alt=Sir William Alfred Stevenson KBE CStJ|thumb|upright|Stevenson (year unknown)
Sir William Alfred Stevenson (19 May 1901 – 29 November 1983) was a New Zealand industrialist, philanthropist and local-body politician. He was also active in rowing, both as a competitor and official, and was a noted big-game fisherman.
Biography
Stevenson was born in 1901, the son of Laura (née Paterson) and William Stevenson, who in 1913 founded the company that would grow into the Stevenson Group.
He was educated at Albany Primary School on Auckland's North Shore and began working as a carpenter for his father. In 1921 the business expanded into construction. Stevenson and his brother Jim took over after their father became ill, and later his sons Bill, Jack and Ross became involved, the company eventually becoming a major contracting firm that was registered as a company on 24 September 1931.
William Alfred Stevenson married Ruby Charlotte Ross (b.1897) in 1924. Their first son, William Alfred (Bill), was born in 1928, followed by John Kennedy (Jack, b.1929), and James Ross (Ross b.1932 in Palmerston North), before the family relocated to Karaka near Auckland around 1938. In 1939 Stevenson purchased a homestead and land in Cockle Bay, Howick. His daughter, Colleen Margaret Rose, was born in 1942.
He served as chairman of the Howick Town Board from 1944 to 1947, and was the second mayor of Howick, following its inauguration as a borough, from 1953 to 1962. and was the first person in the world to catch a tuna, marlin and shark each weighing more than . and the 1975 Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Randwick in Sydney, beating champion mare Leilani.
In 1958, Stevenson purchased the Lochinver Station on the Rangitaiki Plains between Napier and Taupō, and transformed it into a productive farming operation with a carrying capacity of over 100,000 stock units.
As a philanthropist, Stevenson supported many causes and charities, and was particularly interested in the medical area, donating to various hospitals, St. John Ambulance, and endowing chairs in orthopaedic surgery and ophthalmology and an associate professorship in plastic surgery at the University of Auckland. and he was promoted to Knight Commander of the same order in the 1965 New Year Honours. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of St John in 1962, made an honorary member of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 1975,.
Death and legacy
On 29 November 1983, Stevenson died at the age of 82. In 1995, he was posthumously inducted into the New Zealand Business Hall of Fame.