Clipper Ship 'City of Adelaide'

A 22 years old young migrant from London, Charles Joseph Price, travelled to South Australia in a second class cabin on the City of Adelaide’s 1864 maiden voyage.

Charles had been born in August 1842 in the London district of St Luke’s, Middlesex as the second child (and second son) of Joseph and Frances Price.  His father was a silver chaser (engraver).

Charles chose to become a plasterer by trade, and on the night of the 1861 English census, he was 18 and staying at the King’s Head Inn in the village of Ash near Aldershot in Surrey.  His companions were two bricklayers, a sawyer, a carpenter and three builder’s labourers, suggesting that they were working on a building project nearby. Young tradesmen like Price were in high demand in the young colony.

His adventure in migrating to South Australia was compounded when he met fellow passenger and 40 years old widow Mrs Elizabeth Fairlie (1823-1902) who, with her five children ranging in age from 14 to 4, was returning from a visit home to London.

The City of Adelaide reached Port Adelaide in November 1864, and ten months later Charles Joseph Price 23 married Elizabeth Fairlie née Parsons at her home in Jeffcott Street, North Adelaide in September 1865.  She gave her age as 32, but we know she was 42 years old.

Charles moved into the established Fairlie household at North Adelaide, and a son Charles Arnold Fitzwalter Price was born there to the couple in October 1866, but the infant died only 11 months later. 

The subsequent activities of C J Price are not known, and there is no record of his South Australian death before 1916, but it would appear that Elizabeth’s second marriage was not a memorable success.  Through the 1880s and 1890s she was listed as Mrs Elizabeth Fairlie in the South Australian directories.  Her death at North Adelaide at the age of 78 in 1902 was recorded as that of Elizabeth Fairlie, widow of the deceased Simon Fairlie.