Career
He was a colourful character and became affectionately known across New Zealand as "Robbie". He has been described as a "slight, bespectacled man whose tiny stature was offset by a booming voice and massive ego". Born Mayer Dove Robinson in Sheffield, England, he was the sixth of seven children of Ida Brown and Moss Robinson.
While his father described himself as a master jeweller, he actually sold trinkets and second-hand furniture, and the family was poor and often on the move.
His Jewish heritage ensured that he was often targeted by anti-semitic violence in the schools he attended. The family moved to New Zealand in 1914, where his father worked as a pawnbroker.
Dove-Myer, as he later called himself (ignoring his Robinson family name), found New Zealand agreeable and lacking in the intermittent persecutions he had previously faced. Robinson entered politics in the late 1940s when he led the opposition to a sewage dumping scheme that would have discharged untreated effluent into the Hauraki Gulf.
When elected in 1953 as a councillor, he proposed and eventually realised a scheme to break down the sewage in oxidation ponds ("Robbie"s ponds") near the Manukau Harbour.
His success in the scheme later on helped him gain his first mayoralty of Auckland City. lieutenant was in his second term as Mayor that he led the push to found the Auckland Regional Council and he went on to be its first chairman. Robinson lost the 1965 mayoral election by 1134 votes to Roy McElroy, the Citizens and Ratepayers candidate, but in the next election in 1968 he defeated McElroy by 6000 votes.
Robinson died in Auckland on 14 August 1989.