Paddy McElroy, who has just died aged 88, was a well-known Wellington butcher who worked in shops and supermarkets all over the region. Growing up in a large family in rural Ireland he learned commerce from an early age and worked in food shops in Ireland and London before migrating to New Zealand. 

Here in Wellington Paddy did good trade delivering meat to the newly developed suburb of Newlands which didn’t have a butcher at the time. Later he was able to buy Junction Butchery in Miramar which he turned into a successful business. Over the years he owned Kelburn Butchery, Khandallah Butchery and Gipps Street Butchery retiring not long after he sold Gipps Street to its current owner, Bill Allan. 

Paddy credited stints in supermarkets in between shops with keeping himself interested and up with the play. With home entertaining and interest in food and cooking developing, it paid to watch The Graham Kerr show – Cooking with Graham Kerr as customers would ask for cuts he featured.

The recording, which is part of the Butchers Stories Collection at the Alexander Turnbull Library, gives a feel for what it was like for an Irish migrant to make a living as a butcher for the forty years between the late 1950’s and the late 1990’s. Paddy contributed a number of pictures as well as his inimitable voice.

Vale Paddy.   

A note about the Butchers Stories Oral History Collection

I recorded fifteen oral history interviews with older butchers between March 2014 and April 2023 supported by the New Zealand Oral History Awards. Butchers recorded worked shops in Wellington, Naenae, Cannons Creek, Christchurch, Auckland, Gisborne and overseas. 

The interviews are deposited at the Alexander Turnbull Library. Most are available for listening and many are also able to be used in publications. The recordings don’t  yet show on the Library catalogue. Please use the Library’s Ask a Librarian service if you are interested or contact me. 

Alongside the interviews I’ve deposited a large number of photographs  of butchers and butchers’ shops, old and new.