Job Wain’s name lives on in Dunedin through the magnificent hotel he built in Princes Street. Born in London in 1836, Job was working for James Macandrew in the English capital when his employer decided to emigrate to the new Scottish settlement in Dunedin. Job was just a teenager and decided to come along too. He arrived in Dunedin on Macandrew’s ship Titan in 1851 and spent the next year working on Macandrew’s farm in Mornington. When gold was discovered in Victoria, Australia, however, the young man decided to try his luck there.
Wain returned to Dunedin in 1857, at about the same time his parents and siblings followed him to Otago. He then began his career in business. He operated a livery stable and various hotels and ran a stock and station agency and auctioneering business, before constructing in 1878 the beautifully designed hotel in Princes Street for which he is remembered.
Wain married Catherine Jenkins in Dunedin in 1860. She was originally from Stirling in Scotland and had arrived in Otago with her family three years earlier from Australia on the Challenger. They were to have three sons and four daughters together. Wain served a term on the City Council in the late 1860s and was Captain of the Dunedin Fire Brigade for seven years from 1868.
Wain achieved prosperity as well as a respectable social position in the colony. Just six months after opening his new hotel he was able to retire. He and Catherine spent much of the next five years travelling. He then returned to the management of his hotel while also undertaking railway construction contracts for the government. In 1888 he retired for good and settled down as a ‘gentleman’ in a fine home in Warden Street, Opoho. He died in 1922, aged 86. Catherine had predeceased him in 1914, aged 75.
Job and Catherine Wain (née Jenkins)