As some Dunedin readers will know, Tewsley St runs along the old waterfront warehouse area.
It's not the city's most glamorous street, but it is a fitting memorial to one of Victorian Dunedin's colonial businessmen.
Henry Tewsley was never as dominant as E. B. Cargill or James Mills, but he was one of those invaluable men always good for helping to float a new enterprise.
He sat on the harbour board, the chamber of commerce, the Union Steam Ship Co board and other business and church committees.
Tewsley's career followed a familiar course: born in the UK, migrated to gold-rich Victoria and then came across to gold-rich Otago, and to Dunedin, where he managed the New Zealand operations of Melbourne merchants Sargood, Son & Ewen.
Thanks to a lively private letterbook, Wellington descendant Ally McBride tracks his career and changing viewpoints.
In Melbourne in 1854 he decrees ''the English working man and woman are very great donkeys for remaining at home'', though he admits getting good servants is a problem.
A true Victorian, he sees pollution as progress.
In 1857 a turn in the road opened up ''a view of Melbourne with the immensely high shaft of the new Gas works as a prominent object. A long line of steam cloud showed the direction of the railway, the city seemed reposing in the sunbeams''.
A decade later, his colonial boosterism is firmly applied to Dunedin and Otago.
Anyone who has ever run a branch office will sympathise with Tewsley.
Melbourne demands the impossible, cuts the building fund and dumps slow-moving stock and incompetent staff on Dunedin.
Tewsley kept Sargood's New Zealand head office in Dunedin, where his involvement in community affairs continued to grow.
McBride has done a good job of editing Tewsley's letterbook, including many fascinating details.
Sargoods acted for the Otago Acclimatisation Society, and who would have thought that in 1870 a kiwi could have been swapped for a stag?
• Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian.
