Clipper Ship 'City of Adelaide'

Appearing on the first class passenger list of the City of Adelaide on her 1864 maiden voyage to Port Adelaide were Mrs Elizabeth Fairlie (1823-1902), a 40 years old widow, accompanied by her two elder daughters Bessie 14 and Maryanne 11, and three other children, the youngest of whom was 4 years old Amy. They were returning from a visit to London to meet Elizabeth’s relatives and friends who still lived there.

Elizabeth’s late husband, and the children’s father, was Simon Staughton Fairlie (1809-1860) who was born to Simon and Sarah Fairlie in the London parish of St Dunstan’s in Stepney. In October 1837 at the age of 18, he had sailed on the Lord Goderich from the Thames at Gravesend and arrived in South Australia six months later.

Simon Fairlie’s trade or profession is not known at this stage, but he derived some income from investments in real estate.

Elizabeth Parsons was born in December 1823, also in St Dunstan’s Stepney, London. At 25 years of age, she married Simon Fairlie 39 in the Holy Trinity Church, Adelaide in May 1849. They lived in Jeffcott Street, North Adelaide where Elizabeth gave birth to at least six children, although two died in infancy, before Simon died there in December 1860, aged 51.

Ten months after the family had arrived back in Adelaide from London on the City of Adelaide in November 1864, Elizabeth married a young man who had been their fellow passenger on the voyage. At her home in North Adelaide in September 1865, the widow Elizabeth Fairlie née Parsons married Charles Joseph Price, 23. She gave her age as 32, but we know she was 42 years old.

Charles moved into the 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.

Elizabeth’s second daughter Maryanne Fairlie died in 1870 aged only 17. The eldest girl Bessie Fairlie married William Wyly at St Peter’s College Chapel, Hackney SA in 1873 when she was 22, and they had eight children while living in Burnside, Adelaide, Terowie, Kapunda and Mount Lofty.

It would appear that Elizabeth’s second marriage was not a memorable success. 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.