Biography

Evelyn Lockley and his brother Aubrey were the sons of Harriet Lockley, née Bentham, widow of a fashionable Pimlico surgeon, George Frederick Lockley, who had died in 1838 leaving Harriet in command of an estate valued at 9,000 pounds (his family had royal patronage). Besides the two small boys there were two younger daughters, not much more than babies when their father died. George had tried to ensure the continuing care of his children by arranging that after Harriet’s death control of the estate would be continued by his eldest daughter from a previous marriage, Elizabeth. He was not to know that Harriet would live until 1881, and Elizabeth fourteen years longer, so that his sons would never receive their inheritance.

The 1851 census showed that the sons were both bank clerks, living at home. Harriet was a strict mother who tied her family to her apron strings. The boys made the decision to flee soon after attaining their majority and make a life for themselves. When Evelyn left home to marry the seventeen year old Louisa Jane, Aubrey had been sent to bring him back. Instead Aubrey would witness the wedding in the Deptford Parish Church, the home parish of the bride, on 19th October 1854, and the three must have set sail as immigrant passengers almost immediately on the Shalimar arriving in Port Phillip, Victoria, Australia in February 1855, four months after the wedding.

Far from being the “remittance men” of popular fancy, the brothers would be almost penniless, but their well-dressed appearance would see them quickly employed in “gents’ outfitters” in the blossoming Melbourne. Louisa’s first child, Mary Shalimar Harriet, was born in Melbourne. Soon afterwards, they moved inland, not to the goldfield, but to its rapidly growing centre of Ballarat. There the brothers would give their occupations as “drapers and commercial travellers”, salesmen to the various mining and farming populations. Two more children were born to Evelyn and Louisa, and named for Evelyn’s parents – George Frederick (born in 1856) and Harriet Elizabeth (born 1858) before they returned to Melbourne. The next two daughters were born in Carlton, the heavily populated area on the outskirts of the city, where they must have had many friends among the emigrant population.

A surprising development was when, in 1859, the 4 year old Mary Shalimar Harriet Lockley was named on the passenger list of the White Star, sailing to the Mother Country. Perhaps Evelyn had hoped that adoption of her grand-daughter would reconcile his mother to his marriage, but what happened to her afterwards is unknown. She may have been given a new name in England, perhaps adopted by the substitute mother who cared for her on the voyage, or she may have perished on the way. The next daughter, Louisa, was born in 1861 and lived only a year, to be buried in the nearby Carlton Cemetery. When the next baby, Emma, was born in 1862, Louisa would have been weaned, a dangerous time for young children.

Evelyn’s brother Aubrey returned to England in 1874 to be reconciled with his mother and sisters. It is possible that both sons had been given a “remittance” – Evelyn had taken his wife and children across to New Zealand’s South Island in 1863, where he was a storekeeper and licensee of a hotel in Port Molyneux at the entrance to the Clutha River. There, Evelyn’s namesake was born, and another daughter, Ethel Lily Adelaide. If he had been given money by his mother it would cause more distress – in 1863, and again in 1865 his name appears in the Otago Police Gazette, wanted in Victoria for the embezzlement of 747 pounds. In March 1865 he appears as a passenger on the Albion for Melbourne. Nothing more is heard of the case – presumably thrown out when the money was accounted for, but it was too late for Evelyn who lost the business and returned to his salaried position as clerk and commercial traveller. An item in the Otago Witness records that he was secretary when the first Commercial Travellers’ Association was set up.

The last two children were born in Dunedin; Cecilia Blanche, who would return to NSW and marry – a marriage which ended in divorce before she married a hotel steward in Lyttelton; and the short-lived Edward Brewster Lockley, whose death in 1871 does not seem to have been recorded on the family grave in the Northern Cemetery.

Very little is known of Evelyn and Louisa’s last decade in Dunedin, or of their daughters living in the South Island. Evelyn Lockley died on 19th May 1876, aged 45. The Otago Witness of 8th May 1880, page 15, notes the death of Emma Lockley, daughter of the late Mr Evelyn Lockley, Dunedin, aged 17 years and 7 months, at the residence of her brother-in-law M.D.R. Stewart, Conon Street, Invercargill. The Otago Witness of 23rd July 1881, page 9, notes the inquest into Louisa Lockley’s death in 1881, which returned a verdict that the death was from natural causes due to “consumption”.

(Summarised from an extensive Lockley family biography provided by Barbara Bolt, with some additional material from the Otago Witness as noted)