Francis Petre

Francis William "Frank" Petre (27 August 1847 – 10 December 1918) was a prominent New Zealand-born architect based in Dunedin. He was an able exponent of the Gothic revival style, one of its best practitioners in New Zealand. He followed the Roman Church's initiative to build Catholic places of worship in Anglo-Saxon countries in Romance forms of architecture. Despite these constraints his buildings reveal him as an artist.

Able to work competently in a wide diversity of architectural styles, he was also notable for his pioneering work in concrete development and construction. He designed numerous public and private buildings, many of which are still standing in and around Dunedin. His outstanding buildings are a few of his churches and seminaries, the basis of his international reputation.

Petre was a descendant of Dorothy Wadham, a progenitrix of an English crypto-Catholic family and the foundress of Wadham College at Oxford in England in the 17th century. In the 19th century the family was again able to declare its faith. The architect's grandfather invested in the second New Zealand Company.

The Petres were an aristocratic family from Ingatestone in Essex, England. Francis Petre's immediate family was one of the first and most prominent colonial families of New Zealand; Petre Bay, Chatham Island was named after them, as—originally—was the town of Wanganui in the North Island. The Wellington suburb of Thorndon was named after their Thorndon Hall estate in England. Petre was the son of the Hon Henry William Petre, who first came to New Zealand in 1840 as director of the New Zealand Company of which his own father, William Henry Francis Petre, 11th Baron Petre, had been chairman. The New Zealand Company had been set up to promote the colonisation of New Zealand, and bought, sometimes dubiously, thousands of hectares of land from the Māori. Consequently, Henry Petre was one of the founders of Wellington. He was also colonial treasurer of New Munster Province. Henry seems to have been a man of strange appearance, from the description by his contemporary, the New Zealand social commentator Charlotte Godley: "He is immensely tall and thin and looks like a set of fire irons badly hung together".

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