Clipper Ship 'City of Adelaide'

One of the passengers in a Second Class cabin on the 1864 maiden voyage of the City of Adelaide was 20 years old Richard Humbley Wells Humbley (1844-1902). He had been born at Reading in Berkshire as Richard Humbley Wells, the son of Richard Wells and Vimiera V V Humbley.

[The Humbley family had a propensity to give their children alliterative christian names. William Humbley, who married at Boxworth, Cambridgeshire in 1812, named Richard’s uncle William Wellington Waterloo Humbley (1816) and Richard’s mother Vimiera Violetta Victoria Humbley (1820). Richard later named one of his daughters Adeline Emmaline Madeline (1867) and another Vimiera Violetta Victoria (1872), after his own mother.]

Vimiera Violetta Victoria HUMBLEY married Richard Rickett WELLS at West London in 1840, and their first born were Vimiera Mary Jeanette WELLS (at Reading in 1842) and Richard Humbley WELLS (1844). In 1857 Vimiera WELLS, the mother, was remarried at Bosmere in Suffolk to Richard STAMPER.

At some stage in the years before he sailed for South Australia, Richard Humbley Wells made the choice to use his mother’s maiden name HUMBLEY as his surname, rather than Wells (or Stamper). We can only speculate on the reasons.

It is possible that the teen-ager was attracted to perpetuating a proud family name. In the Church of St Mary at Eynesbury there were floor-slab monuments to Humbley ancestors dating back to the 17th century. Subsequently his grand-father Lt-Col William Humbley, his grand-mother Mary and his uncle Col W W W Humbley were similarly commemorated there.

Richard H W Humbley married Adeline Emmaline Schollar at St Paul’s, Adelaide in April 1866. Their first surviving child was Richard Wells Humbley born at Norwood in 1868. They had eight other children while living in Adelaide and the eastern suburbs, but three died in infancy.

At this stage Richard was listed as a builder and as belonging to the firm of Baker & Humbley, based at East Terrace in Adelaide, then at Flinders Street in Kent Town.

In the English census of April 1881 Richard Humbley was recorded as a 36 years old timber merchant staying with his aging mother Vimiera Stamper at Ramsgate in Kent. This appears to have been a return visit, since his wife Adeline gave birth to her youngest child at Fullarton SA in 1883.

In 1884 Mrs Humbley was recorded as a dressmaker in Gilles Street, Adelaide. At some time before 1890 Adeline (with or without Richard) took her six children to live in suburban Sydney NSW, where she died about 1910.

Meanwhile Richard H W Humbley apparently had separated from his wife and family. He married bigamously in the Biggleswade registration district of Bedfordshire, England in 1898, and he died there in August 1902.

The movements of a man with such a distinctive name are relatively easy to identify, but interpretation of the events can be based only on speculation.

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