Bill Rogers (New Zealand politician)
New Zealand politician (1887-1971)
William James Rogers (10 January 1887 – 6 July 1971) was a New Zealand politician. He was a long-serving Mayor of Wanganui, and a member of the New Zealand Legislative Council from 1940 until its abolition in 1950.
Biography
Rogers worked as gardener and miner at Denniston and became involved in trade unionism via the Miners' Union. He was later the secretary of the Wanganui Watersiders' Union. Rogers' daughter, Ida, married electrical engineer Philip Blakeley in 1938.
Rogers was Mayor of Wanganui from 1927 to 1931, and again from 1935 to 1953. He contested the 1925, 1928, and 1931 elections in the Wanganui electorate for the Labour Party, but lost to Bill Veitch, the incumbent.
He was appointed to the Legislative Council by the First Labour Government, and was a member from 15 July 1940 to 14 July 1947; and 15 July 1947 to 31 December 1950.
In 1953, Rogers was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal. Appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1954 New Year Honours, he died in 1971.
“Bill Rogers (New Zealand politician)” enters the record as new Zealand politician (1887-1971). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bill, Rogers and Zealand can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15998151. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1887, 1971, 1940 and 1950.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bill Rogers (New Zealand politician)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.