publisher of the Auckland Star. In the early 1970s, he demolished his old printshop in Henderson and redeveloped it into the Shopping Plaza Arcade.

Photo: Western Leader advertisement for the new 357 Arcade in Henderson, 12 June 1973.

Eventually, all but one of Noel’s former newspapers fell into the hands of Suburban Newspapers. The South Auckland Advertiser and Farm Journal was sold in 1961 and merged with the Manurewa Weekly News and Papakura Progress to become the South Auckland Advertiser, which became a Suburban Newspapers title from March 1965. The Advertiser and Ribbon-News Pictorial later amalgamated into the South Auckland Courier and are predecessors of today’s Manukau and Papakura Courier. Similarly, the Tamaki Times was sold in November 1965 and merged with the South Auckland Courier in August 1967. But it was soon spun off to become the Eastern Courier and is now the Eastern Bays Courier. Suburban Newspapers took over the West Auckland Gazette in late April 1968 and in June incorporated it into the Western Leader. This merger prompted the Leader to begin publishing twice weekly, a practice that continued until March 2020. Lastly, the Papatoetoe-Otara Gazette merged with the Manurewa Gazette in August 1967, thereby creating The Gazette, which was taken over by the New Zealand Herald’s Wilson & Horton the next year.

Photo: Visit New Caledonia advertising supplement, December 1966.

Although he was only active in Auckland’s suburban newspaper market for 19 years, Noel Roseman’s legacy lives on. His actions led to the modernisation of New Zealand printing with the introduction of web offset printing and commercial photoengraving. His visit to London in 1965 delayed for several years the foreign conquest of the domestic newspaper market. And he made great strides internationally, too. In 1966, the Samoan Times was ready to shut down due to a parts supply issue, so Noel printed the newspaper, flying the copies to Pago Pago each week for distribution. He also printed travel inserts on behalf of the governments of Fiji and New Caledonia. His newspapers today partially form the foundations of the Western Leader, Eastern Bays Courier, and Manukau and Papakura Courier. Noel moved his family to Meadowbank in 1961 and permanently moved to St Heliers in 1970. He died on 10 August 1986 and is buried in Purewa Cemetery.

Photo: Surburban Publishers Ltd company letterhead, ca 1962. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections NZMS-2583.

Author: Derek R. Whaley, Senior Librarian Research, Collections Access & Management

Select bibliography:

Churchill, Clifford A, ‘South Auckland newspapers with extracts from some others,’ compiled for the Papakura and Districts Historical Society, 1984, pp1-2.

‘Editorial Epitaph Ends Independent Owner’s Publishing Era’, Ribbon News-Pictorial, 13 May 1968, pp1, 8.

‘Newspaper Group Concludes Purchase of News-Pictorial’, Ribbon News-Pictorial, 11 June 1958, p1.

‘Noel Roseman, apostle of free enterprise’, Bulletin of the N.Z. Community Newspapers Association, Vol. VII, No. 4 (December 1980), pp 2-4.

‘Paper’s forerunner a one-man band’, Western Leader, 30 November 1982, p3.