Francis Stimpson CHAPMAN

Story

Frank Chapman emigrated as a newly married young man seeking change and opportunity, and, quite likely, gold. When he emigrated in 1849 he was a freshly trained and finished blacksmith, who had three months earlier married. He was born in 1823, second child and eldest son of Hannah nee Stimpson, and Robert Chapman, a professional glover, and a countryman, born in Corpusty, near Aylsham, Norfolk. Frank\’s wife, Emma Williamson, was born in 1892 in Northrepps, Norfolk and that was where they married on the 14th March 1849.

Frank Chapman may have had connection to Port Phillip already, and, maybe, secret information about the possibility of finding gold, though it was two years before any gold discovery was announced! because they went, soon after arriving in Port Phillip, straight up to Charlotte’s Plains station (between Creswick and Maryborough) the exact golden spot where a shepherd who worked for the squatter who held that run – a shepherd by the name of Thomas Chapman – had discovered gold in 1848, though the discovery was then deliberately suppressed by the Government. Maybe Thomas Chapman was a relative of the Francis Chapman family and wrote back to Norfolk with the information that was otherwise burning up uselessly inside him for want of someone to whom it might do some good. Frank and Emma Chapman arrived in the Port Phillip district of New South Wales two years before its political separation as the Colony of Victoria. They were on the goldfields 18 months before any gold rush.

About the Journey

They travelled from their native Norfolk to the port of Plymouth and embarked from there on the ship ‘James T Foord’ departing on 17 July 1849 for a four month long voyage arriving in Port Phillip on 7 Nov 1849. No-one was the same person after sending a third of a year on a sailing ship to the other side of the globe on the open ocean. The small horizons they were used to in England were burst open to became a vast orb, and the wildness of the Southern Ocean prepared them for the vast wilderness that was Australia. It seems likely that their first child Mathilda was either born at sea or, in late 1849 or early 1850 within two or three months of their arrival. The fact that her birth wasn’t officially registered implies a bush sojourn from the start, for infants born in, or closer to town were unlikely to go unrecorded.

Impressions on Arrival

Their first years in Australia are shrouded in mystery. The early children were born on Charlottes Plains station. Francis Stimpson Chapman junior, who died in infancy was buried at the now long-disused goldfields cemetery at Bald Hills, in Carisbrook, Victoria. Bt the time the gold rush was at its height Frank and Emma Chapman were established as coach stop, with a blacksmithery, stables and hostelry, with farm and orchards providing much of the fare on the main Cobb & Co coach route at Lillicur, near Amherst, and Talbot, in the Maryborough district of Victoria. The Chapmans\’ remained for many years. It was two of the younger sons who made the move from Lillicur, William and Walter the latter married, went to Wandin in the upper Yarra valley, where they talk up the mountain properties where they developed orchards and berry farms on a far bigger scale than that possible in the harsher conditions of the goldfields. Many years after their arrival Frank\’s young brother by five years William Stimpson Chapman, who had been apprenticed to his father as a glover, arrived in Victoria married to Ann Elizabeth Scott. They settled in North Melbourne and at Richmond and later in Romsey. William died in Maldon Vic. in 1914. Francis and Emma died in Lillicur to be buried (with most of their children) in Amherst Cemetery.

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